As prospects of federal budget cuts loom, housing experts in Illinois worry that more people will go unhoused – and that seniors will bear the brunt of the problem.
Recently, President Donald Trump signed into law a resolution that extends the federal budget to September. That includes $13 billion in cuts from the Fiscal Year 2024 budget. While there is $4.5 billion more for Housing and Urban Development programs, specific items under HUD have been cut. Housing experts project a loss in available affordable housing and assistance to cut the homeless population.
Andrew Greenlee, professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, leads the Urban Housing Lab there.
“The prospect of more cuts and the uncertainty surrounding federal programs, “really is doing significant harm to to our ability to deliver that housing to people who desperately need it. And one other aspect of that that I think is increasingly important is that across the country, the profile of who is taking advantage of or participating in low income housing is also changing, increasingly the participants who are receiving the low income housing benefits are senior citizens.”
While over the last decade, the low income population in the country has declined, so has the stock of available affordable housing, which has created a stubborn gap, he notes..
“Essentially, part of the challenge here is that the circumstances facing low income renters really haven't changed terribly much over the last decade. So the same gap that we saw 10 years ago is the same gap that we're seeing today with regards to there being far more people looking for housing than there are affordable options to house them. So this is a chronic challenge for Illinois and for most all states …right now that really define one of the main issues in our national housing crisis,” Greenlee said.
Bob Palmer is policy director for Housing Action Illinois, which recently released, with the National Low Income Housing Coalition, a report that shows a shortage of housing for very low income people.
Palmer said, “The shortage of affordable housing for extremely low income households is a very persistent, long standing problem, so the results of the gap study this year don't so much show that there's been a significant worsening of the problem, but it's a very bad, severe problem in our state, where three quarters of extremely low income households are paying more than half their income for housing, and there's a shortage of about 300,000 affordable and available units for households with the lowest income. And we just need to be doing more as a society, particularly at the federal level, to address that if we ever want to have the society where everyone has an affordable, stable place to live.”
According to the coalition, HUD’s homeless assistance programs are expected to lose an estimated $168 million, “which may endanger the housing stability and services of over 18,000 people on the verge of or experiencing homelessness.”
Palmer said, “We are very concerned, and are in opposition to what being proposed at the federal level by the Trump administration and the majority in Congress, in terms of reducing the federal commitment to addressing homelessness and the shortage of affordable housing because that's going to result in us going backwards and more people experiencing homelessness and more people experiencing severe housing cost burdens like we as demonstrated in the gap report.”
“Two of the main concerns we have about the federal budget … is that there is inadequate funding to renew all the existing housing choice vouchers that exist in Illinois and across the country. So that means that fewer people will get federal rent subsidies, and also, there is not enough money to renew all the existing projects that get funding that support efforts to prevent and then homelessness,” Palmer said.
“What we really need to be doing is expanding those programs and other programs like public housing, not just reducing their resources or even keeping them just at a flat level because rents in the private market keep going up, and so like programs like the voucher program need ongoing increased funding, just to keep up with rent increases happening in the private market.”
Greenlee said, “The decline in available affordable housing is a bit hard to diagnose. Some of this might be due to upgrading in the housing market, where units are essentially now renting at a rate that are no longer accessible or affordable, especially for extremely low income renters. Some of it may just also be about where the actual supply is in relationship to where renters are located, but are looking for that type of housing,” he said.
Meanwhile, the state of Illinois has invested more into housing over the past few years, which Palmer said has been crucial for homeless shelters and groups that provide supportive housing.
“Those groups that are distributing emergency rent assistance, they are literally helping many tens of thousands, even in the hundreds of thousands of people around the state, stay housed and get housed. Those resources really are having a positive impact.
“The challenge is, at the same time that we have all these excellent resources, there are other things that are happening in our society, like rents in the private market continuing to go up every year. There's a certain amount of affordable rental housing that's lost if housing gets older and falls into a worsening condition, that the overall need is a bit at a standstill, and we continue to have the severe shortage, which is why we're always advocating for more resources because we really need to change the overall landscape,’ he said.
“Most people get their housing in the private market, and that works well for them, but for the people with the lowest income, the private market just has been able to meet their needs. And so we need programs that help nonprofit organizations and for-profit organizations build more affordable rental housing. Rental subsidies we need for as long as we have homelessness. We need more money for shelters and emergency rent assistance and those types of safety net programs.”
