Speak Up for Housing Choice Vouchers
Housing Choice Vouchers (HCVs) are one of the most effective tools in the fight against instability, homelessness, and overcrowding. However, amidst the current housing supply crisis, affordable units are becoming increasingly difficult to find as the market tightens.
Send your letter from NAHRO’s Action Alert Center to urge Congress and the White House to fully fund the HCV program and to pass legislative language ensuring that vouchers remain an effective tool for millions of families.
Vouchers are Effective: Vouchers sharply reduce homelessness and other hardships, lift more than a million people above the poverty line, and give families more choices about where to live, including by expanding access to neighborhoods with more resources.
These effects are closely linked to educational, developmental, and health benefits that can improve adults’ well-being and health and children’s long-term outcomes, while reducing costs in other public programs.
Add These These Minnesota Data Points To Your Letter
This week our letter focuses on strategies to increase the effectiveness of the HCV Program. Add these key findings highlighting why the HCV program matters to Minnesota families:
- Housing is unaffordable to half of all renters in Minnesota. More Minnesota renter households are cost burdened than at any other point in the last decade.
- Median rent increased by 8% in just one year—the largest year-to-year increase in the past decade.
- The number of cost-burdened households rose 9% in just one year.
- In one year’s time, 2,000 more households with children became cost burdened.
- More than one in five children in Minnesota live in a cost burdened household (22%)
- Rental assistance supports working families: 63% of non-disabled, working-age Minnesota households receiving RA include at least one worker.
- Housing Choice Vouchers help ensure cost burdened households with children have safe, affordable and stable housing.
