‘Unprecedented’: Nearly 60,000 Sacramentans can’t find an affordable home
Nearly 60,000 low-income households in Sacramento County can’t find an affordable home to rent, a new report from the California Housing Partnership found.
The lack of cheaper homes and apartments in the county has forced thousands of low-income residents to frequently spend well over the recommended 30% of their income on rent and utilities, underscoring the rapidly worsening affordable housing crisis in Sacramento.
The report, one of 58 released for each county in California this month, found that 81% of extremely low income renters — those who make less than a third of the median income, or roughly $22,300 — spend more than half of all their earnings paying rent.
The lack of affordable housing options prevent renters from being able to buy basic necessities, save for a down payment, pay off debt or accumulate wealth, keeping workers and families trapped in poverty.
“That really leaves very little for anything else,” said California Housing Partnership president and CEO Matt Schwartz during a virtual event Wednesday. “It means people are really one crisis, one lost paycheck away from homelessness and during the pandemic we have unfortunately seen that playing out.”
In Sacramento County, at least 600 households have been evicted since the pandemic began, a Sacramento Bee analysis found. Many have been unable to find permanent housing since.
The data in the report rely on figures from the U.S. Census Bureau collected prior to the pandemic. “What we would be seeing right now if we had (the data) in real-time ... would probably look even worse,” Schwartz said during the event, hosted by the Sacramento Housing Alliance.
In addition to a lack of affordable housing available on the market, low wages are also preventing Sacramentans from being able to find rentals in their budget, Schwartz said.
Renters need to earn about twice the minimum wage ($14 an hour at larger companies and $13 at small businesses) to afford the average asking rent in Sacramento County.
The average monthly rent for a two-bedroom place in Sacramento County is $1,392, according to data from the real estate information group CoStar.
That means a tenant would need to earn about $4,640 a month, or an hourly wage of $26.77, to afford the average asking rent.
Personal care aides, childcare workers, janitors and cleaners, retail workers and medical assistants in California — “the people who make our world work and make it a better place,” Schwartz said — all make less than $26.77 an hour, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Cathy Creswell, a housing policy specialist and Sacramento Housing Alliance’s board president, said during the virtual event that the affordable housing crisis is so severe that it will require the region to be dedicated “in a way we haven’t seen before.”
“We really need local governments to understand one, how serious this crisis is,” she said during the event. “It’s unprecedented, and it’s root in past historic inequities that were even further exacerbated by the pandemic.”
The report found that state and federal funding for housing production and preservation has increased between 2018 to 2020, but housing advocates said Thursday that additional resources are needed to address the current shortfall.
Among the recommendations from California Housing Partnership and the Sacramento Housing Alliance: More state and local funding for affordable housing projects, additional spending on homelessness solutions, streamlining the construction process, financing first-time homebuyer programs, and passing stronger tenant protections.
“We continue to advocate for inclusive housing practices that will lead to the construction of more affordable homes in areas of opportunity, while transforming areas of high segregation and poverty into areas of opportunity,” said Sacramento Housing Alliance policy director Ejiro Okoro during the event.
