I first arrived in this country in 1995, traveling from a refugee camp in Kenya. Having lived for four years without running water or permanent housing, I dreamed of finding stability and opportunity in the United States of America.
But my first impressions of the U.S. were vastly different from the land I dreamed about in the refugee camp. Arriving in New York City, I saw people experiencing homelessness as we rode through the city. As a 12-year-old, I turned to my father and said, "This is not the America you told us about." He smiled and calmly said, "Don't worry. We will get to that America."
We eventually did. We settled in Minnesota — one of the coldest states in the country, where the people have the warmest hearts.
And even though our state economy may be doing well on paper, thousands in our state are barely scraping by. The single biggest reason for that is the skyrocketing cost of housing.
On a single night, more than 10,000 people in Minnesota were homeless last year — the highest number ever recorded. Six thousand of them were youths — which means children are showing up at school without a place to go home to. And this does not include the thousands more who are behind on rent, or are looking for a permanent home after an eviction. In fact, outside of coastal states like New York and California, the Twin Cities was ranked No. 1 in housing costs among the nation's 20 largest metro areas.
And that's just Minnesota. Across the nation, families are struggling with homelessness and housing insecurity. This year, the National Low Income Housing Coalition found that no state or major metropolitan area in the entire nation has an adequate supply of rental housing for its poorest renters. As a result, 12 million renters are severely housing-cost-burdened, spending more than half of their incomes on housing.
Meanwhile, the federal government has not made a large-scale investment in affordable housing since the New Deal. The construction of new public housing has been banned since the 1990s — forcing more than 1.6 million families onto a near-endless waitlist for public housing and another 2.8 million families onto the waitlist for vouchers.
This crisis is not going away — and it could get worse if we don't act. In the wake of the Great Recession, nearly 10 million homeowners lost their homes. A future recession could destabilize the market even further. And with a changing climate, extreme weather events and natural disasters will displace ever more people — making it especially vital that we have an adequate supply of affordable housing.