Historically lack of adequate and affordable housing has been seen as essentially a social service issue –taking care of the least fortunate among us. And that portion of the affordable housing problem is increasingly desperate. Of the over twelve million Americans with worst-case needs, 1.5 million are elderly, 2 million are disabled and 4.3 million are children. The need for affordable rental housing by the poorest households exceeded the available supply by 1.8 million units in 1999. But today the crisis in affordable housing is not confined to the poorest of the poor. Today the housing crisis affects virtually every American family because it affects our children, our parents, our employees, and our public servants.

It is not just the unemployed who are being affected. In 1999 there were 3.7 million working families who were paying at least 50 percent of their income for housing. Record numbers of adult children living with their parents. Today 3.8 million adults aged 25 to 34 are living at home, a pattern largely driven by rent levels too high to be affordable with their current incomes.