The technical Assistance Collaborative and the Consortium for Citizens With Disabilities Housing Task Force recently published the biennial Priced Out in 2012, a study of the affordable housing crisis confronting people with disabilities who are receiving Supplemental Security Income (SSI). The report highlights the fact that nowhere in the United States can a person with a disability who is receiving SSI afford safe, decent housing. For individuals with serious mental illness, anecdotal evidence suggests that because of stigma, affordable housing is often less available to this group than to other disability groups. The public behavioral health system is often identified as broken. However, its visible failures of chronic homelessness, institutionalization, and incarceration are as many failures of federal and state housing policy for the poorest and most disabled individuals. Unfortunately, the problem is worsening and is perhaps the most significant form of discrimination today facing individuals with serious mental illness.

Individuals with mental illness receiving SSI have extremely low incomes that are below 30% of the Area Median Income. In 2012, the average annual income of a single individual receiving SSI payments was $8,714—only 19.2% of the national median income for a one-person household and almost 22% below the 2012 federal poverty level. According to federal housing policy, rent is affordable when it is no more than 30% of a person’s income. Individuals who pay more than 30% of their income for housing are considered cost-burdened and may have difficulty affording necessities such as food, clothing, transportation, and medical care. Data cited in Priced Out in 2012 show that the national average rent for a modest one-bedroom rental unit was $758 in 2012, equal to 104% of the national average monthly income of a one-person SSI household. This finding confirms that in 2012 it was virtually impossible for a single adult with a disability who was receiving SSI to afford rental housing in the community unless he or she had some type of permanent rental subsidy.