With creative financing in the present day housing market, housing values are increasing and homeowners are taking chances with alternative financing methods and consequently putting their homes on the line. As evidenced in the Housing and Vacancy Survey Annual Report for 20071, homeownership rates are decreasing for the US as a whole, and most states. Increasingly, householders are not able to afford the homes they are in, and are losing them. Renters also are facing increasing challenges in meeting their monthly housing costs. Utilities, real estate taxes, and insurance rates are increasing – costs that are be passed on to renters in increased rents. The 2006 American Community Survey (ACS) shows that 46 percent of renters nationwide pay 30 percent or more of their income on housing costs. Thirty-seven percent of owners with mortgages and 16 percent of owners without mortgages spend 30 percent or more of their income on housing costs. Throughout the presentation, we will refer to “30 percent or more of income spent on housing costs” as “housing-cost burden.” In addition, for several figures we will further split the housing-cost burden into moderately housing-cost burden (30.0 to 49.9 percent of income spent on housing costs) and severely housing-cost burden (50% or more of income spent on housing costs). housing affordability is plentiful, but a precise definition of housing affordability is at best ambiguous. The conventional public policy indicator of housing affordability in the United States is the percent of income spent on housing. Housing expenditures that exceed 30 percent of household income have historically been viewed as an indicator of a housing affordability problem. The conventional 30 percent of household income that a household can devote to housing costs before the household is said to be “burdened” evolved from the United States National Housing Act of 1937. The National Housing Act of 1937 created the public housing program, a program that was designed to serve those “families in the lowest income group.