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Stuart J. Mitchell, President/CEO PathStone Corporation [email protected]
Brennon Thompson, Consultant
THE PROBLEM:
A decade after the collapse of the housing market and the Great Recession, the City of Rochester and Monroe County face the sobering reality of a chronic housing crisis. The percentage of rent-burdened households has increased from 59.2% to 61.6% since 2008. Housing insecurity is foundational to the systemic poverty experienced in our community.
PROFILE OF POVERTY
Rochester is the 5th poorest city in the country, with a poverty rate of 33.8%. Yet this measurement fails to capture the true scope and scale of economic distress. The federal poverty metrics are arbitrarily low measures of financial security. On top of the 33.8% facing acute poverty, an additional 31% of the City’s population struggle to make ends meet. In total, over 60% of Rochester residents fall bellow “Financial Self-Sufficiency”. For these residents on the edge, the threat of eviction is a reality. Caught in the paradox of American poverty, not poor enough to qualify for assistance, the burden of housing costs holds down hard-working families.
CRISIS OF INSTABILITY
In Matthew Desmond’s Pulitzer Prize bestseller, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, he illustrates just how fragile life in poverty can be. Furthermore, Desmond articulates the dependent relationship between stability and housing. Housing is the fabric that holds social order together at every level, i.e. individual, neighborhood, and community. “Without housing, everything else falls apart.”
Housing instability and eviction uproot families and destabilize communities. Every aspect of personal and public life is impacted, from education and employment, to neighborhood security and the economic health of the community. The crisis of instability and eviction disproportionately impacts women and children; female-headed households represent half of all those in poverty. From 2016 to 2017, over 2,400 Rochester City School students, 8.8% of all students, experienced homelessness. Kindergarteners, first and second graders suffered the highest rates of homelessness.