What Makes Housing Affordable and Adequate?
A simple explanation of affordable housing.
Billions of people live without access to safe, affordable housing. Making matters worse, the number continues to grow. In 2020, the number was around 1.6 billion.
1,600,000,000 people live without a safe home. The number is expected to double by 2030. Soon, over 3 billion humans will be without one of life’s basic needs.
The numbers are big, the problem complex, and the concept can feel very abstract. Below are simple definitions of affordable and adequate as it relates to housing.
What is “Affordable” Housing?
When paying too much for housing, families are forced to make other compromises in areas like food, health, and education.
There is a standard for housing to be considered ‘affordable’. It varies from country to country, but it’s usually around 20% of income for renters and 30% of income for homeowners. If a household’s cost for housing exceeds these percentages, their housing is no longer considered affordable. They may be able to make their monthly payments, but it’s either unsustainable or requires too much of a sacrifice in other essential areas.
For example, Mexican families in poverty generate less than $500 of income per household, per month (less than $3 daily, per person). If a household is generating $350 dollars of income per month, they shouldn’t be paying more than about $100 for their home.
Without access to affordable options for housing, families end up living in unsafe conditions, rely on overcrowding to share costs, or may squat on land they do not own.
What is “Adequate” Housing?
Safe, adequate shelter requires more than 4 walls and a roof. The following criteria, borrowed from The United Nations, highlights the key priorities for housing to be considered adequate:
- Security of tenure: housing is not adequate if its occupants do not have a degree of tenure security that guarantees legal protection against forced evictions, harassment, and other threats. For example, when people live on land without permission or title of ownership, they are at risk of being removed without cause, recourse, or protection under the law.
- Availability of services, materials, facilities, and infrastructure: housing is not adequate if its occupants do not have safe drinking water, adequate sanitation, energy for cooking, heating, lighting, food storage, or refuse disposal.
- Affordability: housing is not adequate if its cost threatens or compromises the occupants’ enjoyment of other human rights.
- Habitability: housing is not adequate if it does not guarantee physical safety or provide adequate space, as well as protection against the cold, damp, heat, rain, wind, other threats to health and structural hazards.
- Accessibility: housing is not adequate if the specific needs of disadvantaged and marginalized groups are not taken into account.
- Location: housing is not adequate if it is cut off from employment opportunities, health-care services, schools, childcare centers, and other social facilities, or if located in polluted or dangerous areas.
- Cultural adequacy: housing is not adequate if it does not respect and take into account the expression of cultural identity. For example, latrines (outhouse style restrooms) are common and acceptable in rural Haiti but would not be sufficient in rural Mexico. The cultural standards and differences must be accomodated.
In reviewing the criteria, notice the breadth of housing inadequacy. For example, within habitability is the phrase “protection against the cold, damp, heat, rain, wind, other threats to health”. Threats to health? How many ways might a single dwelling experience the elements and environmental threats? Housing is not a one-size-fits-all solution. Many regions throughout the globe are constantly under threat of natural disasters and severe weather. To remain adequate, the home must accommodate those threats.
The concept of physical space is part of adequate housing. You could live in a pristine bunker, but if too many people must occupy the dwelling, everyone is exposed to new risks and hazards. In 2020, the world responded to a global pandemic through quarantines and sheltering in place. No amount of precaution can protect against the fact that diseases, of all kinds, spread faster when people eat, sleep, and work in closer proximately.
Within inadequate housing, there is a sliding scale. Some families may have housing that satisfies 1 of the 7 factors, whereas other families possess 5 of the 7 factors. It’s easy to fall into the trap of ranking need and assuming higher-scoring families are somehow better off.
The adequate housing criteria listed above represent a baseline human right. Regardless of the severity of their suffering, anyone living below the standard is in housing insecurity.
In establishing an objective understanding of affordable housing and adequate housing, we can now get to work addressing the billions of people who live without.
