Advocating for Affordable Housing
Families Together is deeply invested in advocating for Affordable Housing. As a successful rapid rehousing provider in Wake County, Families Together has a lead role in efforts to create a community-wide system to end homelessness and improve the health and well-being of families. Solving family homelessness and ensuring adequate availability of affordable housing will require a broad, community-wide effort. Families Together has nearly 40 years of rehousing experience. For several years, we have studied the affordable housing crisis and evaluated how we can leverage our strengths for positive change.
The scope of the issue of Affordable Housing:
Families Together addresses our community’s need for self-sufficient, resilient families who have access to safe, dignified, affordable housing. While we had past success following best practices of the Housing First model, new external pressures have made it increasingly difficult for our program families to access market-rate rental units that are affordable. These include:
- A gap of 17,000 rental units needed for families that are extremely low income.
- Loss of approximately 1,000 affordable housing units annually in Wake County.
- Skyrocketing rent requires a household to earn $19.73/hour to afford the average two-bedroom apartment.
- An 86% increase in student homelessness since 2010 – four times the rate of the general population increase. This includes a quadrupling of families living in motels in the last five years.
More facts about the affordable housing challenges are community faces can be found here: https://familiestogethernc.org/face-the-facts
What we are doing about the issue?
In 2018, the Families Together Board of Directors set three new strategic goals:
1. Grow our capacity in terms of staff, funding and workspace;
2. Increase the pool of affordable housing for the families we serve;
3. Increase awareness and advocate for affordable housing policies for extremely low-income families.
Since that time we have developed an Affordable Housing Project and begun to build a portfolio of affordable housing that FT owns outright, master leases, or accesses through innovative partnerships.
To ensure homeless families are being represented where key decisions are being made that impact their lives, we have taken the following steps:
Formed an Advocacy Committee led by Board and community members
Created and launched Voices Together, a leadership and public speaking, skills-building program for clients in our program to join our team as we advocate for more affordable housing
Co-launched a coalition of non-profit housing providers to coordinate and speak collectively on the need for more affordable housing
Accepted an invitation to serve on the City of Raleigh’s Affordable Housing Bond Advisory Committee
As we work to increase awareness and encourage community feedback about the AHB plans, we encourage you to participate
An invitation to you:
The city of Raleigh has issued a survey about an affordable housing bond. We would like to invite everyone in our community to take this survey.
Motivated by our Vision statement of “No homeless families in our community” and our Mission of “Moving families from homelessness to home,” Families Together supports the following positions:
1. We will encourage local governments to work towards providing adequate affordable housing solutions, particularly those targeting homeless populations and very low-income renters.
2. We will support a housing bond vote to be held in November by the City of Raleigh to provide funding to increase the pool of affordable housing.
3. We will engage our communities to become involved by participating in the City of Raleigh Affordable Housing Bond survey.
Learn more about the City of Raleigh’s Affordable Housing Bond plans: https://raleighnc.gov/housing-bond-2020
Please take a few minutes to complete the survey now. Make your voice heard!