In cities around the world, skyrocketing housing costs, discriminatory practices, and insufficient government intervention have created a housing crisis. Since the stock market crash of 2008 more than 10 million people have been displaced from their homes. This number continues to rise as inflation steadily rises, rent rises, and displacement continues. Historically, people of specific income and ethnic groups have had limits set on the loans and assistance available to them in order to purchase a home. Solutions to housing concerns include; community land trusts, and government funding to help those struggling to find some stability.

The 2008 housing market crash was caused by a number of variables. However, the main one was that many loans were given out to people that were not going to en up paying them back. The brokers that giving up the loans knew were going to fail but they continued because they were maximizing their profits. When these loans were not payed back, the banks failed. People lost hundreds of millions of dollars and recession ensued.

In more recent days, the reasons that housing is unavailable are due to COVID impacting supply chain management which in turn slows the process of home building down. Because of slow home building, people are hesitant to sell their homes which reduces the amount of homes in the overall market. Other reasons that housing is scarce is due to the economy, inflation is increasing which increases the prices of homes. When wages don’t increase to match the rising inflation people cannot keep up and are unable to purchase things. This is also true for renters not only buyers, increasing rents are a prominent factor in people losing their homes.

Throughout the course of the 1900s, discriminatory practices were used to stop people of color and low income from buying homes in nicer areas and leaving.  Redlining is the most recognized form of this discrimination, which is when an area on a map was marked as red so that banks would know which people they were not to give loans out to. This along with many other methods of housing discrimination against our minorities have for the large part kept them from leaving low income areas of section 8 housing and other forms of government aid and housing.

I think that quality affordable housing  for all should be a basic right for U.S. citizens. I don’t see how there are people living in less ideal conditions and the government is ok with it. The problem also lies in our society, there are hundreds of thousands of vacant houses that are owned. and unused by people looking to make big profit from flipping houses. Thankfully there are various government incentives that came from COVID which have helped people fight against rising rents which have displaced many thousands of people