High costs, tight budgets for state’s households of color

Serghino René

A recent study that puts concrete numbers to the persistent talk about the high cost of living in Massachusetts also found racial disparities and discrimination against people of color in the housing market.

University of Massachusetts-Boston Professor Michael Stone, who headed the study, publicly reported his findings at UMass-Boston’s campus center last week.

According to the study, which uses data from the 2000 Census, nearly 27 percent of all households in Massachusetts were “shelter poor” in 2000, and many of them were families of color. In the study, “shelter poor” are defined as those households that cannot meet their needs for food, clothing, medical care and transportation at some minimum level of adequacy after paying for housing.

Stone’s research determined that 55 percent of Latino households, 42 percent of black households and about 39 percent of Asian households in Massachusetts are shelter poor.

“Housing has a pervasive impact on peoples’ lives,” said Stone. “Households tend to pay for their housing costs first, then adjust their other expenditures to whatever is left. This has consequences for everyone, but especially for households headed by people of color in Massachusetts.”

Stone calls his study a “real world” approach to the issue. Housing affordability is measured by a simple and universal standard: costs of 30 percent or less of a household’s income are “affordable,” costs over 30 percent are “unaffordable” and costs over 50 percent are “worst-case housing needs.”

The study determined that households of color typically have lower incomes than their white counterparts, and that their households tend to be larger than white households. In Massachusetts, over two-thirds of all households of color rent their homes. By contrast, only one-third of white households rent, and they are mainly made of up young singles, couples or elderly women.

The median household size among renters is 2.9 people for Latino-headed households, 2.3 for Asian Americans, 2.2 for blacks and 1.6 for whites. Among home-owning households, the median size is 3.5 for Latino-headed households, 3.4 for Asian Americans, 2.9 for blacks and 2.4 for whites. Since it costs larger households more to meet their non-shelter basic needs, they face a more challenging financial squeeze of income versus housing costs than smaller households with the same earnings.

“While households headed by a person of color accounted for about one of every six Massachusetts households, shelter poor households of color accounted for nearly one out of every four shelter poor households,” said Stone, a professor of community planning and public policy. “We’re talking about 46 percent of households of color living in shelter poverty; that has serious implications for neighborhoods, cities and towns, and the Commonwealth.”

As the population has grown, its housing problems have grown accordingly. In 1990, there were 207,000 Massachusetts households headed by a person of color. By 2005, this number had doubled to 416,000. In 1990, households headed by a person of color accounted for about one out of every 11 households in the state (9.2 percent). But by 2000, this had increased to more than one out of eight households (13.5 percent), and by 2005 to more than one out of six (17 percent).

But beyond the economics is the consequence of persistent racial segregation, says Stone. Unless there is explicit attention to racial dimensions of housing affordability, he believes the disparity will continue to grow.

In his study, Stone recommended linking strategies for income development with housing support, focused primarily in cities and neighborhoods with high concentrations of very low-income renters of color.

“I urge us to bring race and concentrated poverty to the forefront of regionalism,” said Stone. “By and large, policies that have been promoted for expanding housing outside the city have not focused on race and concentrated poverty.”

Stone also suggested the creation of a public program to provide permanent mortgage relief for low-income homeowners who are shelter poor and in danger of foreclosure. Such government programs already exist or are capable of addressing this issue, he said, but they have been severely constrained, under-funded or not funded, and have been starved in recent decades.

He further suggested that state and local government should preserve, improve and expand nonprofit and public housing to not only increase housing affordability, but also to build educational and social supports for shelter poor single-parent families.

“There need to be resources dedicated to organizing because people, if given the means, are important resources for generating, enforcing, implanting and strengthening policies that do exist,” said Stone.