State residents face rent roulette

Hello, Connecticut residents, and welcome to another exciting, challenging game of Nutmeg Rent Roulette. If you’ve ever had to look for an apartment in our fair state, you’re familiar with the game already, but it never hurts to play another round, if only to remind yourself how lucky you are if you’re safely and affordably housed.

Today’s players include members of some of the state’s 465,000 renting households who seek decent, affordable housing in Connecticut, a lovely place that nevertheless consistently ranks among the nation’s most expensive states for housing.

This week’s game will be played by minimum-wage earners. Looking for housing in expensive Connecticut while making $12 an hour obviously adds to the thrill. That minimum wage rises a dollar next month doesn’t make much the game much easier.

Minimum-wage workers, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, tend to be youngish, unmarried, and many of them work in the leisure and hospitality industry — the very industry that took a major hit during the pandemic. According to a February report from the state Office of Legislative Research, that industry’s employment between April 2019 and April 2020 dropped 59 percent. Between February 2020 (before Gov. Ned Lamont began instituting COVID protocols that restricted how bars and restaurants could serve customers), the state’s leisure and hospitality industry employed nearly 158,000 people. By April of that year, employment in the industry was at 70,000 employees.

These residents still needed places to live to ride out the storm until — in theory — we all wore masks and got vaccinated and the virus was gone and the economy could bounce back. Both state and federal governments offered help, but privations exposed by the pandemic illustrated just how tattered is our housing market. Monthly checks and pandemic-induced eviction moratoriums may have put a brief pause on the crisis, but it was only a pause. In June, Lamont lifted the eviction moratorium by executive order, while he pushed landlords to seek relief for unpaid rent. The state also extended tenants’ appeal period from three days to 30. Landlords now file applications with UniteCT, a part of the state Department of Housing that provides emergency rental and electricity bill assistance.

A federal moratorium, enacted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was set to end this weekend. This while 11 million Americans report that they are behind on their rent, and rent aid meant to help are slow in coming.

So what are Connecticut’s low-income/minimum-wage renters supposed to do? Why, spin the wheel and hope they find a place that’s safe and affordable. If not, they can always double-up with friends and family who might already be challenged to find good housing.

Or they can become homeless, and place an increased burden on relief systems already bent to the point of breaking. Sadly, the odds are against them.

According to the recentlyreleased report, “Out of Reach,” from the D.C.-based National Low Income Housing Coalition, the so-called housing wage — or the hourly wage a minimum-wage worker in Connecticut needs to make to afford a decent, two-bedroom home — is $27.37. So that means, according to the coalition, the worker would need to be on the job for 74 hours a week for a one-bedroom home, or 91 hours for a two-bedroom rental home. (The fair market rent in the state for a twobedroom apartment is, says the report, $1,423.)

The report also said the area around Stamford and Norwalk contains some of the country’s most expensive housing markets (with a two-bedroom housing wage of $37.65), along with Danbury ($33.17).

Those numbers are staggering.

Fortunately, small battles are being won by Connecticut housing activists who understand that we can’t keeping pricing out lower-paid workers. As an April report from Connecticut Voices for Children said, finding housing in pre-pandemic Connecticut was hard enough, when some 34 percent of the state’s children lived in homes where the adults paid more than 30 percent of monthly household income in housing. Anything below 30 percent of a household’s income going to housing means a family can reasonably afford food, medical care, and education. Another above means something goes wanting.

High housing prices are especially challenging for the state’s families of color, where wage earners battle systemic racism that includes educational inequality. According to the Voices report, between August 19, 2020, and March 1, 2021, more than 20 percent of Black and Hispanic households said they were behind on rent. Of those families, Hispanic households were 2.1 times more likely to be behind, while Black families were 2.3 times more likely to be behind, compared to white households.

Rent Roulette doesn’t simply mean some lean months while families scrape together money. Precarious housing can be a precursor for homelessness. Connecticut had been at the forefront of eliminating homelessness, but a federal Housing and Urban Development study released in March said the trend of making homelessness brief, and rare has stalled, and for the first time in years, the number of homeless children and veterans didn’t decrease in their annual census. Also for the first time, the number of adults who decided to take their chances sleeping rough — outside, under bridges, in abandoned buildings — was higher than the number of adults who were sleeping in shelters.

The answer to homelessness is homes — safe, affordable homes in a variety of price ranges. Pricing housing so that teachers, firefighters, and other essential workers cannot afford to live in the towns in which they work serves no one. Block after block of McMansions serves no one. Would that we would, forever and always, put a lid on the box of Nutmeg Rent Roulette. It’s a game no one wins, anyway.