Congress Should Increase HUD’s Budget to Prevent Families from Losing Assistance and Address Growing Needs
End Notes
[1] These figures are for total gross discretionary budget authority, prior to netting of rescissions and receipts, for all HUD programs and administration. Gross budget authority is used because it provides a more accurate picture of program-level funding in the HUD budget than do net budget authority estimates. Calculations are CBPP’s, based on the HUD budget for fiscal year 2008 and Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates of budget authority for fiscal year 2007. It should be noted that the President’s budget was finalized before Congress agreed to final HUD funding levels for fiscal year 2007.
[2] These figures are based on a CBPP analysis of data from the 2000 and 2005 American Community Surveys, the latter of which is the most recent Census data available.
[3] Over the 2-year period ending in April 2007, average rents and utilities have increased 7.9 and 16.0 percent, respectively, while average weekly earnings for workers increased 7.6 percent. Sources are the Consumer Price Index for residential rents and fuels and utilities, and the Current Employment Statistics survey for the earnings of production or nonsupervisory workers on private nonfarm payrolls. Both sets of data are published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Figures are nominal and seasonally-adjusted.
[4] For example, the Harvard analysis revealed that families with children that were in the bottom income quartile and paid more than half of their income for housing costs spent 30 percent less on food than households with similar incomes and affordable housing costs. See Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University, The State of the Nation’s Houinsg, 2006, President and Fellows of Harvard College, 2006. Note that the analysis is based on data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey, which includes expenditures made with public benefits such as Food Stamps.
[5] See The Annual Homeless Assessment Report to Congress, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, February 2007, and Martha Burt et al., Helping America’s Homeless, Urban Institute, 2001.