Families could wait for decades to get affordable housing in Newark | Opinion
Updated Mar 03, 2021;
Posted Mar 03, 2021
In a new study, David Dante Troutt, director of the Rutgers Center on Law, Inequality and Metropolitan Equity (CLiME), says 60% of Newark's residents spend one-third of their income on housing and almost one-third of residents spend at least half of their incomes on rent. (Aristide Economopoulos | NJ Advance Media) Aristide Economopoulos | NJ Adva
Facebook Share
By David Dante Troutt
If Newark was to meet its residents’ current need for affordable housing — at least 16,000 units — it would take over 20 years and still fail to reach hundreds of households. Yet by that time, another generation of very low-income families would show all the symptoms of deep economic scarring laid bare by the pandemic —chronic housing instability and displacement, school absenteeism, increased exposure to trauma, poverty-level wages and, as the city’s 2,300 COVID-19 deaths cruelly demonstrated, higher risk for shorter lives.