This means that these 150 families showed: a) their need for adequate housing (meaning they currently live in overcrowded apartments, transitional housing, or are considered "cost-burdened" and spend over 50% of their income on rent; b) are US citizens; c) have lived and or worked in Santa Barbara for the past year.
And this was just the first of six meetings that Habitat for Humanity of Southern Santa Barbara County will hold this week for interested applicants of the 12 new homes which will be built on Canon Perdido Street. The dates and times of the remaining meetings can be found here.
An article in today's Noozhawk by Craig Allen: "Escalating Rents Make It Tough on Renters Who Can't Afford to Buy" sheds light on why so many in our community currently live in substandard housing (which we define as overcrowded, cost-burdened, or transitional). In the article Allen reports that while home prices have fallen since 2008, one side effect is that rental prices have increased. And we have seen that this drastically affects the low and very-low income families in Santa Barbara the hardest.
"The median rent asked in Santa Barbara is $2,053, which is about 53 percent higher than the median rent in California as a whole"
"A good rule of thumb is that renters should spend no more than 30 percent of their net earnings on their rent expense. So, for every $500 in rent, the renter should earn at least $1,667 after tax. According to a recent report by the National Low Income Housing Coalition, only renters in 37 of the nation’s 582 metropolitan regions considered in the report meet this goal. In fact, according to the report, in most parts of the country, rental prices vastly exceed the 30 percent threshold of the average renter’s wages."The need for affordable housing and Habitat for Humanity homes in our community is apparent. We hope you'll join Habitat in making affordable and permanent housing accessible for the many families in Santa Barbara who are priced out of a traditional mortgage and out of decent rental prices.
