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AYA Statement about How Housing Impacts Youth

Housing is a youth issue because:

Our parents with low income have to get more than 1 job to support the family. We don’t get to see our parents. And, our parents have less time to help us with schoolwork and other things in life. Sometimes we have to get jobs to support our family and we have to sacrifice extracurricular activities and a social life. We all end up working harder to keep a house that we’re not spending much time in.

When rent is too high, people can’t afford rent on their own so a few families have to live together. Some of the impacts of overcrowding are lack of privacy and lack of personal space, which for youth means a home where it is difficult to study.

Our houses are in poor condition and it’s hard to show who we really are. For instance, it is difficult to bring friends over because we are embarrassed about our living conditions.

Once we sum up the housing issue, housing is not just an adult issue because we live there.

We think the root causes are:

We think the government is giving up on poor people. And they are only paying attention to rich people.

Developers – people who buy land, who build housing, who are generally in the housing business—make most of the money.

Landlords – they raise rent prices real high – make some of the money.

Solutions we propose:

Protection for renters! Some ideas are:

  • Rent Control – keep rent prices not too high so that people can afford to live.
  • Better maintained, better looking housing - where people are getting their money’s worth – houses we can live in. We want our housing to be nice with clean carpet, clean walls, etc.
  • Protection against unfair eviction – because no one wants to get kicked out of their house.
  • More permanently affordable housing! People with lower incomes should have lower rents.

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