POAH Chief of Staff, Andrew Spofford, talks to Building Green about sustainability efforts in affordable housing development.
By Nancy Eve Cohen, Building Green
There is a vast, unmet need for affordable housing in the U.S.
More than eight million extremely low-income households pay more than half of their incomes to rent their homes. In addition, more than a half million people in the U.S. were homeless last year.
Andrew Spofford, chief of staff of the nonprofit Preservation of Affordable Housing (POAH), says that right now the U.S. is “serving something like one in four families that really need housing assistance.”
The National Low-Income Housing Coalition has identified a shortage of 7.4 million homes that are affordable and available.
While housing advocates are pushing to build more and more homes for low-income people, sustainable design advocates say the affordable housing that we do build should be energy efficient, healthy, and durable.
“People with low incomes are the ones who need it the most,” says Krista Egger, director of initiatives at Enterprise Community Partners. If your income is very low and you live in housing that has low utility bills and is healthier, “you are going to benefit at a greater incremental degree … than if you have a lot of disposable income,” says Egger.
But despite the desire to build green, the priority for state housing finance agencies is to build more affordable units...
Read the full article on BuildingGreen.com