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Three Rivers Campus Library

Three Rivers Anthropology of Housing Loss and Homelessness

This guide presents stories and context of the ongoing housing crisis of lack of affordability, evictions and homelessness going behind the numbers using the anthropological tools. Listen to, read about and watch stories about housing.

Affordable Housing

This Guide

This guide presents housing problems by the numbers using statistics and goes behind the numbers using the anthropological tools of ethnographic observations you can learn more about under the Ethnography and Field Notes tabs. 

Affordable Housing

Housing is a major cost and concern for families. Affordable Housing  should be under 1/3 (33%) of your income. Over half of renters are rent burdened, sometimes paying over 50% of their income on housing. Affordable housing has been a long term problem and the current situation has contributed to housing loss and homelessness. You can think about these issues using numbers (e.g., rent price vs income), but anthropologists go deeper into lived experiences.

Cost-Burdened Renters

Nearly Half of Renter Households Are Cost-Burdened. "Over 21 million renter households spent more than 30% of their income on housing costs in 2023, representing nearly half (49.7%) of the 42.5 million renter households in the United States." This is because rent is rising much faster than wages over the past 50 years. See them diverge (rent is the top orange line and wages is the bottom blue line). What rent skyrocket compared to how much people are paid. Have you experienced or seen this?

Cost burdened renters are more likely to have Housing Instability "such as having trouble paying rent, overcrowding, moving frequently, or spending the bulk of household income on housing."

Statistics Show Housing Costs Beyond Wages

Housing costs are rising much faster than rent and are unaffordable to people making minimum wage across the US. The housing wage in Norwich needed to afford an apartment is over $29 an hour, almost double the CT state minimum wage (2025) of $16.35 per hour. Find information on housing and affordability for each of Connecticut's 169 towns and cities on Housing Data Profiles from the CTData Collaborative.  

Housing Inequality 

Housing in the US is highly racially and economically segregated, in part due to 20th century polices that concentrated poorer, disproportionately BIPOC families in public housing in cities and subsidized the creation of single-family homes for wealthier disproportionately for white families in the suburbs.

Housing Inequality | Interactive  

 

Public Housing

Public housing is owned and operated by local municipal governments with rent capped at 1/3 of renter income. It was once seen as a step in social mobility for poor and working-class families. Since the 1960s, public housing has been disinvested with not enough resources. Since 1974 there has been a moratorium on new public housing development and the number of units has declined. See the Pruitt-Igoe Myth documentary about the rise and decline of public housing.

Over 1.5 million people still live in affordable public housing.

The Metamorphosis of Public Housing

How public housing went from a desirable lifeline for poor and working class families to bring disinvested, denigrated, and destroyed.