Press Room

According to a report released today by the U.S. Census Bureau, 39.8 million people lived in poverty in 2008, a one-year increase of 2.6 million people and 6.85%.  

Even more troubling was the rise in the number of people in deep poverty. Those in households earning less than half of the federal poverty threshold rose by 7.69%, or 1.2 million people, to more than 17.0 million people.

The increase in the poverty rate, especially deep poverty, gives a new urgency to the need for a substantial increase in federal housing assistance. People in deep poverty are at high risk of homelessness; methodology developed by the National Alliance to End Homelessness shows that an increase of this magnitude translates to potentially 123,000 to 269,000 more people becoming homeless.

"Coupled with the continued increase in unemployment, these new poverty numbers show how severely the recession is hitting the lowest income people in our country," NLIHC President Sheila Crowley said. "These new data support the concern of housing advocates that the current recession will cause a surge in homelessness similar to that seen in the recession of the early 1980s. Preventing such a growth in homelessness should be a top priority of the Obama Administration."

Earlier this year, more than 1,000 national, state, and local organizations called for funding for 400,000 new housing vouchers over a two-year period as part of the economic recovery bill. In an open letter to Congress and the Administration, organizations said that "as the Administration and Congress consider action to stem housing foreclosures and to reform the housing finance system, equal attention must be paid to the long-standing and unmet need for decent, affordable homes for households with the lowest incomes. Despite the surplus of single family homes for sale today, the shortage of rental homes that extremely low income households can afford continues unabated." (www.nlihc.org; click on What We Mean By Housing)

Earlier analyses by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities foresaw deep poverty increasing by a range of 5.3 million to 6.3 million people by the fourth quarter of 2009, based on a projected end-of-the-year unemployment rate of 9%. Today, the unemployment rate for August, in the third quarter of 2009, has reached 9.7%. The numbers released today are clearly just the beginning of the trend toward deeper poverty that has continued to play itself out in 2009.  

Overall, the nation's official poverty rate in 2008 was 13.2%, up from 12.5% in 2007.