US bishops urge action as housing crunch turns to crisis for families across the country

Part of that scaling up requirement, Bodnar emphasized, actually means just keeping up.

"Even keeping a flat funding rate is a cut — because housing costs are constantly rising. And keeping these programs going, those costs go up every year because of inflation," she said. "So even a flat funding isn't going to keep the same number of people housed."

"There's not enough affordable housing that's available to those with the lowest incomes," added Bodnar. "More people than ever are spending more than 30% of their income on housing — and that's true for both homeowners and renters."

In 2023, the federal government spent $67 billion on housing assistance, or just over 1% of total federal outlays. About 80% of its support for housing is through low-income rental assistance programs.

The Catholic Church, through all its ministries, is one of the largest private providers of housing services for people in poverty and other vulnerable situations in the U.S., with Church teaching strongly defending the right to housing as a matter of human dignity.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church states, "The political community has a duty to honor the family, to assist it, and ensure especially ... the right to private property, to free enterprise, to obtain work and housing, and the right to emigrate."

In his 1987 encyclical Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, St. John Paul II said "the lack of housing" should be seen as "a sign and summing-up of a whole series of shortcomings: economic, social, cultural or simply human in nature."

Pope Francis also wrote in his 2016 apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia that families have "the right to decent housing, fitting for family life and commensurate to the number of members, in a physical environment that provides the basic services for the life of the family and the community."

"It's always been a crisis," Berry, with the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, told OSV News. "I think people are just maybe in a sense waking up to it now. But in the past, when it was a crunch, it wasn't a crunch. It was still a crisis."

Reflecting on the neighborhood of his youth, Berry's assessment was blunt.

"I grew up on Long Island — and I don't know how anybody who lives on Long Island, who's graduated from college or is coming out of high school into a trade, could ever expect to own a house there," he said. "The prices are just insane."

In 2024, the Society of St. Vincent de Paul USA provided over $78 million in rental assistance to prevent evictions, assist people in securing permanent housing through the Motel to Home program, and house thousands of men, women, and children in shelters and transitional housing.

But the dilemma persists.

"It's an outcome of a multi-tiered problem with income disparity, and it's a lack of available property," Berry said. "There's been a lack of a coordinated, bipartisan approach to what do we do about these issues that are all interrelated."

Independent investigative reporting outlet ProPublica was recently critical of the federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, which provides up to $15 billion worth of tax credits a year nationally to help developers build apartments.

ProPublica's June 3 report noted the tax credit has created "housing that's often no more affordable than the market rate," an outcome that has left subsidized units vacant. It cited Portland, Oregon, with nearly 2,000 vacant unused subsidized units as one example that can also be seen in Denver, Seattle and San Francisco.

"Economists and other academic researchers have been warning for decades," ProPublica noted, "that this was precisely the sort of problem that the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit was likely to create."

Edward Pinto, a senior fellow and co-director of the AEI Housing Center at the Washington-based American Enterprise Institute, would not count himself among those surprised. Nor, though he had just met with Catholic Charities USA, does he agree with the USCCB's conclusions in its letter.

"If one starts talking about — as this letter does — that the supply of affordable housing fails to meet the need, especially among people with very low and extremely low incomes, wages that don't keep up with rising housing costs, that's all true. But it varies tremendously as to where you're living. One-size-fits-all solutions — as are being proposed here — in our opinion, are not the solution."

AEI's June 2 Housing Market Indicators report has this take-away: "The winning frame is smaller, more attainable starter homes — built gradually, on smaller lots, near jobs, and by homeowners and small builders."

"We think the solution lies with the states," Pinto told OSV News. "They can move the needle on land use; they can implement the mantra of smaller lots; and they can implement the mantra of more starter homes."

He said, "The solution is for the government to get out of the way, not more money. That is our basic message."

Underscoring the gravity of the crisis, the lack of affordable housing may also mean fewer marriages and families, according to a March 2025 report from the Institute for Family Studies.

"Among young adults under age 35, homeownership rates have fallen by almost half since the 1970s," it noted. "This young adult housing affordability crisis is a major factor suppressing rates of marriage and fertility in the United States, thus imperiling the health, happiness, and long-term demographic outlook for the entire country."

"If I were the conference of bishops," Pinto said, "I'd be saying, 'Let's have more single family homes. Let's have more single family rentals. Let's have more families. Let's have more marriage.' That's what I'd be saying."