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Project Explanation

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Project Explanation

Introduction

The presented social problem of this project is the housing affordability crisis and its

direct connection between the risk of homelessness in the United States and the housing

affordability crisis. Housing is a basic human right and ground of physical, mental, and social

stability (Bentley et al., 2025). However, safe, stable, and affordable housing cannot be

affordable to millions of American citizens. On one hand, due to the rising cost of rent, sluggish

incomes, and the slow pace of the availability of low-priced housing units, the general lack of

housing security in the urban, suburban, and rural areas has become the rule. This issue is not

particular to certain circumstances but represents the structural issues like economic inequalities,

urban development patterns, and policies. The project also illustrates the visual representation of

housing insecurity in its everyday life through the use of pictures to demonstrate the human and

community cost, the gap between the available affordable housing and the people who need it.

Why Housing Is a Social Problem

Housing insecurity is a social vice since it impacts individuals who make and society as a

whole. Burdened households have to make tradeoffs between shelter and other pressing needs

such as food, health services, and education, and such tradeoffs have long-term consequences to

the health, employment, and social mobility of these individuals (Lichtenberg, 2025). The crisis

also promotes inequality and targets low-income families and communities of color unequally.

Neighborhoods are overcrowded, are displaced in the community, and face reduced access to

social services, which also exacerbates social disparities. The project demonstrates the

multidimensionality of the problem, not only the personal stress and instability, but also a

problem of the situation in the local neighborhood, and proves that housing insecurity is
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perceived not as an individual issue but as a systemic problem that needs to be addressed by the

whole society.

Extent of the Problem

The scale of the housing crisis is huge. There are more than twenty-one million cost-

burdened renter households that spend more than 30% of their income on housing, and millions

of those are severely burdened, making above 50% (US Census Bureau, 2024). The disparity

between wages to housing prices is widening; full-time employees in most states cannot afford to

rent out even a small two-bedroom flat. The housing supply is severely inadequate: among 100

of the most low-income renters, 33 affordable units can be found. The eviction problem grows

more frequent and directly puts families in the threat of homelessness or insecure

accommodation (Khan et al., 2022). These statistics demonstrate the acuity of the problem and

reveal the structural malfunctions of the whole system that continue to exacerbate housing

insecurity in all fifty states.

Social Factors, Causes, and Consequences

The housing crisis is caused by a number of social factors. Stagnant wages, growing

rental costs, and economic inequality provide economic strains on housing stability (Lichtenberg,

2025). The zoning, urban development, and gentrification do not allow the formation of

affordable units, and the rental markets are arranged with the profit motive in mind by investors,

disregarding accessibility. The impairment is ironical and multi-resilient. People are exposed to

long-term stress, mental and physical health issues, and children to educational solutions.

Societies are overcrowded, displaced, and socially disintegrated (Zehrung et al., 2025). The cycle

of poverty is increased by experiencing evictions, and neighborhoods lose permanent residents,

which undermines trust and connections. The crisis has individual, community, as well as
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societal impacts. Using these dimensions as the focal points of the discussion, based on imagery

and contextual explanations, the project focuses on why housing affordability is not merely a

personal problem but a social issue whose effects go so far.

Takeaways and Conceptualization

There are several lessons learned by working on this project. Housing insecurity is a

structural problem that overlaps with the economic policies, social equity as well and the health

of the population. Visual representation assists in the representation of the human aspect of the

figures and makes the abstract data visible and emotionally impressive. The project shows that

there are several aspects of the crisis: a personal aspect of undergoing stress and instability, a

group aspect of overcrowding and eviction, and a societal aspect of inequality and community

stability. Through a carefully organized visual display of images and background directions, the

project conveys the breadth of the issue as well as the profundity of it, which portrays that

housing insecurity is institutional. The process contributed to the significance of the

comprehensive approach to social issues and employed innovative strategies to make people

interested in critical social issues.

References

Bentley, R., Mason, K., Jacobs, D., Blakely, T., Philippa Howden-Chapman, Li, A.,

Adamkiewicz, G., & Reeves, A. (2025). Housing as a social determinant of health: a

contemporary framework. The Lancet Public Health, 0(0). [Link]

2667(25)00142-2

Khan, A., Weller, C. E., Roberts, L., & Zonta, M. (2022, August 22). The Rental Housing Crisis

Is a Supply Problem That Needs Supply Solutions. Center for American Progress.

[Link]

that-needs-supply-solutions/

Lichtenberg, N. (2025, November 15). “We’ve probably made housing unaffordable for a whole

generation of Americans”: top real-estate CEO on the real cost of Covid economic

firefighting. Fortune. [Link]

bad-amherst-ceo-sean-dobson/

US Census Bureau. (2024, September 12). Nearly Half of Renter Households Are Cost-

Burdened, Proportions Differ by Race. [Link].

[Link]

[Link]

Zehrung, R., Hu, D., Guo, Y., Zheng, K., & Chen, Y. (2025). Investigating the effects of housing

instability on depression, anxiety, and mental health treatment in childhood and

adolescence. AMIA Annual Symposium Proceedings, 2024, 1303.

[Link]