Housing typically refers to the provision of shelter or accommodation for individuals, families, or communities. It encompasses various types of residential structures, such as houses, apartments, condominiums, townhouses, or mobile homes, where people live and reside.
Housing serves as a fundamental human need, providing a safe and secure space for individuals and families to live, sleep, and engage in daily activities. It offers protection from the elements, privacy, and a sense of personal space.
Apart from its basic function of providing shelter, housing also plays a crucial role in social, economic, and cultural aspects of society. It is often a significant component of a person’s identity and a reflection of their socioeconomic status. Housing can influence quality of life, access to amenities and services, community interactions, and overall well-being.
Housing can be provided through various means, including homeownership, rental arrangements, public housing programs, cooperative housing, or transitional housing for individuals experiencing homelessness. The affordability and availability of housing can greatly impact individuals and communities, and housing policies and initiatives are often implemented to address housing needs, promote affordability, and ensure adequate housing options for all segments of society.
Housing Quotes
1. “I believe that every American should have stable, dignified housing; health care; education – that the most very basic needs to sustain modern life should be guaranteed in a moral society.”
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
2. “The pathway to housing should be fair and equitable for everyone, and access to affordable housing is the infrastructure people in our communities need to elevate families into the working class and the middle class. It is the foundation that helps people support their families and contribute to their economies.”
— Raphael Warnock
3. “The biggest and most deadly ‘tax’ rate on the poor comes from a loss of various welfare state benefits – food stamps, housing subsidies and the like – if their income goes up.”
— Thomas Sowell
4. “For the family living paycheck-to-paycheck, or those at risk in their current living situation, access to affordable housing is pivotal to their safety and long-term stability.”
— Alex Padilla
5. “Housing wealth – the net equity held by households, consisting of the value of their homes minus their mortgage debt – is the most important source of wealth for all but those at the very top.”
— Janet Yellen
6. “What I’m fighting for now in my work… for an expression relevant to all manner of blacks, poems I could take into a tavern, into the street, into the halls of a housing project.”
— Gwendolyn Brooks
7. “The demands of the Civil Rights era weren’t limited to voting rights – they strove for an end to segregation in all aspects of life, including housing, employment, and public accommodations.”
— Alicia Garza
8. “Student loans are delaying retirements. They’re suppressing the housing market. They’re suffocating new business formation. They’re even leading young people to delay getting married and having children.”
— Annie Lowrey
9. “Fair and affordable housing is a basic right for all New Yorkers and all Americans.”
— Nydia Velazquez
10. “From education to employment, housing to trust in the police, politicians from all parties must understand the different issues affecting individual communities.”
— Rishi Sunak
11. “You could say that bad typography brought us the Afghanistan war, the Iraq war, the housing crisis and a good number of other things.”
— Stefan Sagmeister
12. “We must recognize the fact that adequate food is only the first requisite for life. For a decent and humane life, we must also provide an opportunity for good education, remunerative employment, comfortable housing, good clothing, and effective and compassionate medical care.”
— Norman Borlaug
13. “Imagine a safe city with all the affordable housing we need, a city that uses its resources to help lift the marginalized up and into stability. This is the Portland I imagine. This is the Portland I dream about every single day.”
— Ted Wheeler
14. “We have to create and preserve enough affordable housing to meet the demand, because the affordability crisis is imposing a hardship on millions of Americans.”
— Ritchie Torres
15. “I live in Brick Towers, a public housing project in Newark’s Central Ward. I moved in when the projects were privately owned by a man who the residents and I believed was a grade A slumlord.”
— Cory Booker
16. “The largest challenge that we face, from my perspective, is the ability to continue moving forward so the agency will have a single mission: that is, to provide decent, safe, and affordable housing.”
— Alphonso Jackson
17. “I tried all my life to make housing affordable. The more affordable the house, the more money I make.”
— Harry Triguboff
18. “Everything needs to work at the same time. But what keeps society vibrant permanently is jobs, industry, business, and stuff like that. It pays for everything else. If you just build affordable housing, and those people don’t have jobs, it’ll no longer be affordable soon. So you really have to build around the business community.”
— Jamie Dimon
19. “Felons are typically stripped of the very rights supposedly won in the civil rights movement, including the right to vote, the right to serve on juries, and the right to be free of legal discrimination in employment, housing, access to education, and public benefits. They’re relegated to a permanent undercaste.”
— Michelle Alexander
20. “Unless children have strong education and strong families and strong communities and decent housing, it’s not enough to go sit in at a lunch counter.”
— Marian Wright Edelman
21. “When we advocate for violence against women to be eliminated on campuses, we say, ‘Well, actually, it’s not just on campuses we have to worry about.’ We might have to worry about high schools. We might have to worry about police precincts and cars. We might have to worry about public housing.”
— Kimberle Williams Crenshaw
22. “I had begun to worry about the housing market back in 2003, when lenders first resurrected interest-only mortgages, loosening their credit standards to generate a greater volume of loans. Throughout 2004, I had watched as these mortgages were offered to more and more subprime borrowers – those with the weakest credit.”
— Michael Burry
23. “Substandard housing was a blow to your psychological health, not only because things like dampness, mold, and overcrowding could bring about depression but also because of what living in awful conditions told you about yourself.”
— Matthew Desmond
24. “When you feel house poor, you don’t buy anything. Housing immediately impacts the job numbers because there are so many housing-related jobs within the industry, and in adjacent industries.”
— Mellody Hobson
25. “There are a lot of people who can’t find housing, who worry about the future, and that insecurity and precarity in their own lives is being exploited by some politicians who are using it to divide us by saying, ‘hey it’s the fault of new Canadians, it’s the fault of refugees, it’s the fault of Muslims.’”
— Jagmeet Singh
26. “We control health and pathogenicity by complex multi-speciated relationships through symbiosis and synergy. Portable shelters for livestock, along with electric fencing, insure hygienic and sanitary housing and lounging areas, not to mention clean air, sunshine, and exercise.”
— Joel Salatin
27. “People return home from prison and face legal discrimination in virtually all areas of social and economic and political life. They are legally discriminated against employment, barred from public housing, and denied other public benefits.”
— Michelle Alexander
28. “Housing is absolutely essential to human flourishing. Without stable shelter, it all falls apart.”
— Matthew Desmond
29. “The Democratic position seems to be everything is going to be free. Free education. Free health care. Free housing. Free love. Free kittens, I don’t know.”
— John Kennedy
30. “We can start with housing, the sturdiest of footholds for economic mobility. A national affordable housing program would be an anti-poverty effort, human capital investment, community improvement plan, and public health initiative all rolled into one.”
— Matthew Desmond
31. “I grew up on Section 8 housing, food stamps, welfare, and dealing with social services. I never had a Christmas. I never had a birthday.”
— Logic
32. “You can spend the money on new housing for poor people and the homeless, or you can spend it on a football stadium or a golf course.”
— Jello Biafra
33. “There is no one-size-fits-all solution to the challenges facing our cities or to the housing crisis, but the two issues need to be considered together. From an urban design and planning point of view, the well-connected open city is a powerful paradigm and an engine for integration and inclusivity.”
— Richard Rogers
34. “An investment in housing is an investment in family stability, children’s success, and the economic health of our entire state.”
— Ned Lamont
35. “What we see out there is an affordable housing crisis, particularly in the rental market in cities big and small, and we don’t have the resources necessary to fill that gap.”
— Julian Castro
36. “I have been to the Occupied Palestinian Territory, and I have witnessed the racially segregated roads and housing that reminded me so much of the conditions we experienced in South Africa under the racist system of Apartheid.”
— Desmond Tutu
37. “My father grew up in Levittown, L.I., in the first tract housing built for G.I.’s. His dad had stormed the beaches of Omaha and died when my father was very young. My dad had to raise himself, pretty much.”
— Bert Kreischer
38. “The cause of homelessness is lack of housing.”
— Jonathan Kozol
39. “Do we believe housing is a right and that affordable housing is part of what it should mean to be an American? I say yes.”
— Matthew Desmond
40. “If we don’t figure out a way to create equity, real equity, of opportunity and access, to good schools, housing, health care, and decent paying jobs, we’re not going to survive as a productive and healthy society.”
— Tim Wise
41. “I don’t think that you can address poverty unless you address the lack of affordable housing in the cities.”
— Matthew Desmond
42. “Lots of people have gone from public housing to do great things in the world and have a tremendous sense of duty to their fellow man because of it.”
— Jewel
43. “The standard of ‘affordable’ housing is that which costs roughly 30 percent or less of a family’s income. Because of rising housing costs and stagnant wages, slightly more than half of all poor renting families in the country spend more than 50 percent of their income on housing costs, and at least one in four spends more than 70 percent.”
— Matthew Desmond
44. “The relationship between violence and nonviolence in this country is interesting. The fact of the matter is, you know, people do respond to riots. The 1968 Housing Act was in large response to riots that broke out after Dr. Martin Luther King was killed. They cited these as an actual inspiration.”
— Ta-Nehisi Coates
45. “We need one America – one that includes housing, education, jobs, access to capital, and economic inclusion for every American. This will create a stronger America.”
— Byron Allen
46. “Tackling affordable housing via land use planning won’t necessarily solve the problem.”
— Kate Brown
47. “I support defunding the police – particularly the militarization of our police force and reallocating those resources toward public health. And not just health care but mental health support, affordable housing, education, alternatives to incarceration, non-emergency responses to those who might be in mental distress.”
— Jamaal Bowman
48. “A strong economy causes an increase in the demand for housing; the increased demand for housing drives real-estate prices and rentals through the roof. And then affordable housing becomes completely inaccessible.”
— William Baldwin
49. “I don’t think we can fix poverty without fixing housing, and I don’t think we can address housing without understanding landlords.”
— Matthew Desmond
50. “The movement toward a holistic approach to community development has been long in the making, but the housing crisis has motivated further progress.”
— Ben Bernanke
51. “On housing, education and skills, health and social care, transport and economic development, local government is better placed to make decisions in the interests of local communities.”
— Wes Streeting
52. “I used to live in a street in Bristol which was, depending on your tabloid of choice, either Britain’s most dangerous street or a moral cesspit. People made judgments about me on where I lived. It affected me – it affected my life chances. That is going on today with people in social housing. That, to me, isn’t acceptable.”
— Sajid Javid
53. “Eviction comes with a record. Just like a criminal record can hurt you in the jobs market, eviction can hurt you in the housing market. A lot of landlords turn folks away who have an eviction, and a lot of public housing authorities do the same.”
— Matthew Desmond
54. “I’ve never had a stylist. My style is very distinctive from where I am from in Puerto Rico: a housing project in Carolina.”
— Anuel AA
55. “Public housing is more than just a place to live, public housing programs should provide opportunities to residents and their families.”
— Carolyn McCarthy
56. “It’s true that eviction affects the young and the old, the sick and the able-bodied. It affects white folks and black folks and Hispanic folks and immigrants. If you spend time in housing court, you see a really diverse array of folks there.”
— Matthew Desmond
57. “Stronger regulation and supervision aimed at problems with underwriting practices and lenders’ risk management would have been a more effective and surgical approach to constraining the housing bubble than a general increase in interest rates.”
— Ben Bernanke
58. “A black man of my generation born in the late 1960s is more than twice as likely to go to prison in his lifetime then a black man of my father’s generation. I was born after the Voting Rights Act, after the Civil Rights Act, after the Fair Housing Act.”
— James Forman, Jr.
59. “I know what it’s like to be dependent on the government for food and housing, and what doctor you are going to see, and I know how limiting it can be.”
— Lauren Boebert
60. “I come from a lower-middle-class family and used to stay in a housing board colony.”
— Aishwarya Rajesh