Why is housing such a difficult challenge for people with serious mental illness?
• Poverty – The most recent “Priced Out” study published by the Technical Assistance Collaborative (TAC) and the Consortium for Citizens With Disabilities (CCD) Housing Task Force covers data from 2004 and reveals a number of important findings documenting how people with severe disabilities living on Supplemental Security Income (SSI) are completely priced out of the rental market. Among these key findings are: • As a national average, a person receiving SSI needed to pay 109.6% of their entire monthly income in order to rent a modest one-bedroom unit (from 2002 to 2004, the housing affordability gap for people with disabilities continued to grow alarmingly while federal housing officials repeatedly proposed re-directing essential rent subsidy funds to higher-income households), • During the six years since Priced Out in 1998 was published the amount of monthly SSI income needed to rent a modest one-bedroom unit has risen an astonishing 59% – from 69% of SSI in 1998, to 109.6% of SSI
