Affordability, affordability, affordability! Many experts agree that the number one problem facing America’s housing market is the lack of affordable housing. It might be hard to imagine due our stark real estate reality, but this was not always the case. In 1970, America actually had excess affordable housing. This meant that as a society were able to provide adequately priced housing for all the poor people who needed it and then some. Over the years, as time progressed, the extra housing stock began to dwindle. Today, we are facing a shortage in our supply of affordable housing. According to an article from The Atlantic Cities, How the Poor Are Squeezed Out of the Most Affordable Housing by Emily Badger, in recent years the shortage has continued to grow—so much so that it is “pushing more and more people at the bottom rung of the housing market out of housing all together.” This has lead to the exacerbation of homelessness in America. There is a strong belief in American society that the homeless are a group of people that “just need to get a job”. However, as Badger points out in her article, this is not the case. It is estimated that nearly half of the homeless people in the United States work in one form or another. The problem facing homeless people isn’t laziness or lack of work ethic. The problem is that their incomes simply are not able to support their housing needs.
In a three-month experiment, Barbara Ehrenreich, was able to expose just how difficult it is to survive on a minimum wage salary. She chronicled her adventures in her groundbreaking novel Nickle and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America. Working as a waitress, hotel maid, house cleaner, nursing-home aide, and Wal-Mart employee, Ehrenreich exposes many of the difficulties low-wage workers face, one of which is finding affordable housing. Unfortunately Ehrenreich’s experiment is reality for far too many people. According John M. Levy’s Contemporary Urban Planning, “The planner may be able to make some contribution to easing the problem of homelessness via his or her involvement with housing policy.” He argues that because municipal housing policy affects the entire housing stock, including low-cost housing and homelessness, planners may be able to see the connections and alleviate some of the problems.
What exactly can the planner do to alleviate homelessness and ensure more affordable housing? Levy suggests that the planner can:
- Advocate housing policies that do not reduce the supply oh housing at the low end
- Push for some expansion of low-cost housing through more flexible zoning (such as permitting “accessory apartments” and apartments over stores
- Advocate flexibility in housing codes and zoning to make it easier to build group homes and other forms of group housing
zoningthegardenstate 
As nice as this sounds, Global Capitalism i.e.; Neo-liberalism, and the Iron-triangle, being implemented through the rhetoric of deficit-hawks and implemented in American policy through austerity measures then trickling down to cuts in public subsidies and zoning-laws balkanizing the former shattered middle-class landscapes of country and replacing them with, gentrified “Smart cities” where the concentration of social, cultural, and intellectual capital is in flight to i.e. “brain drain” ex. Atlanta, Berkeley etc.. pretty much guarantee that the “precariat” could in the midsts of cyclical unemployment and undercutting working rights in light of the global economic downturn/recession and the growth of multinational and transnational corporations can spend their entire lives in the North American version of “favela’s” for all the government cares.