Federal Help for Poor Families With Children Is Evaporating

The plight of families is deepening with the affordability crisis. For the most vulnerable families in the U.S., however, help is getting even harder to find. The past decade has seen federal support for very low-income families with children slide, even as their ranks have skyrocketed.

A new report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities finds that housing aid for families with children is at its lowest point in a decade. Even as the number of families with children with worst-case housing needs—meaning families living in substandard housing conditions or paying more than half their household income toward rent—grew sharply over the Great Recession, the federal rental assistance these families received stayed flat.