Housing on the wish list
SOON CHILDREN will be re enacting Clement Moore's ritual -- hanging stockings on the fireplace mantle and hoping that a portly fellow in a red suit will squeeze down their chimney with an oversized bag of stuff.
Certainly hundreds of thousands of children live in homes with fireplaces: 55 percent of new homes today have one fireplace. In another 5 percent of new homes, children have more than one to choose from.
If Santa has to go to the bathroom (after all that milk, all those cookies), he will be in luck. Over 95 percent of new homes have at least two bathrooms; over 50 percent have more than two bathrooms (compared with 15 percent of homes built in 1971).
And if Santa needs to park his sleigh, there is plenty of room. More than 80 percent of new homes have a two-car garage; almost one in five can garage three or more cars.
There is even room to park the sleigh indoors. Although family size has dropped almost 25 percent during the past 30 years, the average size of new homes has increased almost 50 percent, to about 2,400 square feet.
Of course, it is fortuitous that we have such large homes -- more places to store the stuff we accumulate. And Santa will be carrying bags and bags of expensive stuff for everybody in the family.
In this season of relentless gift trafficking, charitable groups pop up with campaigns to remember "those less fortunate"; that is, those children who cannot depend on Santa to bring dolls and trucks and iPods. So the groups collect money for stuff. They want to make every child smile like Clement Moore urchins on the holiday (Christmas, Hanukkah and Kwanzaa seem to have morphed into one retail ecstasy) morning.
Forgive me. Maybe I have overdosed on mall carols.
This season, please remember that most homes do not have fireplaces, or if they do they are used to heat the apartment rather than hang stockings. Seventy percent of low-income renters pay more than 50 percent of their incomes for housing, leaving precious little for holiday trinkets. Over the past decade, as the United States has cut back on federal subsidies, we have lost 2 million low-cost rental units. Minutes down the superhighway from the McMansions are more modest dwellings.
More than 6 million households face overcrowded conditions -- the highest number since 1960. Those families have not amassed enough money to buy a home; in fact, the tenants who are working at low-wage jobs in the service sector -- the fastest-growing sector of today's economy -- will probably never save enough money for a down payment. One in four workers earns less than $11 an hour and half of all workers have jobs that pay less than $16 an hour.
Dolls that talk and trains that rumble are nice. They surely will make children smile, at least for a few hours. But thousands of families need more than toy help. They need housing help. They need a way to close the gap between their income and the cost of housing. They need, not Santa, but Uncle Sam. Instead of a toy in every stocking, how about honoring the 1949 Congressional mandate of "a decent home and a suitable living environment" for every family?
Nicholas Retsinas is director of the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University. 
