@time

Record-breaking real estate prices. Surging rents. Homelessness on the rise. Marcia Fudge is trying to decide which fire to put out first. In the year since Biden appointed Fudge Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the crises of homelessness and housing prices have grown worse. Nearly half of American workers no longer earn enough to rent a one-bedroom apartment in the city where they live. And more than half a million Americans, including more than 100,000 children, were homeless in 2020—the fourth consecutive year that number increased. As the chief of U.S. housing policy, it is, at least in theory, Fudge’s job to fix this mess, and she must do it with a depleted set of tools in her toolbox. She is nevertheless getting to work. The housing crisis, she likes to say, is about much more than housing. It’s about people no longer being able to live where the jobs are. It’s about companies no longer being able to hire people to fill open positions. And it’s about the damage done to America when buying a home becomes impossible for all but the already rich. “Home was everything,” she says, recalling her own childhood. “We didn’t have much. But we did have that.” Read more at the link in our bio. Photograph by @michellegustafson for TIME.

February 08, 2022