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THE HOUSING CRISIS GOES SUBURBAN 1 Seventy years after President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared that the Depression had left one-third of the American people ill-housed, ill-clothed and ill-nourished,2 Americans are well-clothed and increasingly over nourished. But the scarcity of affordable housing is a deepening national crisis, and not just for inner-city families on welfare. The problem has climbed the income ladder and moved to the suburbs, where service workers cram their families into overcrowded apartments, college graduates have to crash with their parents, and firefighters, police officers and teachers cant afford to live in the communities they serve. 2 Home ownership is near an all-time high, but the gap is growing between the Owns and the Own-Nots —as well as the Owns and the Own-80-Miles-From-Work. One-third of Americans now spend at least 30% of their income on housing, the federal definition of an unaffordable burden, and half the working poor spend at least 50% of their income on rent, a critical burden. The real estate boom of the past decade has produced windfalls for Americans who owned before it began, but affordable housing is now a serious problem for more low- and moderate-income Americans than taxes, Social Security4 or gas prices. 3 America used to care a lot about affordable housing. Roosevelt signed housing legislation in 1934 and 1937, providing mortgages, government apartments and construction jobs for workers down on their luck. In 1949, Congress .set an official goaljjf a decent home and a suitable living environment for every American family, and in 1974, President Richard M. Nixon began offering subsidized rent vouchers to millions of low-income tenants in private housing. For half a century, most housing debates in Washington revolved around how much to expand federal assistance. 4 But for the past two decades, the only new federal housing initiative has been HOPE VI5, a Clinton administration program that has demolished 80,000 uni