Coalition of Religious Communities (CORC)

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The Coalition of Religious Communities is project of Crossroads Urban Center that brings people together from a variety of faith traditions to reduce hunger and homelessness  in Utah.  We have a weekly email called Hunger & Homelessness Weekly Update and organize opportunities to learn from experts and speak directly with elected  officials about hunger and homelessness in Utah.

Volunteer to help ask candidates for state and local government to go big on affordable housing

Before the Great Recession of 2009, Utah was making serious progress toward reducing homelessness by building permanent supportive housing for people with physical or mental health conditions that made them unable to obtain housing on their own. When the recession began Utah stopped building new housing like this for ten years. During those years our state's population grew dramatically and the Baby Boomer generation began to age out of the workforce onto fixed incomes. As if these factors were not enough to create a spike in homelessness-- during these same years rents grew more than twice as fast as wages.

Now, we are in a new recession and the leaders of the Utah Legislature are talking about cutting $5 million for affordable housing from the state budget-- despite the fact that money would leverage over $120 million in other funding and create hundreds of jobs during a recession. Today we ask Governor Herbert and legislative leaders to keep this money in the budget but in the coming weeks and months we need to challenge Utah's elected officials to do more. State and local government bodies may have limited cash to invest in housing but they own parcels of land that are ideal for investing in housing. 

This is an election year and so we have the opportunity to ask candidates for state and local government to look for creative ways to invest in the production of affordable housing. Do you have time to help reach out to candidates and see whether they are willing to act to create jobs during a recession, stimulate the economy and help address Utah's long term housing affordability and homelessness crisis?

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