Safe, stable, affordable housing was first recognized as a universal human right in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Although the US signed this declaration, there are still no federal laws that guarantee access to housing (unlike countries such as France, Spain, Sweden, and Belgium, whose constitutions expressly create a right to housing).
As of 2022 in the U.S, there were an estimated 650,000 unhoused people and a projected housing shortfall of up to 7 million housing units. Only one in four eligible households receive federal housing assistance.
Under capitalism, housing is a commodity — one that corporations have increasingly begun to dominate as a means of exploiting the working class. A 2022 study by Drexel University of three major cities (Philadelphia, PA; Jacksonville, FL; and Richmond, VA) found that in the last 30 years, the proportion of rental properties owned by individuals (not LLCs) dropped from 77% to 41%. Investor purchases of single-family homes also increased, with more than 1 in 5 homes sold going from homeowners to investors in neighborhoods that were redlined under the Federal Housing Act of 1934.
Why is this a problem?
Corporations that own rental properties are not required to disclose beneficial owners. Because they are shielded from liability, corporate owners are incentivized to put profit over people and may not maintain their properties. In addition, corporations have the liquid capital to purchase properties and can easily absorb the cost of holding vacant and delapitated properties for long periods of time. This is how redlining and gentrification work.
In redlined areas, prospective buyers and current owners struggle to access mortgage financing, face low sale prices and high vacancy, and have higher shares of residents who are Black or Hispanic. Eventually, investors rennovate and resell or rent these properties at prices that are unnaffordable for the area’s original residents, leading to the increase in property value in the surrounding area and the displacement of individuals who are unable to afford the rising prices (gentrification).
Meanwhile, for the average family, homeownership is increasingly out of reach. The average cost of a home has risen from $18,000 in 1963 to $420,800 in 2024, whereas the median income for families in 1963 was $6,200 and as of 2024 the median income for families is $74,580. This number is lower for Hispanic ($62,800) and Black ($52,860) families. In percentage terms, in 1963 a family’s yearly salary was 34% of the cost of the home. Today, a family’s yearly salary is only 18% of the cost of the home. In the 1960s, rent was an average of $71 per month (meaning 14% of your monthly paycheck went to rent). Today, rent is an average of $1827 per month (meaning 29% of your monthly paycheck goes to rent).
So what can be done?
Imagine what the world would look like if the government devoted its $825 billion defense budget to creating low-cost housing units and offered subsidies and/or rent control for low-income groups. If the U.S. constitution contained an ammendment demanding acess to safe, sanitary housing for all. If homelessness was not treated as an individual problem, but a systemic one. Because in a country where 66% of people live paycheck to paycheck, homelessness is an ever-present danger for many.
Although Congress denied the $300 billion “Housing as A Human Right Act” in 2020 and 2021, local legislation is still powerful. One notable example is California Senate Bill 567, i.e., the Homelessness Prevention Act, which went into effect on April 1, 2024. The bill caps rent hikes at 10% and prevents landlords from evicting tenants without legal cause. Another example is California Assembly Bill 12, i.e., the new residential security deposit law, which went into effect on July 1, 2024 and limits the amount landlords can charge for security deposits.
Other steps that could be taken by the federal government include increasing protections for and expanding section 8 housing, introducing legislation requiring the disclosure of beneficial owners for LLCs and tracking high priced real estate transactions, and creating protections for tenants focused on just cause evictions and right to counsel for eviction. The government should also increase the tax rate on vacant properties, so that it is no longer profitable for corporations to hoard territory in a deliberate effort to delapitate and then gentrify urban areas.
Thank you for being a quiet place filled with books. There are so few quiet places where we can exist without paying — no need to buy a cup of coffee before I ask the librarian a question. Thank you for making learning look beautiful, with your dark oak bookshelves stretching up, and your little stools to reach the top shelf, and your endless rows of colorful spines stacked in neat columns like vertebrae. Thank you for being a place where everyone feels welcome. Thank you for being free, because knowledge should be free. Not everyone has a home with a computer and internet, but, because of you, everyone can have access to the opportunities those resources provide.
I wish everyone saw books as the treasure you do. If the Nazis had paused, and let their fingers caress the fraying edges and feel the thickness of the pages as their eyes lingered on the titles, maybe they would never have burned the books. Maybe they would have read them and learned to think for themselves.
I wish the people who are banning books today would read the books they claim to be so dangerous. I wish everyone had the courage of librarians, the ones who say: “Shhh, honey, we’re reading”. People make so much noise about what they don’t understand. Don’t they know you have to be quiet to read?
I know times are hard. Stay a quiet place, please, full of worlds written for everyone.
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Libraries of all types receive only 0.003% of the federal budget, but their programs and services are used by more than 1.2 billion in-person patrons, and many more virtual visitors. They offer early literacy development and grade-level reading programs, summer reading programs for kids, high-speed internet access, employment assistance for job seekers, homework and research resources, veterans’ telehealth spaces, STEM programs, and small business support for entrepreneurs [1].
On March 14 of this year (2025), Donald Trump issued an executive order that listed the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) as one of the governmental entities to be “eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law”, as part of his effort to “[continue] the reduction in the elements of the Federal bureaucracy that the President has determined unnecessary” [2].
The IMLS distributes more than $200 million in grants nationwide [3]. Now that the Trump administration has frozen funding to the IMLS and placed the agency’s roughly 70 staff members on administrative leave, libraries across states are suffering. Although most libraries are funded by city and county governments, federal dollars help pay for summer reading programs, interlibrary loan services, and digital books. In 2023, more than 660 million people globally borrowed e-books, audiobooks, and digital magazines. Due to Trump’s funding freeze, that service is now in jeopardy; Cindy Hohl, president of the American Library Association (ALA), explained that “the cost of providing digital sources is too expensive for most libraries” [4].
Libraries are also a cornerstone of the fight against book bans. The American Library Association has been pivotal in tracking data about banned and challenged books, as well as fighting back against these bans. When the U.S. Department of Defense Education Activity announced on February 7 that it would remove “books potentially related to gender ideology or discriminatory equity ideology topics” in DoD schools, the ALA released a statement stating that “the DoDEA is engaging in censorship of legitimate views and opinions that violates the First Amendment rights of those who serve our nation and their families, thereby denying them the very freedoms they have pledged to protect with their lives” [5].
The U.S Supreme Court addressed the removal of library books from high school and junior high school libraries in the 1982 case Board of Education, Island Trees Union Free School District v. Pico. The Board of education of the Island Trees Union Free School District in New York had removed books from school libraries, characterizing them as “anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic, and just plain filthy”, declaring “it is our duty, our moral obligation, to protect the children in our schools from this moral danger as surely as from physical and medical dangers” [6].The Court ultimately decided that “the special characteristics of the school library make that environment especially appropriate for the recognition of the First Amendment rights of students”, and that “local school boards may not remove books from school library shelves simply because they dislike the ideas contained in those books and seek by their removal to “prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion” [6].
In the Court’s decision, they reflected deeply on the importance of libraries to students. While they acknowledged the authority of school boards to choose a curriculum and academic materials, they also stated that students’ “selection of books…is entirely a matter of free choice; the libraries afford them an opportunity at self-education and individual enrichment that is wholly optional”, an opportunity that must be protected because “In our system, students may not be regarded as closed-circuit recipients of only that which the school chooses to communicate” [6]. The Supreme Court cited the decision from one District Court, which stated that in the school library “a student can literally explore the unknown, and discover areas of interest and thought not covered by the prescribed curriculum. . . . Th[e] student learns that a library is a place to test or expand upon ideas presented to him, in or out of the classroom” [6].
Since 2021, efforts to ban books have spiked; in 2020, 231 unique titles were challenged, while in 2021 this number jumped to 1,858. In 2022, a total of 2,571 unique titles were challenged, and in 2023 this number climbed even higher to 4,240 [7]. While this number decreased to 2,452 in 2024, the ALA states that this decrease may be the result of underreporting, censorship by exclusion, and legislative restrictions. Underreporting is when book challenges are not publicly reported in order to avoid risk to library workers’ professional livelihood and personal safety. Censorship by exclusion occurs when library workers are prohibited from purchasing books, often due to legislative restrictions, which are laws that require school districts to restrict or remove library materials broadly deemed to include “sexual content” or controversial themes — often resulting in the removal of books with LGBTQ+ characters or themes, as well as books about race or racism and featuring characters or color [8].
A 2022 report by PEN America analyzed documented cases of book bans between June 2021 and July 2022 [9]. They found that 41% of banned or challenged books (674 titles) explicitly address LGBTQ+ themes or have LGBTQ+ characters. A total of 9% of these feature transgender characters or stories (145 titles). A total of 40% of banned book titles (659 total) contain prominent characters of color, and 21% of banned book titles directly address issues of race and racism.
PEN America identified at least 50 groups operating at the national, state, or local levels, over 70% of which have formed since 2021 [9]. These groups are campaigning in an effort to control and limit the kinds of books that are available in schools. They use social media and inflammatory language like “grooming” and “pornography” to influence public perception; they circulate book lists to their audiences to challenge, flood school districts with official challenges, mobilize supports to attend board meetings, and even file criminal complaints against teachers, school district officials, and librarians. PEN directly linked 20% of the book bans enacted in the 2021-22 school year to these groups, and estimated an additional 30% of bans were the result of these groups’ likely influence, including the use of common language or tactics [9].
A 2022 CBS news poll showed that Americans “overwhelmingly reject” banning books about history or race [10]. The movement to ban books is undemocratic. It imposes restrictions on all students based on the preferences of those seeking the bans. As Varian Johnson stated, “I think a parent can say, well, I don’t want my child to read this. I can respect that. But what gives you the right to bar all children from reading it? To bar all children from seeing a life that imitates theirs? It bars them from seeing someone who looks like them exist on the page and triumph over something…Anytime a book that features someone who looks like you is banned, it says that you’re not worthy. You don’t deserve to exist. You’re not as important as other things. Your life is not important. That’s wrong and it’s dangerous” [9].
Books themselves are not dangerous. They are a tool for education, and they create space for conversations with young people about how to navigate the world. Adults must be willing to have those uncomfortable conversations, instead of denying young people the opportunity to become aware of ideas and worlds that are different from those in which they grew up. Libraries are one space in which those conversations can take place. We must protect the right of every young person to explore. We can start by protecting public libraries.
