Public housing in this country is rapidly becoming endangered, and with it, the lives of low-income people. Public housing provides a safety net for the working poor and those on a fixed income, which is critical in today's housing market considering that as of 2008, there was no county in the United States where an individual working 40 hours a week at minimum wage could afford a one-bedroom apartment at fair market rent.

The state of public housing is the result of decades of bad policies, which has greatly impacted low-income communities, predominantly of color, throughout the country. This reality is uniquely portrayed in a recent report, We Call These Projects Home: Solving the Housing Crisis from the Ground Up, by the Right to the City Alliance (RTTC). RTTC is a national alli­ance of community groups organizing to build a united response to gentrification and displacement.

The report documents the public housing crisis, how it affects residents, and how we can reverse bad policy, all by going straight to the source -- public-housing residents themselves. Through We Call These Projects Home, RTTC elevates the voices of residents across seven cities: Los Angeles, Miami, New Orleans, New York City, Oakland, San Francisco and Washington, D.C. What they say, what they find and what they recommend deserves our attention.

Decades of ineffective and misguided policies have fueled disinvestment, demolition and deregulation of public housing. The consequence has been mass displacement of residents, destroying critical community networks and scattering residents to the wind. Meanwhile, millions of low-income people still need the safety net that public housing provides -- in the cities studied in this report, there were more than 250,000 people on the waiting lists for public housing and almost 150,000 homeless.

Residents who participated in the report spent, on average, six years on the waiting list to get into public housing. The story of Emma Harris brings these numbers to life. Harris is a resident from San Francisco who spent two years trying to get on the list for housing and then another sevenyears actually "waiting" on the list. So, for those nine years, Harris was forced to stay in unsafe and unsanitary quarters, causing her to suffer from constant physical sickness and mental depression. Meanwhile, while Harris and others like her waited endlessly, over 120,000 public-housing units sat vacant across the country.