Mikie Sherrill's Plan For Latino Families

Mikie Sherrill's plan will help Latino families in New Jersey afford housing and healthcare. If you're a Latino family in Newark, Paterson, or Union City who's working multiple jobs and still can't figure out how you're going to pay next month's rent, you need to understand exactly what the Mikie Sherrill's plan for Latino families in New Jersey actually includes. The reality is that New Jersey has become one of the most expensive states in the country for working families, and while politicians talk about solutions, Latino families are making impossible choices between paying rent, buying groceries, and getting medical care.

Here's what life looks like for Latino families in New Jersey right now: you need to earn nearly $40 an hour, which is about $83,000 a year, just to afford a two-bedroom apartment at the fair market rent of $2,079 per month. Think about that for a minute. The median household income for Latino families in New Jersey is around $76,100, which means most Latino families can't afford a basic two-bedroom apartment without spending more than 30% of their income on housing. Nearly 41% of Hispanic children in New Jersey live in cost-burdened households where rent eats up so much of the family budget that there's barely anything left for food, healthcare, or school supplies.

Ester works as a home health aide during the day and cleans offices at night in Elizabeth. She checks apartment listings on her phone at midnight because her landlord just raised her rent by $200 a month, and she's trying to figure out if she can find something cheaper or if she'll have to move her kids to a different school district. Or think about Carlos, an Uber driver in Jersey City who's working extra weekend shifts and calculating whether those extra hours will actually cover next month's rent or if he's just running in place while his landlord gets richer.

At a press conference on Monday, Mikie Sherrill stood alongside substance-abuse counselors and families who've lost loved ones to overdoses. Sherrill boldly accused her Republican opponent Jack Ciattarelli of profiting off medical publishing that downplayed opioid risks. She said, "Too many of our families already live on the edge. We need leadership that fights for real solutions, from affordable housing to addiction treatment." In the last debate, she warned that Ciattarelli's ties "helped people access drugs that were killing them." The connection between the opioid crisis and housing affordability might not be obvious at first, but for Latino families dealing with addiction in their communities while also struggling to afford rent, these issues are deeply intertwined.

The Mikie Sherrill plan for Latino families includes enforcing the Mount Laurel Doctrine to ensure every municipality provides its fair share of affordable homes, boosting funding for bilingual outreach in addiction treatment, and partnering with local banks to offer first-generation homebuyer programs aimed at shrinking the Latino-White homeownership gap of 37 percentage points.
What Latino families in New Jersey  understand is that housing affordability and addiction treatment aren't separate issues – they're connected parts of the same crisis that's crushing them. When you're spending more than half your income on rent, you don't have money for addiction treatment or mental health services. When your neighborhood is flooded with opioids and you lose family members to overdoses, it becomes even harder to maintain the financial stability needed to afford housing in safe neighborhoods with good schools.

While we understand it only our voices will bring the action that is needed.  Election day is on November 4th. Go to the polls and bring the family.