Jubilee is stories from landlords, formerly homeless, and tenants about housing in NH.

We’ll hear from Martin Toe about Granite State Organizing Project’s Housing Jubilee Campaign here in New Hampshire.

Debt jubilee, a practice going back 4,000 years, is an established way of resetting economies that are burdened by excessive personal and collective debt. As we emerge from the economic devastation of the COVID-19 pandemic, we must consider this way of returning to individual and collective economic wholeness.

A particularly critical form of debt is for housing. We were in a national crisis before the pandemic began, with nearly half of all renters spending more than 30% of their income on housing costs and more than 25% paying more than 50% of their income. The Covid-19 crisis hit these households harder than most, as many of them depended on jobs that were lost when the economy partially closed. Some short-term assistance in the form of extra unemployment and one-time relief checks delayed the inevitable impact on these families. Many states have allocated CARES Act money to help people pay their back rent incurred during the state of emergency, but indications are that the NH one-time allocation of $2,500 per household will not be enough to prevent a tide of evictions.

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