In 2008, the National Low Income Housing Coalition released a report detailing how, despite their tremendous efforts to do so, states were unable to make up for the shrinking availability of federal dollars for affordable housing development with their own housing funds.

In the Sacramento News & Review, we read a story that brings this report to life. The legislatively mandated dissolution of California’s housing redevelopment agencies means that affordable housing developments like the one featured in the article may be the last of their kind.

Advocates speculate that funding from the National Housing Trust Fund could help fill in the gap. But as The Nation notes, the National Housing Trust Fund is a necessary program that doesn’t yet have the funding necessary for it to build the housing that low income people need. With uncertainty growing over how lawmakers will address the federal deficit and sequestration, it’s more urgent than ever that a greater measure of fairness be brought to federal housing policy so that the acute shortage of housing affordable to seniors, people with disabilities and those in the low-wage workforce can finally be brought to an end.