Send an email
Our future supporters are in your inbox.
Cut and paste the sample email below to send to your colleagues, friends and family.
Cut and paste the sample email below to send to your colleagues, friends and family.
Subject: Let’s Make Room
Hi [friends and colleagues],
I want you to know about the Make Room campaign, which is working to put the 11 million American families whose rent consumes more than half their incomes on the national agenda. Make Room is sharing real people’s stories and promoting solutions —all to urge our nation’s leaders to act. As part of the Concerts for the 1st series, top musical artists are lending their voices with performances in the living rooms of affected families. I’m excited to be part of the beginning of this new effort and I hope you’ll join me today.
I would personally appreciate it if you could do these easy things to help us spread the word about Make Room and the families we’re aiming to help:
- Sign up your email on the website to stay informed and hear about new ways to act. (Expect about 1-2 email updates a month and your email address won’t be shared).
- Forward this email to others and help spread the word about the campaign. One in 4 families who rent are affected by the rental crisis. It will take all of us to get our country’s leaders to pay more attention to the needs of struggling families.
Thank you for all you can do to help Make Room for everyone trying to make ends meet.
Send a Letter to the Editor
When the news media reports on rental housing in your area, you can use this template to quickly respond and bring attention to senior renters.
To the editor:
For low-income people in [CITY/STATE], getting a job is only half the battle.(“[ARTICLE TITLE]”)
The twin challenges of rapidly rising housing costs and stagnant wages mean even working families struggle to make ends meet, threatening household stability and our economy as a whole.
Experts generally advise renters to avoid paying more than 30 percent of their pretax income on housing costs, including rent and utilities. But rising rents and weak wage growth mean that’s increasingly difficult: A growing percentage of workers are paying more than the recommended 30 percent of income just to keep a roof over their heads – and in some cases far more.
A new report by Make Room, a national campaign to give renters a voice, found that in 2014, 20 million working adults paid more than 30 percent of their income on rent.
That’s a 22 percent increase from 2005, even as the number of workers overall grew by just two percent during the same time period.
It’s almost impossible to provide a steady life for your family when your rent keeps going up and your paychecks aren’t getting any bigger.
The Make Room analysis highlights the need to focus on the how to improve the lives of low-income families, an issue that deserves far more attention from our elected officials. We desperately need a bipartisan approach to ending the rental housing crisis and helping communities across America thrive.
Our policymakers should be working on serious, workable plans to increase the supply of affordable homes, direct scarce public resources to where they are needed most and ensure lower-income workers earn fair wages that are enough to live on.
Housing and wages are inextricably linked: Housing is typically a family’s largest monthly expense, and our local economy simply cannot thrive when a growing number of households have little buying power because they barely earn enough to keep a roof overhead.
To break this cycle, we must tackle these issues at the same time – lifting up the lowest-income workers and strengthening our economy in the process.
[Name][Organization][Local Address/Contact Information]
