Michael T. Pugh is president and CEO of the Local Initiatives Support Corporation, one of the country’s largest community development organizations. In 2024, more than 21 million homeowners were severely cost-burdened, spending over half their income to stay housed. Across the country, families are being squeezed by rising insurance premiums, property taxes and the growing cost of basic repairs. We talk about this as a housing shortage, and it is. But that framing misses a critical truth: We are not just short on housing. We are actively losing the affordable homes we already have. And we are losing them faster than we can replace them. The national conversation tends to focus on one solution: build more housing. Clearly, we do need more housing, but that's not the only issue. While we debate how to build faster, millions of homeowners are quietly slipping into instability — not because they can’t pay their mortgage, but because they can’t fix a roof, or a furnace breaks, or a title was never formally transferred. For many families, especially in under-resourced communities, the margin between stability and displacement is razor thin. A single unexpected cost can trigger a chain reaction, deferred maintenance, code violations and rising debt, which ultimately results in the loss of a home that may have been stable and affordable for decades. Once that home is gone, it is rarely replaced at a price the next family can afford. This is the hidden engine of the housing crisis, the steady erosion of existing affordable homeownership. Heirs’ property compounds this challenge. Homes passed down informally across generations, often one of the only pathways to wealth, can become legally vulnerable. Without a clear title, families are locked out of financing and disaster relief and exposed to forced sales that strip generational assets from communities.