In our Spotlight on Business Report.

You've heard of social justice and even environmental?

Well, the group of state leaders today took a deep dove on achieving financial justice for residents, tackling issues of affordable housing, the impact of medical debt and other debt traps that often target lower income households.

As Melissa Rose Cooper reports, the problems are especially hard hitting for New Jersey residents.

Whether it's redlining or lack of opportunity to get the kind of loans and credit rating and equity and all the things that you need if you're a developer, the high cost of construction, inflation, all these things contribute to the difficulty of building housing.

That's and affordable.

Issues.

Mayor Ras Baraka says he's committed to improving in Newark, a city where roughly 75% of residents are renters.

You are racing against these equity, these LLC companies that come together and are purchasing property as quickly as they could get their hands on it.

Properties that are foreclosed, properties that people have for sale.

You know, people calling people's houses saying, I'll buy your property for $250,000.

Those are the guys, right?

So they're buying your property and they're flipping it or turn it into two and three family homes and are raising the rent on those properties.

So they're making money off of that.

So it's an investment for them which makes it unaffordable for you and difficult for you to purchase.

Purchase a home or rent at a at a at a price that's affordable.

The mayor was one of several speakers discussing possible ways to end the housing crisis and New Jersey Citizen Action's annual financial justice summit.

New Jersey is the seventh least affordable state in the nation, with a fair market rent for a two bedroom apartment in New Jersey estimated at a little over 1700 dollars a month, which requires someone to have an annual income of over $70,000 or make $33.50 an hour if they don't want to spend more than 30% of their pay on utilities and rent.

Despite the fact that New Jersey implemented some of the strongest rental eviction and foreclosure protections during the pandemic New Jersey has.

New Jersey's housing crisis remains acute, with an increasing demand for assistance to low and moderate income individuals across the state, including here in Newark.

Nikita Baily of the National Fair Housing Alliance says many existing housing inequities are deeply rooted in years of systemic racism.

And those race conscious policies explicitly favored white consumer.

So thousands of public policies since the founding of our nation actually ensured that white people would be in a better financial position.

So Bailey says ending those barriers is critical.

And those solutions are things like special purpose credit programs and first generation down payment assistance.

With the state of New Jersey, which is actually passed in, is a significant victory that will help us to correct for that history of discrimination in our mortgage system.

Housing advocates also say it's important for all levels of government to work together to eliminate discriminatory practices so no community will continue to be left behind.

For NJ Spotlight News, I'm Melissa Cooper.