Read the passage and mark the letter A, B, C or D on your answer sheet to indicate the best answer to each of the following questions from 2...

Read the passage and mark the letter A, B, C or D on your answer sheet to indicate the best answer to each of the following questions from 23 to 30.

        In contemporary America, “affordable” housing is conventionally pegged to the HUD threshold of 30 percent of income, yet millions exceed it by punishing margins. For low-income renters, housing often devours over 70 percent of earnings as stagnating wages meet quickening rents. What counts as affordable is indexed to area median income (AMI), so a unit labeled “affordable” in the Bay Area may dwarf market prices elsewhere. The pandemic magnified precarity, pushing evictions and prices upward, especially among marginalized households.

        Policy quarrels trace a long federal–local tug-of-war. Deregulatory voices would relax permits and zoning to let supply expand; interventionists prefer mandates and direct aid. If zoning were substantially loosened, advocates contend, supply would swell and prices would retreat accordingly. Since the 1970s, tools like Section 8 vouchers and the low-income housing tax credit have predominated, with HUD coordinating alongside local authorities. Yet waiting lists are chronic, landlords sometimes spurn vouchers, and periodic funding gaps blunt intended reach.

        Today, local zoning often entrenches scarcity: minimum lot sizes inflate land costs; parking quotas devour buildable area; bans on high-rises and caps on height stifle infill. Homeowners – keen to defend asset values and neighborhood “character” – mobilize procedurally to resist multifamily projects. Filtering exists, but its trickle is slow and uneven, rarely keeping pace with need. In places like Palo Alto, dramatic demand from tech employment collided with inelastic supply, so rents escalated as available units lagged far behind entrants.

        Supply shortfalls predate COVID-19. The subprime mortgage crisis precipitated mass foreclosures, pushing former owners – now with impaired credit – into already tight rental markets. Pandemic relief briefly forestalled deeper damage; when that aid ended, eviction filings surged, with near-record dockets in 2022 as inflation lifted the price of basics. In a climate of scant inventory and soaring home values, minimum-wage earners were priced out, while would-be buyers, unable to qualify for mortgages, remained renters, intensifying competition for too few units.

(Adapted from https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/politics-and-government/affordable-housing-crisis-overview)

Question 23. The word stagnating in paragraph 1 can be best replaced by ______?

A. ballooning                B. plateauing                        C. volatile                        D. equalizing