Joe Mahoney, CNHI News New York Statehouse Reporter
Even after a torrent of reports over the decades on the nation’s shortage of affordable housing, the dream of having a decent place to live remains out of reach for many Americans.
Experts say it’s a crisis exacerbated by soaring construction costs and escalating prices for existing apartments and houses. Communities, state governments and advocacy organizations are struggling to identify solutions.
Fresh solutions to the affordability crisis were highlighted recently by Ivory Innovations, a nonprofit think tank housed at the University of Utah.
Among them:
• A program to support the creation of thousands of units of multifamily housing cooperatives, launched by the Frolic Community of Seattle. This effort is aimed at assisting people seeking to transition from renting to homeownership.
• A free housing search tool that assists people in locating affordable housing. It was developed by Housing Navigator Massachusetts, in concert with the public sector, owners, renters and human service providers to assist in choices for “where to call home.”
• The National Zoning Atlas, a collaborative of researchers involved in digitizing 30,000 U.S. zoning codes in ways intended to point out how zoning impacts housing affordability and availability.
Not all solutions are fresh out of the box.
Catholic Charities USA, a national nonprofit, oversees various programs to increase housing availability for the homeless, those with medical disabilities, victims of domestic violence and senior citizens.
Working closely with the U.S. Council on Homelessness and other nonprofit partners, Catholic Charities has been advocating for congressional support of solutions that address housing insecurity, said Anthony J. Granado, vice president of government relations for the organization. He said he hopes to see bipartisan support for such programs in the next federal budget.
“If you don’t invest on the front end, you will definitely be investing in a much more expensive way on the back end,” Granado said.
Key moves that could be made to deal with the housing crunch include broadened federal support for the federal low-income housing tax credit, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s rural housing program, the National Housing Trust Fund and the Multifamily Housing Preservation and Revitalization Program, according to Catholic Charities.
Granado said solutions would need to come from the collective efforts of the Biden administration, Congress, nonprofits, local governments and private investors.
At the federal level, Granado said there is a concern as the debate over the federal debt ceiling intensifies that there will be a push to slash discretionary spending, which could result in cuts to housing programs.
“We will be advocating for Congress to remember poor and vulnerable people,” Granado said. “People are still impacted by high inflation. They’re impacted by high housing prices. Now is not the time to pull the rug out from under these people. They still need these services in our cities and our communities as they see even more increased housing concerns and homelessness.”
Habitat for Humanity, a nonprofit that reports it has assisted 35 million people globally since it was founded in Georgia in 1976, added its new Black Home Ownership initiative last year.
The goal is to address what the organization calls systemic bias that has limited homeownership and address the economic disparity many Black people and communities of color face in accessing affordable housing.
Habitat said in its latest annual report it plans to invest $25 million in the initiative with a goal of raising an additional $100 million in concert with an equitable lending strategy.
In states such as New York, where local governments have faced what they see as threats to their zoning regulations from proposed state affordable housing mandates, the state government itself could play a wider role in dealing with local housing needs.
Nathan Gusdorf, executive director of the Fiscal Policy Institute, a New York think tank focused on economic policies, said putting the burden on local governments to finance an expansion of affordable housing through bolstering local property tax credits would ultimately be counterproductive when the state government is in a better position to harness the needed funding.
“We think that’s a strategy for promoting affordable housing that’s likely to lead to local fiscal crises,” he said.
But the state, Gusdorf said, could generate revenue for affordable housing by raising taxes.
“If the state were really going to invest in a solution to affordable housing, it would require new revenue,” he said. “We tend to believe that there is a significant amount of room to increase state revenue through a range of higher taxes.”
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