Richard Kyte: We can fix the housing problem one community at a time (2024)

Recent conversations are leading me to reflect more deeply on the ways our society has severely mismanaged its entire approach to housing.

The first took place while attending a leadership conference in another city. I was sitting next to a woman who told me how she had lost her previous job at the local school district during the pandemic. After several months, she found work at a nonprofit agency helping people on low incomes get needed services, but it paid much less, and she could no longer afford a car. Then, just two days earlier, she received a letter saying that her rent would be increasing by $150 per month. She had two teenage children; she didn’t know what they were going to do.

The second conversation took place last week at a groundbreaking ceremony for a new $16 million mixed-income apartment building in my hometown. Talking to those involved in the project — the developer, city officials, bankers and representatives from nonprofit agencies — it became clear why such projects, though desperately needed, are so rare. It takes a great deal of institutional collaboration, a deep personal commitment from the people involved, and a great deal of money. This project, with 62 units, works out to a little over $250,000 per apartment.

We need more large-scale affordable housing projects to meet the demand in many of our cities, but they aren’t enough. We also need to think more broadly about ways to reverse a decades-long trend of housing taking up an ever-increasing share of the typical person’s income.

When I graduated from college in the mid-1980s, the country was in a recession. I couldn’t find the kind of job I was hoping for, so I ended up painting and hanging wallpaper for a year, driving to job sites in a 1966 Ford Econoline. I rented an old house along with three friends. My monthly share of the rent was $125 — 10 percent of my monthly pay. Today the median renter pays around 25 percent of the median household income on housing.

I looked at the data for my own city to see if we represent national averages. The median rent in La Crosse, Wis., is $1,000 per month. The median household income is $4,300 per month. But that figure is deceptive. Median household income for renters is considerably lower, about $2,800 per month. Which means typical renters in my area are probably paying over 30% of their income on rent.

According to figures published by Statista, 43 percent of renters in the United States spend more than 35 percent of their income on rent. If you are a single person with an annual salary of $60,000 or more, you can probably afford to do that. If you are a parent making $15 an hour, you can’t.

So, why did communities in the United States quit building affordable places to live? One of the reasons is that few people buy houses anymore; instead, they buy mortgages held by huge financial institutions like Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac. Those institutions determine what kinds of homes get financed, and they prefer financing large, detached homes in subdivisions for people with robust incomes and well-established credit.

Another reason we quit building affordable places is that we have made new apartment construction much more expensive than in other countries. The fire codes in all U.S. cities (except New York and Seattle) require two staircases in any apartment building taller than three stories. This means apartment buildings are built on a large footprint to keep the price per unit down. Most European countries, by contrast, allow for a single staircase in buildings with fewer than six stories, which makes smaller apartment buildings cheaper to build.

Changing zoning laws to allow multiple family dwellings in more neighborhoods would create opportunities for the kinds of incremental development that we need to solve the housing crisis. It would allow homeowners to put an apartment in their basem*nt or attic or to add a small dwelling to their backyard. It would allow small-scale developers to build apartment buildings on lots in the middle of neighborhoods.

There is no single solution to a housing crisis that has been decades in the making, but the good news is that we don’t need to wait for the federal government to act to begin addressing the need. Each community has the ability to act on its own, working proactively with developers to encourage new large-scale affordable housing while also working systematically on a variety of incremental changes, neighborhood by neighborhood.

Solving the housing crisis begins with those who already have a place to live asking what we can do where we are. We can’t wait for someone else to fix the problem somewhere else. We must start by fixing the things that are preventing us from adding more housing in the places where we live.