The Northern Kentucky Chamber of Commerce held its monthly Eggs ‘n Issues breakfast and panel Tuesday morning. Leaders from several regional organizations discussed affordable housing, or rather, what they called income-aligned housing.
Income-aligned housing refers to housing that meets the needs of people regardless of their take-home income.
The panel consisted of three people: Building Industry Association of Northern Kentucky Executive Vice President Brian Miller, Northern Kentucky Area Development District Executive Director Tara Johnson Noem and Kenton County Planning and Development Services Executive Director Sharmili Reddy. The panel was moderated by Wade Williams, director of economic development for the Montrose Group.
There were two main issues related to affordable housing, Williams said, setting the stage for the discussion: a drop in labor participation rates and a shortage of housing in the region.
As it related to housing, the panel frequently cited a September study from the Northern Kentucky Area Development District that assessed the housing situation in the eight most northern counties in Kentucky. The study suggested that those eight counties need “to build 6,650 housing units to support economic development in the next 5 years, which equates to 1,330 units per year” in order to close the gap between supply and demand.
A study of housing in Northern Kentucky has revealed troubling trends for housing in the region, with the largest need being for “workforce housing” for households earning between $15 and $25 per hour, with monthly housing costs between $500 and $1,500. The region needs about 3,000 more housing units to provide for people within that income range, according to the study. The demand for one- to two-bedroom rentals and owned properties consistently exceeds their supply, while supply for three and four-bedroom properties consistently exceeds demand. The study suggests that the region needs to build 6,650 housing units to support economic development in the next five years, which equates to 1,330 units per year. Read more here.
Understanding NKY’s housing shortage
Williams posed questions about how to deal with those two key issues and other issues relating to them.
“The income-aligned conversation is about having a wider variety of housing types,” Noem said, “and that’s what the study really showed is we have needs across the spectrum.”
Williams asked Miller about how the home building sector was responding to this state of affairs. Miller replied by arguing that regulations related to housing construction had the effect of ratcheting up housing prices, a point he’s discussed in the past.
“If you raise the cost of a home by $1,000, you’re pricing out somewhere around 1100 families from being able to afford that home,” Miller said.
He added that simply building about 6,000 new apartments alone won’t solve the problem, even if there is a dearth of affordable rentals in the region. Lowering interest rates won’t be enough either, he argued. Mechanisms also need to be created to help new home buyers purchase property within the existing housing stock and incentivize existing property owners to sell—rates of property resales have declined recently, he said.
Williams asked Reddy about a phenomenon called NIMBYism, an acronym that stands for Not In My Back Yard, wherein community members will protest new developments near their neighborhoods. Reddy said that, actually, NIMBYs had been subsumed by a new phenomenon called “CAVEs, which is Citizens Against Virtually Everything.”
Reddy said that most people who protest new developments are often worried about increased density, increased traffic, property value decline, and the incursion of Housing Choice Voucher, or Section 8, recipients into new areas.
She also discussed the county’s update to its comprehensive plan, which is currently undergoing its public input process. She encouraged attendees to contribute to the planning process and argued that no one sector or institution would be able to solve the problem. Developers and governments must work together to pinpoint key development sites that would provide viable income-aligned housing.
“There’s a whole slew of strategies that are needed, definitely on the public policy side, to move this conversation forward, but it’s going to have to happen in partnership with the private sector,” Reddy said.
Toward the end of the talk, Miller discussed how the problem may have been even deeper than the housing study suggested, saying that prices on houses needed to decline dramatically to attract new prospective buyers. Miller said that if you were to take out all of the pricing out factors he mentioned before, the region needs to attract about 60,000 prospective buyers, only 10% of which could ever be expected to finalize the purchase of a home in the region.
“To get 60,000 buyers into the market in the next 10 years, we need to reduce the cost of a new home by $58,900 average,” Miller said. “How in the world we were going to do that?”
Miller said that the biggest regulatory hurdles in the region were land regulations and infrastructure costs. Land regulation reform would likely need to occur at the federal level, he argued. Luckily, he said, the region is already addressing the latter problem by taking a region-wide approach to infrastructure, citing groups like the area development district as well as the sanitation and water districts as examples of regional institutions.
“We all need to come together and address all this,” Miller said.