Housing professionals and advocates are meeting in Louisville for a two-day event focused on providing affordable homes for Kentuckians.
The Kentucky Housing Corporation, a quasi-governmental agency, themed its annual affordable housing conference around addressing the state’s housing gap. The group released an April report alongside Bowen National Research, a real estate research and analysis firm, looking into the gap.
The study found that around 206,000 housing units were needed in Kentucky for all residents to have access to affordable homes — meaning they wouldn’t need to spend more than 30% of their income on housing costs. Kentuckians making at or below 30% of their area’s median income faced the heaviest shortage compared to other income levels, a trend also found in Louisville.
Patrick Bowen, the research firm’s president, released the second phase of the study Wednesday to conferencegoers at the Kentucky International Convention Center. It estimates Kentucky’s housing gap will increase to about 287,000 units by 2029, and that 10 of the state’s 120 counties will make up more than half of the gap.
The firm also found that many rural Kentucky counties, especially to the east, are expected to lose residents in those five years. Counties near Louisville and Lexington are projected to have some of the state’s highest population increases.
Bowen said while Kentucky’s economy appears to have a strong outlook, it could make affordable housing even more unattainable.
“You have all this economic investment, job growth and, ultimately, household growth. It's going to add to the market pressures for people that need additional housing,” Bowen said.
The study also found that in most of Kentucky’s counties that have multi-family rental data, the vacancy rates for those housing units are below 4-6%. Bowen said those lower rates aren’t healthy for the housing market, and that developers may choose not to improve their properties if renters have fewer options to choose from.
He also said that closing the affordable housing gap requires more than building units; repairing and subsidizing homes are other ways to tackle the problem.
“If you got people living in substandard housing, some of those housing units could be preserved if assistance was available for people to fix those homes,” Bowen said.
“The way through any of the housing issues that Kentucky or individual communities face shouldn't be a one-way solution.”
Wendy Smith is the Kentucky Housing Corporation’s deputy executive director of housing programs. She said that conversations around increasing the state’s housing supply have picked up in recent years.
“The combination of the pandemic, which stopped construction and created supply gap issues with construction as well as labor issues, and the high interest rates that have made it hard for folks to buy a home … created this compression that exacerbated,” Smith said.
She also said that creating more middle housing is an important tool to build more homes on available land.
