HUD Reports to Congress on Worst Housing Needs

HUD is required to provide a report to the Congress every two years on the "Worst Case Housing Needs" with the recently released report being the 13th, covering 2007-2009 (I discussed the previous report here.)

The term “worst case needs” is defined as very low-income renters with incomes below 50 percent of the Area Median Income who do not receive government housing assistance and who either paid more than one-half of their income for rent or lived in severely inadequate conditions, or who faced both of these challenges.

In other words, if you pay more than half of your paycheck toward rent, and/or live in a place that is nowhere close to being decent, you're considered "worst cast need."  Note, also, that homeless people are not included in this estimate.

Given the economic crisis this nation has faced in the past few years, it's hardly surprising that more renters are facing housing problems.  But what is surprising is that "the number of renters experiencing worst case needs jumped by more than 20 percent, from 5.91 to 7.10 million" between 2007-2009, and since 2001, the number has increased almost 42%, now accounting for more than 6% of all households.  In 2001, it was 4.76% of all households. 
 
Inadequate housing accounts for only 3% of all cases, which means that the vast majority of people are paying over half of their income toward housing.  HUD recommends people spend approximately 30%, including on utilities.

Keep in mind that the income classifications are: Extremely Low-Income (below 30% of Area Median Income or AMI), Very Low-Income (under 50% of AMI), and Low-Income (under 80% of AM).  For a better idea of amounts involved, check out the income limits data-scroll down for the map.

Unfortunately, people with disabilites very often are worst-case, "more than 38 percent of very low-income households including nonelderly people with disabilities had worst case needs, amounting to 990,000 households" and when you look at households that include both children and a person with a disability (which could be the child), this reaches 41 percent!  Depressingly, HUD believes that this could be a severe underestimate based on data from other sources. HUD stated that they will be issuing a supplemental report with more in-depth analysis on this.
   
The largest racial group impacted by worst-case housing needs are non-hispanic whites at 48.4% of all cases, and families with children making up 38.5% of all cases (elderly without children are at 18.7%).
 
I've discussed the problem of renting down previously, where higher-income households rent units that should be affordable to those with lower income, and HUD reports that:

A severe mismatch exists between the number of extremely low income renters and the number of affordable units available to them. For every 100 extremely low-income renters, only 61 affordable units exist, and fewer than 36 affordable units are available for their occupancy.  If physically adequate units are required, only 32 units are available for every 100 extremely low-income renters.

Renters with very low incomes find 99 affordable units per 100 renters—nearly enough overall—but similarly find a mismatch of available units. Only 67 units are available for every 100 very low-income renters, and only 60 available units per 100 renters are physically adequate. For low-income renters, available rental stock is sufficient to house all renters, although a small proportion of units have physical problems.

Unfortunately, the data is not broken down into specific metro areas, but using "Midwest" we see that in central cities, 42.1% of low-income households have worst-case needs, with 38.6% of low-income renters in the suburbs and 33% in the non-metro areas. 

So what does this mean for Wisconsin?  At the very least, it means that the WHEDA needs to do a better job of reaching the extremely low-income population, and discourage the focus on elderly-only housing in many communities. It means that many communities need to do a better job of zoning for affordable housing.