Affordable Sticker Shock -- Climbing home and rental prices hurting chances of poorer people putting roofs over their heads | Jim Parker
Coast to coast, the housing industry currently favors the home seller as prices are rising, sales surging and inventories dwindling -- which leave the residences on the market more valuable.
Take Seattle as a caffeinated example.
The northwest city of 3.5 million people boasts the hottest housing market in the country since last fall, according to the Case-Shiller home price index and reported this summer in the Seattle Times. The typical single-family house in metro Seattle cost 12.9 percent more in April than a year ago, the report notes.
Other fast-rising markets are Portland, Oregon; Dallas; Denver; and Detroit, up 9.3 to 7.4 percent respectively. Those totals compare with a 5.5 percent national price growth rate.
According to studies, the nation has been suffering from an affordable housing crisis. Most hurt are an estimated 11.4 million "extremely low-income" American households, which earn below the poverty line, or at 30 percent or less of the area's median income.
A new report by the National Low Income Housing Coalition picked out eight states that count fewer than 30 affordable homes available for each 100 households in "extreme poverty."
The tightest situation is in Nevada, which estimates 15 homes available per 100 extremely low-income renters, the report says.
"There is a dire shortage of affordable housing in Nevada," Leanna Garfield, of Business Insider on AOL.com, wrote in an article this spring on the national housing market. Nevada saw its economy jump after the 2008 recession, "but the state's housing market hasn't kept up with its recent influx of new residents, especially in cities like Las Vegas and Reno," the article points out.
Seven other states in which low-income home buyers are struggling include, in order, California, Arizona, Oregon, Colorado, Florida, New Jersey and Texas, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition.
High prices and shrinking inventories can attack impoverished home seekers even in states without a full-fledged crisis.
For instance, 52.3 percent of households who lease an apartment or home in the Charleston area are considered "rent overburdened," says Affordable Housing Online, whose parent ApartmentSmart.com serves as a marketplace for less expensive rentals and subsidized housing.
Households who pay more than 30 percent of their gross income for living costs are rent overburdened, the affordable housing site says. In Charleston, a household making less than $3,297 a month -- or $39,564 -- would be paying too much when renting an apartment at or above the $989 median monthly payment.
Close to 4,000 affordable apartment homes are for rent in Charleston, which has a population of around 120,000. The median household income is $52,971, while the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development calculates the area median income for a family of four as $68,800.
HUD rental assistance income limits in Charleston for a four-person family earning 30 percent of the median income is $24,600; it's $55,050 for a family of four earning 80 percent of the median income.
Another category, fair market rents, "can be used to better understand the average housing costs of an area," according to Affordable Housing Online. The rental rates are employed to establish payment standards for the national Housing Choice Voucher Program, in which families seek suitable homes, townhomes or apartments and then pay the difference between the rent charged by the landlord and a subsidy paid to the property owner (If the rent was $1,000 a month and the landlord's subsidy $250 a month, then the tenant would pay $750 a month).
For 2017 in the Charleston area, fair market rents run from $713 a month for a studio apartment to $1,665 a month for a four bedroom rental.
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