Affordable Housing

Affordable housing and homelessness are inextricably linked.

Housing is usually considered to be affordable if it costs no more than 30 percent of a household’s income. In the Twin Cities area, however, 185,000 households with annual incomes below $30,000 pay more than this amount for their housing.

In Minnesota, according to Family Housing Fund:

  • Between 1974 and 1993, rents climbed 13% in real dollars, but renters’ real incomes actually declined by eight percent.
     
  • There are 68,900 renter households with annual incomes below $10,000 in the metropolitan area, but only 31,200 housing units with rents affordable at this income level.
     
  • Only 36% of families living in poverty in the Twin Cities area receive housing assistance from government. Cutbacks in federal housing programs threaten to make this situation even more severe.

Since 1990, vacancy rates for apartments in the Twin Cities have fallen from over 6 percent to just 2 percent, further reducing the supply of affordable housing.

According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, 4.9 million households nationally suffer from worse case housing needs, which is understood to be unassisted renters living below 50 percent of area median income and paying over half their income for housing.

Links for Further Research

Further information on the impact of homelessness on housing can be found at: