Rural housing affordability approaches crisis

Key Takeaways

For the first time in Jonathan Harwitz’s 30-year career, housing came up in a presidential debate. That, along with President Trump’s first-day executive order for every agency to address housing affordability, illustrates the level of importance the housing affordability crisis has reached.

But it remains to be seen how those directives will address the mismatch between national policy and rural housing stock and rural needs. Harwitz is the director of policy for the Housing Assistance Council, a nonprofit organization that works in “persistent poverty counties,” in which poverty rates have exceeded 20% for more than 30 years.

“I don’t think a lot of Americans realize how much of the land mass of America is rural and we have tended to build a lot of our housing approaches based on scales that don’t particularly work in rural areas,” he said March 2 to the Rural Action Caucus.

Focused federal action to promote housing affordability can’t come fast enough. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Rental Housing Loans program, for example, is a long-term mortgage payment, often coupled with rental assistance programs, in use in 87% of counties, and the population that uses that program reports a median income of $12,700, two-thirds of whom are elderly or disabled.

“The mortgages are maturing, these projects are at risk of leaving the program and we’re losing affordability,” Harwitz said. “In 2018, we estimated that the wave of property losses would really escalate significantly around 2028. That used to be far away — that’s not far away anymore. That wave is coming in most areas of the country.

“If we don’t intervene by 2054, all of this housing is gone.”

Harwitz noted that rural homelessness is increasing faster than homelessness in any other geography.

“In many of the areas that you’re in, where there’s not a lot of high-capacity nonprofit developers, or even for-profit developers, to meet the housing needs in the area,” he said. “The best way to drive down costs … is to not lose housing that is affordable.”

The Housing Assistane Council’s policy priorities focus on preserving multifamily housing stock, building capacity in rural areas and reforming the regulatory system.

“The dirty little secret of heavy regulation is that it favors the higher capacity places because they have the ability to have grant writers to withstand three environmental reviews from four different agencies,” he said. “That’s an area where there’s an extraordinary amount of [bipartisan] agreement.”

Harwitz expressed hope for the Rural Housing Service Reform Act, a bill receiving bipartisan support in the last Congress that would decouple the rental assistance from maturing mortgages.

“Most of these are owned by for-profits, if you want to stay in the program, when the mortgage matures, you can’t keep the rental assistance, so that means you can’t leverage private financing.”