A real estate developer wanted to increase affordable housing in Denver, trying to make fiscal sense out of a plan to build rental apartments for people making only 30 percent of the area's median income—the kind of housing America desperately needs. He discovered that, no matter what lever he moved or compromise he made, he was going to need some money from the government to make it work. Then he was going to need some more.
Almost one in four U.S. renters spends more on housing than they can afford, according to a report in June from Harvard University‘s Joint Center for Housing Studies—and the problem gets worse at the lower end of the income spectrum. About 10 million renter households earn 30 percent or less of the area median income, accounting for a quarter of the renter population. The U.S. would need to add more than 7 million cheap apartments to meet demand from such extremely low-income renters, according to a recent report from the National Low Income Housing Coalition.
Patrick Clark | Bloomberg