What is causing housing affordability problems?

This past year, we went through many debates related to what caused the housing affordability problems in the state and across the nation.

Jim Rounds from Rounds Consulting and Chris Mackay, Community and Economic Development Director for the City of Phoenix joined Arizona Horizon to explain what is causing the issues.

According to Rounds housing affordability used to be simple, less than 35% of you income should be spent on housing.

“It got very complicated, so now we have to separate out homelessness issues we have to separate out workforce housing from government subsidize housing. it’s gotten more complicated and we’re not nearly as affordable as we used to be and we have to step it up,” Rounds said.

Rounds’ research has found a lot of it had to do with financial issues and actions by the Federal Reserve Board. Others blamed also blamed the cities.

“It really is the city where this rests upon to make sure that we have enough housing for our citizens,” Mackay said.

The city council had created a housing 20/30 plan with a goal to create 50,000 either new or saved housing units by 2030.

“As of Jun we’re at 32,000 of those houses already, those domiciles. Building new apartments, new houses, rehabilitating houses through Habitat for Humanity and other types of things,” Mackay said.

According to Rounds, the problem was actually caused by a number of things. The legislature ran some bills to require more construction of housing and to take some local control from the cities, but the bills failed to advance.

Now, the cities need to demonstrate they are being proactive on this issue to avoid future legislative threats. According to Rounds, the City of Phoenix has been the most aggressive and is marketing its efforts very well.