City of Portland Affordable and Available Rental Unit Data Shows Greatest Need is At Lowest Incomes.

The City of Portland has issued a NOFA HERE to develop "workforce" mixed use rental housing where only 51% of the units developed would be required to be below 80% of MFI, with 20% of units below 60% MFI. The RFP would use $7.4 million in HUD Section 108 funding to help finance the units.

I thought it would be instructive to look at data that shows by income group how many affordable and available rental units there were in the City of Portland, using 2006-2010 HUD CHAS data as analyzed by the National Low Income Housing Coalition. (The concept of affordable and available rental housing is explained in the NLIHC Housing Spotlight paper HERE).

I constructed an Excel workbook that includes two graphs and a table HERE and embedded below. It shows

A. That for Every 100 renter households

• At 30% MFI there were 23 affordable and available units.
• At 50% MFI there were 43 affordable and available units.
• At 80% MFI there were 89 affordable and available units.

B. That the deficit of affordable and available rental units

•  Was 22,210 units for those at or below 30% of MFI
•  Was 27,810 units for those at or below 50% of MFI
•  Was 7,665  unit for those at or below 80% of MFI

Meaning the deficit of affordable and available rental units at or below 50% MFI was 3.6 times the deficit of units at or below 80% of MFI. 

Looking at Supply Alone, There Was a SURPLUS of Units With Rents Affordable to Rental Households at 80% of MFI. 
A careful look at the Excel table shows that disregarding "available" units, the supply of rental units at rents affordable to those with incomes at or below 80% was 124 units for every 100 households in that income grouping. Unlike the deficit of supply affordable to lower income groupings, there was an actual surplus of units with affordable rents for those at 80% MFI.

Moving Upstream in Income Likely Impacts Minorities and Women
Because minorities and women heads of households are disproportionately poor it seems likely that they will be disproportionately impacted from a shift in housing policy to subsidize higher income rental housing development.

For Every 1 Cost Burdened Renter HH's with an Income at $50,000 and Above There Were 18+ Renter HH's with Incomes below $50,000.
A quick review of ACS Table 25106 for 2008-2012 for the City of Portland shows that there were 55,234 cost burdened renters below $50,000 in Income and only 3,043 with incomes at or above $50,000. 
Only 8.5% of renters with incomes at or above $50,000 were cost burdened, while 42% of those with incomes below $50,000 were cost burdened.


 



Originally created and posted on the Oregon Housing Blog.