Plenty of people talk about the growing shortage of housing that essential workers such as teachers, nurses and police officers can afford.
But the National Association of Home Builders has done more than talk. Actually, it has drawn a series of stark pictures for the top 25 metropolitan areas in the nation.
The conclusion, from a survey released last week at an affordable housing conference in Washington: In most metro areas, "people holding three of the important community infrastructure jobs -- police officers, teachers, nurses -- can afford homes in less than one-half the census tracts."
Retail clerks, whose pay is even lower, are priced out of 97 percent of the tracts.
(A caveat: The study assumed only a single income in the family rather than two wage earners. But single parents and young families with a stay-at-home parent are key first-time buyers.)
The picture in the Washington area is worse: A police officer, teacher or nurse making the median salary for that profession can afford a median-priced home in only 37 percent of census tracts. Retail workers can afford to buy in less than 1 percent of census tracts.
Bobby Rayburn, president of the home builders group, and other national and local builders at the conference warned that the situation is likely to worsen. They called on federal and local officials to remove regulatory and land-use barriers to high-density development and to support homeownership tax and down-payment incentives. The group also supports outreach to combat NIMBYism, the "not-in-my-back-yard" reaction to development, particularly toward lower-cost housing.
The group's focus is on building for-sale houses, but Rayburn said rents also are becoming too high. Low-income housing advocates, such as the National Low Income Housing Coalition, are concentrating their efforts on defending and resurrecting federal and local rental assistance help for the most at-risk families, which increasingly includes working families. As rents and home prices go up, the concerns of the builders and the advocates are overlapping more.
Barbara Lipman, research director at the Center for Housing Policy, a Washington-based research group, told the conference that between 1997 and 2003, the number of families with critical housing needs -- defined as those paying at least half their income for housing or living in substandard conditions -- rose by 67 percent. About 25 percent were working families with at least one full-time wage earner.
A sizable percentage of those with critical housing needs are immigrants, according to Census data.
Rayburn, a house and apartment builder from Mississippi, said: "Despite today's positive housing market conditions, millions of working families -- teachers, police officers, firefighters and other moderate-income workers who are the heartbeat of any community -- are finding it increasingly difficult to purchase or rent a decent home in, or close to, the communities where they work."
He said, "In many markets, the gap between those who can afford a home and those who can't is widening at an alarming rate, and the availability of affordable rental housing is in short supply."
David Crowe, NAHB's senior vice president for federal regulatory and housing policy, said the affordability maps for the top 25 metro areas look very similar, like a doughnut with a hole in the middle. Affordable areas are in the center of the metro area -- the doughnut hole -- and on the urban fringe, far from many employment centers.
Around the doughnut hole "is a large ring that contains housing that is not affordable to low- and moderate-income families," said Crowe.
Workers who have longer and longer commutes are rethinking their career choices or moving to other jurisdictions, panelists warned. To keep employees, 180 private employers in Silicon Valley have united to create a housing trust to help more than 1,260 families buy their first homes and to support affordable rental projects, said Carl Guardino, president and chief executive of the Silicon Valley Manufacturing Group.
Similar employer-assisted efforts are underway across the country, with support from Freddie Mac and others.
"With all the uncertainties about workforce housing, one thing we know is that the problem isn't going away by itself," said Nicolas P. Retsinas, director of Harvard University's Joint Center for Housing Studies. One reason, he said, is the increasing number of lower-paying jobs.
"In the amount of time that the number of single-family homes affordable to working families has increased 10 percent, the number of jobs in the retail and service industries has increased almost 100 percent," he said.
As lower-paying jobs proliferate, the number of those with long commutes will increase substantially. Retsinas said, "We do not see a time when the housing market will recalibrate itself to this new labor market."
