Good, Thoughtful Hosts #406: Affordable Housing (2026), Part 1 — Understanding the Current Crisis

Episodes transcribed by AI and proofed for accuracy and spelling by our team.

Sarah Steimer 00:08
Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of Good, Thoughtful Hosts. I’m Sarah Steimer, and today we’re talking about affordable housing, and we’ll be talking about it on the next episode as well. We’re dedicating a little extra time to this topic because we’re in the midst of an ongoing affordable housing crisis, so we thought it appropriate to really dedicate some space to both our understanding of the issue and our approaches to the solution. Today, we’ll focus on what the crisis is, who it affects, and what affordability even means. In keeping with our at-the-forefront theme this season, we’re going to carefully shake off a lot of myths about affordable housing so that we’re getting a clearer and more reality-based understanding of where we’re at, because much of what we know about affordable housing has been steeped in historical context. So we’ve got to get up to speed before we dive into our conversation. I’d like to offer a little data on where we are today.

Sarah Steimer 01:16
Last year, the US ended up with a shortage of 4.7 million housing units, which is an all-time high. The housing stock in the U.S. largely kept up with demand until at least the 80s, but it’s fallen far behind since, and that was exacerbated by a few factors, which included the subprime mortgage crisis of 2007. Now that crisis led to 10 million more families across the country joining the rental market between 2007 and 2016, and since 2000 inflation-adjusted rental costs in the U.S. have risen by over 20%. Now, for buyers, research shows that average home prices are up roughly 50% across the country since 2020 while wages, on the other hand, have only grown 22% since the start of 2021. Nationally, more than 75% of U.S. homes on the market are unaffordable to the typical household, and that average American household would need to make at least $33,000 more annually to be able to afford a median-priced house. I’m throwing these statistics out there to illustrate that this modern crisis isn’t just a problem for the lowest-income Americans. It’s also a problem for the average American, and not being able to afford to live in the community where you work has enormous ramifications. So today we’re going to level set. We’ll talk about where we are and what that means.

Producer 03:03
Today’s special guests:

Laura Dougherty 03:07
My name is Laura Dougherty. I am the regional director of our Denver office for Cushing Terrell, and I’m an architect.

Randy Rhoads 03:15
I’m Randy Rhoads. I’m director of affordable housing for Cushing Terrell. I’m an architect as well.

Sarah Steimer 03:22
Awesome. Thank you guys both so much for joining us. Randy, welcome back. Laura, welcome for the first time, hopefully you’ll be a repeat customer as well after today. So really an exciting topic, affordable housing, and certainly there could not be a better time to talk about this. Last year, the U.S. ended up with a shortage of 4.7 million housing units, which is an all-time high. So this is truly the best time we could be having this conversation. So that said, we’re going to start very basic, very high level here. Let’s talk about what affordable housing is and who it’s for, because I think we’re actually going to wind up talking about some of the myths, like we’re going to do a little tiny bit of myth busting here at the start. So let’s start with what is affordable housing. Laura, do you want to jump in there?

Laura Dougherty 04:13
You know, it really is. It’s infrastructure for communities. It’s the basis that makes our communities thrive, and it really is a contributing factor to how we can have thriving communities year round, in a lot of our smaller mountain communities.

Randy Rhoads 04:34
Everywhere that Laura and I work, the desire is to have a 24/7, you know, authentic, vibrant community. And the truth is, the only way for that to happen is the people that make those communities function need to be able to afford to live where they work. Living where they work gives them a chance to be part of the community, as opposed to commuting all morning to get to a place, working there, and then commuting home in the evening and never having time to actually be part of the place and contribute to it. So it’s like Laura said, it’s the infrastructure of a healthy, vibrant, fully connected community, to have people that work in that community actually live in that community.

Laura Dougherty 05:26
Your point of the people that work and live in the community, and part of the number that Sarah just tossed out, that crisis is being exacerbated because of, obviously, the short-term rental market that is taking over units that used to be in this category, and then that quick shift into remote work that COVID kicked us into. So there’s a lot of folks that are able to not live where they work, and that’s displacing the folks that don’t have that option, that those are the jobs that have to be in person.

Randy Rhoads 06:04
Yeah, the other thing that’s happening is that there’s, if there is existing affordable rental or for-sale options in communities, those are getting chewed up and flipped and turned into higher-end, more expensive things. So not only is it the issue that not enough stuff’s getting built, but the things that are there are in place already are eroding and are disappearing. So the need to build more and preserve more is crucial.

Sarah Steimer 06:38
Something that I think about a lot when it comes to the conversation of affordable housing. and, you know, you guys already touched on this a tiny bit, but I want to connect the dots. I think a lot of people have a hard time imagining who it’s for. They think of maybe the, you know, absolute poverty, poverty, poverty folks who are really, you know, it’s like 70% of their income goes toward housing. That’s not who this always affects when it comes to affordable housing, because it might be someone who, in this part of the country, their income would be very average, but where they happen to be living and working, it is a below-average income. So can you just talk a little bit about what that means, and also connecting the dots. And again, we’ve, we’ve already started into this, how when it matters that your fireman, your teacher, your server at your favorite restaurant can afford to live where you also live really works into the bigger community, the health of the community.

Randy Rhoads 07:40
Yeah, what you’re talking about is like the measure of that is typically area median income. So AMI, and folks that are in the more lower income status, so below 50% area median income, there’s programs that that that try to support that type of housing. Once you get to 60% to 80% and up, there’s fewer programs, and those are more workforce type of salaries, and so that’s that’s the vast majority of the folks in our community. So from 60% up to 100% of area median income, that missing middle of of our community— there’s, it’s really difficult to find housing that that makes sense. So for it to be affordable, the federal government says that you can’t be spending more than 30% of your household income on your housing. The facts are, in Colorado, over 50% of the population in Colorado spends over 50% of their income on housing. So you could see the extreme nature of of the the issue and one health care crisis or pandemic or some other kinds of issue could put somebody in a family in an incredible Jeopardy. So there’s a project that Laura and I worked on in Aspen that actually had ranges of income from 50% AMI up to 240% AMI, because even people at 240% AMI still were struggling to find affordable housing in Aspen so that that extreme range of of incomes is a function of just the the extreme lack of affordable housing options in many communities.

Laura Dougherty 09:46
We’re calling it workforce housing, is one of the one of the kind of titles for this, but really it’s critical for our employers, our business owners, because they can’t recruit. Right, or retain employees if their employees don’t have anywhere to live. So it really is that kind of full ecosystem of what a community needs to thrive. Employers need to have people they can hire.

Randy Rhoads 10:16
Yeah, and it’s, this is the economic development issue. It’s a housing issue, absolutely, it’s about creating safe and healthy living conditions for folks, but it’s an economic issue for all the employers, for the hospitals, for the schools, for anyone that relies on people to do to do their business, which is everybody, right? So this is when we talk about who lives in affordable housing, and we are talking to an employer, typically that’s going to represent somewhere 75 to 80% of their employees. So the vast majority of the people that that call that, that place their their workplace, and would love to call that place home, struggle to make that happen.

Sarah Steimer 11:07
So now that we’ve defined who this is for, let’s talk about really what it often is and how we try to solve it. And I think the most common thing we hear is this high density housing, right? And I think we’ll probably bust another myth right here, where, as soon as you kind of hear high-density housing, and, you know, I’m in Chicago, I think everyone’s brain probably goes high rises, these big, huge developments that are just, you know, stories and stories and stories high. What really is high-density housing? And then we’re, we’ll jump into with maybe how that is or is not a great solution. But let’s start with really what high density housing is.

Randy Rhoads 11:46
So what you describe, Sarah, as as high rises? I think that is what most people think about when they think about high-density affordable housing. The most typical affordable housing that I’ve worked on for the last 35 years is more in that kind of middle density, more in two-, three-story townhouses and garden buildings. But you you see in many communities today, and it’s a function of cost, really, and it’s a function of zoning and other things, but maybe five stories, and part of that is a function of wood frame construction, because wood frame construction is one of the least expensive approaches to build residentially. And code allows you to go certain number of floors and even with some concrete at the ground level, and then wood on top of that five stories is become kind of the typical higher-density approach. What Laura and I have worked on in some other communities is townhouses and two- or three-story, double-loaded corridor buildings. So the— ultimately, what we find is that we really need to look at the scale of the community, and think about what’s going to fit and be a good neighbor and be received well, and something that will be absorbed and appreciated in the community and seen as an asset.

Sarah Steimer 13:12
We’re going to kind of roll that out. Let’s tease that out a tiny bit more. You know, this was the reason I wanted to talk to you both about this topic is, you know, Laura, you wrote a blog post recently, and we’ll link to that in the show notes, but this idea that high density versus livability, and, you know, Randy, you already, you started to kind of poke at this a little bit. It’s this idea of, how does this fit into the lifestyle? You know, how does this work with the way people actually want to live? Versus, you know, people need homes, let’s build as many homes as closely together as possible, and just shove people in. You know, like that’s that’s a crazy way of thinking. That’s not how we live at all. You know, we really try to find places that define not only where we’re living in the grander scheme of the city, the region, et cetera, but what we want and why we’re there in the first place. So give me an idea, Laura, and you can, you know, tap into what you already wrote about, of course, of this idea of high density versus livability.

Laura Dougherty 14:16
It’s really that idea that housing is housing, and people are people, and that we all want to have a quality of life and be able to enjoy raising our families and going to work and being a part of our communities. And so recognizing that, ultimately, for this to be successful infrastructure, it has to be livable, and it has to feel like it is part of the community that it’s in. So dropping in something that is high density, and as as Randy described, think of these as like these, bigger four-story, maybe five, double-loaded corridor apartment buildings— that’s not necessarily going to fit in all of our communities, and certainly not some of our smaller mountain communities, at least not on the you know, the kind of first initial concept.

Sarah Steimer 15:14
So we’re pausing our conversation here. Next episode, we’ll dive into solutions, particularly marrying the need for more housing with livability. That means it’s not just about more units, but about desirable homes that actually meet people’s wants and needs beyond the most basic necessity of having a roof over their heads. This also includes a discussion on the role of community education, which can help to ensure that these developments are not just approved, but become integrated into their neighborhoods.

Producer 16:09
Music for Good, Thoughtful Hosts was written, produced and performed by Sam Clapp. Our moderator is Sarah Steimer, editing by Travis Estvold. And a special thank you to our content development team, Marni Moore and Trisha Miller. For more information about the podcast, visit thoughtfulhosts.com. Thanks for listening.