Key Point: “The Trump administration’s proposed 2020 budget also contains cuts for rural housing programs, Stan Keasling, president of National Rural Housing Coalition, said in testimony at the Congressional hearing earlier this month. The cuts target ‘a laundry list’ of programs, including direct homeownership, home-repair loans, and loans and grants for rural rental housing.”

CBS News: Housing’s hidden crisis: Rural Americans struggle to pay rent

By Aimee Picchi

April 10, 2019

Housing has been famously unaffordable in expensive cities such as San Francisco for a while. But now in tiny towns and counties across the country, an increasing share of rural residents are struggling to pay their rents and mortgages.

The housing affordability crisis is spreading to rural communities such as Aroostook County, Maine, and Malheur County, Oregon, where the share of residents who are severely burdened by housing costs has surged since the housing crash of 2006 to 2010, according to the County Health Rankings. Other researchers are also calling attention to the issue, with Pew’s Stateline finding that one of four of the country’s most rural counties have seen a rise in severely cost-burdened households — those that spend more than half their income on housing.

Fifty years ago, the most urgent issue for rural communities was substandard housing, such as whether residents relied on outhouses rather than indoor plumbing, noted Lance George, director of research and information at the Housing Assistance Council, a nonprofit focusing on rural housing. But affordability now ranks as the top housing concern among rural residents, he said.

“You think it’s often just with big cities,” he said. “Housing costs are lower in rural areas, but incomes are pretty low too.” Housing affordability is a “simple equation,” George added. “It’s incomes related to housing costs, and incomes in the lower quintile have not increased at all, and maybe even declined.”

In other words, the affordability crisis in rural America is almost the inverse of the dynamics of cities such as New York, where rapidly rising incomes and a population surge are driving housing prices upward. In rural towns and counties, flat incomes for poor and moderate-income workers are partially to blame for the housing affordability crisis.

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The Trump administration’s proposed 2020 budget also contains cuts for rural housing programs, Stan Keasling, president of National Rural Housing Coalition, said in testimony at the Congressional hearing earlier this month. The cuts target “a laundry list” of programs, including direct homeownership, home-repair loans, and loans and grants for rural rental housing.

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