Report: Housing increasingly unaffordable

REGIONAL- A statewide crisis with the lack of affordable housing has not been a quietly kept secret in recent years, as the state Legislature in its past two sessions has devoted funding to try to address a portion of those needs.
But the problem is growing, says a report by the Minnesota Housing Partnership, and renters in particular are feeling the burden of housing costs beyond their means.
The 2024 State of the State’s Housing report states that housing is unaffordable for half of all renters in the state, a cost burden greater than at any time in the past decade. Over 300,000 renters pay more than 30 percent of their income for rent. The burden falls heaviest on seniors and those considered low income – 66 percent of seniors pay more than they should, and 86 percent of renters earning under $35,000 a year are cost-burdened. Twenty-five percent of renters statewide are considered to be severely cost burdened, spending more than half of their monthly income on rent.
The report identifies seven counties in the Arrowhead region as the Northland region, including St. Louis County, and this region has the highest percentage of both cost-burdened renters, 52 percent, and severely cost burdened renters, 27 percent, in the state. St. Louis and Itasca counties are in the top five counties in the state for highest renter cost burden at 53 percent and 60 percent, respectively. No county in the state has a higher percentage of severe renter cost burdened household than Itasca County, where 35 percent of renters pay more than half of their income for rent.
Forty-nine percent of people in the region with severely low incomes have no housing options they can afford.
Taking a look at the state’s five most in-demand jobs – home health and personal care aides, retail salespersons, registered nurses, cashiers, and fast food/counter workers – only registered nurses make enough money to reasonably afford a two-bedroom apartment, and none of those occupations earns enough money to afford a median-priced home.
As a result, evictions statewide are up 44 percent over pre-COVID levels and eight percent from 2022 to 2023. That eight percent translates into 24,211 individuals and families who were evicted. On any given night, 19,600 Minnesotans are homeless, with 7,232 of them families with children and another 1,659 of them children who are experiencing homelessness on their own.
The problem is less grim but still significant for homeowners. Twenty percent of homeowners are paying more than 30 percent of their monthly income for mortgage payments.
Overall, the percentage of cost burdened renters and homeowners increased by nine percent from 2021 to 2022, to 641,549, and a primary cause is that incomes have not kept up with price increases for housing. For homeowners, the report says, median incomes rose by two percent over five years, while median home values rose 19 percent at $328,600. Renter incomes rose three percent, while the cost of rent rose seven percent to a median level of $1,200 a month over the same time period.