New dashboard shows realities of Kent County housing crisis

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WOOD) — A new data dashboard paints a stark picture of the housing crisis in Kent County.

The Housing Stability Alliance data dashboard aims to provide the information local organizations need to help address the crisis Kent County, like many parts of the country, is facing. The alliance, an organization with almost 130 stakeholders, set out years ago to keep data on housing in Kent County transparent, Housing Kent President Eureka People told News 8.

“Housing Kent just came along in the last couple of years to steward that vision to life and create the data dashboard, which is a powerful new tool to really facilitate a clear picture of the housing system, its issues and to facilitate a community-wide conversation across sector on how we could partner together to achieve solutions,” she told News 8.

She said her team has been excited about the feedback it has gotten on the dashboard, with everyone from housing providers and grant makers to the business community finding it useful. Other local municipalities have reached out to Housing Kent asking for advice on putting together their own dashboards, People added.

Housing Stability Alliance housing crisis data dashboard

Gathering the data was a collaborative effort, People said, with community partners getting data from places like the Census Bureau, the Bureau of Labor Statistics and Michigan courts.

“We also established some really strong partnerships with data organizations that have proprietary data related to housing that they freely gave access to us, even apart from any data sharing agreement. It really was … another collaborative effort,” People said. “It showcases the beauty of what can happen when we pull together multiple resources for a single cause in our community and abroad.”

The data is set to be updated annually on a rolling basis. Right now, it’s updated manually, but People said the team is hoping to eventually automate the process.

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The dashboard takes a look at three key factors: homeownership affordability, rental affordability and homelessness.

“One of the key stories that we want people to take away from the dashboard is that affordable housing is scarce, if not nonexistent, in many places in Kent County whether you’re a homeowner or a renter,” People said.

People also noted that while the housing crisis is significant, it could get worse.

“One of the most salient pieces of data is really related to the homeownership growth compared to the wage growth, in that stark gap that keeps growing,” People said. “Because even if the market flattens out, the homeownership growth rate, that’s still going to be a significant gap to close and it’s not going to close anytime soon.”

According to the dashboard, an entry-level home in 2001 was around $66,000 and the median annual wage was $27,480. Two decades later in 2022, the entry-level home price is $205,000, while the median annual wage is $42,730.

In just seven years, between 2015 and 2022, the price of an entry-level home increased by 126%, while wages only grew by 26%, the dashboard shows. Right now, the median wage is 31% below what someone would need to buy an entry-level home.

Housing Kent found no part in the county where a resident can afford a typical entry-level home while making the median wage.

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And the dashboard found that while renting was “once an affordable alternative to homeownership, renting has become perilous — nearly half of Kent County renters (46%) are cost-burdened, paying more than 30% of their incomes toward housing.”

The dashboard says rent is rising faster than wages in Kent County, and residents need to make $47,840 a year to afford the median rent, $5,110 more than the current median annual wage.

Rising housing costs have led to a spike in homelessness, the dashboard says. It shows that Kent County has one of the highest homeless rates in the state, at 188 people who are homeless for every 100,000 residents.

Next-door Ottawa County has a rate of 72 unhoused individuals for every 100,000 residents; Wayne County, 94, Muskegon County, 91.

Kalamazoo County has the highest rate in the state, the dashboard shows, at 243 per 100,000. Calhoun County, Lenawee County and a combined Ingham and Eaton counties had about the same rate as Kent County.

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The 2023 point-in-time homeless count, done annually in January, found 1,239 unhoused individuals throughout Kent County, a 35% increase from two years prior, the dashboard says. The point-in-time count from January 2024 — not included in the dashboard — found a slight decrease in homelessness.

The 2022 data in the dashboard also says that around 4,500 people in Kent County experienced homelessness at some point that year, and 61% of those were homeless for the first time.

In all three key factors, Housing Kent found racial disparities. In 2022, 76% of white households were homeowners, compared to 34% of Black households, a gap that has held steady since 2017. There has been some progress for Hispanic of Latino households, with a growth from 46% of household homeowners in 2017 to 54% in 2022.

For those renting their home, 54% of Black renters and 51% of Hispanic or Latino renters are housing cost burdened, compared to 42% of white renters. And 29% of Black renters and 24% of Hispanic or Latino renters are severely housing cost burdened, compared to 19% of white renters.

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Black people were also eight times more likely to experience homelessness compared to white residents in Kent County, the dashboard shows. The nightly homeless rate found a rate of 8.9 unhoused individuals for every 1,000 Black residents; 2.3 for every 1,000 Hispanic or Latino residents; 1.1 for every 1,000 white residents.

People said she hopes the data dashboard will serve as a community call.

“We really need to bring more intentionality to how we partner together on solutions and share resources, to really think about how to do this differently if we want to achieve the outcomes that we all hope to see in housing,” she said.

To check out the full data set from the Housing Stability Alliance dashboard, go to housingkent.org.

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