Report offers insight into region’s ongoing affordable housing crisis — and an answer.

The Bay Area needs more than 160,000 additional homes to house its poorest residents, according to a report published Thursday that offers new insight into the extent of the region’s ongoing affordable housing crisis.

There are only 35 affordable units available for every 100 extremely low-income households in the combined area of San Francisco, Alameda, Contra Costa, San Mateo and Marin counties, according to the report by the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

It’s even worse in the South Bay, where there are just 29 homes available for every 100 ex

tremely low-income households in Santa Clara and San Benito counties. And those estimates, calculated based on 2019 census data, don’t even capture the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Nor do they count unhoused residentswho need housing.

But the numbers offer some insight into what’s driving the Bay Area’s massive housing shortage, and why the region’s population of homeless residents is rising. Homelessness increased in Alameda County by 43% from 2017 to 2019, and by 31% in Santa Clara County.

Experts say one major factor is the extreme shortage of housing that people in the lowest income bracket — including people with low-wage jobs or who are disabled and out of work — can afford.

On Thursday, new data released by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development showed homelessness increased by nearly 7% in

California as of January last year compared with 2019.

“That these numbers are going up even pre-pandemic reinforces the need for permanent solutions, not temporary actions,” said Jennifer Loving, CEO of Destination: Home. “Nowhere in California do we build housing accessible to people that are the poorest and also disproportionately households of color.”

San Francisco and the North and East Bay together are short 121,244 homes for the region’s lowest-income residents — those making less than 30% of the area median income. In Alameda County, that’s $39,150 for a family of four.

Santa Clara and San Benito counties are short 40,550 homes for their extremely low-income residents.

“It is time to treat this challenge with the same urgency we’ve brought to the pandemic,” Will Dominie of the Bay Area Regional Health Inequities Initiative wrote in a news release.” We’ve diagnosed the issue; our lawmakers must begin treatment.”

Because there are so

few homes affordable to people in this lowest income bracket, and many of those that are affordable are rented by people who make more money, the Bay Area’s lowest earners end up spending so much of their paychecks on rent, that they have little or nothing left over for other expenses. That lifestyle is untenable and often leads to missed rent payments and eviction, or the threat of eviction.

In Santa Clara and San Benito counties, nearly three-quarters of extremely low-income households spent more than half of their income on housing in 2019.

“That means they will become homeless with one disaster,” Loving said.

Nationally, among extremely low-income households, 36% contain someone in the labor force, 30% are seniors, 18% have someone with a disability and 7% are students or caregivers. Extremely low-income renters also are more likely to be people of color — 20% of Black households, 14% of Latino households and 10% of Asian households fall into that category,

compared with 6% of White households.

California has one of the country’s gravest shortages of low-income housing. There are 24 affordable, available homes for every 100 extremely low-income renters in the state — putting California among the five lowest-ranking states in the country.

On Thursday, HUD released its annual report on homelessness. But the data doesn’t tell the whole story in the Bay Area. HUD reported 8,124 unhoused residents in San Francisco, 8,137 in Alameda County and 9,605 in Santa Clara County as of January 2020 — compared with 8,035 in San Francisco, 8,022 in Alameda County and 9,706 in Santa Clara county the year before.

But those counties, like most in the region, count their unsheltered homeless populations every other year and did not do so in 2020. That means HUD’s latest data relies on the 2019 unsheltered counts, plus counties’ 2020 counts of people staying in their homeless shelters.