More studies detail Nevada’s affordable housing crunch
Jacenta Harris brought her two youngest children to Las Vegas to start a new life.
Then came the eviction notice.
Harris, 38, said she moved from Detroit in August to escape an abusive relationship. She spent almost all her savings to move into an apartment but faced homelessness a month later after an expected janitorial job didn’t materialize.
“I thought we were going to be out on the street,” Harris said. “I felt lost. I had no peace.”
Things have gotten better. Harris has a parttime housekeeping job, a cheaper apartment and help paying rent from the nonprofit Hopelink of Southern Nevada.
Tens of thousands of households across Southern Nevada aren’t so lucky.
Experts say this desert valley of shimmering lights and more than 2.1 million residents — its workforce
HOUSING
dominated by casino, hotel and restaurant employees — has a growing affordable-housing crisis.
And it’s not a problem that can be measured by simply comparing rent in Vegas with that in Los Angeles or other West Coast metropolises.
“While the rents in Las Vegas and Reno may be lower than those in Seattle and San Francisco, the median wage is also considerably lower,” Nevada Housing Division administrator Steve Aichroth said.
Three recently released studies show the affordable-housing gap is widening across Nevada.
Among the findings:
Some 210,000 low-income households in Clark and Washoe counties need assistance obtaining affordable housing, according to the state’s Annual Housing Progress Report. About 168,000 of those families live in Southern Nevada.
Wait lists in Nevada have nearly doubled in size since 2014 for the nation’s most prolific type of affordable housing, those built by leveraging federal tax-credits, according to the state’s Taking Stock report.
Nevada is the worst state in the nation at providing affordable housing to extremely low-income families, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition’s “The Gap” report.
The news comes as federal programs designed to house Clark County’s poorest residents are stretched to their limits.
Demand for housing choice vouchers became so great following the Great Recession that the Southern Nevada Regional Housing Authority has taken new applications for the program twice in the past 10 years. Wait lists for public housing stretch past 30,000 names, more than 10 times the number of homes the program has to offer.
For applicants without Snrha-designated preferences, “you’re probably talking about waiting at least three, four, five years,” eligibility manager Sheila Christmas said.
Shortage of homes
Nevada’s rental market has faced mounting pressure since the recession, when foreclosures pushed
homeowners into apartments. The state’s economy is rebounding, its unemployment rate is improving and population growth is among the strongest in the country.
Despite this, U.S. census data shows last year Nevada had the fourth-lowest homeownership rate among U.S. states and Washington, D.C. Only 55 percent of Nevada households owned a home, representing a 10-percentage-point decrease from before the recession.
Vivek Sah, director of UNLV’S
Lied Institute for Real Estate Studies, said that’s due to a combination of increasing home prices and a shortage of new entry-level homes that would be affordable to service industry workers or young professionals saddled with student loan debt.