In June of last year, housing experts looked at rental vacancies in St. Paul priced for households earning about $30,000 or less for a family of four. They found none.

They looked again in June of this year. They still found none. And they weren’t surprised.

“It’s incredibly hard to find a unit for families earning $30,000 or less,” said Sue Speakman-Gomez, president of HousingLink, which has begun publishing monthly rental market reports specific to St. Paul and Minneapolis. “We’ve seen this for years, and I think there hasn’t been a way to put it out there in the public eye more visibly. It’s a major issue for our core cities.”

HOUSINGLINK

HousingLink — at HousingLink.org — a Minneapolis-based affordable housing data and listing service, hopes to get its monthly, city-specific rental housing briefs on the desks of lawmakers, policy makers and housing advocates everywhere.

Unlike many housing reports, the latest nine-page St. Paul brief is full of easily digestible year-over-year data, including a stark “0” where the number of vacant units priced for four-person households earning $30,000, or 30 percent of area median income should be. That’s equivalent to about $675 – $780 for a two- to three-bedroom apartment.

“The primary resource that is available for developing new low-income housing is the federal tax credit program, and that program targets families earning 60 percent of area median income,” Speakman-Gomez said. “We certainly need those units, and more housing in general, but does that story sort of overshadow the fact we are not developing housing for people at 30 percent of area median income? Every new affordable unit is a great thing, but we have a growing gap.”

That gap has been highlighted by members of the St. Paul City Council, as well as St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter. Carter’s administration is exploring new pilot programs that could help families in that earnings bracket. One possibility includes creating a three-year, $300 rent subsidy for low-income families of children in select St. Paul Public Schools who pay more than 40 percent of their income toward housing.

Council members also were supportive of an affordable housing trust fund to boost production of new units targeted to families earning 30-50 percent of area median income.

“We have not been able to develop that for the past 12 years,” said Council Member Jane Prince. “It’s not that it’s anybody’s fault, necessarily. It’s the problem with the type of money that we have to build housing. We used to have much more involvement from the philanthropic community than we do now. Low-wage workers cannot afford to live in our cities.”

Prince noted, however, that the city has helped build “supportive housing” with targeted services for the homeless or youth in danger of becoming homeless.

FAMILIES EARNING $60,000 FIND MORE VACANCIES

Not all the news is bad news for renters.

When it comes to rental housing affordability, the results were rosier for higher income levels and, in fact, showed year-over-year improvement, thanks to an uptick in affordable vacancies such as the new Thomas Avenue Flats and the Press House Apartments.

As of this June, about 14 percent of St. Paul rental vacancies would be considered affordable to families earning 50 percent of area median income — or about $50,000 for a family of four. In June 2018, the number was just 8 percent.

A family living on $60,000 — 60 percent AMI — this June could rent more than half the city’s vacant housing stock, or 52 percent, up from 35 percent the year before.

A family living on $100,000 — or the median income for the region — could lease 94 percent of the city’s rental housing, up from 91 percent a year ago.

Overall, however, HousingLink found rents in St. Paul to be rising two or three times as quickly as inflation, with the biggest increases evident among two-bedroom apartments.

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“That’s coming from all of the private market data in our Twin Cities Rental Revue,” Speakman-Gomez said. “We’ve got 20 different management companies that give us direct feeds of their vacancy data, so we get all of their vacancies, including private market luxury units, all the way down to affordable units. We get feeds directly from tenant-management software. And we have some staff who literally data-enter data from Craigslist.com and other online sources.”

AFFORDABLE UNITS PROPOSED, NONE UNDER CONSTRUCTION

Other data in the St. Paul rental housing brief also jump out.

From April through June of this year, HousingLink’s search of affordable and mixed-income housing developments in St. Paul found more than 3,700 proposed but none actually under construction during that time.

About 930 market-rate units were actively going into the ground.

Vacancies among private units that accepted tenants receiving federal housing aid were in dwindling supply, especially for families with more than one or two kids or other dependents.

As of June, owners of 33 vacant apartments in the private marketplace were willing to take federal Section 8 housing vouchers, a type of portable rental assistance, down from 44 apartments a year prior. Only three of those 33 apartments were three-bedroom units.

Meanwhile, openings to get on waiting lists for public housing, tax credit projects and project-based housing developments geared to Section 8 recipients had fallen 50 percent from year to year.

That data does not yet include a recent waiting list lottery held by the Metropolitan Council, as well as public housing authorities in St. Paul and Minneapolis.

“We’re just waiting for them to be able to share that data with us,” Speakman-Gomez said. “But you have to wait, oftentimes, between two and five years before your name comes to the top of a waiting list. Those aren’t true vacancies.”

INCOMES MUST BE 2.5 TIMES RENTS

According to HousingLink, many landlords screen tenants based on income standards that expect them to earn 2.5 times as much as their rent.

By that standard, renters would need a household income of $2,488 per month, or about $30,000 per year, to lease a one-bedroom apartment. They’d need to earn $39,000 to lease a two-bedroom, and $49,000 for a three-bedroom.

As of Jan. 1, the minimum wage in Minnesota is $9.86 per hour, or about $20,000 per year — roughly half the necessary income to meet income standards for a market-rate two-bedroom apartment.

Not surprisingly, the report found that half of St. Paul renters live in housing they can’t afford, based on the standard that a renter should put no more than 30 percent of their pre-tax income toward housing.

St. Paul Public Schools found that 5 percent of its students had experienced homelessness over the previous year, defined broadly to include living in shelters, motels and weekly-rate residences, living with friends and non-relatives, or living in public spaces such as abandoned buildings.

The report also looked at NOAHs — “naturally occurring affordable housing” — or housing that happens to be below market-rate but is not subsidized or deed-restricted.

Among rental vacancies, St. Paul had 11 three-bedroom NOAHs in June 2018, and that number had fallen to just five as of June 2019.

The number of one-bedroom NOAHs had grown, year over year, from 103 to 127. The number of two-bedroom NOAHs had dropped from 67 to 45 in the same period.

There were 32 rental openings geared to military veterans through the “Keys for Heroes” program, a seven percent increase from the year before. There were 34 rental openings that advertised at least one accessible feature for the disabled, down 36 percent from the year before.

Landlords looking to purchase apartments are in luck. Among apartment sales, the report found that costs had gone down by 26 percent over the previous year, with the typical apartment commanding a sale price of little more than $110,000, according to the Finance and Commerce Apartment Development Tracker.

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Staffers at MPR’s music stations The Current and Classical MPR vote to unionize Also in June, a search of the short-term vacation rental service Airbnb.com found 300 listings for an entire St. Paul home rental (as opposed to a single bedroom within a house).

“Anecdotally, we’ve heard of landlords taking entire duplexes out of the rental housing stock and listing them on Airbnb,” Speakman-Gomez said. “We didn’t see anyone tracking this, so we thought we would start.”