The gap between the number of affordable units available and low-income families in one Iowa county is wide, with just 30 units for every 100 families

At the back of a nondescript house, the Catholic Workers of Des Moines serve food to those who need it. Tim, who lives in a river encampment several miles away, walked to get here. He’s been homeless for five years, battling an addiction to alcohol and drugs with no insurance and no stable address. The homeless shelters he’s tried to stay at in the city are, according to him, “straight hell on earth”. He spoke of a time he’d bought new pants, went to the shelter to shower, and had them stolen out of the stall while he was showering.



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Tim has tried to get into an affordable housing facility nearby, but with no success. He claimed the facility told him that they no longer had any funding.

Christina, another congregant in the yard, has had a history of homelessness. But unlike Tim, she recently got into an apartment at an affordable housing facility. She described the conditions as “terrible”, but quickly adds that she would never have enough money to move to unsubsidized housing. After listing the ailments that have kept her from working, as well as her problems with Medicaid and social security income, she admits that her housing is better than the alternative, echoing Tim’s sentiments about the area’s homeless shelter.

The number of low income families unable to find or be placed in affordable housing in Des Moines is a growing problem. In fact, it’s even worse than in Brooklyn, New York.

A map recently published by the Urban Institute breaks America’s housing crisis county by county. The gap between the number of affordable units available in Polk County – which includes the city of Des Moines – and low-income families in need of housing is a wide gulf, with just 30 units for every 100 families.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Data compiled by the Urban Institute on affordable housing across the country. Click the link to interact with the map. Photograph: apps.urban.org

Neighboring Omaha, Nebraska, a city with approximately twice the population, has a slightly better 35 units per 100 families.

Birmingham, Alabama, has roughly the same population size as Des Moines, but has 54 units of affordable housing per 100 low-income families.

Brooklyn has 48 units of affordable housing per 100 low-income families.

This clashes with the idea, disseminated often in a variety of publications, that Des Moines has one of the best quality of life ratings in the country. While this can be true for middle class workers and their families, it obscures the deepening problems that many low-income families in the area face, following a nationwide trend.

From the gravel drive of the Catholic Workers of Des Moines’ house, there’s a direct view of the ever-growing Des Moines skyline, a symbol of the financial and insurance industries that buoys its middle class. Not far to the west lies Hawthorne Hill, a homeless shelter that works to help place the homeless into affordable housing. A single mother is currently living there with her five children, and a sixth child is due in four months. She was nearly placed in a three-bedroom apartment, but it fell through after the landlord found out she was pregnant.

“With her income, we’re cutting it close on her even qualifying for a market-based rental of a three bedroom, so finding a four bedroom will be nearly impossible with her income,” Kiana Hines, the shelter operations manager, said. “We try to only have women stay at the shelter for 60 days and we’re over that limit in trying to find housing for her. And it’s not for her lack of trying or anything like that.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The skyline of Des Moines, Iowa. Photograph: Walter Bibikow/Getty Images/AWL Images RM

According to Maya Brennan, a research associate at the Urban Institute, this problem has partially risen out of an unavailability of housing across income levels.

“When there’s not enough housing supply across all of the income band, when there aren’t enough units being built or existing units being preserved, people who earn a higher amount, they often don’t have that next ‘great’ place to move into, so they may be living in a place that doesn’t fully meet their needs,” she said.

An apartment “could have been affordable, to say, a teacher,” she continued, but in a different housing situation with lower rent and higher supply, the same apartment “might have been affordable to a housekeeper”. As a result, “the teacher wishes that something else were available at their income level. So anything that any county can do is relax some of the restrictions that make it more difficult to build more supply, whether it’s affordable or not.”

Another important factor that plays into this crisis is a disparity between income and the cost of housing.

“I think it’s a two-fold issue,” Kiana Hines, program director at the shelter, said. “I think wages are not as high as they could be to support what the rent rates are currently within our city.”

In April, the Republican-controlled state legislature rolled back a planned minimum wage increase for Polk County and took away the power of individual cities and counties to set their own minimum wage, effectively freezing it at $7.25 statewide.

The city of Des Moines did not respond to requests for comment for this article.

For now, organizations advocating for housing access are doing what they can to improve access to affordable housing. The Polk County Housing Trust Fund (PCHTF) is one such advocate. The organization is dedicated to planning and building affordable housing, and receives funding from the state of Iowa. It is measurably successful, but local organizations can only do so much.

“I think the biggest player in the affordable housing issue nationwide is going to have to Department of Housing and Urban Development,” Josh Hellyer, the policy and communications coordinator for PCHTF said. HUD’s own self-defined mission is to “create strong, sustainable, inclusive communities and quality affordable homes for all.” “This is a time when lower income families are feeling a real squeeze on their budget. They’re having to pay for rent, they’re having to pay for medical care and transportation and other costs that are part of everyone’s daily needs”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A residential development in west Des Moines, Iowa. Photograph: Alamy

He adds: “the proposed Trump administration cuts to the Department of Housing and Urban Development budget really come at a very inopportune time for those families, but then to cut the housing vouchers that are helping so many extremely low-income households across the country is going to push a lot of families over the brink into homelessness, honestly.”

When asked for comment, the Des Moines division of HUD provided their budget justification to congress, as well as their report on the worst case needs of those they’re trying to serve. According to the Urban Institute, the number of HUD assisted units in Des Moines has fallen from 28 units for every 100 low-income families to just 14 units for every 100 low-income families since 2000.

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HUD’s current budget of $48.9bn is seemingly inadequate, as evidenced by our nation-wide affordable housing crisis. Donald Trump’s administration has proposed cutting that budget by over $6bn.

Despite the current administration’s desire to reduce their budget, it’s clear that HUD is the only organization capable of addressing the affordable housing crisis, even when addressing problems on a local level.

“When we talk about somebody at the extremely low-income level … they’re working full time in a restaurant job or as a housekeeper at a hotel,” Brennan said. “They’re more likely to need some kind of additional subsidy. The best source is going to be the federal government. Unfortunately, regardless of the politics of the person in office, the federal government has never made housing assistance, even for the very poor, an entitlement.”

She continues: “There’s not enough to go around and we, as a society, have to determine if we’re okay with that. Whether it’s okay that a person can be working a full-time job and be really struggling to keep up with their debt, to afford the gas they need to get to work, or go homeless. Until we as a society push for the federal government to truly think about providing enough subsidy for people who either can’t work or are working and the job just doesn’t make enough for the rent, we’re going to continue to have a lot of struggles.”