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As AI takes the helm of decision making, signs of perpetuating historic biases emerge

Paige Gross — Mon, 14 Oct 2024 09:30:07 +0000

Studies show that AI systems used to make important decisions such as approval of loan and mortgage applications can perpetuate historical bias and discrimination if not carefully constructed and monitored. (Seksan Mongkhonkhamsao/Getty Images)

In a recent study evaluating how chatbots make loan suggestions for mortgage applications, researchers at Pennsylvania’s Lehigh University found something stark: there was clear racial bias at play.

With 6,000 sample loan applications based on data from the 2022 Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, the chatbots recommended denials for more Black applicants than identical white counterparts. They also recommended Black applicants be given higher interest rates, and labeled Black and Hispanic borrowers as “riskier.”

White applicants were 8.5% more likely to be approved than Black applicants with the same financial profile. And applicants with “low” credit scores of 640, saw a wider margin — white applicants were approved 95% of the time, while Black applicants were approved less than 80% of the time.

The experiment aimed to simulate how financial institutions are using AI algorithms, machine learning and large language models to speed up processes like lending and underwriting of loans and mortgages. These “black box” systems, where the algorithm’s inner workings aren’t transparent to users, have the potential to lower operating costs for financial firms and any other industry employing them, said Donald Bowen, an assistant fintech professor at Lehigh and one of the authors of the study.

But there’s also large potential for flawed training data, programming errors, and historically biased information to affect the outcomes, sometimes in detrimental, life-changing ways.

“There’s a potential for these systems to know a lot about the people they’re interacting with,” Bowen said. “If there’s a baked-in bias, that could propagate across a bunch of different interactions between customers and a bank.”

How does AI discriminate in finance?

Decision-making AI tools and large language models, like the ones in the Lehigh University experiment, are being used across a variety of industries, like healthcare, education, finance and even in the judicial system.

Most machine learning algorithms follow what’s called classification models, meaning you formally define a problem or a question, and then you feed the algorithm a set of inputs such as a loan applicant’s age, income, education and credit history, Michael Wellman, a computer science professor at the University of Michigan, explained.

The algorithm spits out a result — approved or not approved. More complex algorithms can assess these factors and deliver more nuanced answers, like a loan approval with a recommended interest rate.

Machine learning advances in recent years have allowed for what’s called deep learning, or construction of big neural networks that can learn from large amounts of data. But if AI’s builders don’t keep objectivity in mind, or rely on data sets that reflect deep-rooted and systemic racism, results will reflect that.

“If it turns out that you are systematically more often making decisions to deny credit to certain groups of people more than you make those wrong decisions about others, that would be a time that there’s a problem with the algorithm,” Wellman said. “And especially when those groups are groups that are historically disadvantaged.”

Bowen was initially inspired to pursue the Lehigh University study after a smaller-scale assignment with his students revealed the racial discrimination by the chatbots.

“We wanted to understand if these models are biased, and if they’re biased in settings where they’re not supposed to be,” Bowen said, since underwriting is a regulated industry that’s not allowed to consider race in decision-making.

For the official study, Bowen and a research team ran thousands of loan application numbers over several months through different commercial large language models, including OpenAI’s GPT 3.5 Turbo and GPT 4, Anthropic’s Claude 3 Sonnet and Opus and Meta’s Llama 3-8B and 3-70B.

In one experiment, they included race information on applications and saw the discrepancies in loan approvals and mortgage rates. In other, they instructed the chatbots to “use no bias in making these decisions.” That experiment saw virtually no discrepancies between loan applicants.

But if race data isn’t collected in modern day lending, and algorithms used by banks are instructed to not consider race, how do people of color end up getting denied more often, or offered worse interest rates? Because much of our modern-day data is influenced by disparate impact, or the influence of systemic racism, Bowen said.

Though a computer wasn’t given the race of an applicant, a borrower’s credit score, which can be influenced by discrimination in the labor and housing markets, will have an impact on their application. So might their zip code, or the credit scores of other members of their household, all of which could have been influenced by the historic racist practice of redlining, or restricting lending to people in poor and nonwhite neighborhoods.

Machine learning algorithms aren’t always calculating their conclusions in the way that humans might imagine, Bowen said. The patterns it is learning apply to a variety of scenarios, so it may even be digesting reports about discrimination, for example learning that Black people have historically had worse credit. Therefore, the computer might see signs that a borrower is Black, and deny their loan or offer them a higher interest rate than a white counterpart.

Other opportunities for discrimination?

Decision making technologies have become ubiquitous in hiring practices over the last several years, as application platforms and internal systems use AI to filter through applications, and pre-screen candidates for hiring managers. Last year, New York City began requiring employers to notify candidates about their use of AI decision-making software.

By law, the AI tools should be programmed to have no opinion on protected classes like gender, race or age, but some users allege that they’ve been discriminated against by the algorithms anyway. In 2021, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission launched an initiative to examine more closely how new and existing technologies change the way employment decisions are made. Last year, the commission settled its first-ever AI discrimination hiring lawsuit.

The New York federal court case ended in a $365,000 settlement when tutoring company iTutorGroup Inc. was alleged to use an AI-powered hiring tool that rejected women applicants over 55 and men over 60. Two hundred applicants received the settlement, and iTutor agreed to adopt anti-discrimination policies and conduct training to ensure compliance with equal employment opportunity laws, Bloomberg reported at the time.

Another anti-discrimination lawsuit is pending in California federal court against AI-powered company Workday. Plaintiff Derek Mobley alleges he was passed over for more than 100 jobs that contract with the software company because he is Black, older than 40 and has mental health issues, Reuters reported this summer. The suit claims that Workday uses data on a company’s existing workforce to train its software, and the practice doesn’t account for the discrimination that may reflect in future hiring.

U.S. judicial and court systems have also begun incorporating decision-making algorithms in a handful of operations, like risk assessment analysis of defendants, determinations about pretrial release, diversion, sentencing and probation or parole.

Though the technologies have been cited in speeding up some of the traditionally lengthy court processes — like for document review and assistance with small claims court filings — experts caution that the technologies are not ready to be the primary or sole evidence in a “consequential outcome.”

“We worry more about its use in cases where AI systems are subject to pervasive and systemic racial and other biases, e.g., predictive policing, facial recognition, and criminal risk/recidivism assessment,” the co-authors of a paper in Judicature’s 2024 edition say.

Utah passed a law earlier this year to combat exactly that. HB 366, sponsored by state Rep. Karianne Lisonbee, R-Syracuse, addresses the use of an algorithm or a risk assessment tool score in determinations about pretrial release, diversion, sentencing, probation and parole, saying that these technologies may not be used without human intervention and review.

Lisonbee told States Newsroom that by design, the technologies provide a limited amount of information to a judge or decision-making officer.

“We think it’s important that judges and other decision-makers consider all the relevant information about a defendant in order to make the most appropriate decision regarding sentencing, diversion, or the conditions of their release,” Lisonbee said.

She also brought up concerns about bias, saying the state’s lawmakers don’t currently have full confidence in the “objectivity and reliability” of these tools. They also aren’t sure of the tools’ data privacy settings, which is a priority to Utah residents. These issues combined could put citizens’ trust in the criminal justice system at risk, she said.

“When evaluating the use of algorithms and risk assessment tools in criminal justice and other settings, it’s important to include strong data integrity and privacy protections, especially for any personal data that is shared with external parties for research or quality control purposes,” Lisonbee said.

Preventing discriminatory AI

Some legislators, like Lisonbee, have taken note of these issues of bias, and potential for discrimination. Four states currently have laws aiming to prevent “algorithmic discrimination,” where an AI system can contribute to different treatment of people based on race, ethnicity, sex, religion or disability, among other things. This includes Utah, as well as California (SB 36), Colorado (SB 21-169), Illinois (HB 0053).

Though it’s not specific to discrimination, Congress introduced a bill in late 2023 to amend the Financial Stability Act of 2010 to include federal guidance for the financial industry on the uses of AI. This bill, the Financial Artificial Intelligence Risk Reduction Act or the “FAIRR Act,” would require the Financial Stability Oversight Council to coordinate with agencies regarding threats to the financial system posed by artificial intelligence, and may regulate how financial institutions can rely on AI.

Lehigh’s Bowen made it clear he felt there was no going back on these technologies, especially as companies and industries realize their cost-saving potential.

“These are going to be used by firms,” he said. “So how can they do this in a fair way?”

Bowen hopes his study can help inform financial and other institutions in deployment of decision-making AI tools. For their experiment, the researchers wrote that it was as simple as using prompt engineering to instruct the chatbots to “make unbiased decisions.” They suggest firms that integrate large language models into their processes do regular audits for bias to refine their tools.

Bowen and other researchers on the topic stress that more human involvement is needed to use these systems fairly. Though AI can deliver a decision on a court sentencing, mortgage loan, job application, healthcare diagnosis or customer service inquiry, it doesn’t mean they should be operating unchecked.

University of Michigan’s Wellman told States Newsroom he’s looking for government regulation on these tools, and pointed to H.R. 6936, a bill pending in Congress which would require federal agencies to adopt the Artificial Intelligence Risk Management Framework developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The framework calls out potential for bias, and is designed to improve trustworthiness for organizations that design, develop, use and evaluate AI tools.

“My hope is that the call for standards … will read through the market, providing tools that companies could use to validate or certify their models at least,” Wellman said. “Which, of course, doesn’t guarantee that they’re perfect in every way or avoid all your potential negatives. But it can … provide basic standard basis for trusting the models.”

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U.S. Senate panel probes federal government’s role in affordable housing crisis

Ariana Figueroa — Wed, 25 Sep 2024 19:45:47 +0000

Rhode Island House of Representatives Speaker Joseph Shekarchi testifies before the U.S. Senate Budget Committee on Sept. 25, 2024. (Screenshot from committee webcast)

WASHINGTON — The speaker of the Rhode Island House described how his state has tackled affordable housing and how it could be a model for local and state governments across the country in a Wednesday hearing before members of the U.S. Senate Budget Committee.

“My mantra has been: production, production and more production,” Rhode Island House of Representatives Speaker Joseph Shekarchi said.

Shekarchi and housing experts urged the senators to take a multipronged government approach to tackling the lack of affordable housing, such as reforming zoning, expanding land for building and streamlining permits.

“I really believe this is an all-hands-on-deck crisis,” Sen. Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington, said.

Murray said that in her state, there is a shortage of 172,000 homes. She asked one of the witnesses, Paul Williams, the executive director at the Center for Public Enterprise, how the federal government could help state and local governments tackle the issue. The Center for Public Enterprise is a think tank that aids public agencies in implementing programs in the energy and housing sector.

Williams said the federal government should encourage municipalities to look at local permitting and zoning processes to see if those delay new apartment construction projects or prevent them from happening.

He added that financing can also remain a challenge.

Tax credits

Another witness, Greta Harris, the president and CEO of the Better Housing Coalition, an organization based in Virginia that aims to produce affordable housing, said the federal government should consider expanding the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Low-Income Housing Tax Credit. That program provides local groups with a tax incentive to construct or rehabilitate low-income housing.

“The low-income housing tax credit program has been extremely effective in allowing us to produce more housing units and also preserve existing affordable housing units,” Harris said.

She added Congress should consider expanding federal housing vouchers, and that closing and down payment assistance in home purchases is crucial. Federal housing vouchers help provide housing for low-income families, those who are elderly, people with disabilities and veterans.

Most wealth building is through owning a home and acquiring equity in that home, she said.

“People can use that equity for retirement, to help their kids go to college, to start a business, and to be able to breathe a little bit,” Harris said.

How a state can be successful

Rhode Island Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, the chairman of the committee, asked Shekarchi to describe some successful impacts of the state’s approach to housing.

Shekarchi said that “we haven’t substituted state control for local control,” and have instead made the process to get building permits and address land disputes easier. He added that Rhode Island also created a role for a housing secretary, to address the issue.

“Overall, you’re seeing an increase in building permits,” he said.

Indiana GOP Sen. Mike Braun asked Harris if housing should be left to local government and private entrepreneurs, rather than Congress.

“Left to its own devices, the market is not equitable and it serves certain portions of our society and not all,” she said.

She said the government at all levels — local, state and federal — should participate in addressing the housing crisis.

GOP bashes Harris plans

The top Republican on the committee, Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, blamed the Biden administration for the cost of housing

He also criticized a housing plan released by Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential candidate, that would provide $25,000 in down payment assistance to first-time home buyers — a proposal that hinges on congressional approval.

“Economists from across the political spectrum have noted how such policies would backfire by pushing up housing prices even further,” Grassley said of Harris’ policy.

Ed Pinto, a senior fellow and co-director of the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute Housing Center, said that there is a shortage of about 3.8 million homes. He argued that Harris’ plan to give down payment assistance “is almost certain to lead to higher home prices.”

“The millions of program recipients would become price setters for all buyers in the neighborhoods where the recipients buy,” Pinto said.

Rent is eating up a greater share of tenants’ income in almost every state

Tim Henderson — Mon, 16 Sep 2024 09:40:58 +0000

An apartment maintenance man changes the lock of an apartment after constables posted an eviction order in Phoenix. In Arizona, low wages, a housing shortage, and short-term rental and vacation homes are eating away at the stock of affordable housing for renters. (John Moore/Getty Images)

There were 21 states where a majority of tenant households spent 30% or more of their incomes on rent and utilities last year, compared with just seven states in 2019.

Nationwide, about 22 million?renters are shouldering that percentage.?Anyone paying more than 30% is considered “cost burdened,” according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and may struggle to pay for other necessities, such as food, clothing, transportation and medical care.

In Kentucky, housing consumed 30% of income or more for 47.5% of renter households, up from 43.3% in 2019.

Three presidential swing states had among the biggest increases in the share of renters who spent that much on housing: Arizona (to 54% from 46.5%), Nevada (to 57.4% from 51.1%) and Georgia (to 53.7% from 48.4%). The numbers are based on a Stateline analysis of American Community Survey data released today by the U.S. Census Bureau. Florida and Maine also saw large jumps.

In Arizona, low wages, a housing shortage, and short-term rental and vacation homes are eating away at the stock of affordable housing for renters,?according to Alison Cook-Davis, associate director for research at Arizona State University’s Morrison Institute for Public Policy.

“You’ve got people across the state kind of pulling their hair out, saying ‘I thought Arizona was supposed to be the affordable state,’” Cook-Davis said.

Rents in Arizona have shot up 40% to 60% in the last two years, she said. And the state’s eviction filings spiked 43% to 97,000 between 2022 and 2023, she said.

In places such as Arizona and Nevada where the housing bubble of the late 2000s left vacant houses, the construction of apartments and other homes has not caught up with population increases, Cook-Davis added.

A University of Nevada, Las Vegas,?data brief reported in May that the Las Vegas area had the highest percentage of cost-burdened renters in the state, at 58.3%, more even than the New York City metro area (52.6%) or San Francisco metro area (48.9%).

Census figures released last week showed that in addition to Arizona, Nevada and Georgia, the states with the highest jumps in the share of cost-burdened renters were Florida, which increased to 61.7% from 55.9%, and Maine, at 49.1% from 44%.

That jump left Florida as the state with the highest rate of cost-burdened renters. It was followed by Nevada (57.4%), Hawaii (56.7%), Louisiana (56.2%) and California (56.1%).

“Florida isn’t the deal it used to be,” said Christopher McCarty, director of the University of Florida’s Bureau of Economic and Business Research. “Florida still has disproportionately lower-paying jobs compared to other states, and rents are increasing compared to other states as well.”

The states with the lowest rates of cost-burdened renters as of 2023 were North Dakota (37%), Wyoming (41.2%), South Dakota (41.3%), Kansas (43.5%) and Nebraska (44%).

The share of cost-burdened renters increased since 2019 in every state except Vermont (down to 47.8% from 54%), Wyoming (down to 41.2% from 44%), North Dakota (down to 37% from 38%) and Rhode Island (down to 48.1% from 49%).

There’s hope for the future in Arizona and other states with increased home construction, Cook-Davis said.

“If you keep building, eventually this will sort itself out. But that could take years. It’s a slow process,” she said.

This story is republished from Stateline, a sister publication to the Kentucky Lantern and part of the nonprofit States Newsroom network.

More than shelter, campus to provide ‘wrap around’ care to a growing population in Louisville

Sarah Ladd — Tue, 10 Sep 2024 21:14:09 +0000

Renderings of the Community Care Campus under construction in Louisville's Smoketown neighborhood. (Volunteers of America)

LOUISVILLE — Construction has begun on Louisville’s Community Care Campus, a multi-building site in the Smoketown area aimed at providing housing, medical and other services to unhoused people in Kentucky’s largest city.?

The campus, funded in part by the General Assembly, is now slated to open in 2027, Louisville Mayor Craig Greenberg announced Tuesday. Demolition of several existing structures on the campus grounds will begin next week.?

Greenberg was joined on the future grounds by Jennifer Hancock, the president and CEO of Volunteers of America, which is planning and will operate the campus.?

“Every day, we see how homelessness has increased on our city streets, and the need for more housing services has become even more urgent,” Hancock said. “My colleagues and I are ready and eager to address this challenge — and opportunity — for our city head on.”?

House Republican Floor Leader Steven Rudy, R-Paducah, and Senate Democratic Floor Leader Gerald Neal, D-Louisville, also spoke.?

Volunteers of America CEO and President Jennifer Hancock speaks in downtown Louisville on the future grounds of the Community Care Campus, Sept. 10, 2924. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Sarah Ladd)

How is the campus funded??

The $58 million campus will include shelter for unhoused families, a health clinic, transitional housing for young adults, food services and an office for Louisville Metro Police.?

The campus will also include a playground, activity courtyard and family lawn, according to 2024 floor plans.?

Of the $58 million price projection, $23 million was appropriated by the General Assembly and Louisville Metro Government. Another $19 million came from low income housing tax credits. VOA raised an additional $1 million, and says it will announce a major investment next week, which will go toward the remaining $16 million needed to finish the project.?

During the 2024 legislative session, lawmakers approved a two-year budget, which included $100 million for projects in Louisville, including the Community Care Campus.

Hancock said the police office on the campus is “not built on a premise of enforcement.”?

“If that has to happen, of course, we need them to do their jobs,” she said. “But there is so much upside to having them be part of the community that we are going to create.”?

Greenberg said having a police presence in the campus will be a chance for police to “develop stronger relationships with nonprofit partners” and “build relationships with individuals themselves to show that we are policing in a new way in this city.”?

In August, the Department of Justice said Louisvillians needed better access to community based services to end a cycle of over-policing as a solution to mental health crises.?

Senate President Robert Stivers, R-Manchester, said the Community Care Campus is “a response to the DOJ report, but it is not in response to the DOJ report.”?

What the data shows?

A report from The Coalition for the Homeless showed that between 2018 and 2021, homelessness in Louisville increased 41%, from 7,572 to 10,640. The number of people who sought non-shelter services also increased from 75 to 3,724.?

Of those in need, Hancock said Tuesday, “the greatest problem today is the number of families who are unhoused.” So, while the Community Care Campus will help individuals, she said, it will prioritize families.?

The campus will have an economic benefit to the city, Greenberg and others said.?

In 2023, Greenberg said, 15% of fire department runs “involved encampments or interactions with people experiencing homelessness.” That includes medical responses and runs to fires in homeless shelters, encampments, vacant house fires and fires started by squatters, a VOA spokesperson said.?

Also in 2023, the city spent $400,000 on removal of solid waste — both garbage and human waste — left at encampments. That’s down from $600,000 in 2022, according to VOA data.?

Rep. Rachel Roarx (LRC Public Information)

Stivers praised Greenberg’s efforts to make sure Louisville has “a great downtown for the purpose of being functional and aesthetically really good looking.”?

“But it’s not going to be someplace that people want to come to if there’s a large homeless population in and around the area that don’t feel safe,” Stivers said. “I can talk about all the economics, I can talk about all the tourism, but let’s talk about basic humanity. We need to take care of those who most need help.”?

While VOA works on the campus, it will also open a temporary shelter for families and children during the upcoming winter months, Hancock said.?

Rep. Rachel Roarx, D-Louisville, said the campus is “a great step in addressing one of our most important issues” in her county.?

“It’s not only about housing,” she said. “It’s about providing critical services in one place that truly wraps around an entire individual, young person, family and sets them on a path to stable housing in the future.”??

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A look at how federal plans could make the costs of housing more affordable?

Casey Quinlan — Wed, 21 Aug 2024 23:15:52 +0000

A sign advertising units for rent is displayed outside of a Manhattan building on April 11, 2024. The Biden administration and the Harris campaign are making their housing policy case to the American people as Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump compete for voters’ trust on economic issues. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

As renters and would-be homeowners struggle with the high cost of housing, the Biden administration has announced policies to address this strain on household budgets.

That includes $100 million in funding for a program to incentivize affordable housing production and streamlining loan application processes to expedite building more housing.

Some of those proposals – such as a cap on rent increases from corporate landlords – call for congressional action, while others are rules and grants that can be done without legislative approval. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development will also be finalizing a rule to allow different kinds of housing, such as duplexes and triplexes, to be built under the agency’s manufacturing and safety standards.

KY housing shortage will worsen without action, low-income renters most vulnerable, says study

The Biden administration and the Harris campaign are making their housing policy case to the American people as Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump compete for voters’ trust on economic issues. An August Financial Times/Michigan Ross poll shows that Harris is slightly ahead of Trump when it comes to who voters trust more on the economy, by 1 percentage point. Although that is a very small advantage, it is a change from July, when 35% of voters approved of President Joe Biden’s job on the economy compared to 41% for Trump.

Plans would cut red tape, but housing stock is still low??

The administration’s plans to address supply and soaring prices also include repurposing federal land in Nevada and a cap on rent increases from corporate landlords, which would require congressional action. Housing and homelessness experts say many of these changes are positive, particularly zoning changes, while others argue that a few of these actions are insufficient for the crisis at hand.

On Friday, Vice President Kamala Harris announced her plans for boosting housing affordability if she wins the presidency. Harris’ plans are similar to some of the Biden administration’s approaches to housing policy, with an emphasis on stopping corporate landlords from driving up rents and knocking down local zoning barriers to building affordable housing. She also announced a policy to provide up to $25,000 in payment assistance for first-time homebuyers on the condition that they paid rent on time for two years.

“We will take down barriers and cut red tape, including at the state and local levels, and by the end of my first term, we will end America’s housing shortage by building 3 million new homes and rentals that are affordable for the middle class,” Harris said at a campaign event in Raleigh, North Carolina on Friday.

Indivar Dutta-Gupta, who focuses on policy research and seminars at the Georgetown University McCourt School of Public Policy, applauded developments to make it easier and less costly to build affordable housing through the Pathways to Removing Obstacles to Housing program, which provides funding for communities getting rid of barriers such as “outdated” zoning policies and a “lack of neighborhood amenities.”

“It’s very difficult for a builder to just kind of copy and paste their plans from one community to another. Secondly, we’re not just talking about requirements for special permitting and land use that are tedious,” he said. “They’re time consuming and that dramatically increases the cost of housing, so if you can knock down a process that takes 12 months to six months, that can make a big difference for housing affordability.”

Kenneth Chilton, professor at the department of public administration at Tennessee State University, said there are certainly homes being built – just not enough affordable ones between $100,000 and $300,000 in the area he lives in Nashville. Wages have also not caught up to those prices, he added.

“The market has catered to the more affluent households, so there are new houses being built, but they’re million dollar-plus houses for people who can afford or are willing to put themselves in a financial burden to afford a million dollar house,” he said. “… It’s becoming harder and harder to afford the discretionary income needed to save up for down payment.”

The Biden administration and Congress has also focused more on corporate landlords of late, who are influencing the housing market. Dutta-Gupta and Chilton said that even in situations where they make up a smaller percentage of landlords, their practices influence other landlords and drive up rents. Chilton, who has studied how firms that can quickly snatch up all kinds of properties can influence regional housing markets, said it’s hard for the average homeowner to compete.

“You have a lot more corporations and investors who are buying up housing,” he said. “Some of those are institutional, but there’s been recent reports that even smaller local landlords are kind of adopting the same business practices of one-year leases with built-in cost of living adjustments. They’re operating like corporate landlords.”

He said that none of the Biden administration proposals he saw accounted for potential homebuyers, who have to apply for loans, failing to compete with groups and investors making all-cash purchases without inspections. Democratic lawmakers have introduced legislation in Congress to limit corporate landlords’ power, but it has not passed.

Dutta-Gupta said the Biden administration’s recent efforts are putting “meaningful dollar amounts” into the quest for affordable housing through grant opportunities, even though they are probably below the demand. He said he’s also heartened to see that the U.S. Department of Transportation is making sure its discretionary infrastructure grants give preference to communities with more “pro-housing policies,” to give localities more incentives to favor affordable housing. But he said the administration has to make sure it effectively communicates this through outreach.

“There’s going to have to be a meaningful effort to explain to the communities that there’s a new preference and this is how those communities can potentially fall into that category of the preference,” he said. “You don’t want to just let them know there’s a preference and then no change in behavior happens.”

Although Trump has talked about mortgage rates during his campaign, he hasn’t provided a lot of detail on housing policies. The Federal Reserve’s federal funds rate has an influence on mortgage rates and Trump has said the president should “have at least a say” in Fed policy. The Republican Party’s 2024 platform also includes a section on housing affordability, which mentions tax incentives to “promote homeownership,” allowing for new home construction on some federal lands, and reducing regulations that “raise housing costs.”

The challenge of keeping people housed

Given the challenges to building the supply of more affordable housing, the National Alliance to End Homelessness would like to see broader policy approaches to prevent more people from becoming homeless. Homelessness reached a record high in 2023.

Although the Biden administration has taken steps to expand housing access for groups particularly vulnerable to homelessness, such as veterans and survivors of intimate partner violence, Steve Berg, chief policy officer at the National Alliance to End Homelessness, would like to see more of a universal approach, such as housing vouchers that meet the scale of the need. He said targeted emergency rental assistance combined with eviction moratoriums in places where homelessness is particularly high and rising quickly would also be effective at reaching the people who need it most.

“The eviction moratorium combined with subsidies for landlords to help when people got behind on their rent were very effective interventions,” Berg said of earlier pandemic policies to keep people housed.

Why political leaders are focused on housing

The Federal Reserve has signaled it is close to cutting key interest rates as inflation has slowed and the housing market has begun to cool in response to high mortgage rates. The Fed started to raise interest rates in 2022 and hiked them 11 times until late 2023, putting pressure on the housing market during a time of high demand for housing and a shortage of affordable homes.

In May, U.S. rent growth was up 3.2% from a year ago, which was the biggest gain there has been in more than a year, according to CoreLogic’s single family rent data. A lack of housing affordability is also closely tied to homelessness. From 2019 to 2023, the number of people who had to go to emergency shelters for the first time rose more than 23%, a 2024 report from the National Alliance to End Homelessness shows.

“The Federal Reserve primarily slows the economy by making construction of residential housing, and generally taking out loans, more costly. People are certainly experiencing the higher cost of housing right now due to the higher interest rates, so the timing [of the policies] may be fortuitous,” Dutta-Gupta said.

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KY housing shortage will worsen without action, low-income renters most vulnerable, says study

Liam Niemeyer — Wed, 21 Aug 2024 23:03:20 +0000

One of the slides from the presentation by Patrick Bowen, showing the number of needed housing units in each county as a percentage of the existing housing units. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Liam Niemeyer).

LOUISVILLE — A leader of a national real estate research firm says if no action is taken over the next five years on Kentucky’s housing shortage, more Kentuckians could be forced to live in substandard housing, live with family or friends in crowded spaces, deal with severe housing costs or become homeless.

Patrick Bowen, the president of Ohio-based Bowen National Research which conducts housing market research across the country, presented findings Wednesday at an affordable housing conference. Bowen’s report is part of a housing gap study commissioned by the Kentucky Housing Corp., the state’s independent public corporation that invests in housing projects. It? compared Kentucky’s current housing needs to projected needs in five years.?

Patrick Bowen said repairing and weatherizing existing housing can help ease the gap. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Liam Niemeyer)

Kentucky currently needs about 206,000 housing units, including rentals and homes for sale. Without a push to build or repair more housing, that number is projected to increase by more than 80,000 by 2029 to 287,000-plus housing units, driven significantly by the need for lower-income rentals and higher-income homes for sale.?

“It can be daunting. You can make it feel like the mountain is so high. How are you going to address this?” Bowen said. “But Kentucky, you’re not alone, right? This is a national crisis we’re going through.”

The estimate of housing needed takes into account what’s needed for a healthy housing market, to meet economic growth and to move Kentuckians out of poor-quality housing or from under? severe housing cost burdens, meaning they pay 50% or more of their income on housing.?

“If you care about the economy, care about jobs, when people spend over 50% of their income towards their housing costs, they’re not spending — they don’t have disposable income,” Bowen said.?

Bowen said while the highest need? is in the state’s largest population centers of Louisville, Lexington and Northern Kentucky, rural counties could face a similar housing supply crunch by 2029. The consultant presented a map showing the number of housing units needed in each county as a percentage of the overall number of housing units in the county.?

By 2029, the study projected the? housing gap in numerous rural counties will rise to more than 18% of their existing housing units. Simpson, Breathitt, Boyle and Carroll counties would all have a housing gap to existing households of more than 20%. Bowen said Carroll County is projected to? need only 866 housing units by 2029, but proportionally the county is “feeling this impact of the housing gap” just as much as other counties.?

“Employers are feeling it, the citizens are feeling it, and it’s true for these bigger parts of the state, but rural Kentucky shouldn’t be forgotten,” Bowen told the audience.

Patrick Bowen, right, and Wendy Smith of the Kentucky Housing Corporation on stage for opening remarks at an affordable housing conference in Louisville, Aug. 21, 2024. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Liam Niemeyer).

The increasing housing gap for low-income Kentuckians, particularly renters, is projected to substantially worsen across the state. The number of rental housing units needed in each county as a percentage of the county’s total existing rental housing units is expected to be more than 30% in nine counties by 2029 including Franklin, Breathitt, Powell, Boone and Boyle counties. The rental housing gap in Simpson County is projected to be 46.5% of its total rental housing stock by that year.?

Bowen’s firm found rental housing demand rising across all income levels but most significantly among households earning at or below 30% of an area’s median income. The gap in rental units, the study detailed, was equally driven by the growth in number of households along with those living under severe housing costs.?

A look at how federal plans could make the costs of housing more affordable?

Bowen told the Lantern that while more housing units need to be built in Kentucky, other solutions such as weatherizing and repairing existing homes or providing financial assistance to those facing severe housing costs could help reduce the housing gap as well. He said encouraging housing developments of all kinds, especially affordable housing, is key.?

“I think there should be a broad plan that allows people to stay in their homes if that’s what they want to do,” Bowen said.?

The state’s housing gap, if left unchecked, could worsen the living situations of manyKentuckians, Bowen said. More people could be forced to move into living spaces with family and could be facing severe housing costs.

“Some of these people are going to become homeless,” Bowen told the Lantern.?

Wendy Smith, deputy executive director of the Kentucky Housing Corporation, said the second phase of the corporation’s housing gap analysis should be made publicly available in September. Smith recently presented the first phase of the corporation’s analysis before a task force of lawmakers.

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Kentucky’s housing shortages receive legislative scrutiny

Liam Niemeyer — Wed, 14 Aug 2024 09:30:32 +0000

Rep. Randy Bridges, R-Paducah, who was the primary sponsor of the resolution creating the Kentucky Housing Task Force, speaking with Rep. Jacob Justice, R-Elkhorn City, during this year's legislative session. (LRC Photo)

Kentucky doesn’t have enough housing. On that even the state’s lawmakers can agree.

But the reasons for the shortages differ from community to community, exacerbated by natural disasters in some counties and a booming economy in others.?

A task force, established by the GOP-dominated legislature earlier this year to better understand the state’s housing needs, has met twice this summer to hear from leaders of housing agencies and local elected officials about what they’re seeing in their communities. The task force is set to meet again Aug. 20 with three more meetings after that leading up to next year’s legislative session.?

Co-chaired by Sen. Robby Mills, R-Henderson, and Rep. Susan Witten, R-Louisville, the task force is required to submit their findings and recommendations to the Legislative Research Commission by Dec. 1.?

Here are the major takeaways from the two meetings.

Shortage straining renters and homeowners

Wendy Smith, deputy executive director at the Kentucky Housing Corporation, an independent public corporation that invests in housing projects, told the task force in June that Kentucky has a shortage of 206,000 housing units, but that shortage isn’t just for rental units. It also includes a lack of luxury homes and apartments that could help attract a workforce to communities.?

A slide from a presentation by the Kentucky Housing Corporation’s Wendy Smith, showing the percentage of available housing units as a share of a county’s overall housing stock. (Screenshot)

The Kentucky Housing Corporation released the first phase of a report on the state’s housing gap earlier this year, with the second phase of the report coming sometime this month detailing a five-year projection of housing based on migration patterns, job announcements and the status of home starts.

Smith, citing the housing gap report, called the shortage “Kentucky’s most urgent issue” affecting all counties from rural areas to larger cities. She pointed to an increase in first-time homelessness as a symptom of a “market problem.”?

“Because there’s not enough supply in the overall marketplace, we’re losing ground in serving the folks we try to serve. The overall marketplace needs more housing, and we need kind of a systematic approach that helps Kentucky be able to build and get brought to market more housing to meet our economic and population growth,” Smith said. “If we had enough supply — not even affordable, just enough supply — Kentucky would have lower average housing costs. Supply will bring down costs. That’s just, that’s economics, right?”?

While the lack of homes for buyers is evenly distributed across incomes, Smith said, lower-income Kentuckians are disproportionately affected by the lack of rentals. And while the largest number of housing units needed are in Louisville, Lexington and Bowling Green, the need for housing is spread out across the state.?

A slide from a presentation by Kentucky Housing Corporation’s Wendy Smith, showing the percent of vacant rental units in each county as a share of overall housing stock. (Screenshot)

“I think there are a lot of folks who might think rural areas don’t have a housing crisis, and I can tell you, I am hearing from so many rural county judge executives and other leaders that they have a real need for more housing,” Smith said.?

Disasters, new jobs and ‘local resistance’?

Smith also testified in June that natural disasters destroyed and damaged housing, including roughly 5,000 housing units combined lost from a deadly tornado outbreak in December 2021 and deadly Eastern Kentucky floods in July 2022.?

Damage from natural disasters have also increased home insurance and rental insurance costs, she said, referencing New York Times reporting that showed claims for losses in 2023 were larger in Kentucky than any other state, except Hawaii.?

Another factor in some communities, she said, was housing strain brought on by economic growth, “local resistance” to building new housing and a lack of home builders.

She pointed out that many small builders “who did the lion’s share of construction in rural Kentucky,” quit during the Great Recession earlier this century. “They got out of business. They haven’t gotten back into it,” she said. “If they’re even trying, it’s hard for them to get access to lending.”?

Elizabethtown Mayor Jeff Gregory testified in the July task force meeting alongside other local officials that the jobs and economic activity brought by building the BlueOval SK electric vehicle battery plants were creating “unintended issues” with housing.?

Joe Reverman, the director of land use planning for Elizabethtown, said the city in the past has issued permits for about 100 housing units every year; over the past two years, that number has spiked to roughly 2,000 units. Reverman said keeping up with the infrastructure provided to the homes has been a major challenge.?

“With the previous state of development, we’ve been able to kind of plan and provide infrastructure in places where it was needed,” Reverman said. “But when you increase that tenfold, just in a short amount of time, it’s really difficult to build that infrastructure in advance.”?

Another local official in rural Marshall County also testified that the lack of available utilities, including high-speed internet access, limited housing growth.?

Boone County Judge-Executive Gary Moore also said that local control of housing development is going to be “huge,” saying that some people in his county are more resistant to building affordable, lower-income housing.?

“There’s places that people definitely understand the need for low-income housing and may be willing to consider it,” Moore said. “Other parts of the county, they know we need it — but ‘not in my backyard.’”?

A desire for denser ‘middle’ housing

Smith, the Kentucky Housing Corporation deputy director, and local officials also spoke about the need for denser housing, particularly in cities, to help increase the housing supply.?

Smith said the state generally lacked “middle housing,” explaining that zoning laws in Kentucky usually only allowed for the building of single-family homes or apartment complexes — and nothing in between. The federal funding the housing corporation gets, she said, is also usually geared toward building single-family homes and apartment complexes. She said the building of other types of housing ranging from duplexes, triplexes and more has almost “zeroed out.”?

Louisville Mayor Craig Greenberg, who testified in July, said density could also mean taking single-family homes and turning them into duplexes, or adding more housing density with major transportation corridors for people to have access to transportation routes. He said given the limited amount of land to build new homes in Jefferson County, building more townhouses, duplexes, triplexes and other dense housing could be a solution.

“When you think of the way the world is evolving, people are looking to live in different ways than they have historically,” Greenberg said. “From an architectural standpoint, there is no visible added density, but maybe two families just live on smaller lots than what historically has been the case.”?

Elizabeth Strojan, the new executive director of the Louisville Metro Housing Authority, described housing density from her experience of living in the Highlands, a neighborhood on the east side of Louisville.?

“So you might walk past a single-family home, and the home next door is a duplex. And the home next door is an apartment building,” Strojan said. “It makes for a beautifully diverse neighborhood, so density can look different depending on what the context is.”?

Greenberg said some of the millions of dollars in funding the legislature appropriated to the city is being used to convert downtown office space into housing.?

What’s next for the housing task force?

When Mills, the co-chair of the task force, began the second meeting of the study group in July, he emphasized that the purpose of the committee wasn’t to “create or develop legislation” and that lawmakers wanted to hear about housing challenges around the state.?

Rep. Randy Bridges, R-Paducah, a member of the task force who was the primary sponsor of the bipartisan resolution to create the interim committee, told the Lantern that while he can’t speak for Mills, he thinks the committee can find other ways to make changes in housing through the regulations, either by creating new ones or modifying existing.?

“We don’t want to make a knee jerk reaction and come up with statutes that will be counterproductive or have unintended consequences,” Bridges said, who works as a Paducah real estate agent. “What we do realize is some of these may not require new laws.”?

Housing advocates and nonprofit home builders had called on lawmakers to invest $200 million? into state housing trust funds, citing a flush state “rainy day” fund, to provide a reliable source of investment for housing construction, especially to rebuild housing in areas of the state recovering from natural disasters. GOP legislative leadership did not heed those calls, instead providing funding for specific housing projects instead.?

Bridges said he didn’t want to appear to be “turning a deaf ear” to those advocates, saying that he wants to keep an open mind about possible solutions. But he said large appropriations for housing were probably not “in the list of urgency” on what he believed lawmakers would do.

“Where are we going to get the most return on our investment?” Bridges asked.?

The rural Americans too poor for federal flood protections

Claire Carlson, The Daily Yonder — Tue, 13 Aug 2024 09:30:41 +0000

Cleanup efforts at the Isom IGA store in East Kentucky after the flooding of July 2022. (Photo by Malcolm Wilson)

This story was produced through a collaboration between the Daily Yonder, which covers rural America, and Climate Central, a nonadvocacy science and news group.

On the day he would become homeless, Wesley Bryant was awoken by his wife, Alexis.

“Get up,” she told him. “There’s a flood outside.”

It was 8 a.m. on a Thursday in late July, two years ago in rural Pike County, Kentucky, and rain had been pouring for days. Overnight, it got heavier. Homes and vehicles were being swept down the narrow valleys of Eastern Kentucky’s mountainous terrain.

Dozens of people died after more than a foot of rain fell from July 26 through July 30, 2022, flooding 13 rural counties in Eastern Kentucky. Yet as these communities attempt to rebuild, they’re being overlooked for federal spending that’s protecting wealthier and more urbanized Americans from such weather disasters.

Wesley, Alexis, their two daughters and Alexis’ sister evacuated, hiking the half-mile to Alexis’ mother’s house via the mountains behind their own home to avoid flooded roads. They’ve been living there ever since.

Wesley and Alexis Bryant with their three children. The two oldest escaped the July 2022 floods, and the youngest is the family’s newest addition. (Photo provided by Wesley Bryant)

Kentucky is a regular victim of flooding. During the past century, more than 100 people have died in storms across the state, including at least 44 two summers ago. Heat-trapping pollution is driving up rainfall rates and flood risks.

Thousands of survivors were forced to move out of damaged homes, including Wesley and his family. Their house, which Wesley’s grandfather built in the 1970s, is unlivable. Insulation peels from the ceiling and the floors bubble with water damage. Finding contractors to fix the house has been difficult because thousands of other flooded properties are also being repaired or replaced.

Their furniture and appliances were destroyed, and Wesley estimates replacing them would cost around $20,000. The family was denied FEMA disaster assistance so they’ve had to foot these costs themselves. “We just need a little help from our government,” he said.

Despite histories of flooding, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) classifies Pike County and the 12 other counties that flooded two years ago as facing “low” risks in the event of a natural disaster like a flood. That’s largely because they have less to lose —financially — compared to more urbanized areas.

Critics of FEMA’s risk-determination tool, called the National Risk Index, say it doesn’t include enough information about rural communities, especially when it comes to flooding, leading it to understate hazards.

That suggests that as the federal government cranks up spending on infrastructure, including the allocation of more than $1 billion to help reduce future flood threats, families in East Kentucky and other rural regions are at risk of missing out on projects that could help them prepare better for the next disaster.

What is the National Risk Index

FEMA developed its National Risk Index to help local and state officials and residents plan for emergencies through an online tool. The agency sourced historic rainfall and other data to characterize these risks, allowing it to paint a national picture of threats from local disasters, findings that influence its spending decisions.

FEMA began developing the risk index in 2016, though initial work dates to 2008. The first iteration of the risk index was released in October 2020, and the data has been updated twice since then, most recently in March 2023.

Work to update how the risk index handles inland flooding is expected early next year. In a press release touting new requirements that forced the coming update, the Biden administration said that in “recent years, communities have seen repeated flooding that threatens both lives and property” but that the agency’s approaches to measuring risks based on historical data “have become outdated.”

The agency is also working on a “climate-informed” risk index looking at future hazards but, so far, inland flooding is not on the list of disasters planned to be included.

FEMA’s national and regional press offices declined to be interviewed or answer questions for this story.

“There’s a bias against, I think, rural communities, especially in the flood dataset,” said Chad Berginnis, executive director of the Association of State Floodplain Managers, a nonprofit that certifies floodplain managers and educates policymakers about flood loss. He said this bias could profoundly confuse or affect emergency managers in those areas.

“It’s giving false results,” Berginnis said. “I think we’ve got to be very thoughtful and very careful on how we use [the risk index] for the hazard of flood in particular.”

The building of homes and communities in vulnerable locations and the effects of heat-trapping pollution are converging to escalate the frequency of weather disasters across the U.S. One of the effects of climate change is an intensification in the amount of rainfall that can fall every hour. A federal report on the latest climate science showed the rainiest days across the Southeast are dumping more than a third more water on average now than was the case in the late 1950s. Ongoing emissions and warming threaten to continue to boost rainfall rates.

“If it’s gone up that much already, we might be wise to be concerned,” said Scott Denning, an atmospheric sciences professor at Colorado State University who studies carbon dioxide, water, and energy cycles. “You ain’t seen nothing yet.”

That rain often falls on ground where coal mining excavations removed mountaintops. Researchers overlaid data regarding fatalities from the floods with maps of mountaintop removal mining and found that many of the deaths were downstream from or adjacent to such sites.

Neglecting rural Americans

Todd DePriest doesn’t “believe in Facebook,” but uses his mother’s account to surf the website’s digital marketplace. That’s what he was doing two summers ago when he saw alerts about severe floods in Letcher County, Kentucky, where he serves as the mayor of Jenkins, population 1,800.

Public service announcements warning people to “turn around, don’t drown” during floods were circulating on his mother’s feed. DePriest got up from his computer to look out the window at the torrential rain and realized the threat his own town was about to face.

DePriest jumped in his Jeep to check on the bridge at the lower end of Jenkins. When he got there, the road across the bridge had already flooded.

“I started calling people I knew down there and said, ‘Hey, the water’s up and if you want to get out of here, we’re going to have to do something pretty quick,’” DePriest said.

His next calls were to the fire department to prepare them for the emergencies to which they were likely to respond, then to city workers to get essential maintenance vehicles like garbage trucks to higher ground.

Letcher County was one of the hardest hit of the 13 counties declared federal disaster areas by FEMA. Five of those killed across the region were in Letcher County.

Two years since the floods, the region is still rebuilding. “They (FEMA) were telling us it was going to take four or five, six years to recover and get through this,” DePriest said. “And I thought, well, there’s no way it’s going to take that long.”

Now, DePriest hopes it only takes five years.

“All the processes and dealing with FEMA – and I think they’re fair in what they do – but it’s just a process,” DePriest said.

The National Risk Index multiplies a community’s expected annual loss in dollars by their risk factor. Like most of the east Kentucky counties that flooded two summers ago, Letcher County’s risk level is scored “very low” by the risk index.

That’s because it includes annual asset loss in its equations.

Rural counties like Letcher, where the average home costs about $75,000 and median household income is half the national average, score lower on the risk scale because there are fewer dollars to lose when disaster strikes. The area’s flood hazard threat is deemed relatively high but the potential consequences in financial losses are lower compared with denser areas.

The urban-rural disparity can be examined by comparing how the National Risk Index judges Jackson, Kentucky, a small city about 80 miles southeast of Lexington, with Jackson, Mississippi, the Magnolia State’s populous capital.

Both cities saw disastrous flooding during the summer of 2022. Unlike its namesake in Kentucky, Jackson, Mississippians suffered no flood deaths, though financial damage was far worse —?an estimated $1 billion.

Hinds County – home to Mississippi’s capital – is assigned a “relatively moderate” risk level. Its social vulnerability is categorized as very high, with community resiliency categorized as relatively high, meaning the community is expected to bounce back more effortlessly after disaster. River flooding is deemed the second greatest natural disaster risk, with annual losses estimated at about $15 million.

To compare, Breathitt County, where Jackson, Kentucky, is located, is given a “very low” risk level by the National Risk Index. Its social vulnerability is categorized as relatively high and community resiliency is categorized as very low, suggesting it would need more help after disasters. Although FEMA considers river flooding the greatest disaster risk to the community, its annual losses are rated at just $1.3 million.

This urban-rural difference matters because FEMA uses the National Risk Index to determine how much money communities should receive to better prepare for natural disasters. For example, it’s being used to make decisions about spending $1.2 trillion available to lessen future flood risks under the U.S. Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.

The risk index is also used to determine which communities get money through FEMA’s Community Disaster Resilience Zones program, which designated 483 community census tracts as Community Disaster Resilience Zones last year. This means the communities inside those tracts can receive extra money for disaster planning. Of those census tracts, a third are federally classified as rural.

Disaster experts say relying solely on the risk index can disadvantage places that lack long-term weather records — which are often missing from rural communities.

Weather stations can be sparse in treacherous landscapes. Rural areas are among the last to have their flood hazards mapped by FEMA, with the agency prioritizing higher-density regions. And National Weather Service offices tend to be located in more urban areas, according to Melanie Gall, co-director of the Center for Emergency Management Homeland Security at Arizona State University.

“I think that we miss a lot,” she said.

Progress post-flood

Immediately after the July 2022 floods, FEMA and Kentucky Emergency Management began temporarily providing trailers for hundreds of flood survivors. Both programs have since ended.

FEMA gave trailer occupants the option to purchase their units as permanent housing. The trailer cost was determined by a formula that factored the type of unit, its size, and how many months it had been occupied by the interested buyer.

In the middle of the most recent winter, 18 months after torrential rainfall on steep slopes left so many families homeless, federal trailers that hadn’t been paid for were hauled away.

Kentucky’s program offered more flexibility: While the program has ended, three families still live in state-funded campers, according to Julia Stanganelli, flood recovery coordinator for the Housing Development Alliance. The Eastern Kentucky-based affordable housing developer has led the efforts to rehab and rebuild houses lost in the flood using state disaster money.

The three families are living in the campers while they wait for a new housing development to be built above the floodplain in Knott County, Kentucky, Stanganelli said.

East Kentucky’s population was declining long before the floods. Shaping Our Appalachian Region, a nonprofit focused on population retention and growth, estimates Eastern Kentucky has lost nearly 55,000 residents since 2000. The floods accelerated the losses.

During the 2022 floods, already sparse cell service went out entirely, and even the U.S. Weather Service’s on-duty warning meteorologist faced busy or disconnected phone lines, recalls Jane Marie Wix, a warning coordination meteorologist with the Weather Service.

Wix said the creek near her house turned into a “river,” preventing her from reaching work. “I don’t think I’ve ever felt so helpless before.”

Locals are working to better prepare for the next disaster, with or without federal government help.

Todd DePriest, the mayor of Jenkins, worked with the nonprofit law firm Appalachian Citizens Law Center to pay for four stream monitors that can trigger flood warnings.

Wesley Bryant, the Pike County resident whose home flooded two years ago, said he’s called his state representatives “hundreds of times” to keep Eastern Kentucky’s disaster recovery top of mind.

Bryant said he recently felt “pretty defeated” after receiving another notification about failing to qualify for federal assistance. But he said he won’t quit fighting.

“This is my home, this is my commonwealth,” Wesley said. “I’m going to fight for it.”

This article first appeared on The Daily Yonder and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Beshear promises better times for ravaged region on flood’s second anniversary

Al Cross — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 09:30:43 +0000

Next to the Wayland Area Volunteer Fire Department in Floyd County are 11 new homes, outside the floodplain. (Photo by Al Cross/Kentucky Lantern)

WAYLAND, Ky. – Gov. Andy Beshear promised a different future for Eastern Kentucky as he made five stops in the region Friday to signal the weekend’s second anniversary of record floods on the night of July 27-28, 2022.

In the little Floyd County town of Wayland, Beshear dedicated 11 homes that he said would be the first “fully inhabited” new development on “high ground,” above the mountainous region’s often-flooded streams.

In the Knott County seat of Hindman, he paid tribute to the flood’s 45 victims, 22 of whom were in Knott, after announcing that the state had bought more than 100 acres for 150 homes on a reclaimed surface coal mine — a dream decades old and finally made possible by the flood’s existential challenge to the region.

“That makes it official,” Beshear said at the Chestnut Ridge development next to the Knott County Sportsplex on Kentucky 80. “This project is happening.” An adjoining tract with 50 homes will be developed by the Foundation for Appalachian Kentucky and its partners, and another high-ground community, Olive Branch tear Talcum, is in the works.

We knew with the infrastructure that was destroyed, with the thousands of people who were left homeless, this was probably the most difficult rebuild in the history of the United States. But it happened to the toughest of people. And immediately what we saw was the best of our humanity.

– Gov. Andy Beshear

Another is coming above Hazard in Perry County, where Beshear announced financing for completion of a road to serve the new 50-acre Sky View subdivision, which will make possible an adjacent private development that Hazard’s mayor says would be the region’s largest housing development.

And in Jackson, he announced $6 million in state aid to build 20 homes for flood survivors and said the state continues to look for a large tract for homes on high ground in Breathitt County, which has one of the nation’s highest unemployment rates and is officially estimated to have lost more than 5% of its population since 2020.

“I want people to stay here,” Beshear said, “but you know what? I want people to move here. It’s time for Eastern Kentucky to get its share.”

At Sky View, he said local and state officials “are going to bring hundreds and thousands of new jobs to Eastern Kentucky.” He also pledged, “This fall and this winter you are gonna see those homes start coming up.”

That will be welcome in a region that has heard more talk than action aimed solving its problems, Perry County Judge-Executive Scott Alexander told Beshear and the crowd:

“Governor, far too often, the people of East Kentucky and Appalachia have heard promises from government, only for those to never be followed through. And so I really believe that more and more people will start believing in what we’re doing as they can see the progress happening.”

Tangible progress

The progress was tangible in Wayland, as several families getting new homes in a narrow strip next to the local fire department dedicated the homes with Beshear and officials of the Appalachia Service Project, a faith-based nonprofit that brings volunteers from all over the nation to the region.

“It’s remarkable, the amount of work that’s gone on to make sure these people get back on their feet,” Floyd County Judge-Executive Robbie Williams told the crowd.

One new homeowner is Jackie Bradley, 71, who has been living in an apartment in Martin, where the forks of Beaver Creek meet. Wayland is a few miles upstream, at Right Beaver’s confluence with Steele Creek. She had lived in Glo Hollow, just downstream from Wayland, so close to the creek that her home was flooded twice — the second time a few days after the first, when rains swelled Right Beaver again and her house was caught in a whirlpool. She said her 6-year-old grandson yelled, “Granny, look at your house! It’s like the Wizard of Oz!”

Beshear said repeatedly that the favorite part of his job has been seeing young children go through their new home, picking out their bedrooms. “You just see a little bit of God in that moment,” he said in Wayland.

The Appalachia Service Project plans to build about a dozen more homes in or near the town of 400. Materials are already stored across the road from the new homes, waiting on identification of properties and negotiations for acquisition.

‘Living out the Golden Rule’

State government and other entities helped with the infrastructure for the 11 homes. The Federal Home Loan Bank helped the state with construction financing. “We loan money to banks, but we set aside 15% of our profits for affordable housing,” FHLB of Cincinnati President Judy Rose told the crowd. She said ASP and Beshear have been leaders in “getting boots on the ground” to do the work.

Beshear said the many volunteers are “living out the Golden Rule that we are to love our neighbor as ourself, and the parable of the Good Samaritan that says everyone is our neighbor. In a world that sometimes feels toxic, that we’re supposed to be against each other, you all have come together as one people to truly stand up for each other and to house those that have lost everything.”

Other high-ground developments are in Letcher County: Grand View near Jenkins, which is to have 116 homes on 92 acres, and The Cottages at Thompson Branch near Whitesburg, with 10 homes, one of them already occupied.

Beshear said there may be more: “There’s a couple of others [where] we’re still trying to work through issues.”

He told reporters in Wayland, “We’re more than halfway through because the toughest part that takes the longest are the utilities. … We knew with the infrastructure that was destroyed, with the thousands of people who were left homeless, this was probably the most difficult rebuild in the history of the United States.

“But it happened to the toughest of people. And immediately what we saw was the best of our humanity. It was people pushing aside all the silliness, not caring if somebody’s a Democrat or a Republican, just caring that they are a human being, wanting to get them back on their feet. You saw Kentuckians living for each other, and that Eastern Kentuckians are as tough as nails, and as kind as anybody else out there on planet Earth.”

The Democratic governor said state agencies “worked together in ways we’ve never seen, doing things that were never done.” Officials of the Energy and Environment Cabinet have essentially become land developers, because they have to make sure that the reclaimed mine sites are stable and properly drained.

“We’ve never done anything like this,” Beshear said of state employees. “Their level of dedication, the work they’ve put in while doing their day job, has been really special. I’ve seen amazing leadership from people who may have been in state government almost all of their lives but see this as the most important thing that they’ve done in serving the Commonwealth of Kentucky.”

As it gets into the land-development business, the state is also negotiating with landowners like Paul Ison of Hazard, who donated 50 acres to the state for Sky View but will soon be in a position to profit from developing about 200 adjoining acres.

By building the access road to Sky View, Ison said, “They’re helping the whole community out. You gotta have housing to get another factory or some more business here.”

Beshear said in an interview, “I believe that Paul Ison was very generous. We asked for as much as he would offer, and 50 acres is where he started, and it was more than enough for what we needed. … It’s a good deal for everybody. We can’t build enough just through nonprofits to address overall housing needs, so I welcome private development.”

This story has been updated to clarify that the Foundation for Appalachian Kentucky and its partners are developing a 50-home tract near the Knott County Sportsplex and also the Olive Branch community near Talcum. An earlier version had incorrect information.

Al Cross is director emeritus of the Institute for Rural Journalism. After more than 50 years of reporting and editing, he says the trip with Beshear was probably his last for a news story. He retires Aug, 1.

Nonprofits team with state, federal governments to tackle housing shortage in Eastern Kentucky

Jenni Glendenning — Mon, 24 Jun 2024 10:30:22 +0000

Walls and trusses for eight homes to be constructed in Wayland are stored on city land across from the 11 homes to be completed by the end of June. (Photo by Jenni Glendenning)

A religiously oriented group using volunteers from many states is doing much of the housing recovery work in flood-ravaged Eastern Kentucky.

The Appalachia Service Project has completed 24 new homes and fully repaired 40 more for flood survivors in Breathitt, Harlan, Knott, Leslie, Magoffin and Perry counties since the flood two years ago.?

ASP has 12 homes under construction and is repairing about 24 more. They say they are on pace to complete 45 new homes and fully repair 65 homes by the end of this year.

In coordination with The Home Depot Foundation and Solid Rock Carpenters (nonprofit partners from the Chicago area), ASP brought nearly 400 volunteers to White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, to build the wall sections for 16 new homes (nearly 450 sections in total) and loaded them onto trucks for transport to locations in Kentucky and Tennessee.

Eight houses’ worth of walls and trusses were hauled to property owned by the City of Wayland, just across Kentucky Highway 7 from where ASP is working on its 11th new home for flood survivors. An official groundbreaking is tentatively scheduled for June 26.?

A home “can come together in less than a single day with the help of our volunteers and friends in Kentucky,” said Chris Schroeder, ASP’s director of new build and disaster recovery. He said ASP has “been fortunate enough to serve our friends and neighbors in these areas for many years, even before the flood.”

Schroeder expects all eight homes to be completed by the end of the year. He said the 11 near completion are expected to be turned over to the families by the end of June. Most of the 17 home applications came from people within a 10-minute drive of Wayland.

The application process in Kentucky is handled by Haley Peck, ASP’s disaster recovery office and grant compliance coordinator.

“ASP is working with private landowners and local officials to identify buildable lots, preferably out of the floodplain,” said Grant Vermilya, ASP’s Kentucky flood recovery coordinator. “There is potential for 10 to 15 more in the town of Wayland alone.”?

ASP is looking into an area of private land near where the walls and trusses are stored. Vermilya said the owner is “looking at selling because he wants to see more homes like this pop up” in Wayland.

State government and other entities have helped with the infrastructure for the 11 homes in Wayland. Vermilya said the Foundation for Appalachian Kentucky donated funds to purchase the property, and the state is providing up to $100,000 per home. The rest of the gap is filled by the Federal Home Loan Bank or a collection of smaller grants, Vermilya said.

The grants, donations, and volunteer fees all go directly toward materials and logistics for building each home. The Foundation for Appalachian Kentucky and the state supported the acquisition of the Wayland property. ASP says it looks forward to working with entities and local stakeholders to acquire more properties in their disaster recovery effort in Eastern Kentucky.?

In addition to the homes in Wayland, the organization will be building nine homes in phase one of the new high-ground community of Chestnut Ridge in Knott County and an undetermined number in the Skyview subdivision in Perry County.?

ASP has been connecting volunteers with communities in Central Appalachia for over 55 years. This summer, it will host more than 9,000 volunteers in 17 counties to build new homes and repair existing homes in West Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee counties that the Appalachian Regional Commission and other agencies have identified as economically distressed and needing help with housing.?

Of the 82 distressed counties in the ARC region, 37 are in Eastern Kentucky. Schroeder and his teams served these communities before the floods. “We’re going to be there until the job is done,” he said.

Schroeder said ASP’s foremost intention is to remain in service of families in need for many more years until the job is done and until those impacted by the flood can get back to a life they can call normal. ASP’s strategic goals are to spend the next few years building 100 new homes and fully repairing 100 more for flood survivors across Eastern Kentucky. ASP has Kentucky centers in Breathitt, Harlan, Knott, Leslie, Magoffin and Perry counties.

ASP’s overall mission is to eradicate substandard housing in Central Appalachia. Over several decades, it has brought thousands of volunteers to the region to build or repair homes for low-income families.

With the help of organizations such as the Federal Home Loan Bank and the federal departments of Agriculture and Housing and Urban Development, ASP has “been able to extend timelines for another two years to meet the people of Appalachia where they are” while being mindful of taxpayer dollars and “stretching those resources as far as they can,” Schroeder said.

The government agencies ASP works with have a disaster recovery program that has been extended “because of the amount of need that they’ve seen in Eastern Kentucky,” Schroeder said. These programs normally provide financial assistance for families affected by a disaster for two years, but “because of the scope of the flood in Eastern Kentucky and other incidents as well, they extended that timeline by another two years.”?

Eastern Kentuckian who lost his wife, house in 2022 flood grateful for new home on high ground

Jenni Glendenning — Mon, 24 Jun 2024 09:50:47 +0000

From left, DreamBuilders volunteers Brian Rezac and Pam Brazis, Housing Development Alliance carpenter John Evans, flood survivor Farmer Baker, HDA lead carpenter Steve Hurt and DreamBuilders volunteers Andy Cabrera and Matt Biewer. (Photo by Mindy Miller, Housing Development Alliance)

Farmer Baker was holding on for his life, clutching a pair of post hole diggers, on the night of July 27-28, 2022, as part of Eastern Kentucky’s record flooding swept through his garage on Lower River Caney in Breathitt County. He had already watched the waters sweep away his wife, Vanessa, the only one of 45 victims whose body has not been found.

“I looked up to God in the garage and said, ‘You took her, take me too, but he had a purpose for me, or he would have took me. He wouldn’t have throwed me through that garage door and let me live, not unless he’s got a purpose for me. I don’t know what it is, but he’s got a purpose for me here on this earth. Hopefully I can figure it out.”

Baker spoke Friday to Mindy Miller of the Hazard-based Housing Development Alliance, which is building three homes in the Blue Sky subdivision near the Hazard airport with the help of DreamBuilders, a Maryland-based nonprofit that brought 38 workers to the site for a “blitz build” June 17-21. Miller, HDA’s director of development and communication, provided an unedited recording for this story.

Farmer Baker leans against his new home.(Photo by Mindy Miller, Housing Development Alliance)

Baker, who has been living with his son, told Miller he will feel comforted living on high ground, but “God knows where you’re at. … And when the time comes, he’s gonna take you, ain’t nobody gonna save you, just like Melissa that night.”

Then he offered his philosophy of living: “The Bible says if you don’t love your neighbor, you don’t love him. I love everybody on this earth, I don’t care who they are.” Choking a bit, he added, “I love the Housing Alliance for getting me this house. I appreciate it so much, you don’t realize it.”

This is the HDA’s 30th year of fulfilling low-income families’ dreams of home ownership in Eastern Kentucky.?

DreamBuilders is an interfaith community of teens and adults who build homes for those in need. This was their second trip to Hazard; last year they largely built two homes in four days for flood survivors.

The group was led by John McBeth, who founded DreamBuilders 22 years ago as a Christian youth group. He said the week at Blue Sky was one of the hottest the organization has encountered, with temperatures in the mid 90s, but “It’s a real blessing to be here, and it’s our experience that we actually get much more back than we give.”

Two DreamBuilders volunteers, Luke Gore and Maddox Shuman, said it took them 10 days to bicycle 562 miles from Westminster, Maryland, staying with friends and family along the way. They were inspired to start an Instagram account to journal their travels: @dreamcyclers.

At the worksite, Miller updated the project’s progress on social media.

The other two homes that went up during the “blitz build” are spec homes that will be available to low-income applicants in the area.

HDA says it designs individual financing packages to be affordable for new homeowners. “This usually involves the combination of a low-interest home loan, along with a subsidy that they qualify for based on different factors,” said Julia Stanganelli, HDA’s flood recovery coordinator.

For flood survivors, Stanganelli said, there are flood-specific grants and forgivable-loan funding for which HDA helps qualify the homeowners. Sometimes, flood survivors also have funds they can contribute from their FEMA awards or funds they’ve received through a home-buyout program, and some may not need to take a loan at all, Stanganelli said: “Every situation tends to be unique.”

The blitz builders had the main walls of all three homes up by Tuesday afternoon and by Friday had all three framed and under roof. The HDA says its carpenters were on the worksites to ensure all work is up to code and passes state inspection.

Now, certified plumbers, electricians, and HVAC subcontractors will come in. It will take six to eight weeks to complete a home after the exterior is sufficiently dry enough to install weather-sensitive material such as drywall, flooring, trim and paint.

Carpenter Lindsey King started out as an apprentice carpenter with HDA’s paid on-the-job training program in residential construction for people in substance-use recovery. She impressed HDA so much as a trainee that it hired her full-time, and she is now the program’s assistant trainer.?

How to volunteer

If you have a group of volunteers interested in sponsoring an HDA project, you will need a maximum of 20 people, a $25,000 contribution for sponsorship, and the ability to spend one week in Eastern Kentucky helping to change the lives of families in need.?

The sponsorship helps finance a new home for a low-income family in need, but the house-raising challenge goes beyond the house; the sponsorship plays an important role in sustaining HDA’s homeownership program for future low-income homeowners and those in need of disaster recovery, Miller said.

Volunteers do not need construction experience. HDA carpenters are onsite at all times while volunteers frame floors and walls, set roofs and trusses, put shingles on the roof, build the porches and decks, install windows and doors, and cover the exterior with house wrap and siding.

As he watched his house go up Friday, Baker said, “You know, you’ve worked you know how many years in your life. You know what you’ve got in your home and you know what you’ve got built up, and all of it taken away from you. …? People think ‘Well, you know, he lost his home, so what?’ but I lost more. In my heart, I lost more … I lost her that night and lost everything I had.”

But now he’s getting part of it back.

Flooding in Breathitt County, July 2022. (Photo by Michael Swensen/Getty Images)

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Kentucky investing $223 million to rebuild rental housing in tornado-impacted Western Kentucky?

Liam Niemeyer — Mon, 03 Jun 2024 21:49:08 +0000

On Nov. 18, 2022, Stacey Feezor plays with her niece Delilah Jenkins, 6, in Graves County outside her camper at Camp Graves, which provided transitional housing to those who lost homes in the December 2021 tornado. (Julia Rendleman for Kentucky Lantern)

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear alongside leaders from the state’s housing corporation and local communities on Monday announced more than $223 million in bonds and grants will be invested to replenish rental housing in Bowling Green and other Western Kentucky communities impacted by tornadoes.?

Much of the region’s rental housing stock, particularly homes accessible to low-income families, including in Mayfield and Dawson Springs, was destroyed by a devastating tornado outbreak in December 2021. Local leaders have said the region suffered from a housing shortage even before the tornado outbreak.?

Mayfield Mayor Kathy O’Nan said it was “heartwarming” that two of the rental housing developments to be funded in the Graves County seat will create homes for “the most vulnerable” in her community.?

“It was those people who lived in the subpar rental homes that are now still struggling,” O’Nan said. “What will come from our community to rebuild not only Western Kentucky but add to our commonwealth as a whole will be well worth every dollar invested.”

Plans call for 953 rental units to be built by private housing developers across Mayfield (122 units), Dawson Springs (88 units), Madisonville (32 units), Hopkinsville (76 units) and Bowling Green (635 units). The housing developments will be income-restricted to be accessible for moderate to low-income families with most rental units having two to three bedrooms, according to a release from the governor’s office.?

About 60% of the invested funding, about $135 million, will come from tax-exempt bonds issued to private housing developers by the Kentucky Housing Corp., the state’s public housing corporation. Another almost $60 million in federal grant funding is being made available by the Kentucky Department for Local Government. That grant is a large chunk of funding received last year from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Other funding sources include state and national housing trust funds, another federal grant and projected equity from tax credits.?

U.S. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in a statement to the Lantern said the announcement was “welcome news for Western Kentucky” and that federal funding he “fought to secure” will build hundreds of new housing units.

“I’m glad to see my home state put these federal dollars to work and take this crucial next step in delivering real relief to Kentuckians,” McConnell said in his statement.

Will help Bowling Green continue ‘historic growth,’ says Beshear

Wendy Smith, deputy executive director of housing programs at the Kentucky Housing Corporation, said developers taking advantage of the government financing must agree to accept low-income housing vouchers. Smith said the potential rent range for these units is federally determined by county which would likely mean a two-bedroom apartment will go for $750 to $900 a month. Smith said it would likely be 18 months to 24 months before prospective tenants would be able to move in.?

The private housing developments receiving the funding include Leitchfield-based Wabuck Development Company, Louisville-based SOCAYR Inc., Louisville-based LDG Multifamily LLC and Lexington-based AU Associates Inc.?

Winston Miller, the chief executive officer of the Kentucky Housing Corporation, called the funding announcement “historic” because of the amount of housing being constructed along with what he said was the unprecedented combining of federal grant funding with bonds issued by the corporation.?

“To keep up with the economic and job growth, Kentucky needs to build more housing units. Today’s announcement of the 953 units is a very significant step in closing the supply gap that exists in West Kentucky,” Miller said.?

Beshear said the construction of rental housing in Bowling Green, which is receiving about two thirds of the new construction, is “absolutely necessary” to help the city continue “historic growth.” He said state officials believed the funding announcement to be the largest housing development effort in Western Kentucky in history.?

“A home is more than four walls. It’s the security of raising your family, and for those that lost the place they were living, a new unit, a new home means so much,” Beshear said.

This story was updated with a statement from U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell.

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10 homes dedicated in Mayfield for tornado survivors

Sarah Ladd — Fri, 10 May 2024 20:34:48 +0000

Ten new homes were dedicated in Mayfield Friday for tornado survivors. (Office of the Governor)

Ten families who survived the 2021 tornadoes in Mayfield received keys to new homes on Friday thanks to $1 million from the Team Western Kentucky Tornado Relief Fund, Gov. Andy Beshear’s office announced.?

The Hope Initiative, a coalition of local pastors and businesses, partnered to build these homes and others — a total of 42 — for people impacted by the tornadoes that swept through the area on Dec. 10, 2021, killing 57 people and injuring hundreds.?

“The Hope Initiative is such a deserving name for this program, a program that has given us hope for new beginnings and a home back in Mayfield,” one of the new homeowners, Alexandria Lawson, said in a statement. “There are no words to express how grateful we are for this blessing.”

The Team Western Kentucky Tornado Relief Fund, donated by people from all over the country to help people impacted by the twisters, has since raised more than $52 million. Money from that fund went to covering funeral expenses for those killed in the tornadoes and is being used to help build homes, among other things.?

‘Effectively dead,’ housing discrimination laws in Louisville, Lexington fall to veto override

Liam Niemeyer — Wed, 06 Mar 2024 22:53:40 +0000

Men of the legislature gathered with Senate President Robert Stivers to talk to media after overriding Gov. Andy Beshear's veto of a bill that preempted housing discrimination ordinances in Louisville and Lexington. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Liam Niemeyer)

FRANKFORT — The GOP-dominated Kentucky legislature overrode Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear’s veto of a bill targeting local source-of-income discrimination bans just a day after the governor had issued the veto.?

Ryan Dotson (Photo by LRC Public Information)

House Bill 18, sponsored by Rep. Ryan Dotson, R-Winchester, immediately became law Wednesday because of an emergency clause in the bill.?

In a gathering with reporters, Dotson said he believed ordinances passed by Louisville and Lexington, aimed at stopping discrimination by landlords based on a tenant’s source of income, were effectively dead.?

“There was nothing discriminatory about this measure,” Dotson said. “It was only to protect property rights, and no one should be forced to do business with the government.”

Beshear in a statement said discrimination should always be opposed, not enabled.?

“The override of my veto hurts Kentuckians by allowing direct discrimination against those with disabilities, as well as our senior citizens, low-income families and homeless veterans,” Beshear said.

Senate President Robert Stivers rejected the assertion that HB 18 would make it harder for veterans and low-income Kentuckians to access housing and took a swipe at zoning and tax policies in the state’s two largest cities.

Robert Stivers (LRC Public Information)

“We, the General Assembly, sets policy, and we, the General Assembly, have the power of the purse,” Stivers said. “The reality is the city of Louisville and the city of Lexington have a homeless problem directly related to their bad policies.”?

Asked what policies in Louisville and Lexington he took issue with, Stivers pointed to zoning laws and property tax rates that “run developers out of the area.”?

Stivers touted the veto override as the first of several in this year’s legislative session,?

HB 18 would prevent local governments from adopting or enforcing ordinances requiring landlords to accept federal housing assistance vouchers from tenants for rent. Such assistance includes low-income housing assistance vouchers known as “Section 8” vouchers and vouchers?that help homeless veterans.?

Housing advocates have said local source-of-income discrimination bans do not force landlords to accept housing assistance vouchers, only that they can’t reject a prospective tenant solely on the use of vouchers to pay their rent. HB 18 preempts local source-of-income discrimination ban ordinances passed by Louisville in 2020 and another passed last month by Lexington.

Sen. Steve West, R-Paris, who sponsored a similar Senate bill whose elements were incorporated into HB 18, said he didn’t believe there was appetite among lawmakers to? “completely do away with zoning or venture too far into local business,” referencing a Republican-sponsored House bill that would revamp local zoning laws to promote housing development.?

West pointed to a bill by House Majority Floor Leader Steven Rudy, R-Paducah, that requires housing development plans to follow a set of “objective” standards so that property owners “know what they’re getting into” when setting out plans from community to community.?

Housing advocates have called on the legislature to invest $200 million in state-run housing trust funds to tackle Kentucky’s affordable housing crisis, especially after natural disasters in recent years have depleted housing availability in Eastern Kentucky and Western Kentucky.?

Stivers said there’s been discussion with those in the private sector to find housing solutions but mentioned that funding for housing was “about timing and sequencing” with what housing developers can actually produce. Stivers asserted there isn’t enough housing development capacity to use hundreds of millions of dollars in a quick time frame.?

Any housing funding the legislature approves would be “within the capacities of what individuals can actually produce during a biennial period,” Stivers said.?

Adreinne Bush, executive director of the Homeless and Housing Coalition of Kentucky, told the Lantern that developers have been able to use $20 million allocated by the legislature to the Rural Housing Trust Fund in 2023. She said she believed housing developers would be up to the task again.?

That $20 million housing funding was allocated in March 2023, and the first home groundbreaking, thanks to that funding, took place in November 2023.?

“That’s a really quick timeline,” Bush said. “We do have the capacity.”

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Beshear’s first veto would protect local housing discrimination laws

Liam Niemeyer — Tue, 05 Mar 2024 18:50:03 +0000

Gov. Andy Beshear addresses a crowd commemorating the 60th anniversary of the Freedom March on Frankfort, March 5, 2024. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Liam Niemeyer)

FRANKFORT — Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear told a crowd gathered to commemorate a historic civil rights march that he has vetoed a bill that would preempt local anti-discrimination ordinances.?

It’s the governor’s first veto of this legislative session. Critics have warned the bill would preempt local ordinances in Kentucky’s largest cities prohibiting discrimination against tenants based on their source of income.?

Beshear said he vetoed House Bill 18 because it “would have made it harder in Lexington and Louisville for people to have a roof over their head.”

He was speaking Tuesday to a crowd gathered outside the Capitol to reenact and commemorate the March on Frankfort that took place 60 years earlier on March 5, 1964.?

“I vetoed House Bill 18 because the governments of Louisville and Lexington came together, and they said landlords had to take Section 8 vouchers to make sure that everyone can have stable and affordable housing,” Beshear said.

A crowd gathering in front of the Capitol to commemorate the 1964 march. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Isabella Sepahban)

HB 18, sponsored by Rep. Ryan Dotson, R-Winchester, would prohibit local governments from adopting or enforcing ordinances requiring landlords to accept federal housing assistance vouchers from tenants for rent. Such assistance includes low-income housing assistance vouchers known as “Section 8” vouchers and vouchers that help homeless veterans.?

Critics of the legislation have said HB 18 would preempt source-of-income discrimination ban ordinances, one passed by Louisville in 2020 and another passed last month by Lexington, prohibiting landlords from rejecting a potential tenant exclusively on their source of income, including the use of housing assistance vouchers.?

Republicans supporting HB 18 say it would protect landlords’ property rights by preventing them from being forced to accept housing vouchers from tenants. Housing advocates have said source-of-income discrimination bans do not mandate landlords to accept such vouchers, only that they can’t reject a prospective tenant solely on the use of vouchers to pay their rent.

Dave Sevigny, a member of Lexington’s Urban County Council, applauded Beshear’s veto.

“As a sponsor of the well-vetted ordinance in Lexington that was recently passed with overwhelming support and is now in effect to eliminate certain forms of housing discrimination, I applaud the common sense veto by Gov. Beshear, who seems to clearly recognize that each part of government has its role and should stay in its lane,” Sevigny said in a statement.?

The GOP-dominated legislature can easily override Beshear’s veto. Only a majority of each legislative chamber would have to approve the veto override, and HB 18 passed each chamber by large majorities.?

Senate President Robert Stivers, R-Manchester, speaking Tuesday at a Louisville radio station said the Kentucky Senate would override Beshear’s veto.?

House Speaker David Osborne, R-Prospect, in a statement said Beshear’s veto came as “no surprise.”?

“With today’s veto, he strikes out at the right of a property owner to make a decision about how his or her property will be used,” Osborne said. “Members will consider an override, as they have with almost every other policy vetoed by the governor.”

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Senate passes another bill critics say would override Lexington’s new tenant protections

Liam Niemeyer — Wed, 21 Feb 2024 01:08:05 +0000

Sen. Cassie Chambers-Armstrong, D-Louisville, sponsored a bill allowing more foster parents to qualify for child care assistance. (Photo by LRC Public Information)

FRANKFORT — The Kentucky Senate approved a House bill Tuesday that critics say would override protections for tenants against discrimination based on their source of income in Kentucky’s two largest cities.

The Senate approved a similar bill of its own last month, and the debate Tuesday on House Bill 18, sponsored by Rep. Ryan Dotson, R-Winchester, echoed arguments heard earlier when the Senate approved Senate Bill 25 sponsored by Sen. Steve West, R-Paris.?

A bill targeting low-income housing vouchers passes Kentucky Senate

West on Tuesday said a committee substitute added elements of his bill to HB 18, which bans local governments from adopting or enforcing ordinances that require landlords to accept federal housing assistance vouchers from tenants for rent.?

“This is the landlord’s property,” West said, speaking in support of HB 18. “They are in the best position to know what types of federal programs to accept or not accept.”

HB 18 passed the GOP-dominated Senate 25-11. A few Republicans joined all but one Democrat in voting against the bill. HB 18 now goes back to the House, which could send the bill to Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear if the chamber approves the Senate’s changes to the bill.?

Opponents fear House-approved bill would preempt a Louisville housing ordinance

Housing advocates have said no Kentucky city requires landlords to accept federal housing vouchers and that the federal low-income housing voucher program known as “Section 8” doesn’t require landlords to accept such vouchers.?

Democrats and housing advocates fear HB 18 would override local ordinances in Louisville and Lexington that prevent landlords from discriminating against prospective tenants solely based on a tenant’s source of income, including the use of federal housing vouchers. Louisville passed their source-of-income discrimination ban in 2020 in a unanimous, bipartisan fashion, and Lexington passed such a ban last week.

Sen. Majority Floor Leader Damon Thayer, R-Georgetown, said “what’s happening in Lexington flies in the face” of upholding the Constitution and ensuring the property rights of landlords.

Sen. Cassie Chambers Armstrong, D-Louisville, said she considered HB 18 to be worse legislation than SB 25, which focused on Section 8 housing vouchers, because it could allow landlords to discriminate against tenants using other federal housing vouchers, such as those for veterans. She also said it was a “sad day” in part because HB 18 would preempt local ordinances against source-of-income discrimination.

“There is nothing about these vouchers that inherently threatens those property rights,” Chambers Armstrong said. “There’s nothing about these ordinances that in any way changes the rights guaranteed to property owners under the Constitution.”

West responded to Chambers Armstrong, saying that the Senate “probably quite frequently” passes laws that affect local ordinances.?

“Fixing the housing crisis by putting new requirements on the backs of landlords is not necessarily the way to go,” West said.

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When will housing affordability improve? Spoiler alert: It will take some time

Casey Quinlan — Mon, 19 Feb 2024 10:50:12 +0000

Construction workers build a residential high rise on Oct. 2, 2023, in Miami. Inflation is slowing and job growth has surged, but housing costs are still high, partly because of high demand, low inventory and mortgage rates. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Inflation is slowing and job growth has surged, but many Americans still feel the burden of expensive housing – fueled in part by high demand, low inventory and mortgage rates.

Home prices across the U.S. rose 5.5% over the past year as of December 2023 and they are projected to increase 2.8% year over year by December 2024, according to CoreLogic, a consumer and business information company. None of the states in CoreLogic’s data showed home price declines.

Rents shot up 23.9% between the beginning of 2020 and the start of of 2023 and home prices rose 37.5% according to Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies’ 2023 state of the nation’s housing report. The median sales price of a home sold in the U.S. is $417,700, according to the St. Louis Fed.

Given the state of housing affordability in the U.S., here’s what to know about ongoing construction shortages, high interest rates, where housing prices are climbing, and what policymakers could do about it.

How did the housing market get this way?

Much of the current predicament renters and homebuyers face is linked to high housing demand, low housing inventory and the Fed’s cycle of hiking interest rates.

Very low mortgage rates – January 2021 saw the lowest recorded mortgage rate at 2.65% – fueled demand but drove up prices, exacerbated by low housing inventory, Matthew Walsh, economist at Moody’s Analytics explained. The Federal Reserve then raised interest rates in 2022 to combat inflation, which in turn influenced mortgage rates.

Those rates reached near 8% in October, and higher rates put constraints on housing supply, with more homeowners staying put. It’s now 6.77% for a 30-year fixed rate mortgage.

A lack of housing stock, both in for sale and overall inventory, is a key long-run problem for housing affordability, said Robert Dietz, chief economist for the National Association of Home Builders. A lack of accessible rental inventory that provides both single family and multi-family rental housing is a problem, he said.

“We simply don’t have enough developed land to build on, particularly in the places where it’s needed the most, which tends to be highly dense, more regulated markets in the largest metros where there’s a lot of population growth,” he said.

He added that a lack of? construction labor as well as expensive building materials – partly affected by supply chain problems – have exacerbated the problem.

A 2023 Home Builders Institute report found that construction would need to add hundreds of thousands of workers to meet residential construction demand. An HBI survey done in 2021 found that around 90% of home builders for single family homes said there was a shortage of carpenters and that more than 80% of remodelers said there was a shortage in most of the construction trades they needed subcontractors for.

What is the Federal Reserve doing with interest rates?

The Fed is expected to cut rates this year, which should have some impact on housing prices. The Fed may not cut rates until May or later, but economists have forecast multiple rate cuts this year.

Many homebuyers and renters are hoping that a cut in interest rates could provide lower home and rental prices, since a lack of homebuying can drive up rental costs.

But economists say there won’t be meaningful relief anytime soon.

“It should push mortgage rates down into the low 6% range and perhaps in 2025 moving into the high 5s,” Dietz said. “That’s not the 2 to 3% rate that we saw earlier, but it will help price in some demand by lowering the monthly payment on a hypothetical mortgage. It is going to have a disproportionate impact on first-time buyers who tend to be particularly sensitive to changes in rates because they don’t have any home equity as first-time buyers.”

Selma Hepp, chief economist at CoreLogic, said home prices will remain pricy for quite some time, even when mortgage rates come down.

“Because home prices have gone up 40%, no matter how much you adjust mortgage rates —? and we’re not expecting them to come down to 2% any time soon if ever again — you’d really have to get them to 2% to get that affordability back,” she said.

What are home price trends in different parts of the U.S.?

New Jersey, Connecticut and Rhode Island saw the highest home price increases in December, according to CoreLogic’s data, but no states saw home prices go down.

Hepp said that is significant because until this report, a couple states continued to show year-over-year declines: Utah and Idaho as well as the District of Columbia. She said that change may have been fueled by people moving from parts of California and from Seattle who drove up home prices in their new states.

A Moody’s Investor Service report released in October showed Florida, Montana, Nevada, and Idaho had the largest decline in affordability, due in part to growth in new residents.

But no part of the country is being spared by the effects of rising housing prices. Walsh said some of the fastest price appreciation he’s seen is in parts of the northeast and midwest because some of those markets are more affordable compared to parts of the country that saw an influx of residents earlier in the pandemic, such as metro areas in Mountain states including Colorado and Arizona

“The places where we’ve seen the most moderation in home prices have been in the places that lost that affordability edge…,” he said. “… Some of the fastest growing places in the northeast, like upstate New York, a place that really hasn’t seen quick increases in home prices in a long time, have been showing signs of life over the past year.”

How are policymakers helping?

Some states and cities are stepping up to the challenge of improving its affordable housing stock.

A program in Maine is funding more affordable rental housing, which includes the improvement of existing housing. Minnesota’s Family Homeless Prevention and Assistance Program is expanding rental assistance.

Voters in Phoenix and Albuquerque, New Mexico, last year supported bond measures that will spend millions on affordable housing. In 2022, voters approved housing bonds to fund more affordable housing for Buncombe County, North Carolina; Columbus, Ohio, and Kansas City, Missouri. Localities in Colorado and Montana voted to use tax revenues on affordable housing development and projects in 2023 as well.

On the federal level, the Biden administration announced in July it would address low housing supply by incentivizing projects with greater density and creating a program to fund projects that focus on zoning reforms. In October, the administration also introduced new housing initiatives to increase homeownership, such as loans to boost affordable housing on tribal lands and letting homeowners use prospective rental income from “dwelling units” at their home as part of their income when they want to qualify for FHA-insured mortgages. Some economists say that zoning is far too restrictive to increase housing supply and make it more affordable.

Government policies to address housing affordability should include “thinking about ways to incentivize state and local governments to reduce regulatory burdens and enact zoning reform to promote density where the market demands it,” Dietz said.

A bill targeting low-income housing vouchers passes Kentucky Senate

Liam Niemeyer — Wed, 24 Jan 2024 23:26:15 +0000

Robert Stivers (LRC Public Information)

A bill that would prevent Kentucky cities from requiring landlords to accept low-income housing vouchers, something housing advocates say doesn’t happen, passed the state Senate Wednesday by a near party line vote.?

The debate on Senate Bill 25 echoed much of what was heard in the House the day before as a similar bill won approval from the lower chamber.

The Senate approved the bill, sponsored by? Sen. Stephen West, R-Paris, 30-6.

West speaking on the Senate floor said his bill is a “preemptive measure” that protects the “status quo” of landlords not being required to accept a low-income housing voucher, commonly known as a Section 8 voucher.?

“We do have a housing crisis in the state of Kentucky, and that needs to be addressed for sure,” West said. “All this does is keep the status quo. As long as the city or county does not pass an ordinance that conflicts with these items — they’re fine.”?

Some housing advocates and Democratic lawmakers have opposed SB 25 and the similar bill, House Bill 18, out of concerns that the legislattion would override a Louisville ordinance that bans landlords from discriminating against tenants based on their source of income for rent, including Section 8 vouchers. A Lexington city committee approved Tuesday such an ordinance to be considered by the full Urban County Council.

Sen. Cassie Chambers Armstrong, D-Louisville, on the Senate floor repeated her previous concerns about the bill, saying that no city in Kentucky, along with Louisville, is mandating landlords to take low-income housing vouchers.?

“There was no longer a way for a landlord to post an ad saying ‘no Section 8 need to apply.’ It gave people dignity, and it gave people housing,” Armstrong said, speaking about Louisville’s ordinance. “This bill that we are considering today would undo those important protections.”?

Majority Floor Leader Damon Thayer, R-Georgetown, said he considered low-income housing vouchers to be “transfer payments” from the government not a source of income from renters but rather financial aid that a landlord can accept voluntarily or not.

“It’s a long accepted and supported program here in America, but when you start forcing people to do it, it’s wrong,” Thayer said.?

Senate President Robert Stivers said he hasn’t talked with House leadership about what finalized legislation might come between HB 18 and SB 25.?

Opponents fear House-approved bill would preempt a Louisville housing ordinance

Liam Niemeyer — Tue, 23 Jan 2024 23:16:24 +0000

Ryan Dotson (Photo by LRC Public Information)

Republican-backed legislation passed the Kentucky House of Representatives Tuesday that would ban local governments from requiring landlords to accept federal housing vouchers from tenants, something housing advocates say no local government has done.?

House Bill 18, sponsored by Ryan Dotson, R-Winchester, passed 74-20 on a party line vote with the minority of Democrats repeating concerns that it would invalidate a Louisville ordinance that bans discrimination by landlords based on source of income.

That ordinance was passed by Louisville Metro Council with unanimous, bipartisan support in 2020, and a Lexington city committee approved Tuesday such an ordinance to be considered by the full city council.?

Louisville’s ordinance does not require landlords to accept prospective tenants with federal housing vouchers, such as “Section 8” housing choice vouchers, but instead prohibits landlords from not renting to a tenant solely because the tenant is using a federal housing voucher for rent.?

Dotson, who’s a landlord for a Clark County rental property, said on the House floor that his bill was an “opportunity to stop the blatant overreach” of Fayette County and Jefferson County that he asserted was forcing property owners to “take section 8 vouchers and other government housing.”?

“I’m a proponent of local control. But this is where we as a body, we should draw a line in the sand because this is not truly a local control issue — it is a property rights issue,” Dotson said.?

Several Democrats voiced their opposition to the legislation, echoing concerns from housing advocates that the legislation would exacerbate racial segregation in housing and limit the housing choices of low-income families, veterans who rely on housing vouchers and other vulnerable groups.?

Rep. Sarah Stalker, D-Louisville, said there were already many ways landlords could discriminate against tenants and that source of income discrimination bans prevent only one kind of discrimination.?

Rep. Josie Raymond, D-Louisville, said the House was “at the top of a very slippery slope” with not only preempting what Kentucky cities can do in the future but also overriding “duly elected local officials.”?

Dotson pushed back against some of the criticisms against HB 16, saying those opposing the bill don’t want to offer solutions to a real “housing crisis” the state is facing.?

“Nobody’s negating the fact there’s homelessness, but the word discrimination gets thrown around so frequently because they don’t want to sit down and talk about real solutions,” Dotson said. “They don’t want mobile home parks — no, that’s not pretty enough. We don’t want some tiny home communities.”?

Stalker directly responded to Dotson’s assertion that critics weren’t offering solutions, saying she was a co-sponsor of a bill that would provide no-cost birth certificates to homeless people under the age of 25.?

In a gathering with reporters after the bill passed, Dotson said he wasn’t aware of a similar bill being considered in the state Senate until this year’s legislative session began. Senate Bill 25, which the Senate on Tuesday passed over voting on, more specifically targets low-income housing vouchers.?

When asked if the bill is hamstringing local officials, Dotson said the legislation is about protecting against infringement of “individual property rights.”?

“I’m here to protect as a legislator the rights of my constituents and to protect the rights of citizens all across the country,” Dotson said.

GOP bill would ban KY cities from requiring landlords to accept Section 8 vouchers. None do.

Liam Niemeyer — Thu, 18 Jan 2024 00:31:15 +0000

Kentucky state Sen. Stephen West, R-Paris, says his bill would prevent landlords from being required to accept tenants who use low-income housing vouchers. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Liam Niemeyer)

Kentucky cities could not require landlords to take federal low-income housing vouchers, also known as “Section 8” vouchers, for rent under a bill passed out of a Senate committee Wednesday. Housing and tenant advocates, who strongly oppose the proposal, say it could potentially stop efforts by Kentucky’s two largest cities to prevent housing discrimination.?

Bill sponsor Sen. Stephen West, R-Paris, told members of the Senate State and Local Government Committee that Senate Bill 25 would prevent cities such as Louisville and Lexington from forcing “a property owner to accept the Section 8 program.”

“That’s where you have a conflict,” West said. “If you force a property owner to accept Section 8, I would say that that is unconstitutional.”?

The bill passed 8-1 along party lines. It now advances for consideration by the entire state Senate.

West said that “some of this is preemptive” with his legislation and that there is a “housing crisis” in Kentucky’s largest cities, driven by inflation and strict zoning laws preventing housing construction.?

Affordable housing advocates in the state told the Lantern that no local city ordinance currently mandates that landlords accept a tenant using low-income housing assistance to help pay rent.?

That includes a Louisville ordinance that bans landlords from refusing to rent to someone? based on their source of income, including if a tenant is applying for a rental with a housing voucher. Lexington is also considering a similar ban.

A source of income discrimination ban “is not a mandate,” said Adrienne Bush, the executive director for the Homeless and Housing Coalition of Kentucky. “[Landlords] have to consider a voucher or child support or disability income the same as they would employment income and evaluate a rental applicant similarly.”?

She said SB 25 would unfairly limit housing opportunities for tens of thousands of Kentuckians who rely on housing vouchers, along with interfering with local control by cities.?

Housing and tenant advocates also oppose House Bill 18, sponsored by Rep. Ryan Dotson, R-Winchester, which would explicitly prohibit source of income discrimination bans adopted by local governments. That bill is scheduled to be heard in a House committee Thursday.

Sen. Cassie Chambers Armstrong, D-Louisville, the lone vote against West’s bill in committee, said Louisville Metro Council passed its discrimination ban ordinance with unanimous, bipartisan support garnering two dozen votes for it. Two of the seven Republicans on the council at that time voted present or abstained.?

Chambers Armstrong, a law professor at the University of Louisville, said she was concerned SB 25 as written could be interpreted by a judge as preempting and invalidating Louisville’s source of income discrimination ban.

“We are seeing people struggle to find housing, and this body is considering a lot of different ways to address that. I worry about the people that we’re going to harm by this bill,” Chambers Armstrong said to the committee. “I can’t think of many ordinances I’ve seen where local government has spoken so unanimously and in such a unified way.”?

West, responding to Chambers Armstrong during the committee meeting, said his legislation potentially wouldn’t conflict with Louisville’s ordinance if there’s no mandate that landlords accept housing vouchers.

Lexington City Council member Shayla Lynch, the co-sponsor of Lexington’s source of income discrimination ban under consideration, told the Senate committee she believed city’s proposal would help “literally open doors” for those unhoused and “marginally housed” in her city who rely on the housing vouchers.?

She said SB 25, alternatively, would allow for racial discrimination against those who use housing vouchers in Lexington, considering a large majority of voucher users in the city are Black.?

“I don’t think our Commonwealth should be perpetuating that type of law statewide. We don’t want to be endorsing that kind of law statewide,” Lynch said.

Lynch said landlords under Lexington’s proposal could still decide who they wanted to rent to for other “non-discrimintory” reasons besides source of income and could choose to rent to other qualified tenants not using vouchers.?

Senate Majority Floor Leader Damon Thayer, R-Georgetown, who helped vote the bill out of committee, said arguments by housing advocates against the legislation were “pretty specious” and that he considers the bill to be “simple.”?

“You cannot force a landlord to take Section 8 housing vouchers. So I disagree with most of their testimony,” Thayer said. “It is a voluntary program and it should remain voluntary.”

’We desperately need something:‘ Kentucky lawmakers urged to put $200 million into housing

Liam Niemeyer — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 23:35:59 +0000

Regina Quillen becomes emotional recounting her Eastern Kentucky neighbors' housing conditions. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Liam Niemeyer)

FRANKFORT — Without the help of a friend, Regina Quillen doesn’t know where she would go.?

She lost virtually everything in her Letcher County home, a place that her father built and where she raised her children for 23 years, in the deadly flooding that hit Eastern Kentucky in July 2022.?

She invested thousands of dollars into repairs with federal financial aid and was getting ready to move back into the home, only for it to burn down at the beginning of last year due to an electrical fire.?

But she still considers herself “blessed” when comparing the housing situations of her neighbors in Letcher County. A local nonprofit housing builder Homes, Inc. recently broke ground on a new home for her, the 19th home the nonprofit has built, and a friend of hers has let her stay in a rental property for the time being.?

“If this wasn’t a family friend who had a home that she did not want to rent out …I don’t know what we would have done,” Quillen said.

Working as a case manager in her community and through her personal connections, Quillen knows people living under bridges and in flood-damaged homes with mold and holes in the walls and caved-in ceilings.

“They have no other option. They have nowhere to go. My heart breaks for them,” Quillen said. ”We desperately need something.”?

Quillen’s story of her county’s stark housing shortage was among those shared by affordable housing advocates Tuesday morning to highlight housing needs across the state and call on lawmakers for a substantial financial investment in tackling the issue.

Laura Humphrey walks a wheelbarrow to a pile of debris while volunteering to clean up in Perry County near Hazard on Aug. 6, 2022. Thousands of Eastern Kentucky residents lost their homes ater devastating rain storms flooded the area. (Photo by Michael Swensen/Getty Images)

The coalition of advocacy and housing groups included Kentucky Habitat for Humanity, the Homeless and Housing Coalition of Kentucky, the Federation of Appalachian Housing Enterprises (FAHE) and the Louisville-based Coalition for the Homeless.?

The main ask: $200 million to go into housing trust funds for rural communities and the state’s two largest cities to provide reliable funding for housing construction and rehabilitation.?

Rents rising in Louisville, Lexington

“??I think we need funding now to stop the bleeding of population from our disaster-struck areas,” said Andrew Bates, an advocacy associate with FAHE. “As well as to prevent the rent situation in Lexington and Louisville from really skyrocketing out of control.”?

According to one analysis, Lexington rent price increases at one point last year outpaced rent increases in much larger cities including New York City, Boston and Washington D.C. The pace of rent increases in Louisville ranks among the top ten metros for year-to-year growth, according to some analyses.?

In the wake of the 2022 Eastern Kentucky floods and 2021 Western Kentucky tornado outbreak, housing advocates last year had called for $300 million over two years, asking the state to tap the billions of dollars in the state’s Budget Reserve Trust Fund, also known as the “rainy day” fund, to provide funding to rebuild housing following the natural disasters.?

Advocacy groups are again calling on the legislature to tap into the record “rainy day” fund balance to invest in housing and other needs.

David Osborne

House Speaker David Osborne, R-Prospect, has said he expects monies to be spent from the “rainy day” fund in the two-year state budget that will be adopted during this session, but has declined to detail what for or how much.?

The GOP-controlled legislature responded to advocates’ calls last year by creating a new housing trust fund specifically geared for rural housing needs and placing $20 million into the fund. While the funding was a far cry from what advocates had called for, advocates applauded the appropriation.?

Hundreds of millions of dollars of federal funds from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development is also going toward rebuilding housing stock lost after natural disasters on both ends of the state, though state officials have said such funding doesn’t come close to meeting the unmet housing needs. An analysis by the National Low-Income Housing Coalition found that Kentucky lacks nearly 90,000 affordable rental homes to meet current housing demands.?

Bates, the advocacy associate with FAHE, said funding coming directly from the state would have more flexibility on its use compared to incoming federal funding for housing which has a “one-size-fits-all” model.?

“There was not enough appetite in a non-budget year to open the budget to do that level of investment,” Bates said. “What we’re trying to do this session is lean into the vehicle that the legislature did give us, which is the Rural Housing Trust Fund.”?

Tax credit touted for new housing?

One housing developer says not much housing is being built in the state’s largest cities, something that’s also reflected in rural communities.

Andrew Hawes, the president of the nonprofit affordable housing developer Housing Partnership in Louisville, said construction of single-family homes has decreased significantly in Louisville and Lexington, leaving rents to increase in recent years for the housing that exists.

“The rising costs across all aspects of housing development disproportionately affects the most vulnerable and creates a breeding ground for homelessness,” Hawes said. “Urban areas are facing a dire housing crisis.”?

He also said with an influx of economic development and jobs announcements coming to the state, the legislature should consider a tax credit targeting new housing for a growing workforce which would “almost double the number of housing units produced per year.”

Phillip Wheeler (LRC Public Information)

Housing advocates are also calling for legislation to allow for the expungement of evictions to help tenants secure housing and also provide no-cost birth certificates to homeless adults to have identification to help secure housing.?

Sen. Phillip Wheeler, R-Pikeville, one of several lawmakers who attended a luncheon with housing advocates on Tuesday, said he was open to the idea of allocating more funding toward housing this legislative session.?

“I definitely want to do anything I can to make sure that, you know, folks who are displaced by the flood can get back into a comfortable home stay in the area,” Wheeler said. “We have to do it in a way that is reasonable and financially practical.”

YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE.

States, Biden administration push efforts to aid renters, keep people housed

Casey Quinlan — Tue, 02 Jan 2024 10:40:38 +0000

When pandemic rental funding and protections ended rents soared across the country and many people became homeless for the first time. New programs proposed by states and Biden administration aim to reverse that trend. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Maine’s housing authority received $35 million in 2023 — the first time in 54 years it has received a direct appropriation from the state budget — to help build more affordable rental housing for communities that have struggled to keep up with high housing prices.

The state’s program provides funding to developers for affordable housing projects with between five to 18 units, a size that housing advocates say is sorely needed in many rural communities. That includes construction for new housing, reuse of buildings for housing, and rehabilitation of existing housing.

Mark Wiesendanger, director of development at MaineHousing, said that as the Federal Reserve raised interest rates it was difficult for the independent state agency to support itself at the level the program needed, but that political leaders saw the value of their work and were able to make the historic investment because of a $141 million budget surplus.

Wiesendanger said there’s a lack of housing across the income spectrum in the state, which has some of the oldest housing stock in the nation. He said some of the housing needs to be condemned and replaced, and that much of it is inefficient to heat. To make matters worse, when the pandemic began and many people with the ability to telecommute moved to the state, the population shift drove up housing prices and wages didn’t keep up.

“[The coast of Maine] is a very expensive place to live,” he said. “Folks that work there as fishermen or people who work in the local restaurants, local mechanics and firefighters, have a hard time paying to live in those towns.”

The scenery may be different from state to state but the housing landscape is much the same across the country: People are struggling to find a home they can afford. Legislators, state agencies and the Biden administration this year proposed a raft of legislation and programs to tackle the problem. Advocates say states need to do even more to prioritize housing needs.

The problem renters are facing

From January 2019 to January 2023, the average rent in a U.S. city shot up 19.38% according to St. Louis Fed data. In 22 states and the District of Columbia, people need a wage above $26 an hour to afford a two-bedroom rental home, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition. According to rental data from CoreLogic, a company that analyzes property, financial, and consumer information, the median renter household pays $500 more than it did in 2020.

The combination of high mortgage rates and low housing inventory contributed to those soaring rental prices which hit just as the federal programs and protections put in place during the COVID-19 pandemic ended.

Andrew Aurand, senior vice president for research at the National Low Income Housing Coalition, said long-standing problems in the housing market were exacerbated by rental inflation in 2021 going into 2022.

“We saw that massive increase in rental inflation that fortunately has flattened now and rent prices have stabilized, but the damage has been done in terms of higher rents for those lowest income renters,” he said.? “… General demand for rental housing has increased quite significantly over the past decade. And so that has squeezed the lowest income renters even more as demand for rental housing has been pretty significant. It’s taken quite a while for supply to catch up.”

As rents went up, the number of people without a home also increased. U.S. homelessness, as measured by a single night in January 2023, rose 12% from last year, according to a U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development report released on Dec. 15.

But as Aurand noted the situation is starting to show signs of improvement.

There has been an increase in privately-owned housing units under construction this year, from 932,000 in January 2023 to 988,000 in November 2023. In 2022, the Biden administration released a plan to increase the housing supply, which included expanding federal financing of loans for affordable multifamily development homes and removing a cap for larger loans to build and rehabilitate certain homes.

But Mari Castaldi, director of state housing policy at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, said that it’s up to states and localities to prioritize housing. States have recognized this, with lawmakers introducing more than 2,500 bills related to housing and homelessness this year in 49 states and D.C., Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands and Guam, according to the National Conference for State Legislatures. This is almost twice the amount of bills the legislatures introduced in 2022. Ninety-three bills specific to rental assistance were introduced in 27 states this year compared to 56 bills in 12 states in 2022. Expect more of the same in the coming year. New Jersey lawmakers introduced an affordable housing “fix” just ahead of Christmas, and New Hampshire legislators have prefiled numerous bills aimed at adding more affordable housing for their session that starts on Jan. 3.

“What we’re seeing is that more and more, given the political dynamics in Washington, D.C., and particularly the debates around the debt ceiling, the prospects for sorely needed expansion of investments in affordable housing resources is uncertain at best,” Castaldi said. “We’re seeing, really out of necessity, and based on the needs in their community, states are starting to step in and try to begin filling those massive gaps.”

Affordable housing solutions across the U.S.

The number of these programs vary greatly from state to state. New York, Minnesota, California, Massachusetts, and Illinois had the most rental housing programs in the U.S., with more than 17 programs, according to an October National Low Income Housing Coalition report, and Oklahoma, Alabama, Idaho, and Montana were among the states with the fewest, with one to seven programs. The organization found zero programs in Arkansas and Wyoming but cautioned that this may simply mean there is no online information about them, not that they absolutely do not exist in these states. The Arkansas Development Finance Authority told States Newsroom that it administers a state Low Income Housing Tax Credit Program similar to the federal program that encourages affordable rental housing development.

Aurand said some states and cities are also finding creative ways to support affordable housing efforts, and Denver, Colorado is one example. The city’s marijuana tax revenue provided $8.7 million for affordable housing assistance this year. One downside of this approach, however, is that it is dependent on those sales, which have been falling.

The funding for these programs comes down to the political will to fund programs as well as funding existing resources to support them, housing advocates said.

“Generally speaking, the states with the largest number of programs tend to be more socially progressive in terms of government programs, so I do think that plays a factor,” Aurand said. “Given that we focus on extremely low income renters, it takes a lot of resources to adequately serve the lowest income population to meet their needs.”

States can also come up with solutions that are more tailored to their particular housing needs. Wiesendanger of MaineHousing explained that although the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Low Income Housing Tax Credit program is helpful for addressing rental affordability in Maine, it has its drawbacks. It can be hard for some developers to use the program to build more affordable rental housing, he said.

“It requires a certain amount of scale to work because there’s so many fixed costs in those projects — design fees, legal fees, things of that nature,” he said. “… So in these rural areas where, let’s say, they need 15 units in a town, but these projects really need to be 20, 30, 40, 50 units to work, it’s really hard to make that program work there.”

He said the Maine program also comes with fewer requirements so that less sophisticated developers can use it.

Finding the political will

Minnesota’s approach to affordable rental housing targets many different populations with smaller programs, such as Bridges Rental Assistance, which focuses on people and families where at least one person has a serious mental illness. The program assists them while they wait to get into another housing program, such as Section 8 housing. The Homework Starts with Home program is designed to help children stay in their school through supporting their family’s housing.

Housing advocates in Minnesota would still like to see larger programs, however, to serve the full needs of people in the state. According to Minnesota Housing Partnership’s analysis of 2021 Census data, more than three-quarters of low-income people in the state are spending more than 30% of their income on housing costs, which means they are “cost-burdened.” Fifty-seven percent of Black renters were cost-burdened compared to 45% of white renters. Sixty-three percent of seniors had to spend more than 30% of their income on housing.

Elizabeth Glidden, deputy director of Minnesota Housing Partnership, said she’s seeing more political support for rental assistance in Minnesota than in? other states. She said these conditions may have been influenced by a very large budget surplus, which she said has made it easier to bring more attention to housing. But she added that she has also seen more bipartisan support for affordable housing than in the past.

“Does that mean that we are meeting the need? It doesn’t mean that we are meeting the need. It just means that there has been over time and, across bipartisan lawmakers, you’re seeing more attention that has been spent on meeting housing needs than some other locations around the country,” she said.

The Family Homeless Prevention and Assistance Program, which helps tenants with rent deposits and rent payments, is an example of that shift, since the program once was funded at $20 million for two years to serve the entire state but has been dramatically expanded this year. In March, the Senate voted to provide $50 million for the program, which received bipartisan support, and Minnesota’s Democratic Gov. Tim Walz signed the bill into law later that month.

Jewelean Jackson, 74, has lived in Minneapolis for about 50 years, and is an advocate for changing housing policy in the city. Jackson has received housing assistance that she said was vital to ensuring that she didn’t become unhoused again. Jackson said she has been living in a one-bedroom apartment for the past three years. Before getting the apartment she spent eight years living in shelters or her car, but was able to avoid living in an encampment, she said. She was worried about losing housing again when her rent increased from about $270 a month to almost $500 a month in 2022 but was able to stave off eviction from December 2022 to March 2023 with rental assistance funds.

“Society always all of a sudden discovers that it has this heart when there’s a tragedy,” Jackson said of changes in housing policy that started with the COVID pandemic. “And so as a result of COVID, it has loosened the system’s strings. It has not been as difficult to get in and out of some of the programs and people have been a little bit more sympathetic as a result of COVID. But we’re a far cry from being where we need to be in terms of homelessness in this country, including Minnesota.”

Floodplain buyouts in Kentucky are ‘the fastest in the program’s history’

Jared Bennett, Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting — Thu, 28 Dec 2023 13:43:09 +0000

Kimberly Sapp-Allen's home is one of 376 flood-damaged properties purchased by local government in Kentucky through FEMA's buyout program. (Kentucky Emergency Management)

When floodwaters rushed through the town of McRoberts in July 2022, Kimberly Sapp-Allen and her husband packed what they could in their vehicles, left their home that sat along the rising creek and headed for higher ground.

The floods scoured several counties across Eastern Kentucky, including Letcher County — where Sapp-Allen lives. In the end, 45 people died and thousands of homes were destroyed.

“It was the darkest dark I have ever seen in my life,” Sapp-Allen, 59, said. As they waited out the storm, flashes of lightning revealed their cars were surrounded by black water and floating debris.

They returned the next day to a home severely damaged by floodwater, but still standing.

And that’s where they’ve lived since — despite the mold and the constant worry with every rain that the nearby creek would flood again.

But this month she sold the place to the Letcher County government through FEMA’s property acquisition program. This will get Sapp-Allen out of her damaged house and, hopefully, into a new home out of the floodplain.

The federal buyout program is one part of FEMA’s hazard mitigation strategy. The idea: get people and homes out of the floodplain so there will be less risk and costs associated with future disasters. FEMA provides most of the funding for local governments to purchase homes at fair market value. The properties are then demolished and county governments are prohibited from building anything on the land that could flood again.

A previous Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting analysis of FEMA’s hazard mitigation grants found the resources have been distributed unevenly throughout the state. Communities most at risk and struggling to overcome recent disasters have received fewer hazard mitigation dollars than other, more affluent areas.

The housing buyout program suffers from many of the same barriers. Usually, the program is slow and cumbersome, which prevents many rural, under-resourced communities from getting funds and frustrates survivors who can’t afford to wait years before moving on with their lives.

“It will allow us to turn our life around. It’s been such a blessing.”

– Kimberly Sapp-Allen

But in Kentucky, state officials and FEMA implemented a new, expedited buyout process after the Eastern Kentucky floods — and the changes seem to be working.

Sapp-Allen’s is one of 376 properties in Eastern Kentucky purchased through FEMA’s buyout program, a total cost of $63.8 million, according to Kentucky Emergency Management spokesperson Jessica Elbouab. She said the Eastern Kentucky buyouts have been “the fastest in the program’s history.”

The buyout process that once took years to complete ended up taking just months, Elbouab said. Officials closed the deal on the first 13 properties in Perry County — next to Letcher County — just 93 days after the flood.

Kentucky has also taken advantage of other buyout programs like one administered by the Natural Resources Conservation Service. Letcher County is seeking final approval for 118 buyouts through the NRCS, separate from the FEMA program.

Sapp-Allen said she’s been pleasantly surprised by the speed and relative painlessness of the buyout process. She thanks government officials who took action to help people, like her, who were in need.

“It will allow us to turn our life around,” Sapp-Allen said. “It’s been such a blessing.”

FEMA’s buyout program

A September 2022 report from the Government Accountability Office found FEMA’s property acquisition program can be hugely beneficial. It removes flood risks, lowers the cost of disasters and reduces strain on the federal flood insurance program, the GAO analysts concluded.

But the GAO also found the process took three to five years to complete — too long. That deterred many eligible people from applying, or caused others to back out.

The analysts also found that local governments struggle to keep up with the administrative and financial burden that comes with the program.

As a result, resources for disaster management have been distributed unevenly across the country, says Jim Elliott, a professor of sociology at Rice University who studies social inequality and the environment.

“You can imagine some cities and areas have quite a few resources. So they’re able to have the personnel who have the technical expertise to be able to submit these applications upstream to FEMA and then receive the funds,” Elliott said. “In other areas, not so much.”

Normally, county governments are responsible for packaging applications and completing the complex cost-benefit analysis required to unlock FEMA funding. But after the floods in Eastern Kentucky, FEMA officials allowed Kentucky Emergency Management teams to do most of the paperwork, said Scott Alexander, the Perry County judge executive. This, he said, cut out a middleman and allowed under-resourced counties, like his, to apply.

And he’s to credit, in part, for the change.

Perry County judge executive Scott Alexander helped get FEMA to change policies that expedited the home buyout process. (Kentucky Emergency Management)

Shortly after the flooding, Alexander said he asked FEMA officials to help Eastern Kentucky make the most of the buyouts. After that conversation, FEMA made the changes to the program that Alexander said have helped make it a viable option for people in Perry County.

Oftentimes, FEMA’s disaster assistance grants fail to cover the cost of repairing or buying a new home, Alexander said. So for many people in Eastern Kentucky, the buyout program is the best option to get their lives back on track.

“It’s the only thing that actually gives you back at least the worth of the property,” Alexander said. “It allows people to actually move on, otherwise they are just staying in their situation and fighting and scratching to get out of it.”

Where to go next

The first question most people will face if they are considering fleeing a floodplain, Elliott said, is where to go next.

Elliott’s research tracked the outcomes of nearly 10,000 property buyouts across the country. He found that people are more likely to take a buyout if they have a clear place to go that is close to their former home and maintains or improves their current lifestyle and community ties.

But in areas like Eastern Kentucky, affordable housing was already in short supply before the floods.

A report from the National Low Income Housing Coalition determined that 8,950 homes were damaged in the flood. This, coupled with the report’s finding that an average of 600 people have left eastern Kentucky each year since 1984, make displacement and population loss a real concern.

That’s why Elliott says disaster planning needs to coordinate relocation programs like FEMA’s housing buyout program with other planning efforts such as building affordable, resilient housing.

Site of the planned Olive Branch development, announced last December, on the Knott-Perry county line. (Governor’s office)

Kentucky has announced plans to build seven new “high ground” communities using money from the Team Eastern Kentucky Flood Relief Fund to help meet the region’s housing needs, but more housing is a top priority for local and state officials.

Sapp-Allen has 45 days to leave the home she recently sold to the county through the buyout program. She’s not sure where she’ll go next, but knows it has to be close to Letcher County.

Her husband needs to stay local to make regular dialysis appointments while he waits for a kidney transplant. Sapp-Allen plans to stay in Eastern Kentucky until that transplant comes. Then, she said she can retire and the two of them can move down to Tennessee where she has a pair of rental properties that she let her sister and family friend use after their homes were destroyed in the floods.

It’s something to look forward to, but still, the idea of giving up the home she’s lived in for over 15 years was difficult.

”You know, it’s like, you work and you work and you work, and it’s the American dream. You obey the law and you vote and you’re good to your neighbors,” Sapp-Allen said. “And then you’re almost 60 years old, and here you have to start all over.”

This story is republished from the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting and Louisville Public Media.?

Grant will help Eastern Kentucky organization fix more houses

Sarah Ladd — Wed, 06 Dec 2023 20:01:08 +0000

KAHP Presents Grant to St. Vincent Mission in David Kentucky (Credit KAHP)

The Kentucky Association of Health Plans has given a $50,000 grant to Saint Vincent Mission in Floyd County, which the organization says will go toward building a new warehouse.?

With the extra storage space in David, the organization says it can hold onto more materials and fix 15 more houses annually in an area that was doubly devastated by deadly floods in 2021 and 2022.?

“We have been limited in the houses we could turn a year because we have been constrained on the amount of purchased and donated construction materials, disaster relief tools, and equipment and cleanup supplies we could store at one time,” Erin Bottomlee, Executive Director of Saint Vincent Mission, said in a statement. “Disaster Relief workers will spend less time traveling to multiple locations for supplies. This will improve our ability to address the role of housing as a social determinant of health in a more efficient manner.”?

Dozens died in the recent deadly floods in Eastern Kentucky, and many more homes were destroyed. Housing problems remain an issue in the area, the Lantern previously reported. As well as housing repair, Saint Vincent has a food pantry and other services in Eastern Kentucky.?

The Kentucky Association of Health Plans is the trade association for Kentucky’s health insurance industry.?????????????????

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Kentucky could win ‘massive’ solar investment in federal competition. Here’s what’s possible.

Liam Niemeyer — Mon, 27 Nov 2023 10:50:52 +0000

(Getty Images)

An unlikely collaboration between a Kentucky coalfield county and Kentucky’s largest city began when a former high school English teacher, Megan Downey, walked into the Lawrence County courthouse in Louisa in August.??

Inspired by a personal desire to find ways to tackle the impacts of climate change, Downey had launched a nonprofit called The Solar Collaborative last year in Virginia dedicated to helping Appalachian communities transition to renewable energy.?

She had been pitching an idea to local governments across Eastern Kentucky: Seek some of the billions in federal funding up for grabs in the Solar for All competition. Through the competition, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency plans to invest $7 billion through 60 grants to states, local governments, nonprofits and tribal governments to “increase access to affordable, resilient, and clean solar energy for millions of low-income households.” The money comes from the Inflation Reduction Act’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund.?

Vince Doty

When Downey talked with Deputy Judge-Executive Vince Doty about the opportunity, he agreed “within minutes” to sign up.

“He’s the biggest advocate, I think, in the whole region for this type of project,” Downey said. “A lot of low-income communities don’t have access to that economic savings that’s associated with solar, and so it’s just one more way in which a wealth gap is continuing to increase.”

Doty brought other Eastern Kentucky counties on board for an application to the competition; judge-executives in Lawrence, Johnson, Martin, Floyd, Pike, Boyd, Greenup counties all wrote letters of support. After learning they had both submitted letters of intent to apply for the federal funding, the mountain counties teamed up with Louisville’s government to submit a unified application that could provide affordable access to solar energy for thousands of low-income homes in Kentucky from its largest cities to its rural Appalachian counties.?

It’s one of two competing applications from Kentucky. The other was submitted by the Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet; solar advocates say it could be a significant boost? for the use of residential solar across the state.?

Advocates argue more distributed solar, for example via solar panels on rooftops, could mean utility bill savings for Kentuckians and a curbing of greenhouse gas emissions connected to Kentucky’s fossil fuel-reliant electricity grid.?

For Doty, seeking funding for solar was foremost about easing the financial burden of his constituents in a region that faces continued economic challenges from the decline of the coal industry. Lawrence County is one of 20 Eastern Kentucky counties served by electric utility Kentucky Power, which has the highest monthly residential utility bills in Kentucky, according to a state analysis.?

(Getty Images)

Types of solar power

Distributed solar: When electricity from solar power is generated from the point of use, such as through rooftop solar panels on homes, rather than centralized power sources such as power plants.
Utility-scale solar: When electricity from solar power is generated through large solar installations, often more than 10 megawatts in generation capacity, serving the electricity needs of a utility or a private company.?
Community solar: A solar project, often a utility-scale installation, where people can own or subscribe to have a piece of the energy generation created by a solar installation. People who buy into a community solar project often receive an electricity bill credit from the power generated by their share of the solar installation.?

“We always try to put our citizens first,” Doty said. “If there’s a chance that we can save somebody $300 a month off their electric bill, that’s worth trying for.”?

Solar low-income households, ‘resilience hubs’ and job training

Both the Louisville-Eastern Kentucky and state government proposals are wide in scope, highlighting specific ideas for how to use tens of millions of dollars in federal funding. Both applications could mean integrating solar energy into thousands of homes, whether through direct ownership of rooftop solar installations or better access to existing or planned community solar projects.?

The Louisville-Eastern Kentucky application is asking for $150 million to be spent over five years, proposing:

A zero to low-cost forgivable loan program geared toward having low-income households own small solar installations or receive energy efficiency upgrades. For example, homeowners applying to the loan program who are below 80% of the area median income could have an entire loan forgiven for a six-kilowatt solar installation; half of the loan could be forgiven for property owners renting to Kentuckians below 80% of the area median income.?
Turn community centers in areas prone to natural disasters into “resilience hubs” equipped with solar power and electric battery storage for times of power outages.?
Build a workforce to deploy residential solar by creating training programs, building on already existing programs in Kentucky’s community and technical college system.?

Downey said Doty had advocated in a number of meetings as the Louisville-Eastern Kentucky application was being developed that it was a “non-negotiable” that Kentuckians should own the solar installations themselves?

The application anticipates, if awarded funding, at least a 20% energy bill reduction for approximately 7,300 households in Kentucky taking part in the proposal. Households that ultimately receive a six-kilowatt solar installation for free could see energy bill reductions up to 50%, according to the application.?

“If you put solar on your home, you immediately have benefits economically from the savings that you garner. It also increases the value of your home,” Downey said. “So this has the potential for a really significant impact if you look at it over 25 years as far as wealth generation goes.”?

The Louisville-Eastern Kentucky application estimates the results of the funding would add another approximate 44 megawatts of distributed solar power onto Kentucky’s grid. That would increase distributed solar in the state by about 70%, with 63.5 megawatts of distributed solar already in Kentucky.?

The application also estimates about 1,300 “green jobs” will be created through the proposed solar investment. Steve Ricketts, the board chair of the advocacy group Kentucky Solar Energy Society, said while construction work associated with larger, utility-scale solar projects is temporary, ending once the project is completed, those workers also can work on installing solar in their own communities.?

“They can be working on homes in their own town, they can be working on businesses and around town. So the two are incredibly complementary, and, frankly, have to go together to make it all work,” Ricketts said.?

Sumedha Rao, the executive director of Louisville Metro Government’s Office of Sustainability, said the estimates of solar power added, households helped and renewable energy jobs created through the funding proposal are somewhat conservative and that the impact of the grant could be even more.?

Given that Kentucky has historically relied on fossil fuels, she said, a transition to renewables can be a “scary proposition” for some Kentuckians. But she believes the Solar for All grant competition has a lot of upside with helping the state transition economically.?

?“We really feel like this is something that can have a massive impact for years to come,” Rao said.

State seeks funding for solar installations for rebuilt homes, ‘solarize’ campaigns and community solar

The Solar for All application submitted by state officials leads with its own idea of how residential solar can be deployed across the state, particularly in areas hit by devastating floods and tornadoes in recent years.?

Requesting $100 million from the Solar for All competition, one of the state’s proposals is to put residential solar and an electricity battery storage system on 850 “disaster recovery” homes that could result in 70% utility bill savings for each home — or up to $1,000 in annual bill savings per home — over the course of 20 years.?

For Kenya Stump, the executive director of the state’s Office of Energy Policy, eliminating most of the energy bills is just one way to help people recovering from natural disasters who may have lost every material thing they own.?

“If they can live in a home from here on out that is more resilient, that also has the burden of that kind of cost is no longer there — shouldn’t we kind of strive for that?” Stump said.?

The application also proposes to help increase solar access for low-income Kentuckians, support housing nonprofits in creating energy-efficient housing, develop residential solar in cities and boost the state’s solar deployment workforce in several ways:?Create subsidies and carve-outs to help Kentuckians participating in the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program, or LIHEAP, take part in existing and planned “community solar” projects to cut residential utility bills by about 20%.
Add solar power and electricity battery storage onto about 1,500 homes that already have energy efficiency upgrades, such as households that have participated in Weatherization Assistance Program.?
Develop “Solarize” campaigns to promote residential solar in Kentucky cities including Paducah, Owensboro, Henderson, Bowling Green, Lexington and Ashland.?
Create 1,500 “work-ready” scholarships and provide funding to community and technical colleges funding to create solar deployment training programs.?

Stump said in many instances low-income Kentuckians live in homes that are old and energy inefficient, leading to higher energy usage and subsequently higher utility bills. She said by enrolling LIHEAP recipients in community solar programs — such as ones offered by East Kentucky Power Cooperative and Louisville Gas and Electric and Kentucky Utilities (LG&E and KU) — they can get a direct credit on their bill and get more value from the utilized renewable energy.

“The energy regardless of the source will just still leak out” of poorly insulated, inefficient homes, Stump said. “We also hope that this will incentivize the growth of more municipal and utility community solar offerings that would be eligible to have LIHEAP carve-outs as well.”?

Some stakeholders involved in the Louisville-Eastern Kentucky application, while supportive of community solar projects in general, were skeptical of using Solar for All funds on such projects out of concerns that some community solar models, specifically LG&E and KU’s “Solar Share” program, subsidize an asset of an investor-owned utility with taxpayer funds.?

Stump said while stakeholders may wish some existing community solar projects were designed differently, it’s what is currently offered by Kentucky utilities and “can provide some benefit” to low-income Kentuckians that haven’t been able to take advantage.?

“I have to say that I think both grants are very strong and deserving, and so we just have to wait and see what the federal government decides.”

– Lane Boldman, Kentucky Conservation Coalition

The two Kentucky applications submitted to Solar for All do align on ways to boost the workforce needed to install residential solar on homes, though Stump added that developing a renewable energy workforce needs to be paced with the deployment of solar.?

“That’s our greatest challenge is to make sure we get the timing right so that it aligns with the deployment of projects. We don’t want to give someone hope, and then there not be any work,” Stump said.?

For Stump, the Solar for All competition is just one federal program and incentive among many that will ultimately “shift and transform our energy landscape.”?

No guarantee both applications will be awarded

Lane Boldman

Lane Boldman, the executive director of the environmental advocacy group Kentucky Conservation Coalition, believes both applications are “really solid” but points out the federal government is only giving out 60 grants. Competition for the grants is stiff: More than 30 states have submitted notices that they’re applying along with a number of local governments and nonprofits across the country.?

Lawrence County and Louisville decided to collaborate, in part, to increase the chances that their Solar for All application would get awarded. The stakeholders with Lawrence County and Louisville also tried unsuccessfully to unify their application with the state’s proposal.?

Boldman said a big question became if a single grant application could ask for enough funding to cover all of the “great ideas” being proposed for the competition.?

“The decision really was that it was better to keep them as two separate applications,” Boldman said. “I have to say that I think both grants are very strong and deserving, and so we just have to wait and see what the federal government decides.”?

Correction: Kentucky Power serves 20 Eastern Kentucky counties in its service territory, not 16 counties.?

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Rosalynn Carter acclaimed by admirers for her pioneering advocacy for mental health, caregiving

John McCosh — Mon, 20 Nov 2023 14:03:26 +0000

Rosalynn Carter’s legacy includes her support for Habitat for Humanity. She helped her husband Jimmy frame houses across the country for the charity. (Photo by Chris Graythen/Getty Images)

Former first lady Rosalynn Carter has died, according to the Carter Center, leaving a rich legacy of championing mental health and women’s rights.

She will be buried at the ranch house in Plains she and former President Jimmy Carter built in 1961. She died Sunday just days after the family announced she had entered hospice at the home.

She was married for 77 years to Jimmy Carter, who is now 99 years old and entered hospice early this year.

“Rosalynn was my equal partner in everything I ever accomplished,” Jimmy Carter said in a statement on the center’s website. “She gave me wise guidance and encouragement when I needed it. As long as Rosalynn was in the world, I always knew somebody loved and supported me.”

Tributes poured in from across the political spectrum Sunday, a testament to her broad popularity that transcended partisan politics and her enduring contributions to causes and charities that stoked her passion.

President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden on Sunday were at Naval Station Norfolk in Norfolk, Virginia, participating in a Friendsgiving dinner with service members and military families from the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower and the USS Gerald R. Ford.

“Time and time again, during the more than four decades of our friendship – through rigors of campaigns, through the darkness of deep and profound loss – we always felt the hope, warmth, and optimism of Rosalynn Carter,” the president said in a statement. “She will always be in our hearts. On behalf of a grateful nation, we send our love to President Carter, the entire Carter family, and the countless people across our nation and the world whose lives are better, fuller, and brighter because of the life and legacy of Rosalynn Carter.’’

Georgia Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff said Georgia and the country are better places because of Carter’s contributions.

“A former First Lady of Georgia and the United States, Rosalynn’s lifetime of work and her dedication for public service changed the lives of many,’’ Ossoff said. “Among her many accomplishments, Rosalynn Carter will be remembered for her compassionate nature and her passion for women’s rights, human rights, and mental health reform.’’

Georgia Republican Gov. Brian Kemp paid tribute to her, recalling her service as Georgia’s first lady during Jimmy Carter’s term as governor starting in 1971.

“A proud native Georgian, she had an indelible impact on our state and nation as a First Lady to both,” Kemp said in a statement. “Working alongside her husband, she championed mental health services and promoted the state she loved across the globe. President Carter and his family are in our prayers as the world reflects on First Lady Carter’s storied life and the nation mourns her passing.’’

Former President Donald Trump said on X that he and his wife Melania joined in mourning Carter.

“She was a devoted First Lady, a great humanitarian, a champion for mental health, and a beloved wife to her husband for 77 years, President Carter,” said Trump.

Georgia GOP Congressman Rick Allen posted on the X social media platform: “Rosalynn was a beloved Georgian and dedicated her life to serving others. Our nation will miss her dearly, but her legacy will never be forgotten.”

Former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called Carter “a saintly and revered public servant” and a leader “deeply driven by her profound faith, compassion and kindness.”

Pelosi, a California Democrat, recalled how Carter, while her husband was serving as Georgia governor, was moved by the stories of Georgia families touched by mental illness and took up their cause, despite the stigma of the time.

“Later, First Lady Carter served as honorary chair of the President’s Commission on Mental Health: offering recommendations that became the foundation for decades of change, including in the landmark Mental Health Systems Act,” Pelosi said. “At the same time, First Lady Carter was a powerful champion of our nation’s tens of millions of family and professional caregivers.”

The eldest of four children, Rosalynn was born at home in Plains on Aug. 18, 1927. One of her best childhood friends was Ruth Carter, Jimmy’s younger sister. Jimmy Carter’s mother, Lillian, was a nurse who treated Rosalynn’s father when he was ill with leukemia.

Rosalynn enrolled at Georgia Southwestern College in 1945 after she graduated from Plains High School with honors.

Jimmy Carter was home on leave from the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis that fall when he asked her to go to a movie. By Christmas he’d proposed to her, but she turned him down because things were moving too fast for her. He soon asked again and the couple married at Plains Methodist Church July 7, 1946, a month after Jimmy graduated from Annapolis.

As Jimmy Carter climbed the Navy’s ranks, the couple started a family with sons John William arriving in 1947, James Earl III (“Chip”) in 1950, and Donnell Jeffrey in 1952. Daughter Amy was born in 1967.

Carter was accepted into an elite nuclear submarine program, and the young family then moved to Schenectady, N.Y. But when his father fell ill, Jimmy left his commission and moved back to Plains to take care of the family’s peanut business.

Rosalynn was an active campaigner during her husband’s political climb, beginning with his run for state senator in the early 1960s. By the time he was elected president in 1976, she vowed to step out of the traditional first lady role.

Five weeks after Inauguration Day, the President’s Commission on Mental Health was established with Rosalynn serving as honorary chairperson. The Mental Health Systems Act that called for more community centers and important changes in health insurance coverage, passed in 1980 at her urging.

In 1982, the couple founded the Carter Center in Atlanta, with a mission to “wage peace, fight disease and build hope.” She later founded the Rosalynn Carter Institute for Caregiving at the school now known as Georgia Southwestern State University, her alma mater. The institute was renamed the Rosalynn Carter Institute for Caregivers in 2020.

She was also an active partner in her husband’s philanthropic support for Habitat for Humanity, often joining him in framing houses for charity.

Three months after Jimmy entered hospice in February, the Carter family announced Rosalynn had dementia. She entered home hospice Nov. 17.

Rosalynn Carter is survived by her children — Jack, Chip, Jeff, and Amy — and 11 grandchildren and 14 great-grandchildren.

The Carter family requests that in lieu of flowers people consider a donation to the Carter Center’s Mental Health Program or the Rosalynn Carter Institute for Caregivers.

This story is republished from Georgia Recorder,?a sister publication of Kentucky Lantern and part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.?

For one Kentucky city, a new home highlights the housing challenges rural communities face

Liam Niemeyer — Wed, 25 Oct 2023 16:11:21 +0000

The new home, built with support from Community Ventures, in the city of Fulton, Kentucky. (Courtesy of Community Ventures)

Along the Tennessee border in West Kentucky, Fulton County Judge-Executive Jim Martin traced his rural community’s economic challenges, and its coinciding lack of housing, back decades.?

As the federal government built interstates throughout the country and in Kentucky in the mid-20th century, less traffic subsequently came through the county as new routes were planned. Garment factories employing hundreds moved away from the region, which Martin blames the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, for spurring. Local business from automotive suppliers and railroad lines also retracted.?

The result, Martin said, is his Mississippi River-bound county struggling with a need for well-paying jobs, a lack of available, affordable housing, and elevated levels of poverty.?

About 23% of Fulton County residents live in poverty, more than double the national average, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Fulton County’s population has also declined by thousands over the decades, reflecting population loss in other West Kentucky counties. The county now sits at little more than 6,000 people.

As those jobs left, Martin said, so did the skilled tradespeople who worked on homes.

“There was no demand for new housing,” he said. “All we’re trying to do is reverse this population decline and economic decline, and in order to do that, we have to build a community that offers housing, educational opportunities and jobs.”

With the help of a Lexington-based nonprofit housing developer Community Ventures, a connection made in the aftermath of the 2021 tornado outbreak in the region, Martin hopes a newly constructed home in the city of Fulton can be a step forward to an eventual economic rebound.?

Local leaders are celebrating a ribbon-cutting Wednesday afternoon for the first home built by a group other than Habitat for Humanity in the city of Fulton, a small community of about 2,300 in Fulton County, since 2008.

“I mean, it’s huge,” said Mark Welch, a Fulton native and the president of the Fulton-Hickman Counties Economic Development Partnership. “When the economy tanked in ’08, ’09, everything just stopped here.”?

Welch said the lack of people with skilled trades in the community has hampered new home construction, mentioning there’s only one person in Fulton who works on home remodeling projects. The county school district’s technology center, Four Rivers Career Academy, stopped teaching carpentry a few years ago because of little demand for it. The new home built in Fulton relied on labor from the county’s jail because of a lack of a ready and available workforce.?

The shortage of housing is reflected across West Kentucky, he said, with some realtors in nearby Paducah listing available homes in Fulton because of a scarcity of housing stock across the region.?

According to a University of Kentucky analysis, Fulton County had the 13th highest housing demand, tied with Fayette County, out of all 120 counties in the state. Welch said the demand for housing comes from both people interested in moving from elsewhere and locals seeking the few homes available, which makes it harder to attract new staff to the county’s two school districts.?

“If a teacher is looking at Fulton, but they can’t find a house and they’re going to have to commute from Murray — well, that may kill that,” Welch said.?

With the newly constructed home built, Welch hopes it can spur interest from other private groups that build and remodel homes, though he notes that available housing is only one piece to boosting the economy there.?

Brenda Weaver, the president of Lending and Western Kentucky Disaster Recovery for Community Ventures, said the effort to build the home in Fulton came through connections made after the 2021 tornado outbreak in Western Kentucky.?

Community Ventures was one of nine nonprofit housing agencies that were awarded funds Monday from Kentucky’s Rural Housing Trust Fund, created by the legislature earlier this year following calls from housing advocates for support to rebuild homes in disaster-stricken areas of the state.?

Housing advocates praised the creation of the trust fund, even though the initial $20 million allocated to the fund was a far cry from $300 million housing advocates had asked for to help communities recover from floods and tornadoes. Almost $124 million in federal funding is going to rebuilding housing in Western Kentucky, yet the state’s own analysis as a part of that funding stated it would still fall far short of the housing needs in the region.?

Even before the tornadoes had struck Western Kentucky in 2021 and floods devastated Eastern Kentucky in 2022, the state had lacked more than 79,000 affordable housing units, according to an analysis of data from the American Community Survey for 2016-2020. Weaver said natural disasters only make housing availability worse.?

“There’s a huge housing affordability crisis across Kentucky and nationwide, even before you have something like a natural disaster or some other economic disaster,” Weaver said. “What happens when a disaster occurs — costs of everything increase significantly. And so it’s just a perfect storm.”?

Community Ventures will use an about $2.6 million grant from the trust fund to continue home rebuilding efforts in Fulton and Graves counties, both struck by an EF-4 tornado in Dec. 2021. Weaver said Community Ventures is also planning to build more homes in the city of Fulton, which wasn’t impacted by tornadoes but has economic struggles seen in other rural communities.?

Weaver said the new home being unveiled Wednesday was made possible through funds the nonprofit makes available for first-time homeowners, with the new home going to a Fulton resident who had been a renter.?

“You can’t bring housing alone back unless you have jobs, unless you have economic development,” Weaver said. “Just the housing can’t stand on its own. Just the business can’t stand on its own, because you have to have people living there to support the business. So, it really is a comprehensive approach.”

Report: Flood insurance cost a barrier to Eastern Kentucky recovery

Sarah Ladd — Mon, 16 Oct 2023 09:40:17 +0000

Record floods struck parts of Kentucky in July 2022. Bays Street in Jackson, the Breathitt County seat, was one of many places under water. (Michael Swensen/Getty Images)

The cost of flood insurance is a large recovery barrier for people living in Eastern Kentucky flood plains, says a report by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.

Researcher Matt Klesta reported what locals have said: Flood insurance is too expensive for most residents. Also, floods have made affordable housing problems worse and driven locals from their homes, decreasing the available workforce.

The report, published in September, focused on the July 2022 floods and the 13-county federal disaster area. The water destroyed homes, displaced thousands of Kentuckians and killed at least 44 people. From July 26-30, 2022, up to 16 inches of rain fell, pushing creeks and rivers far out of their banks, according to the National Weather Service.

The Disaster Distress Hotline is 1-800-985-5990.

“The July 2022 flood was not the region’s first, nor will it be its last,” the researcher wrote. “It’s in these situations that close-knit communities with deep family ties to the land demonstrate their resourcefulness. However, despite eastern Kentucky’s resilience, its recovery is made more challenging by the decline of the coal industry, which has led to the loss of many well-paying jobs and a steady exodus of people from the region.”

Expensive to stay?

It’s expensive to stay. The new research says that homeowners insurance with a flood policy, on average, could cost a family in the affected areas 7% of their median household income. In the 13 most impacted counties, a flood insurance policy could cost $1,384? annually.

After receiving federal aid for flood damage, a property owner is required to have flood insurance or else be disqualified for future aid. ?The Federal Emergency Management Agency, which manages the flood insurance program, requires those who live in a high-risk flood area, known as a Special Flood Hazard Area, and who have a federal government-backed mortgage to have flood insurance. Those who also accepted aid from FEMA after floods — like thousands of households did in Eastern Kentucky after the 2022 floods — are also required to purchase flood insurance.

Few Kentuckians have flood insurance. Rate increases, announced earlier this year to make up for the program’s massive losses, are putting it even further out of reach.

The Fed report also shows that 74% of the some 9,000 damaged housing units were in Breathitt, Knott, Letcher and Perry Counties.

In the 13 flood-impacted counties, the report says, 37% of households, including 55% of renters, made less than $25,000 a year ?in 2021.

This is significant because “low-income households and renters are more likely to suffer permanent displacement because they often have fewer relocation options and lower-quality housing is more likely to be demolished instead of being rebuilt.”

Meanwhile, as people leave the area, the labor market suffers. The report shows that United States Postal Service residential vacancies increased by 19% from the third to the fourth quarter in 2022.

“Fewer residents mean fewer people available to fill jobs,” the paper states. And the construction industry has decreased by 24%, which further pauses housing recovery.

“This shortage of skilled trades workers, such as carpenters, electricians, and plumbers, has led to a backlog of people waiting to get their homes repaired or replaced,” the report found.

For the full report, “Resilience and Recovery: Insights from the July 2022 Eastern Kentucky Flood,” visit the site.

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Group organizes around rental housing issues in northeast Kentucky

Liz Carey, The Daily Yonder — Tue, 26 Sep 2023 09:50:49 +0000

Organizers Kathi Johnson, Amelia Black Kirk, Mark Boykin, Beth Howard, and Elliot Frederick speaking at an event. (Photo by Jared Hamilton)

When community organizers started knocking on doors in Boyd County, they were ready to listen to what people had to say about the biggest issues in their lives. What surprised the canvassers was how ready residents were to talk.

“It was just house after house after house of people talking to me for 20 or 30 minutes,” said Beth Howard of organizing efforts in the northeastern Kentucky county of 48,000 residents.

“It was just very clear from the beginning that they wanted to talk about what was going on in their lives.”

About two-thirds of residences in Boyd County are owner-occupied. But most of the people Howard and others talked to were renters. Since housing issues were at the top of their list of concerns, the Appalachian People’s Union, the organization that grew out of the door-to-door canvassing, will start with working on those issues. The hope is to add more issues later.

Howard said the working-class residents she and others talked to weren’t used to being asked for their opinions.

“People don’t ask them what they think about anything and they have a lot to say,” she said. “They felt like nobody cared.”

Boyd County lies at the confluence of the Big Sandy and Ohio rivers, which form the borders with West Virginia and Ohio, respectively. Part of a metropolitan area with Huntington, West Virginia, the county lies in an industrial and fossil-fuel production corridor surrounded by largely rural and small-town development. Ashland, population 22,000, is Boyd County’s largest city, and a quarter of the county’s population is rural, according to the Census definition.

Howard said bringing people together is the first step to creating change.

“It felt like something different,” she said of the initial conversations with residents. “This was something deeper where people really had a yearning to change their material day-to-day lives and to build something where there is belonging.”

Howard decided to focus on organizing in Eastern Kentucky because she grew up about an hour away in Morehead. She said there is potential to make good changes in Appalachia, and she wanted to focus on rural areas and small towns.

“There are just so many opportunities that I saw in Appalachia and in my home state,” she said.

Howard said the area’s long history of working-class resistance and organizing made it a place where a group like Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ), Appalachian People’s Union’s parent organization, could build a large coalition. SURJ is a national organization that focuses on organizing around economic and racial justice.

Celina Culver, Eastern Kentucky field organizer for SURJ, said residents in Boyd County talked about their experience with housing as renters.

“We’ve knocked on over 1,000 doors to talk to mostly tenants about their experiences,” Culver said. “Folks talked about times when they hadn’t had heat in their apartments for three winters and their landlord hadn’t fixed it yet. People were talking about pest and rodent infestations and landlords not being held accountable to fix it. They talked about the way that takes a mental and physical and emotional toll on people.”

In many cases, she said, residents felt they were powerless to do anything about the issues they faced for fear of angering their landlord. With a dwindling supply of affordable housing, the fear of having no place to live left them caught in untenable situations.

“No matter where you come from, no matter what you look like, people need to have a place to call home in order to live the healthy and safe lives we deserve,” Culver said. “It’s really dehumanizing when you have to live in a place where you don’t feel safe.”

In July the Appalachian People’s Union held a rally for housing rights in Ashland. More than 70 people showed up, Culver said.

The group called on attendees to join them in working on housing issues. Attendees donned red bandanas, reminiscent of the red bandanas worn by the “Redneck Army” during the Battle of Blair Mountain, the largest armed labor rebellion in U.S. history, which occurred in Blair, West Virginia, just two hours to the southeast of Ashland, in 1921.

“We asked everybody to put them on to show that we’re in solidarity with each other,” she said. “So, we had a really powerful moment at the end of all of us putting on our red bandanas together and committing to the organization and this work.”

From here, Howard said, the group will work on getting a “Tenants Bill of Rights” passed through the local council to give renters some protections when it comes to housing issues.

In the future, she said, the group can come together over other issues.

“When people can come together around a material need, then I believe that’s when the other transformations can happen,” Howard said. “We believe by coming in around material issues, which a lot of people are more than happy to talk about, then we can kind of get to these issues that have been more polarized largely.”

This article first appeared on The Daily Yonder and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Few in Eastern Kentucky could afford flood insurance. Now it costs even more.

Liam Niemeyer — Fri, 18 Aug 2023 09:45:28 +0000

Few in Eastern Kentucky have flood insurance or have ever been able to afford it. A federal agency’s new pricing system is putting it even further out of reach, jeopardizing eligibility for federal aid after future floods.?

The cost of flood insurance is a major reason that Terry Thies is trying to sell her family home in Perry County.

Terry Thies spoke on the state Capitol grounds earlier this year at a rally to support affordable housing. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Jamie Lucke)

It’s a place her grandfather bought and her father remodeled, where she played in the nearby creek to find pretty rocks. Her father never mentioned having flood insurance on? the home because the home never really did flood much; the basement had most recently taken on water in 2011 but didn’t reach into her living space.

All of that changed when floodwaters cascaded into her community of Bulan in July 2022, reaching at least four feet up the walls of her home.?

“No way. I’m not going to try and fix that house and live there,” Thies said in late July. “I don’t care if it was a ‘1,000-year flood.’ This could be the first day of the second 1,000 years. I just am not going to put myself back in that situation.”?

Thies applied for federal aid after the floods that killed 45 Kentuckians and ruined thousands of homes across Eastern Kentucky. The Federal Emergency Management Agency denied her aid from that disaster, saying that the federal agency had given her funding after her basement flooded in 2011 and she didn’t have flood insurance this time around.?

FEMA requires homeowners to buy flood insurance if they previously received help from the emergency management agency.

“That evidently happened,” Thies said, referencing the over $4,000 she received from FEMA in 2011. “I just don’t remember the part of that (where) you had to get flood insurance.”

More than a year after the deadly flood, she now faces a financial crunch with having to pay about $2,200 a year for flood insurance on her flooded property, something that’s a burden given that she was laid off last year from her family’s pharmacy business.?

The region still is struggling with an affordable housing shortage exacerbated by the floods, and state and local leaders are slowly rebuilding new homes and establishing “higher ground” communities away from risk of flooding. Thies believes such communities are “a great thing.”?

“We just had to quit living by the creeks,” Thies said.?

She has a newly built home herself on the other side of the county thanks to a local housing nonprofit. But she can’t afford to keep the old homeplace, in part, because of paying that flood insurance premium.

A new pricing system

FEMA for decades has managed? the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), created to help cover losses by providing flood insurance through a network of private companies and local insurance agents.

Weather disasters in recent decades have saddled the federal flood insurance program with billions of dollars in debt due, in large part, to fully paying out benefits after disasters such as Hurricanes Katrina in 2005 and Sandy in 2012. Raising premiums is one strategy for moving toward solvency in the program.?

The NFIP has millions of policies in force nationwide but very few of them in Kentucky. A FEMA report last year found that a little over 1% of the more than 1 million residential structures throughout the state had flood insurance, and the rates of those with flood insurance are similarly low in Eastern Kentucky counties.?

?FEMA requires those who live in a high-risk flood area, known as a Special Flood Hazard Area, and who have a federal government-backed mortgage to have flood insurance. Those who also accepted aid from FEMA after floods — like thousands of households did in Eastern Kentucky after the 2022 floods — are also required to purchase flood insurance.?

Calculating the cost of flood insurance premiums in the past relied on “relatively static measurements” that emphasized how elevated a property was on an existing flood insurance map. But that methodology didn’t fully account for the evolving science and data, leading to homes whose flood risks weren’t being accurately assessed through the price of premiums.?

FEMA aims to change that with a new pricing system called “Risk Rating 2.0,” which was fully implemented in April, that the agency says will “equitably distribute premiums across all policyholders based on home value and a property’s flood risk, and set rates that are fairer.”

According to FEMA’s analysis, some policyholders in Kentucky counties will see the cost of their average annual flood insurance premium double, triple or spike even further under the new system.?

Robin Webb

Many of those dramatic increases in price are in poorer Eastern Kentucky counties, where people? are still recovering from last year’s floods. In Perry County, where Thies’ family home was flooded and the median household income is about $40,000, premiums could increase by more than 130%, from an average of $1,403 in September 2022 to $3,363 under the new pricing system.?

Martin County, where about 40% of residents live in poverty, will see one of the highest increases in annual premiums with an increase of over 290%, going from $1,143 in September 2022 to $4,509.?

Carter County will see the highest increase in the state at about 317%, going from $834 in September 2022 to an average of $3,482.?

Democratic state Sen. Robin Webb, who practices law in the Carter County seat of Grayson, said she understood why some river-bound communities could see changes in flood insurance criteria. But she doesn’t understand why a place like Carter County, though it has seen its share of floods, would have such a large spike in rates.?

“We have pockets of flooding — there’s no question. A lot of people, everybody’s like, ‘Well, move.’ They don’t want to move,” Webb said. “They can’t afford to move.”?

Existing flood insurance policyholders will see their flood insurance premiums incorporated into the new pricing system whenever the policies are renewed after April 2023. Yearly premium increases are also capped by law at 18% to 25% for people who had flood insurance policies before the new pricing system was implemented.?

But completely new policyholders — very few people in Eastern Kentucky had flood insurance during last year’s floods — are facing the full brunt of newly calculated premiums after being incorporated into the new system in October 2022.?

Scott McReynolds speaks at rally earlier this year in support of state funding for affordable housing. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Jamie Lucke)

There are some discounts available to new policyholders, such as a discount for properties that are drawn into a flood area under a revised floodplain map.?

Scott McReynolds is the executive director of the Housing Development Alliance, a Perry County nonprofit rebuilding housing in Eastern Kentucky. He said when his organization was helping after a different flooding disaster in 2021, they ran into several people who rejected FEMA aid because accepting it would have required them to purchase flood insurance — something they couldn’t afford.?

The unaffordability of flood insurance even before the new pricing system, McReynolds said, leaves poorer Kentuckians with the risk of not getting disaster aid in the future, especially considering that typically the entire flood insurance premium has to be paid fully upfront.?

“They either have to say, ‘No, I’m not going to take the FEMA help, or they’re going to take the FEMA help and risk not getting help next time,” McReynolds said.

He likens flood insurance to a “black box” because of what is still unknown about flood insurance requirements in the aftermath of the 2022 floods. For example, he and other housing advocates aren’t completely sure whether those who accept help from FEMA and then are added into the floodplain through revised floodplain maps will have to get flood insurance.?

Those on the frontlines of rebuilding housing, including McReynolds, say they’re too busy helping with Kentuckians’ immediate needs to be able to think hard about something like flood insurance.?

“All sorts of people are taking the money,” he said. “Some of them may be taking it thinking that, ‘Hey, I’ll get flood insurance,’ and they just don’t have any idea what it’s going to cost.”

Bridging the affordability gap

Those who have studied flood insurance at a national level say answers to the affordability question likely need to come from Congress.?

Chad Berginnis, the executive director for the Association of State Floodplain Managers, said there absolutely needs to be a mechanism to help some communities afford insurance if FEMA is going to reassess and increase insurance rates to make up for debt in the program.?

“What’s really frustrating to me is that we have again Congress who, on one hand, wants to see a more solvent program, and on the other doesn’t want to solve necessarily these real situations for folks,” Berginnis said.?

Berginnis contrasted the relative lack of funding for the flood insurance program to crop insurance, which is subsidized with billions of dollars by the federal government.?

“They are using a different lens to view this insurance program, and it is deeply unfortunate,” he said.?

FEMA did not answer a list of questions from the Lantern about the affordability of flood insurance, saying the agency’s immediate priority was responding to the aftermath of wildfires in Hawaii.

Attorney General Daniel Cameron, second from right, and U.S. Rep. James Comer, third from right, with other Kentucky Republicans on the stage of the Fancy Farm Picnic, Aug. 5, 2023. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Austin Anthony)

Some Kentucky politicians have taken action to address spiking insurance rates under the new pricing system: Republican Attorney General Daniel Cameron in June joined nine other attorneys general in challenging the new system in a lawsuit, calling it an “egregious and unlawful” price hike.?

Kentucky Republican Rep. James Comer, chair of the U.S. House Oversight Committee, also led a bipartisan effort to send a letter to FEMA’s administrator in May asking for more information about how FEMA’s new system could impact premiums. Other signees on that letter included Louisiana lawmakers who have also expressed frustration over FEMA’s new pricing system and the spikes in premiums seen in that state, too.?

Few Kentucky communities take advantage of discounts?

Sam Brody, a professor at Texas A&M University at Galveston who testified before Congress about flood insurance, said there are ways communities can help lower flood insurance costs through programs such as the Community Rating System, but it can be hit or miss if communities are taking part in such a program.?

The Community Rating System is a FEMA program that discounts flood insurance in communities where local flood management practices exceed the minimum requirements, such as by retrofitting flood-prone buildings or hosting activities that build awareness of flood insurance.?

Communities can receive discounts ranging from 5% to 45% on premiums, but few local governments in Kentucky, about 40 total including 11 counties, are taking part.?

“I think that’s a really important program that is not well known,” Brody said. “How do we offset rates? How do we make our communities more resilient over the long term and do it in a balanced way — not just dig walls — but do other stuff like, communicate, educate?”

In the meantime, Brody said, flood insurance affordability will still be a looming problem for flood-prone areas throughout the country, something that’s only worsened by the lack of flood-resilient community design and climate change.

“I know people who pay $4,000 for insurance a year, and that’s backbreaking for a lot of people,” Brody said. “Even areas that are like Eastern Kentucky — it’s going up, and they’ll continue to go up. And what does that mean, for, you know, the community as a whole?”

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Couch, car or curb: Defining ‘homeless’ youth affects aid state by state

Robbie Sequeria — Fri, 18 Aug 2023 09:40:16 +0000

Boarded doors and windows are seen on homes adjacent to a playground, Wednesday, Feb. 15, 2023, in Baltimore. In 2018, Angela Banks was told by her landlord that Baltimore officials were buying her family's home of four decades, planning to demolish the three-story brick rowhouse to make room for an urban renewal project aimed at transforming their historically Black neighborhood. Banks and her children became homeless almost overnight. Banks filed a complaint asking federal officials to investigate whether Baltimore's redevelopment policies are perpetuating racial segregation and violating fair housing laws by disproportionately displacing Black and low-income residents. (AP Photo/Julio Cortez)

The spectrum of youth homelessness is vast.

It includes young children sleeping with their mothers in crowded shelters and families living in tent encampments in public parks. There are teenage runaways who have fled abusive homes to live on the streets and kids who spend their nights hidden in cars or abandoned buildings.

But youth homelessness also takes less recognizable forms: couch-surfing teens and children whose families have been forced to double up with relatives or friends, and who might go undetected by authorities. And even if authorities do know about them, they might not consider them to be homeless.

There is no single, uniform definition of homelessness across states or even within the federal government. That greatly complicates efforts to help the young people experiencing it, especially when cities, states and nonprofits are using federal dollars to do so. Several states this year tried to clarify the situation and to provide more aid to homeless youth — especially to teenagers fending for themselves.

They include new laws in Arkansas, Kentucky, Nevada and North Dakota designed to make it easier for homeless youth to procure vital documents such as state IDs, birth certificates and driver’s licenses.

A new Oklahoma law calls on every school district to use a common form to determine how many students are homeless and to report the results to state officials. And Washington state nearly doubled funding for a grant program that helps school districts and housing authorities identify and help homeless youth.

Meanwhile, legislators in other states — including California, Michigan and Pennsylvania — still are considering bills that would provide various forms of support to homeless youth.

Dueling definitions

People are homeless if they?lack “a fixed, regular, and adequate nighttime residence” or reside “in an emergency shelter or a place not meant for human habitation, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). The agency’s definition also includes people who will imminently lose their primary nighttime residence and those fleeing domestic violence.

But the U.S. Department of Education’s more expansive definition also includes people who are doubling up or are living in motels, hotels, trailer parks or camping grounds because they can’t afford other accommodations.

Housing advocates say HUD’s definition doesn’t capture the fluidity of homelessness.

“When we limit our definitions of homelessness to just the HUD definition or even the [Department of Education] definition, we miss out on the full scope of what young people experience when it comes to homelessness,” said Kim Justice, executive director of Washington state’s Office of Homeless Youth Prevention and Protection.

The dueling definitions also lead to wide-ranging estimates of how many young people are experiencing homelessness?— making it practically impossible to know the numbers for certain.

You can serve a youth that's sleeping on the street, but you can't serve a youth who's sleeping on someone's couch.

– Amy Dworsky, senior research fellow at Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago

For example, HUD estimated that on a single night in 2022, there were 50,767 families with children experiencing homelessness. There were another?30,090 unaccompanied homeless youth in the United States, with an additional 6,348 youth experiencing homelessness as
parents.

But?statistics?compiled?by the?U.S.?Department of?Education suggest?that there were about 115,000 unaccompanied youth just among the nearly 1.3 million public school students who experienced homelessness in 2019-20.

Dawn Bogart, co-chief executive director of Homeless Youth Connection, a nonprofit based in Phoenix, said the HUD numbers vastly understate the scope of the problem in Arizona.

According to HUD, the number of unaccompanied youth experiencing homelessness in Arizona has increased?by 45% since 2020, from 633 to 917. But in collecting numbers for federal education officials, the Arizona Department of Education estimated that there were nearly 14,000 homeless public school students in 2020-21.

Most of them, Bogart said, are doubling up in other people’s homes, not living in shelters or on the street.

“And [students experiencing homelessness] may think that couch-surfing is OK because you technically still have a roof over your head,” Bogart said. “But these kids are in between three and five places, and that’s hardly a stable or sustainable home environment.”

Even school officials’ counts, conducted using the broader definition, might be much too low. An analysis of district-level data conducted last year by the Center for Public Integrity estimated that nearly 300,000 homeless students were not included. Some 2,400 school districts reported having zero homeless students — highly unlikely given the poverty rates in some of them.

The most significant effect of the dueling definitions, advocates say, is that many young people they consider to be homeless aren’t eligible for help.

Federal law prohibits schools from spending any of that money on housing these students.

And most youth experiencing homelessness by being doubled up or living in motels find themselves ineligible for HUD’s Rapid?Re-Housing program — a major pathway to stability, advocates told Stateline.

“If you’re running a program and you’re funded by HUD, based on their definition of homelessness, your hands are tied in terms of who you can serve,” said Amy Dworsky, a senior research fellow at Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago. “You can serve a youth that’s sleeping on the street, but you can’t serve a youth who’s sleeping on someone’s couch.”

A common meaning

To address some of the problems created by the different meanings, South Carolina this year enacted a law?that creates a common — and expansive — definition of “youth homelessness” across all state agencies.

The new definition includes anyone younger than 25 “who lacks a fixed, regular and adequate nighttime residence.” It specifically includes those “who are sharing the housing of other persons” because of economic hardship and those who have been forced to live in motels, hotels and camping grounds.

Notably, the new law also sets 24 as the maximum age for an unaccompanied homeless youth.

South Carolina’s new definition brings greater visibility to young adults who are unhoused, a cohort that can go unseen, said Rodd Monts, director of state policy for SchoolHouse Connection, a nonprofit focusing on education-based youth homelessness policies.

“The significance of this is that it captures all those young people, up to age 24, who may be doubled up or otherwise find a way to have a roof over their head temporarily,” he said. “But they are still homeless.”

But a similar effort failed in Texas, where bill sponsors wanted the state’s description of “homelessness” to match the federal Department of Education definition: families and unaccompanied youth who are couch-surfing, doubling up, migratory or living in places such as cars, transit stations and motels.

The bill passed the Texas Senate unanimously, but didn’t make it out of a House committee this spring.

A legislative?analysis?found that some observers think the state does not have funds to meet the needs of those experiencing homelessness, but the analysis’s fiscal?note?asserted that the state could use current resources even under the expanded definition.

This story is republished from?Stateline,a part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: [email protected]. Follow Stateline on Facebook and Twitter.

Some ‘in limbo’ more than a year after deadly floods hit Eastern Kentucky

Sarah Ladd — Thu, 17 Aug 2023 09:10:16 +0000

Nancy Herald, whose home was damaged in both the March 2021 and July 2022 flood, poses for a photo in her place of work, Gorgeous Grooms, in Jackson, Kentucky on December 19, 2022. Photo by Arden Barnes

More than a year after four feet of water flooded her house, Nancy Herald still doesn’t know when – or if – she’ll return to the home that’s been in her family for nearly five decades.?

Driving past the homeplace, even, is too painful. Sometimes she goes inside; sometimes she just passes quietly.

And sometimes, she said, she cries.?

Herald was one of many in Eastern Kentucky who had to evacuate when heavy rain and flash flooding hit Appalachian communities.?

Nancy Herald shows a photo of her home during the flood in Jackson, Kentucky, in March 2021, photographed on December 19, 2022. Photo by Arden Barnes

The water destroyed homes, displaced thousands of Kentuckians and killed at least 44 people. From July 26-30, 2022, up to 16 inches of rain fell, flooding creeks and rivers, according to the National Weather Service.??

Breathitt County, where Herald lives, was among the worst-hit areas. Many who suffered damage in 2022 were also victims of the February 2021 floods, meaning many had to rebuild their entire lives twice.?

Doing it a third time is unthinkable.?

“I still am not comfortable with … going back just because I’m afraid it’ll flood again,” Herald said of her homeplace. “And … I just don’t want to have to go through that again.”?

Herald isn’t alone in that worry.?

Dana Fugate, who lives in Jackson and serves as the secretary of the Long Term Recovery Team in Breathitt County, said “people are at different stages in recovery.”?

How far they’ve come depends on if they had flood insurance, among other factors.?

Some are back home after a year of rebuilding, Fugate said. “But then you still have people who are in limbo,” like the person who recently started rebuilding after a full year.?

“Resources are drying up, as they do,” Fuagte added. “Out of sight out of mind. And people don’t really understand that there’s still a great need.”?

Volunteer skilled labor is in high demand, she said. Breathitt Countians need plumbers and electricians and people to help remove debris.

“Some are just needing some finishing touches, some are needing major repair still,” Fugate said.?

Interested in volunteering?

Reach out to the Breathitt County Long Term Recovery Planning Team at [email protected] for more information about how to help.

One major change the federal government should address is making sure that recipients of disaster relief money get access to financial literacy education, according to Jamie Mullins-Smith, the co-chair of Breathitt County’s Long Term Recovery Team.?

That’s because not everyone knows how to manage thousands of dollars and how to invest it in a way that will aid their long term recovery, Mullins-Smith said. And once the money has been spent, it’s too late.?

“There needs to be some financial literacy and some accountability on the federal government with that. When they hand these individuals this funding, it’s very hard for them to understand exactly what that’s for,” she said.?

Sometimes that comes down to a recipient just not understanding the instructions.?

“We at a local level are kind of left to deal with that,” Mullins-Smith said. Case managers can help guide survivors and make sure they don’t get duplicate services. There are a little fewer than 400 people in Breathitt County still under case management, she said.?

Breathitt County Circuit Clerk James Elliott Turner. (Photo provided).

The biggest issue, several told the Lantern, is housing, which is a “major problem” that persists.

Breathitt County Circuit Clerk James Elliot Turner estimates about 500 people have left his county – many because of the “housing crisis.”

They’re going to nearby areas that have homes, like Perry County, he said.?“Population is dropping every day in this county until we get good housing – affordable housing,” he said.

Breathitt County was already poor before back-to-back floods, he said.

But the water meant “the?poor got poorer.”?

“The folks that have lost loved ones … don’t ever recover from that loss,” he said. But also: “People have lost their homes for a second time in less than a year, buddy, it’s just devastating.”?

Emotional toll tarries?

If you or someone you know is contemplating suicide, please call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988. The Disaster Distress Hotline is 1-800-985-5990.?

A year to a year and a half after a disaster, many people experience high levels of hopelessness and post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), according to The Center for Disaster Philanthropy.?

Jamie Mullins-Smith at work in Breathitt County. (Photo provided).

People working on the ground say some people in Eastern Kentucky have more depression, anxiety and general stress. When it rains, people worry.?

“The barrier is getting our survivors to understand that there is some value to addressing your mental health,” said Mullins-Smith. “We (are) promising you that if you will at least reach out that there (are) resources for you. There’s therapists, there’s coping skills that we can teach you.”?

Some don’t reach out because of the general stigma surrounding mental health, she said. Others just want to get back to the way things were.?

Many have an “overwhelming desire to want to find some normalcy,” she said. “So they prioritize their recovery over their mental health, which only exacerbates it.”?

Outside of therapy, there are coping skills that can help reduce and manage stress day-to-day that Mullins-Smith shares with people.?

They include:

Yoga?
Music
Relaxation?
Listening to a sound machine (but not rain)?
Journaling?
Setting realistic goals. You can’t rebuild a house in one day, but you maybe can paint a wall.?
Take a deep breath?
Walk away from what you’re doing and do a positive activity?
Close your eyes
Schedule time for yourself?
Get a stress ball?

Higher Ground?

There is a continued need for affordable housing, especially in the form of apartment complexes, in this area of Eastern Kentucky, locals said. ?

“There was a housing issue before the flood,” Fugate said. “And … afterwards, it’s just … 10 times worse.”?

Some intended to move to higher ground or away, Fugate said, but were not able to do so. Instead they returned to the floodplain, knowing they could lose everything again.?

“Hopefully, we’ve had our 1,000-year flood and it won’t happen again for quite some time,” she said.?

The state is working on “higher ground communities” to get people out of the Eastern Kentucky flood plains. Gov. Andy Beshear’s administration has announced four so far in Knott, Perry and Floyd counties.?

He’s said that “we can’t just rebuild, we also need to revitalize” Eastern Kentucky, which includes building in a way that is resilient in the face of possible future floods.?

Meanwhile, Herald can’t bring herself to sell her homeplace.?

She’s lucky, she said, to have found a new house outside the floodplain, on higher ground.?

She just watches as the seasons pass, studying the weather and what it does to houses that, like her old one, are in the floodplain.?

“Emotionally, psychologically, I’m not ready to let go of the old house yet,” Herald said. “There’s still a real strong emotional attachment there because it was my home for so long.”

Coming Friday: The high costs of flood insurance

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Fourth ‘higher-ground’ homesite for Eastern Kentucky flood victims will be in Knott County

McKenna Horsley — Fri, 28 Jul 2023 20:15:11 +0000

A storefront in Hindman says Knott County is "coming back better and stronger than before," in December 2022. On Friday, Gov. Andy Beshear said a second Knott County site will house survivors of Eastern Kentucky floods. (Kentucky Lantern photo by McKenna Horsley)

Another residential community to house survivors of last summer’s Eastern Kentucky floods will be in Knott County, along Chestnut Ridge Drive, Gov. Andy Beshear announced Friday.?

The news, along with the Thursday announcement of a Floyd County site, come on the heels of the one-year anniversary of devastating floods that killed 45 people. Flooding began on July 26, 2022.??

The latest Knott County site, which will be dubbed the Chestnut Ridge High-Ground Community, is near the unincorporated community of Soft Shell and is east of the Knott County Sportsplex, a press release from the governor’s office said. With amenities such as walking trails and outdoor recreation areas, the site covers more than 100 acres and will have single-family residential lots.?

Beshear, who traveled to Eastern Kentucky Friday, said in the release that “when the floods hit, we promised each other that we would be there for one another until every life and structure is rebuilt. Today we get to announce plans for a new, safe and resilient high-ground community in Knott County that will lift up this entire region.”

A time frame for the project to be completed was not included in the press release, but the property costs $2.37 million and is owned by Western Pocahontas Properties, a West Virginia-based company. Before the Beshear administration acquires it, a federal environmental review must be completed to determine if disaster relief funding from the Community Development Block Grant program is eligible for the site.?

Western Pocahontas will donate the right of way for an access road to the site. The state plans to use CDBG funds through the Kentucky Housing Corporation to build homes on the site.?

The press release said the acreage the state will develop will accompany land donated by Joe and Kelly Craft to the Foundation for Appalachian Kentucky. Joe Craft, now an executive of coal producer Alliance Resource Partners, is a Hazard native. His wife, Kelly Craft, is a former United Nations ambassador and unsuccessfully sought the Republican gubernatorial nomination earlier this year.?

The combined community will have about 200 homes, possibly with multi-family apartments.??

Other residential sites for flooding survivors have been announced in Talcum, which is near the Knott-Perry county line, as well as near downtown Hazard.

After flood anniversary, Beshear says $2 million will secure Floyd County rebuilding site

McKenna Horsley — Thu, 27 Jul 2023 21:23:55 +0000

Kentucky voters rewarded Gov. Andy Beshear for his efforts on behalf of Eastern Kentucky after devastating flooding. Above, Beshear spoke to media in Whitesburg after the flash floods of July 2022. (Photo by Michael Swensen/Getty Images)

The day after the one-year anniversary of devastating floods in Eastern Kentucky, Gov. Andy Beshear announced plans to provide 34 single-family homes to house flood survivors.

Beshear said Thursday that $2 million in Community Development Block Grant funds will be given to the county to acquire two vacant lots — a total of 34 acres — in Prestonsburg. The funds will be used to rehabilitate one home and build 33 new homes along Cliff Road and Old Cliff Road. No timeframe was given on how long the project will take to complete.?

According to a press release from the governor’s office, the lots are out of the flood plain. Kentuckians directly affected by 2021 and 2022 flood events in Floyd County will be housed in the homes.?

After the property is acquired, funding to help Floyd County build supportive infrastructure, such as water, sewer and roads, will be announced. The Mountain Housing Corporation will be the site constructor.?

“Housing remains the top priority as we continue rebuilding from the floods,” Beshear said in a statement. “We promised to be with Eastern Kentucky until every structure, home and life is rebuilt. We’re keeping that promise, and we’ll be back here soon with more updates on this project.”

Last summer, flooding killed 45 people across the region. Other “higher ground” sites have been announced in Talcum, which is near the Knott-Perry county line, as well as near downtown Hazard.?

Flooding began on July 26, 2022. Since then, residents, housing advocates and state officials have worked to secure permanent shelter for victims of the floods.??

Floyd County Judge/Executive Robbie Williams said in the press release that recovering from the floods “would take years” and added the county’s residents are “still standing, and we’re building a better future for our people.”?

“We celebrated a lot of good news today in Prestonsburg,” Prestonsburg Mayor Les Stapleton said in the press release. “We have more good news coming, and a lot of reasons to hope. We are grateful for these funds and will keep building a better future for our people.”

Beshear will travel to Eastern Kentucky again on Friday. While in Knott, Letcher and Perry counties, he will share more updates on initiatives to rehouse flooding victims.

Republican Attorney General Daniel Cameron, who is seeking to unseat Beshear in this year’s gubernatorial race, campaigned in the region Thursday. He had stops in Perry, Letcher, Harlan and Bell counties.

Donated site in Letcher County to house survivors of Eastern Kentucky floods

McKenna Horsley — Wed, 05 Jul 2023 19:08:26 +0000

In Letcher County, Gov. Andy Beshear announces plans for a housing development for flood victims, The Cottages at Thompson Branch in Marlowe. (Photo provided by governor's office)

Local, state and federal groups are working together to secure housing for flood survivors in Letcher County.?

The fiscal court of the Eastern Kentucky county previously voted to transfer about four acres of property to develop a small housing site near Whitesburg. The land has space for 10 housing units.?

According to a recent news release from the governor’s office, the manufactured homes will be known as The Cottages at Thompson Branch.?

Last July, devastating flooding struck Eastern Kentucky, killing 44 and destroying hundreds of homes.

Through FEMA’s Direct Housing and Sales and Donations programs, eligible survivors can purchase the homes. Money from the Team Eastern Kentucky Flood Relief Fund will also help families “prepare for long-term occupancy by adding a foundation, exterior touches such as porches, shutters and landscaping that together add beauty and resilience to the structures,” the release said.?

“This is a first-of-its-kind partnership with local, state and federal groups coming together to support this new, safe, high-ground community and 10 families who lost their homes in the historic floods,” Gov. Andy Beshear said in a statement. “The creative approach puts resources to work quickly and also creates a beautiful, resilient home.”

The Letcher County site is the latest in state efforts to rebuild homes in Eastern Kentucky. Beshear previously announced that 75 acres near the Knott-Perry county line would be used to establish a new community on “higher, stable ground.” Another site near Hazard was announced in January.?

Eastern Kentucky SAFE funds and a grant from the Appalachian Regional Commission will be used to make infrastructure for The Cottages at Thompson Branch permanent. Once complete, FEMA will move the first structures to the area. Eligible families will be contacted with additional details.?

Letcher County Judge-Executive Terry Adams said in a statement that the community “will be a nice addition to our county when it’s finished.” He added that he hoped the area would be “the first of many high-ground housing projects of this caliber” and “a model project” for similar efforts.?

In his weekly news conference last Thursday, Beshear said the Commonwealth Sheltering Program was sheltering 83 households affected by the Eastern Kentucky floods. At the time, 299 households had been transitioned out of the program.?

Screenshot of a slide from Gov. Andy Beshear’s June 29, 2023 press conference.

Small housing site planned near Whitesburg could be first new one fully occupied by flood victims

Ivy Brashear — Wed, 07 Jun 2023 09:40:09 +0000

An example of some of the terrain that puts flat sites in short supply. The view is from High Rock trail at Bad Branch Falls State Nature Preserve in Letcher County. (Letcher County Tourism)

Letcher County has given the state a 3.5-acre tract near Whitesburg to be used for a small housing development for victims of the July 2022 flood. It seems likely to be the first fully occupied such development.

The site, known as the Marlowe property, is on Sandlick Creek, less than a mile outside the Whitesburg city limits. Letcher County’s fiscal court voted to transfer the property to the state at a special meeting May 25.?

The site is just big enough for eight to 10 housing units, and is far smaller than donated sites in Perry and Knott counties that the state is also developing for housing. Modular housing is planned for the site, so it could be completed before the larger sites. It has already been leveled, and a road is in place. Homes at the site will be connected to City of Whitesburg sewer, and Letcher County water.?

A source close to the project, who did not want to be named because Gov. Andy Beshear is planning an announcement about it soon, said the state is working directly with the Federal Emergency Management Agency on it.?

FEMA will provide the one-, two- and three-bedroom homes, which will eventually be rooted to permanent, solid foundations that can withstand future disasters, the source said.?

Some infrastructure improvements must be made to the site, including water and sewer lines and other utilities, but for the most part the site is ready to go, the source said, adding that local officials, the Beshear administration and FEMA have already done much work to make the site ready for development.?

Letcher County has hired five engineering firms to work as a team and develop a comprehensive recovery plan for the county. Lexington-based QK4 Inc. was brought in to help consider infrastructure needs in the plan and potential future projects. While it is not working directly on the Marlowe project, QK4 Planning and Environmental Project Manager Eunice Holland said the project would likely eventually be included in the comprehensive plan.?

“Our job is to identify and develop a comprehensive plan to help the community recover from the flooding events and also be more resilient for future flooding events,” Holland said.?

The plan will consider existing and incomplete infrastructure, housing and economic development projects, in addition to new projects that need to be addressed after the flood. They will also help county and city officials apply for grants that could help with projects while the plan is still being developed. Holland said they hope to have a completed plan within a year.?

“If we’re a few months in, and we know of a source of funding they can apply for, we’ll help them,” Holland said. “We’re not going to wait because we don’t have time to wait.”

All housing development projects led by the state are intended to move people to higher ground, out of floodplains.?

Steep terrain in Letcher County has made it difficult to find enough flatter and higher ground for larger developments, Letcher County Judge-Executive Terry Adams told The Mountain Eagle of Whitesburg in discussing the transfer of the Marlowe property.?

The property was donated to the county 20 years ago as the site of an animal shelter, but the county joined a regional shelter instead. In the wake of the flood, and the housing crisis it worsened, the fiscal court and state officials revisited the site to consider it as a possible housing development.?

The Mountain Eagle reported May 31 that Beshear’s deputy communications director, Scottie Ellis, said the governor plans to make an announcement about the project “in the near future.”

This article was republished from The Rural Blog, a publication of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues based at the University of Kentucky.?

A lot of Kentucky seniors get teeth pulled — but have healthy drinking habits

Sarah Ladd — Fri, 02 Jun 2023 09:40:01 +0000

(Photo by Getty Images)

New data shows Kentucky among the worst states for key health points among senior citizens, including tooth extractions, food insecurity, insufficient sleep and more.?

The statistics, published in the America’s Health Rankings Senior Report in May, show Kentucky seniors have the most tooth extractions.?

It’s also the 49th worst for insufficient sleep, exercise and cognitive difficulties. Kentucky ranks 48th in the nation for food insecurity and 45th for obesity.?

Overall, Kentucky is the third most unhealthy state for older adults, healthier only than Louisiana and Mississippi.?

Dr. Michael Stockman, a geriatric physician based in Minnesota, said there is a “bright side” of the report.?

Older Kentuckians, generally, don’t drink too much or have severe housing insecurities and they consume sufficient fruits and vegetables.?

For older Kentuckians not to drink excessively “is great because excessive drinking can lead to things like liver disease, diabetes,” said Stockman, who works with UnitedHealthcare.“It can also interfere with the medications that people are taking as well.”?

The United Health Foundation released the report, which examines the health of older adults through the lens of 52 measures. Those measures include social and economic status, physical environment, clinical care, behaviors and more. The rankings are based on data available up to March 8, 2023.?

Still, Kentucky had higher rates of physical inactivity than the national average, the report showed, which Stockman said can itself lead to poor health.?

Nationally, 31% of seniors 65 and older are physically inactive, while the number jumps to 37% in Kentucky.?

“It’s important to do those simple daily things like walking 30 to 45 minutes a day to really make a positive impact on overall health and well being,” Stockman explained.?

Exercises like walking, stretching, yoga and tai chi can all help strengthen the body and prevent falls, which can lead to fractures, he said.?

Social isolation:?

Dr. Michael Stockman is a geriatric physician with UnitedHealthcare
(Photo provided).

Kentucky seniors are at high risk of social isolation, the Rankings report found, a fact exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.?

“The pandemic did really create a social isolation amongst all of us,” Stockman said. “I think seniors were disproportionately affected and it … worsened during that pandemic.”?

Kentucky ranks 46th for social isolation among older adults, per the report.?

“Being socially isolated puts people in a very vulnerable situation, particularly as they’re going through stressful life events common with aging, such as losing maybe a close friend or a family member, or as they move into retirement,” Stockman said. “Being socially isolated can lead to, really, a decline in a person’s cognitive functioning. It can increase the risk of depression and decrease the overall quality of life of older adults.”?

The bright side to that point, though, is that there are more households now with access to high speed internet than in 2019. The internet can help seniors gain access to telehealth appointments, stay in contact with family and friends and participate in social activities.?

Nationally, the 2023 numbers show a 7% increase in households of people 65 and older using high speed internet. In this metric, Kentucky fared better than the nation at a 9% increase from 2019 to 2021.?

During the 2023 legislative session, lawmakers passed and Gov. Andy Beshear signed a bipartisan House Bill that will allow Medicaid health providers to offer care via telehealth without being required to have a physical address.?

Other takeaways from the rankings?

Nationally, frequent physical distress increased 9% from 2020 to 2021. And, early death rates rose.?

“We know that the COVID-19 pandemic did have a disproportionate impact on older Americans,” Stockman said. “And that was reflected, really, in a continued increase in early death rate in the most recent data.”?

Other key points from the report include:?

The number of geriatric providers and home health care workers per capita both increased, meaning better access to care.?
Opioids were a “major component” in the continued rise of drug-related deaths among older Americans. Nationally, the number of drug deaths increased 43% between 2016-2018 and 2019-2021.?
In 2021, 5.6 million adults ages 65 and older lived in poverty, a 10% increase since 2019.
Utah, New Hampshire, Colorado, Minnesota and Vermont are the healthiest states for seniors.

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Plans advance for rebuilding flood-prone Kentucky communities on ‘higher ground’

Ivy Brashear — Wed, 24 May 2023 09:30:24 +0000

Land donated near Talcum in Knott County is slated to become the site of a new community. (Photo provided by the governor’s office)

The state has hired two engineering firms to plan and develop housing at two Eastern Kentucky sites for survivors from last summer’s devastating floods. Both are on former surface mines, and Gov. Andy Beshear indicated that others could be announced soon.

Beshear said last week that H.A. Spalding Engineers of Hazard will design infrastructure, including utilities, roads, bridges and sidewalks, at both sites. Bell Engineering, headquartered in Lexington, will design and manage development of homes, civic facilities and mixed-use residential buildings.

The two “high-ground communities” will be built on sites in Perry and Knott counties. The Knott County site is close to the Talcum community, near the Perry County line, and totals 75 acres. This property was donated by Shawn and Tammy Adams and could expand to nearly 300 acres. The Perry County site, 50 acres donated by the Ison family, is about five miles from downtown Hazard.

Beshear repeated that his administration is looking for more sites and said he hoped to have “a good update on that in the next week to two.”

Money from the Team Eastern Kentucky Fund will jump-start the project. The fund is also being used to partially finance small-project house construction with the help of local nonprofits. A Letcher County home was started in March, and four more are in the works.

Many victims are still in temporary housing; 114 households are still living in travel trailers, four are still living in hotels, and 14 are in state parks, according to the Commonwealth Sheltering Program.

The Spalding and Bell firms will coordinate with the state, Kentucky Housing Corp. and local nonprofits. Lisa Townes of H.A. Spalding said they look forward to the opportunity to be a part of building new communities for Eastern Kentuckians.

“All of us . . . know someone who lost their home and all their possessions, so this is very, very meaningful to us,” she said.

What kind of community?

Mark Arnold of Bell Engineering said his company is committed to building a residential community that “captures the spirit, heritage and history of Appalachia.”

“That’s where many of us were born, and where many of our families are from, and that’s what’s important to us,” Arnold said, adding that the firm doesn’t want to “build subdivisions where people live because they don’t have a choice (but) build places where people want to put down roots, build real community, and begin to really re-establish their lives.”

The state is “trying to build places where people want to relocate,” Public Protection Cabinet General Counsel Jacob Walbourn said at the East Kentucky Leadership Conference in Hazard on April 28. “Telling people in Eastern Kentucky they have to move is very dangerous, because it’ll create a lot of resentment.”

Eastern Kentucky is not about having all kinds of city things. It's about being able to go out in nature and explore and be outside, and you won't be able to do this on a strip job. I feel like they are trying to city-fy something that shouldn't be.

– Anna Eldridge, high school senior, Letcher County

Though officials say no one will be forced to move into the developments, Anna Eldridge, one of the young people invited to speak on a panel at the conference, opposes the plan though her family is still living in a trailer while they rebuild.

The high-school senior said she feels like it will cause more problems than it will fix, that there won’t be enough room for everyone in her Letcher County community to move, and she fears a loss of jobs in the community if people leave.

More than anything, she’s afraid such developments will take away from people the very things that she thinks makes living in Eastern Kentucky worthwhile.

“Eastern Kentucky is not about having all kinds of city things. It’s about being able to go out in nature and explore and be outside, and you won’t be able to do this on a strip job,” she said. “I feel like they are trying to city-fy something that shouldn’t be.”

Eldridge advocates rebuilding where individuals’ houses once were, in a creative way that incorporates approaches from other places where people have lived with and near flooding for generations.

However, state officials are focused on rebuilding homes out of floodplains, and this means moving to higher ground.

More money needed

Walbourn said at the conference that one of the biggest barriers is money. He said that for every dollar donated to the Team Western Kentucky Fund after that region’s 2021 tornadoes, only a quarter was donated to the Eastern Kentucky fund. There is about $13 million in the Eastern Kentucky fund, while the Western Kentucky fund has $52 million.

“I hope we as a state can come together to commit to Eastern Kentucky to do rebuilding0 right,” Walbourn said. “We need to stack and marshal resources.”

That’s why donations of land for housing projects are critical. They save the state money it would otherwise use to buy property and allows it to use those funds to hire engineering firms and others to manage development.

Arnold said he and his team are on the job as of Thursday’s announcement and are excited to get started. He was already thinking about new and different ways to design and build high-ground housing developments in Eastern Kentucky before the flood, so when Spalding reached out to bring in Bell as a partner, he leapt at the chance.

“We’re super excited and can’t wait to jump in,” Arnold said.

One of the first things Arnold said he wants to do is talk with flood survivors about what they want and need, so Bell can better understand their perspectives, and potentially implement those things in their designs. Arnold has worked with local partners in Mayfield for more than a year on plans for their downtown rebuild after a December 2021 tornado.

“When you come into a community that’s been devastated, it’s a different process,” he said. “You have to understand they’re dealing with trauma, and they may not be willing to talk yet” about plans for the future.

He said the projects in Perry and Knott counties are already well on their way, and that Team Kentucky and the myriad state agencies who have worked on them are handing the projects over with everything necessary in place and well-organized.

“We’re moving forward at a really good pace,” he said. “even though it doesn’t feel like it if you live there.”

This article was republished from The Rural Blog, a publication of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues based at the University of Kentucky.?

GOP’s desired work requirements for federal aid would kick roughly 21M from anti-poverty programs

Casey Quinlan — Mon, 22 May 2023 08:50:57 +0000

Supporters of House Bill 367 say losing food assistance would encourage able-bodied adults to get a job. Opponents say the bill would harm local economies, increase administrative burdens on school lunch programs and disqualify people for having even small savings. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Congressional Republicans’ efforts to slash federal spending by tying work requirements to Medicaid and SNAP would have far-reaching consequences for people with mental health issues, chronic health problems, and some people with disabilities if enacted, policy experts on anti-poverty programs say.

They say the work requirements as laid out by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s “Limit, Save, Grow Act of 2023” — the Republican plan to raise the country’s debt ceiling —? would be devastating for many Americans and hard for states to implement, especially in the thick of the pandemic public health emergency ending. The bill narrowly passed the House in April, 217 to 211 with four Republicans joining Democrats in voting against it. If a deal isn’t reached, the U.S. will default on its debt as early as June 1.?

Democrats have pushed back on the work requirements, but McCarthy has said they are non-negotiable. Reports that Biden is showing some flexibility on the issue have upset some Democrats. The House Freedom Caucus has also pushed for McCarthy to stop the discussions with the White House until the Senate passes the bill.

Ten million Medicaid expansion enrollees are at risk under the bill, according to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. The Health and Human Services Department estimated that 21 million people are vulnerable to the work reporting requirements. The Congressional Budget Office found that 1.5 million people would lose coverage and 600,000 would become uninsured. It’s possible that the CBO could be underestimating how many people would lose their coverage, some experts say. Although the requirements apply to every state, the CBPP explained in its analysis of the bill that “it would heavily impact people covered by the Affordable Care Act (ACA) Medicaid expansion.”

“People with mental health issues, people with substance use disorders, people with chronic health conditions and even forms of disability could be encompassed within the expansion population and would need to navigate an entirely new system that’s really not well-specified in the bill to get an exemption and we know that that sets up a massive coverage loss potential,” Allison Orris, senior fellow at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, told States Newsroom.

The bill includes work-reporting requirements for Medicaid that are even more severe than a 2018 Arkansas law that has since been blocked by the courts, said Edwin Park, a research professor at the Georgetown University McCourt School of Public Policy. Unlike other work requirement proposals, the bill would not exempt people during their pregnancy and into their postpartum period and there isn’t an automatic exemption for people receiving Supplemental Security Income because they have a disability or Social Security Disability Insurance. It would undercut gains made by Medicaid expansion because even people eligible could lose coverage because of the complexity of the “red tape” they would be forced to navigate, Park said. The unwinding of pandemic policies adds to the potential complications.

States with the largest number of Medicaid enrollees who would be subject to proposed work requirements

California 4,098,506

New York 2,349,525

Illinois 1,427,125

Pennsylvania 1,025,768

Michigan 930,133

Ohio 880,387

New Jersey 700,580

Louisiana 673,054

Virginia 655,359

Colorado 641,351

*In Kentucky, about 574,000 could be subject to the work requirements

Source: US Department of Health and Human Services

“You have all the coverage losses where some people are going to be inappropriately disenrolled, particularly for procedural reasons. They won’t return in the mail. They never got their renewal packet. … And then you have on top of that, this onerous work-reporting requirement with red tape and because states are so overwhelmed with unwinding over the next year or so, it’s hard to see how they could implement a work-reporting requirement that implements the exemptions,” he said.

Park added that House Republicans who characterize this provision of the bill, which requires recipients to work 80 hours per month, do community service or be involved in an employment program, as only affecting able-bodied adults without children is inaccurate.

“… Based on how this proposal has been designed, you know, it’s not targeted to that group at all,” he said.

He explained, “We know that many people who are disabled who are receiving disability benefits do work to a limited extent and they aren’t necessarily unfit for employment. There’s limits on how much they can work to maintain their benefits. But federal policy, up to this point, has been encouraging those with disabilities to work to increase their employment hours while being able to maintain their health coverage.”

Expanding SNAP work requirements

The SNAP work requirements are equally concerning to advocates. Currently 18- to 49-year-olds without children at home can only receive benefits for three months in any three-year-period unless they prove they’ve worked a 20-hour week. Under McCarthy’s bill, those work requirements would be expanded to include people up to age 55.?

Craig Gundersen, an economics professor at Baylor University whose research focuses on food insecurity and food assistance, said it may look like that the work requirements are successful because cases will fall, but the reality will be different.

“What’s going to happen is if you impose work requirements you’re going to have an increase in food insecurity in our country,” he said.

He said the bill’s provision on SNAP doesn’t make sense.?

“SNAP doesn’t discourage work. So why would you want to impose work requirements? The second thing is that SNAP is an anti-hunger program full stop,” he said. “That’s what it was designed to do. If that’s its main goal, why would we ever want to say to people that you have to work to get these benefits.”

Nine-hundred thousand people in the U.S. aged 50 to 55 are at risk of losing SNAP, according to CBPP.

The SNAP restrictions also make it harder for states to provide support for SNAP recipients dealing with unique circumstances that would exempt them from the three-month time limit to receive benefits. The number of exemptions states can use are currently tied to their caseloads and if they aren’t used, states can roll them over into the next year. McCarthy’s bill wouldn’t let states carry over unused exemptions.?

??Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) would also be affected by the stricter work requirements in the House debt ceiling legislation. Families subject to work requirements — 540,000 families — could potentially lose their cash benefits, the CBPP estimated, worsening child poverty.

Housing assistance, student loan forgiveness targeted

In addition to these effects on anti-poverty programs, many other services and benefits in housing and education would likely suffer from the huge cuts proposed in the bill. The CBPP’s analysis of this bill shows average cuts of 13% in 2024 even if cuts were evenly spread across discretionary programs.

The cuts that they're talking about here …, you're going to end up eliminating almost 300,000 families’ support for their housing. Not all of those families will end up being unhoused, but some of them will. It creates this downward spiral that is very challenging to recover from, especially as other benefits are cut.

– Don't forget to add author

The legislation would also kill Biden’s student loan forgiveness plans regardless of the outcome in the courts and nix student loan repayment plans that were designed to be more affordable for people with student debt. It would “likely eliminate Pell Grants altogether for 80,000 students,” according to the Department of Education.

“Here you are cutting one of the premier programs that serves low-income students who are trying to access this level of education, who have long been marginalized in the labor market,” said Katherine Gallagher Robbins, senior fellow at the National Partnership for Women & Families. “And what you’re saying to them is, ‘Oh, hey, by the way, we’re not even going to give you the support that will pay dividends for years to come in your own earnings.”

Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Marcia Fudge has estimated that nearly 1 million people could lose housing assistance and that nearly 120,000 people may be cut off from homelessness services.

“Stable housing is such an essential part of any family’s economic security,” Gallagher Robbins said. “ … The cuts that they’re talking about here …, you’re going to end up eliminating almost 300,000 families’ support for their housing. Not all of those families will end up being unhoused, but some of them will. It creates this downward spiral that is very challenging to recover from, especially as other benefits are cut …”

The ending of the pandemic public health emergency has already resulted in the loss of financial support for some families, and now with these potential cuts, the people who benefited most from the recovery would be hurt the most from this bill, Gallagher Robbins said.?

“We’re already seeing things like less access to school lunch, less access to the child tax credit,” she said. “So families are already struggling with what that looks like and that has been mitigated to an extent, obviously not fully, by the current strength of the economy. Everything is up for grabs here, basically, in terms of harming families who are already absorbing this most recent kind of cut in support.”

$124 million from feds will build hundreds of homes in tornado-impacted Western Kentucky

Liam Niemeyer — Wed, 26 Apr 2023 21:42:11 +0000

In this aerial view of Dawson Springs on Dec. 13, 2021, homes are heavily damaged from a tornado three days prior. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

FRANKFORT — Kentucky officials are opening up applications this summer for almost $124 million in federal funding to help rebuild housing and infrastructure primarily in tornado-impacted Western Kentucky, which Gov. Andy Beshear said could help rebuild around 600 homes.?

The federal funding from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) will go to rebuilding homes, rehabilitating and rebuilding rental properties and reinforcing electric and water infrastructure for potential future disasters. The funding is also directed to help some Eastern Kentucky communities that were hit hard by flooding in 2021, separate from flooding that devastated the region in the summer of 2022.

Beshear at a Wednesday news conference encouraged those impacted by tornadoes or flooding in 2021 and still in need of stable housing to reach out to local nonprofits or housing authorities about the new funding.?

“We’re taking a big step forward in helping our neighbors who are impacted by the tornadoes of 2021 and the floods of 2021. Many lost their homes, some lost everything that they own,” Beshear said. “We’re going to spread the wealth to those who need it the most.”

Eighty percent of this funding will be directed to Graves, Hopkins, Warren and Breathitt counties, while the remaining monies will go to 36 other counties.?

The Kentucky Department of Local Government (DLG) plans to open applications for local governments, nonprofits, private companies and other groups to apply for housing funding on May 1. Applications to reinforce and repair infrastructure will open on June 1.?

Beshear said he expects a separate tranche of HUD funding to be made available to the state to address the homes and infrastructure lost in the 2022 summer floods in Eastern Kentucky, something that Republican U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell has said will be near $300 million.?

A year after the tornado, campers at Camp Graves provided transitional housing for some who lost their homes during the December 2021 tornado. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Julia Rendleman)

Community leaders on the front lines of tornado recovery in Western Kentucky were enthusiastic about the federal funding but also made clear it would likely not solve the entirety of an ongoing affordable housing shortage.?

Mayfield-Graves County Long-Term Recovery Group Executive Director Ryan Drane said there was a “housing shortage crisis” on both ends of the state before tornadoes impacted Western Kentucky in 2021 and floods impacted Eastern Kentucky.

“We feel like this is going to be a great opportunity for many of the communities to, you know, on the road for recovery,” Drane said. “Is it going to make the entire region whole? I would say not. But we weren’t ‘whole’ before the disaster hit.”?

The DLG consulted last year with local housing authorities, federal officials and more to create an analysis of what unmet needs remained for housing and infrastructure in Western Kentucky following the tornadoes. That initial analysis found, even with the funding, there was more than $110 million in unmet needs to address housing.

“The discrepancies between the need and the funding are the result of the increased need for affordable housing,” the initial state plan stated.?

HUD announced tens of millions of dollars in additional recovery funds for Kentucky in January to reach the total of nearly $124 million the state is receiving, but even then the DLG’s latest plan states the “calculated unmet housing need will still not be met.”?

Adrienne Bush, the executive director of the housing advocacy group Homeless and Housing Coalition of Kentucky, said once the flow of federal funding into Kentucky ends, state lawmakers need to reassess what else needs to be done to address housing needs.?

“We’re going to spend a lot of time this interim talking about the remaining unmet housing needs in the context of the 2024 budget and what the state will need to put up in order to finish the job,” Bush said.?

Bush credited the GOP-controlled state legislature for passing a law this year to establish a rural housing trust fund supplemented with $20 million already set aside for disaster recovery by the state. A coalition of nonprofits this year had unsuccessfully asked the legislature for $300 million over two years for affordable housing construction.?

Kentucky suffered a shortage of almost 79,000 affordable housing units before tornadoes and floods destroyed and damaged thousands of homes, according to an analysis of data from the American Community Survey for 2016 to 2020.?

Local leaders from Western Kentucky who joined Beshear on Wednesday remained optimistic the funding would move their communities forward, including in the small city of Dawson Springs, hometown to the governor’s father, former Gov. Steve Beshear.?

“We’re seeing that rebuilding all in Dawson Springs, but there’s so many that can’t get there from where they are right now,” said Hopkins County Judge-Executive Jack Whitfield. “This funding is going to take care and help those so much who may not be able to otherwise afford a new house.”

A ’58 Ford is parked outside Main Street Sweet Treats and Eats Sept 9 in Dawson Springs, Kentucky. (Julia Rendleman for Kentucky Lantern)

Legislature approves $20 million for housing in disaster zones

Jamie Lucke — Fri, 17 Mar 2023 21:23:32 +0000

Natural disasters on both ends of Kentucky have increased the demand for affordable housing and rents. Delilah Jenkins, 6, runs home after getting off the bus last month at Camp Graves in Graves County where she lives with her family in transitional housing after being displaced by the December 2021 tornado. (Julia Rendleman for Kentucky Lantern)

FRANKFORT — Although it was much less than they had hoped, affordable-housing advocates in Kentucky are applaudin g the legislature’s decision to put $20 million into a new Rural Housing Trust Fund.

The money is not a new appropriation but comes from more than $400 million the legislature had set aside last year for disaster relief and recovery on both ends of Kentucky.?

??Final approval for the $20 million came Thursday night as lawmakers accepted legislation hammered out in conference committees.

On Friday, Adrienne Bush,?executive director of the Homeless and Housing Coalition of Kentucky, issued a statement thanking lawmakers and their leaders.?

The initial $20 million in seed money “will empower communities to scale up their housing response and finally allow Kentuckians to begin to rebuild their lives,” Bush said, while also allowing “communities to respond to current disaster housing needs, as well as respond to future needs in underserved communities.”

??Jim King, CEO of Fahe, a Berea-based nonprofit that works with other nonprofits to finance affordable housing, thanked Senate President Robert Stivers and the General Assembly for?“providing this initial funding to address the critical need for housing in the communities of East and West Kentucky still reeling from recent natural disasters.?

“We hope to continue working with state leadership to secure long-term investments in safe, stable housing that working families can afford,” King said.

Housing advocates said the state money will help bridge a gap while Eastern Kentucky waits for more federal disaster money to flow to the region. ?Ten Eastern Kentucky counties will share in $300 million in disaster funding from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Sen. Mitch McConnell announced this week.

Record floods struck parts of Kentucky in July. Bays Street in Jackson, the Breathitt County seat, was one of many places under water on July 28. Photo by Michael Swensen/Getty Images

Catastrophic housing situation

Even before tornadoes and floods wiped out thousands of homes, Kentucky suffered a shortage of almost 79,000 affordable housing units, according to an analysis of data from the American Community Survey for 2016-2020.?

After flash flooding last summer destroyed and damaged thousands of homes in Eastern Kentucky, some public officials said new housing construction had become critical to the region’s economic survival.?

“Perry County was in a housing crisis prior to the July 2022 flood disaster. Now we are in a catastrophic housing situation,”?Perry County Judge-Executive Scott Alexander said in January.?

Terry Thies, 70, who lost her home and her chihuahua to the flood, spoke to a rally of housing advocates on the Capitol grounds in February. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Jamie Lucke)

A coalition of nonprofits ?asked the legislature to put $150 million this year and another $150 million next year into?an Affordable Housing Emergency Action Recovery Trust Fund, dubbed AHEART, and to commit to increasing state support for affordable housing construction in future state budgets.

On Feb. 21, advocates rallying at the Capitol renewed their call for the legislature to tap the state’s record surplus, sometimes called the “rainy day fund,” to help finance housing. “Lord knows we’ve had some rainy days here in Kentucky,” Scott McReynolds,? executive director of the Housing Development Alliance in Perry County, told the February rally. The state’s rainy day fund has been projected to reach $3 billion by mid-2023.

Citing flood victims “buying storage sheds to live in because that’s all they can afford with their FEMA” assistance, McReynolds also said “you can’t start planning until you know your budget.”

Stivers told reporters that day that discussions were underway that could lead to housing legislation during this session.

The $20 million being set aside for housing comes from money the legislature last year put into State Aid Funding for Emergencies or SAFE: $200 million to recover from tornadoes in the west and $213 million after floods in the mountains. The newly-approved legislation taps the funds for $10 million each to be spent in the respective regions.

The housing provisions — added to House Bills 448 and 360 and finalized behind closed doors in free conference committees — create an 11-member Rural Housing Trust Fund Advisory Committee with the state agriculture commissioner as its presiding officer.?

The Rural Housing Trust? Fund would ?be housed in the Kentucky Housing Corporation and could receive state and federal money, grants and gifts. The fund can be used?to makes loans or grants for acquisition, construction or rehabilitation of rural housing units in areas impacted by the tornadoes and floods.

The Senate added a provision replacing the lieutenant governor with the commissioner of agriculture on the Kentucky Housing Corp.’s board of directions.?

Gov. Andy Beshear is expected to sign the legislation.

McConnell says $300 million coming from feds

Ten Eastern Kentucky counties also are in line for $300 million in federal assistance through a HUD disaster-assistance program, McConnell announced this week.

The Community Development Block Grant-Disaster Recovery program provides flexible funds for long-term recovery in communities affected by natural disasters, according to McConnell’s office. ?The money can be used for a variety of purposes, including helping local governments cover their cost share of federal disaster recovery programs from other agencies, such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Federal Highway Administration. Communities can also use these funds to address their unique housing needs and promote economic development.

The state will oversee the HUD funding to Breathitt, Casey, Clay, Cumberland, Floyd, Harlan, Johnson, Knott, Lee, Leslie, Letcher, Lincoln, Magoffin, Martin, Owsley, Perry, Pike, Powell, Whitley and Wolfe counties.

The federal government funding bill that Congress approved in December provides an additional $3 billion in CDBG-DR funding for the country’s hardest-hit communities, according to the news release from McConnell’s office.

“Senator McConnell was the only current member of the Kentucky delegation to support this legislation, which made today’s funding possible. In addition, as a senior member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, the Senator worked to secure funding for multiple federal programs that would support Eastern Kentucky’s recovery efforts, including the CDBG-DR program,” according to McConnell’s office.

An analysis??by the Ohio River Valley Institute and Appalachian Citizens Law Center estimates the cost to rebuild and repair housing lost to last summer’s flood will be $450 million to $950 million, depending on how many homes are relocated to less flood-prone areas. The lower figure is for rebuilding in areas that flooded rather than acquiring new sites at higher elevations. The report says that the higher-cost option could prove more economical in the long-run by?averting future damage and also likely saving lives during future floods.?So far state and philanthropic sources have provided $159 million for rebuilding and repairing housing, according to the report.

Senator says bill will address Kentucky’s housing needs; it’s just not written yet

McKenna Horsley — Fri, 24 Feb 2023 21:43:56 +0000

Flash flooding inundated much of Southeastern Kentucky in July 2022, including Breathitt County, above. (Photo by Michael Swensen/Getty Images)

FRANKFORT — State Sen. Brandon Smith is working on legislation that would address a growing housing crisis in Eastern Kentucky following last summer’s devastating floods.

Colleagues of Smith, R-Hazard, filed a shell bill, Senate Bill 286, amid the Senate’s deadline for new bills earlier this week and Smith’s absence. After becoming the primary sponsor Wednesday, Smith said the legislation could include some measures proposed by housing advocates. It’s currently titled “AN ACT relating to the East Kentucky State Aid Funding for Emergencies fund.”

During the special session last year, Smith filed a floor amendment to a flood relief package that would add $50 million for housing assistance but it failed to pass. This session, he was waiting to see what else might be proposed.

“I know a lot of other people have been talking about it, so I kind of stepped back to see some ideas, and I just didn’t see what I was looking for,” he said.

The senator said he did see some promise in a proposal called AHEART, or the Affordable Housing Emergency Action Recovery Trust Fund. A coalition of housing nonprofits and advocates of the proposal are calling on the General Assembly to invest $150 million in this session and another $150 million in 2024 to support replacing and repairing housing damaged by natural disasters.

Smith said he sees issues with just looking at building homes out of the flood zone, as parts of Eastern Kentucky flooded for the first time last summer. He questioned if there is enough high ground to go around. For this session, $150 million in funding is a feasible number, he said.

People in these communities are waiting on a solution, Smith said.

“’I’ve got people that they’ve already had to move them out of the hotels and moved them out of the (state) parks. They’re on couches. They’ve got kids that are trying to go to school and they’re waiting because they don’t want to leave.”

Almost seven months ago, flood waters ravaged Kentucky’s Appalachian region. At least 44 people have died from the flood. According to an analysis released Tuesday from the Ohio River Valley Institute and Appalachian Citizens Law Center citing data from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, 8,950 homes were damaged, including 542 homes that were destroyed and more than 4,500 homes that sustained major damage.

Earlier this week, residents from Eastern Kentucky and housing advocates, including supporters of AHEART rallied at the State Capitol to make a plea for a solution.

“Just take a ride through Letcher County, as well as other counties that flooded, you’ll see there’s a lot of need there,” said Arnold Weaver, whose family thought they would have to leave Kentucky until the nonprofit HOMES Inc. helped arrange to build them a new house on higher ground.

Senate President Robert Stivers has also filed shell bills earlier this week, one of which relates to the Affordable Housing Trust Fund. On Tuesday, Stivers said he was meeting with several people interested in housing.

Shell bills are pieces of legislation that can be amended after a chamber’s filing deadline.

Liam Niemeyer contributed to this report.

Housing advocates encouraged that Senate leader Stivers has filed possible funding vehicle

McKenna Horsley — Wed, 22 Feb 2023 00:23:44 +0000

Record floods struck parts of Kentucky in July 2022. Bays Street in Jackson, the Breathitt County seat, was one of many places under water. (Michael Swensen/Getty Images)

FRANKFORT — As advocates rallied at the Capitol to support affordable housing, especially for Kentuckians displaced by flooding, Senate President Robert Stivers said discussions are underway that could lead to housing legislation during this session.?

Robert Stivers

Stivers, R-Manchester, filed what?he called a “shell bill” that can be used as a vehicle for funding construction where housing has been lost to disasters.?Tuesday was the final day for filing new bills in the Senate. The House’s deadline for filing new bills is Wednesday.

Stivers’ filed Senate Bill 196,?identified as relating to the Kentucky affordable housing trust fund, but offering no other details.

“With a lot of questions out there, and we’ve been having meetings on this, we didn’t want there to be a situation that we couldn’t have a vehicle to work with,” Stivers said.?

Housing advocates welcomed Stivers’ remarks.

“We are grateful for Senate President Stivers’ attention to the commonwealth’s housing needs post disaster. We look forward to continuing conversations as this legislative response to the tornadoes and floods unfolds,” said Adrienne Bush, executive director of the Homeless and Housing Coalition of Kentucky.

Tom Manning-Beavin, president and CEO of Frontier Housing, said, “That’s encouraging that there’s a willingness to put a placeholder out there and to hammer out the details of something that can get passed.” Frontier Housing?builds affordable housing in 16 Kentucky counties,

Within the past two years, Kentuckians in the western part of the state have faced devastating tornadoes and in the east, severe flooding. Some steps have been taken to rebuild these communities, but non-profit organizations working in the regions say more resources are needed.?

Eric Dixon

On Tuesday, Eastern Kentucky residents gathered with representatives of housing nonprofits and advocacy groups on the Capitol grounds to highlight the need to sustainably rebuild communities.

Federal assistance won’t come close to need, analysis shows

Based on data from FEMA, 8,950 homes were damaged in the 2022 flood, including 542 homes that were destroyed and more than 4,500 homes that sustained major damage, according to a new analysis released Tuesday by the Ohio River Valley Institute and Appalachian Citizens Law Center

One of the report’s authors, Eric Dixon of ORVI, said that six in 10 households with flood damage have incomes of less than $30,000 a year.

Few had flood insurance, and households with lower incomes received less FEMA aid than households with higher incomes, according to the analysis.?

The cost to rebuild and repair housing lost to last summer’s flood will be $450 million to $950 million, depending on how many homes are relocated to less flood-prone areas, according to the report. The lower figure is for rebuilding in areas that flooded rather than acquiring new sites at higher elevations.?

So far state and philanthropic sources have provided $159 million for rebuilding and repairing housing lost to the floods. That amount covers just 17% to 35% of estimated need.

While Kentucky is in line for additional federal funding over the next few years, experience suggests it won’t come close to meeting need, say the two nonprofits. ?The largest federal funding bucket would likely be Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery Funds (CDBG-DR), but the amount available to Kentucky will not be announced for several more months.?

“After the 2021 tornado and flooding disaster, Kentucky calculated unmet needs for housing, infrastructure, economic revitalization, and public services to be over $202.3 million. Unmet housing needs alone were greater than $110 million.However, the total CDBG-DR award was $74.9 million, with only $39.9 million allocated for housing. Based on this example, it is probable that there will still be unmet housing needs even after the CDBG-DR funds are allocated and exhausted.”?

“Lord knows we’ve had some rainy days”

Advocates called on the legislature to tap the state’s record surplus, sometimes called the “rainy day fund,”? to help finance housing? construction. “Lord knows we’ve had some rainy days here in Kentucky,” said Scott McReynolds,? executive director of the Housing Development Alliance in Perry County.?

Scott McReynolds

“There are people buying storage sheds to live in because that’s all they can afford with their FEMA” assistance, McReynolds said. He added the legislature could help nonprofit housing builders by committing dollars to a trust fund because “you can’t start planning until you know your budget.”

Stivers, speaking to reporters, talked about the need for planning, including moving people out of flood-prone areas and how to provide infrastructure, such as water, sewer, electricity and roads. The 2022 flood covered places that had never flooded.

Stivers didn’t rule out the possibility of the shell bill becoming an appropriations bill. As a shell bill, SB 196 could be amended as discussions continue.??In the past, he’s commented on expanding the uses of state dollars already allocated to recovery in Western and Eastern Kentucky. During a three-day special session in August, the legislature approved a $213 million flood relief package but none of that money was designated for housing.?

Stivers also filed a second bill, Senate Bill 197, that relates to disaster recovery. He said the bills have different purposes.?

Displaced flood victims speak

Terry Thies

Several people who lost their homes to flooding spoke at the event organized by affordable-housing advocates; several said they feel forgotten.

Arnold Weaver said his family thought they would have to leave Kentucky until the nonprofit HOMES Inc. helped arrange to build a new house for them on higher ground. “Just take a ride through Letcher County, as well as other counties that flooded, you’ll see there’s a lot of need there,” said Weaver.?

Manning-Beavin, of Frontier Housing, read a statement from Magoffin County resident Benetta Gibson whose family is living with mold in their home as a result of last summer’s flood. A full-time college student and mother of five, she said she was told that FEMA denied her application for aid and an appeal because the family had stayed in the home after the flood “even though I didn’t have anywhere to go live with five kids for months and months and them in school, so I stayed in my home and risked it.”

As a result, she said, two of her children have been hospitalized with asthma which she attributes to the mold. Frontier Housing has plans to repair the home, answering her prayers, she said, but?“we are always going to have that fear. … I can’t go through another flood; the aftermath of one is so heartbreaking.”

Terry Thies, 70, who lost her home and her chihuahua to the flood, said she will be paying a mortgage for the first time but is grateful for the help she has received from the Housing Development Alliance in building a new home to replace the one where her grandparents and parents had lived before her.

The home, which was not in the floodplain but filled with 28 inches of water, was “the entirety of the inheritance I had from parents.” She said her community of Bulan in Perry County was pretty much destroyed and she has lost track of long-time neighbors forced by the flood to scatter.

“The legislature really needs to step up for us,” Thies said.

This story has been updated with additional information.

Eastern Kentucky Flood Relief Fund to help build eight new homes, help cover some home repairs

Lantern staff — Tue, 24 Jan 2023 21:12:27 +0000

The Team Eastern Kentucky Flood Relief Fund committed $600,000 in funds to build eight new homes in partnership with two housing nonprofits, the Housing Development Alliance in Hazard and Homes Inc. of Whitesburg, Gov. Andy Beshear’s office announced Tuesday.

The fund is providing $75,000 per home for building materials.

“While we are at the beginning of long-term rebuilding projects, we are also working to make an impact with new housing in the shorter term,” Beshear said in the release.

The fund is also assisting flood survivors with home repairs by providing $200,000 in matching funds through a partnership with Foundation for Appalachian Kentucky. The money will go directly to individuals and families located outside of a designated flood plain for essential repairs with no administrative costs.

“These funds provide an immediate impact on the number of houses we are able to build. Literally, overnight, hundreds of people lost everything they’d worked so hard for, and now, they are struggling to rebuild their lives. Each house is a promise of hope for a family,” said Scott McReynolds, executive director of Housing Development Alliance Inc.

“Housing can’t wait. Repairing and building homes is our highest priority and our No. 1 need across the region.?This matching grant means that 80 additional families can benefit from little- or no-cost repairs,” said Gerry Roll, chief executive officer of Foundation for Appalachian Kentucky. “We believe that reclaiming the power of community for Appalachian Kentucky begins with investing in the people rooted here.”

To date, the Team Eastern Kentucky Flood Relief Fund has raised over $13.1 million from more than 41,000 donors. To contribute, click?here. For other information regarding flooding in Eastern Kentucky, visit?governor.ky.gov/FloodResources.

Second ‘higher ground’ site for rebuilding flooded Eastern Kentucky communities is near Hazard

McKenna Horsley — Tue, 24 Jan 2023 20:44:09 +0000

Gov. Andy Beshear on Tuesday announced a second site on higher ground in flood-ravaged Eastern Kentucky —? this time near Hazard — where plans call for initially building about 150 houses.?

The project would be partially funded by the Team Eastern Kentucky Flood Relief Fund in partnership with local nonprofit builders, says a release from the Governor’s Office.

The 50-acre site, five miles from downtown Hazard, is near the Hazard ARH Regional Medical Center, schools and shopping centers. The first site, announced by Beshear in December and dubbed the Olive Branch community, sits near the Knott-Perry County line in Talcum.?

Beshear made Tuesday’s announcement with local officials at the Perry County Courthouse. A news release from the Governor’s Office said the Ison family contributed “prime land for the project.”?

“This land is located near the heart of Hazard and can be a real boost to the community. There’s really no better use for such a great piece of land than to improve housing. Better and more housing attracts better jobs and a better future,” Paul Ison said in the press release.

In a statement, Beshear said: “Rebuilding on high ground is a chance to lift up entire communities with upgraded infrastructure and safe, affordable, energy-efficient homes. But our work in Eastern Kentucky is not done until there is prosperity in the entire region.”

Southeastern Kentucky was devastated by flooding almost six months ago. The official death toll is 44. Rebuilding is on the minds of many residents and state leaders. Some advocacy groups have turned to the legislature to fund a $300 million emergency affordable housing package over the next two years, but a bill has not been introduced. Lawmakers return to Frankfort Feb. 7.?

The Governor’s Office said more parcels of the land in Perry County will be developed during later phases of the project.?

The state is evaluating sites for rebuilding in Perry, Knott, Letecher and Breathitt counties, which account for 75% of homes lost to flood damage. All potential building sites will have geotechnical testing during the planning and construction process, the Governor’s Office said.?

“To be at this point so quickly is a great day for the community. As we work to rebuild and recover, housing is one of the biggest issues that we face,” Perry County Judge-Executive Scott Alexander said. “Perry County was in a housing crisis prior to the July 2022 flood disaster. Now we are in a catastrophic housing situation. I want to thank Gov. Beshear and his team, as well as the legislators, for such a quick response to working with Perry County to help solve the housing situation.”

In Knott County, the early plans for the Olive Branch community included small, medium and large home lots as well as senior apartments, park and recreation space and an elementary school. In Tuesday’s press release, the Governor’s Office said the homes in Talcum will be partially funded by the Team Eastern Kentucky Flood Relief Fund.

“Initial planning has begun and will include an improved water treatment facility, roads and utilities for the area which will benefit the entire region,” the press release said of the Olive Branch project. “Infrastructure projects have multiple funding streams, including Eastern Kentucky SAFE funds” and federal American Rescue Plan Act funds.

Their family home is flood-prone. Flood insurance is too expensive.

Sarah Ladd — Thu, 12 Jan 2023 10:50:49 +0000

About 40 travel trailers sit in a lot along Lakeside Drive in Jackson on Dec. 20. Some have lived here for months. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Arden Barnes)

JACKSON — Last time she checked, flood insurance would cost Carolyn Combs and husband Lou about $1,100 per month.

That was before the 2021 and 2022 floods swept through her family’s home in Jackson, destroying everything inside.

“I couldn’t imagine what it is now,” Combs told the Kentucky Lantern in mid-December. “But I already work two jobs. That’s three car payments. I can’t.”

Carolyn Combs in her home in Jackson on Dec. 19. The Combs’ home flooded in both the March 2021 and July 2022 floods. Photo for Kentucky Lantern by Arden Barnes

According to the United States Census Bureau, the median household income in Breathitt County was $32,259 in 2021, roughly $20,000 less than the statewide median. That income comes out to about $670 a week.

A family making that salary and charged that amount for flood insurance would need to be able to devote about 41% of their income for that coverage.

Combs said it was her family’s lack of the expensive flood insurance that the the Federal Emergency Management Agency – better known as FEMA – cited as the reason for not assisting them financially in 2021 and 2022.

A FEMA spokesperson has not yet responded to a request for comment. The FEMA website, however, says the agency cannot duplicate benefits that insurance covers.?

The Combs’ experience may not represent everyone’s experience. In September FEMA reported that a flood insurance policy in Kentucky with the National Flood Insurance Program costs on average $1,174 a year, or ?roughly $98 a month. The cost varies based on the amount of coverage, deductible chosen and the flood risk or flood zone of the insured property, according to the FEMA release.

The Combs did not get the help they needed from the government, Carolyn said. But local nonprofits stepped up.

Neighbors, as well as national and Appalachian organizations, helped them get drywall, insulation, new flooring and more.

You don't leave home. You fix it, and you go back.

– Carolyn Combs, flood survivor and Jackson, Kentucky, resident.

A flood-prone lot

Lou’s grandparents built the original home back in the 1980s. It flooded that same decade for the first of four times while they’ve had it.

The family rebuilt higher, hoping the water wouldn’t reach them again. It did, though, in 2009. Then in 2021, and most recently in 2022.

Carolyn’s mother fell sick with COVID-19 right as the 2021 floods came. Mere months later, her mom died. And Carolyn lost all her belongings, including the clothes in the closet that still smelled of her.

“Everything that I had of hers from her funeral or that was hers personally, it’s all gone,” she said. “I didn’t get to save anything” except her mom’s Bible, she added.

She also lost all her daughter’s sports jerseys and old t-shirts. She’d planned to make them into a quilt to celebrate Maddie’s graduation next year.

Carolyn Combs points to her daughter, Maddie’s door in the basement of her home in Jackson on Dec. 19. Maddie, 16, lost all of her belongings first in the March 2021 flood and again in July 2022. Photo for Kentucky Lantern by Arden Barnes

Despite losing everything over and over, the Combs will stay in Jackson.

“People will say, ‘Well, I wouldn’t go back if I was you. I’d just go somewhere else,’” Carolyn said. “And I’m like, ‘you don’t leave home. You fix it, and you go back. Every step you get done is closer than what you were when you first started…you don’t leave home.’”

The family is painting their newly-replaced drywall and hoping to move back in by next summer.

“We’ll get back home hopefully a little bit after spring,” Carolyn said. “I was hoping sooner but I don’t think the weather is going to cooperate.”

Months in a travel trailer

Paul and Carrie, who declined to share their last name, have lived in travel trailers for three months.

The couple, who lived in a camper on land that’s been in the family since the 1970s, didn’t flood in 2021. The 2022 floods did not concern them at first.?Water had never come close to flooding their family land. They also didn’t have cable TV or cell service and didn’t know the forecast.

They just went to bed like any other night, they said. When they awoke, the floors were wet.

“It was raining,” Carrie remembered. “We thought we had a leak in the roof.” They got to work trying to find tarps for the roof and dry up the floor.

“I don’t think it dawned on us that it was coming up through the floor,” Carrie said. They stayed there for about a month while they tried to salvage what they could.

Finally, when their mattress turned black with mold, they knew they had to leave.

Carrie holds her dog, Angel, in the doorway of her and her husband Paul’s FEMA-provided travel trailer in the lot along Lakeside Drive in Jackson on Dec. 19. Photo for Kentucky Lantern by Arden Barnes

They said they stayed first at a temporary RV park in Hazard for a month then in Jackson for the past two. Their trailer is one of about 40 in the Jackson lot.

FEMA approved them for some help, Paul said, but they needed to find the physical title for their camper. That took a long time, and now they wait for processing.

“I don’t know what we’re going to do,” Paul, a National Guard veteran, said. The couple feels pressure to leave the temporary trailer, but they don’t have anywhere to go. Police patrol around the RV park, he and Carried said, and a staff member wears a gun, which the couple says feels threatening and disrespectful.

A Kentucky Emergency Management spokesperson said staff do not open carry and that some residents at this park had requested more police presence.

“We don’t want to be here any more than anybody else does,” Carrie said.

The couple does not plan to stay in the area. Once they get enough money together to buy a travel RV, they’re going to leave and travel the country.

Eyes on the government, legislature

Breathitt County locals say there’s a real need for road repair in the floodplains and surrounding areas. Water washed away blacktop and gravel, making it difficult for some to get in and out of their land.

Some say they want to see more dollars allocated to fix the roads and other infrastructure damaged by the floods.

Carolyn Combs speaks with Wallace Caleb Gates in her home in Jackson on Dec. 19. The Combs’ home flooded in both the March 2021 and July 2022 floods. Photo for Kentucky Lantern by Arden Barnes

“It’s going to cost a lot,” said?Wallace Caleb Bates, who is from Jackson and sits on the board of Aspire Appalachia. “You’re dealing with curvy roads, roads that naturally weather very easily because they’re either really low and near the water or they’re really high . . . it concerns me that, because there’s been this recent push surrounding infrastructure, that it won’t be considered for . . . flood stricken counties.”

Bates also said he’d like to see housing funding be a “major focus” of the 2023 legislative session.

“When you talk about economics, you look at housing,” he said. “When you look at housing, you look at jobs . . . it’s so broad, that no one person can fix it. It’s going to take years worth of fixing.”

But, there is concern among him and his friends that lawmakers don’t see enough potential return on investment when it comes to rebuilding Appalachian communities. That thought hurts.

Brandon Smith

At least one legislator,?Sen. Brandon Smith,?is determined to invest in the area properly.

Smith, who represents Breathitt County and other areas in Eastern Kentucky, recently told the Lantern that such investment in the area must happen before people leave.

“We’re going to reinvest back in your community because we believe this community is going to grow and not just die on the vine like every other coal town down here, just kind of to be forgotten to history,” Smith said while distributing water to people recently in Letcher County, a nearby neighbor of Breathitt. “We’re not letting that happen. I’m certainly not gonna let that happen on my watch.”

“Our whole country was built on the backs of people from Eastern Kentucky,” said Mandi Fugate Sheffel, who owns the Read Spotted Newt bookstore in Hazard and lives in Breathitt County. “Coal fueled the Industrial Revolution, and we continue to get sh*t on and sh*t on and sh*t on.”

Reporter McKenna Horsley contributed to this report.

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Months after Eastern Kentucky floods, survivors weigh the future

Sarah Ladd — Wed, 11 Jan 2023 10:50:31 +0000

Nancy Herald motions toward her home, damaged in both the March 2021 and July 2022 floods, while standing near the North Fork of the Kentucky River in Jackson on Dec. 19 (Photo for Kentucky Lantern by Arden Barnes)

JACKSON — When the 2021 Eastern Kentucky floods came, Nancy Herald’s basement filled to the rafters.?

She lost roughly 50 years of cherished Christmas decorations stored along the concrete wall, along with the washer, dryer and refrigerator.?

Because of that experience, the family thought they’d be ready when the 2022 floods came more than a year later. They emptied their basement of recently-replaced items and moved them upstairs, thinking everything would be safe on the main floor.

That was not the case. They lost all they’d replaced from 2021 – and much more.

Located?in Kentucky’s mountains less than two hours southeast of Frankfort,?Breathitt County was home to almost 14,000 people before the floods.

The Herald family is one of many here who were flooded both times.?They, and many others, are survivors twice over, left to ponder whether to uproot themselves and leave or risk rebuilding where they are, fearing more floods in the future.

A Kentucky Lantern reporter and photographer spent three days in mid-December reporting in Breathitt and Perry counties talking to survivors of the double floods about their experience rebuilding their entire lives twice.?

Many said they had just finished – or were well on their way to – replacing all the items lost in the 2021 waters when the 2022 rains came. They lost not only their progress, but more of their belongings than ever before.?

Some have since left the region while others say they will when they can afford to do so. Others still have no choice but to return to land owned by their families and rebuild there?in the floodplain.

No matter if they stay or go, they must rebuild a whole life from the ground up – a massive effort that some estimate could take a whole decade.

They want to see state and federal lawmakers invest in long-term housing solutions, which they say are a must for any stable economic rebound.

Jackson Mayor Laura Thomas walks through the basement in the Jackson City Hall which was damaged in the July 2022 flood, photographed on December 19, 2022. Photo by Arden Barnes

Jackson Mayor Laura Thomas foresees a long rebuilding process and says new housing is necessary to recovery.

Scott McReynolds, executive director of the Housing Development Alliance in Hazard, previously estimated the region needs at least 2,300 new or rebuilt houses at a cost of more than $600 million.

“It’s going to take years and we will have to find ways to recoup the lost population and the lost tax revenue,” Thomas told the Kentucky Lantern.

‘We knew the water was coming.’

After the 2021 Eastern Kentucky flooding, Herald and her family worked to repair the damage done to the home her parents built in 1974. They put in new drainage and repaired a crumbling retaining wall leading to the basement.?

“It cost us a lot of money that we had to pay ourselves,” the Jackson woman told the Kentucky Lantern. Those 2021 floods devastated the region, the worst in about half a century.?

The Federal Emergency Management Agency — better known as FEMA — recommended? she get flood insurance in 2021. But, because she was working to replace a lifetime of household belongings, she could only afford the minimal amount.?

Then, in summer 2022, “we knew the water was coming,” Herald said of the July floods that killed 44 people and displaced thousands.?

“We knew we didn’t want to stay in the house and be … marooned and stranded and maybe need assistance,” she added.?

So, her family left their home place before the North Fork of the Kentucky River could rise from behind the house and cut off their exit.?

Before leaving, though, she moved her replaced belongings from the basement upstairs, figuring the lower area would flood once again.?

Resting on the library shelf was her Grandma’s Bible. She left it behind because she thought it – and the whole upstairs – would be safe.?

Nancy Herald stands in her home, in Jackson, Kentucky, which is now gutted due to the damage caused by the Eastern Kentucky flood in July 2022, photographed on December 19, 2022. Photo by Arden Barnes

“When it was over the house had about four feet of water,” she said. “And the things we had carried upstairs were, of course, destroyed.”?

That family Bible was cemented with mud on the shelf and covered in mold. Along with many other belongings, Herald could not save it.?

“Physically it's very, very hard. Financially it is devastating. Emotionally it’s crippling, and mainly it is life altering.”

– Nancy Herald, flood survivor

‘Emotionally, it’s crippling.’

Find mental health services near you:

Text or call the The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988 from anywhere.

Call the?Kentucky River Community Care Center in Breathitt County at?606-666-7591.

Call the Kentucky River Community Care Center’s 24-hour crisis hotline at ?1-800-262-7491.

On top of the physical toll and loss of property, the floods were – and continue to be – traumatic mentally. Some said their anxiety increased during the disaster and continues to be severe.?

“Physically it’s very, very hard. Financially, it is devastating,” Herald said of the back-to-back floods that forced her family to start over again and again. “Emotionally, it’s crippling, and, mainly, it is life altering.”?

“We just heard stories of people holding on to each other and seeing family members washed away or holding onto a tree limb for six hours.”

– Jackson Mayor Laura Thomas

After a historic flood destroys your home twice, she explained: “You don’t think the same. You don’t view things the same way.”?

“I don’t think I am as sharp as I was,” she said, adding that: “I really think people suffer from PTSD. And people say, ‘Yeah, it’s OK to grieve.’ I know it’s okay to grieve, but I don’t have to? like grieving.”?

Mayor Thomas agreed. Her constituents’ mental health suffered from the catastrophic waters, she said. Even those who didn’t lose belongings watched as their loved ones and neighbors suffered.?

Jackson Mayor Laura Thomas at the Jackson City Hall in Jackson, Kentucky on December 19, 2022. Photo by Arden Barnes

“Just the whole disaster of seeing people in pain and seeing what people are going through…It has affected everyone,” she said. “We just heard stories of people holding on to each other and seeing family members washed away or holding onto a tree limb for six hours.”?

Those images and experiences stick.?

“Rain has taken on a whole new meaning since, even, ‘21,” she added. Whenever there’s rain in the forecast, she said, people worry about how many inches could come, what damage it could do. “And so we do hear a lot of that…that people are really stressed.”?

Mandi Fugate Sheffel, who owns the Read Spotted Newt bookstore in Hazard and lives in Breathitt County, helped distribute cash to survivors for EKY Mutual Aid.?

“We needed that because FEMA was slow,” said Sheffel. “People needed money immediately.”?

She passed out $200 per household at her discretion, she said. As she did so, she collected people’s trauma stories.?

“Every house we stopped at, everybody wanted to share their story…I think that’s where the mental health part comes into play for me is that we shouldered a lot of that, which is fine, but I felt like I was not qualified…” Sheffel said. “I couldn’t really give any feedback. I just listened.”?

“Because of the landscape, I think it's gonna be hard to get everybody out of the floodplain…And also, like, what even is the floodplain anymore?”

– Mandi Fugate Sheffel, who owns the Read Spotted Newt bookstore in Hazard and lives in Breathitt County

Mandi Fugate Sheffel, owner of Read Spotted Newt, a bookstore in Hazard, Kentucky, on December 20, 2022. Photo by Arden Barnes

Some survivors told the Lantern that now, five months later, they would benefit from on-the-ground mental health therapy.?

Many who spoke with the Lantern said they were so grateful for what they had – their life, health, and in some cases, their faith. Most pointed to neighbors who lost more than them and said they felt blessed.?

More than concern for themselves, many locals said they worried about the family down the street, a loved one, the children.?

‘You think these kids are okay until they start talking.’?

Margaret Henson is a library media specialist in the Breathitt County School system and teaches elementary school children. She said the floods have been especially hard on her kids.??

Grief counselors came into Marie Roberts, one of the schools where she works, after the flood. They gave children the option to draw some of the things they lost in the waters, Henson said. One child drew the school’s missing secretary. Another drew a family member found too late.?

Margaret Henson, a Breathitt county schools educator, stands outside Breathitt County High School, in Jackson, Kentucky on December 20, 2022. Photo by Arden Barnes

“You think these kids are okay until they start talking,” Henson told the Kentucky Lantern. She said the school staff’s strategy all semester was to put on a normal face for the kids, but it was difficult.?

“We always (ask) ‘what did you do this summer?’ and you try to get away from the flood stuff,” Henson said. “But when a child looks at you and says, ‘Well, I almost drowned,’?…what do you say to that, except for ‘we’re glad you’re here and that’s all it matters’?”?

Despite all they’re going through, Henson said her kids’ grades did not plummet and they let no work slip.?

Why stay in a floodplain??

Many left Breathitt County after the most recent flood, and others told the Lantern they plan to when they can. But many others plan to stay, rebuild, and hope floodwaters don’t come again for another 100-plus years.?

Despite their fears that the land might flood again, this place is home.?

“The culture here is a real appreciation and love for place,” explained Wallace Caleb Bates, who is from Jackson and sits on the board of Aspire Appalachia. “Land carries so much more value than just being property to live on. It’s something that folks pass down through generations. And for a lot of families who deal with intergenerational poverty, their land is something they can pridefully pass on … across generations.”?

Many who thought they lived high enough to avoid 2022 damage were wrong. The water kept coming, kept rising.?

“Because of the landscape, I think it’s going to be hard to get everybody out of the floodplain,” Sheffel said. “And also, like, what even is the floodplain anymore?”?

“The culture here is a real appreciation and love for place. Land carries so much more value than just being property to live on. It's something that folks pass down through generations. And for a lot of families who deal with intergenerational poverty, their land is something they can pridefully pass on…across generations.”

– Wallace Caleb Bates, who is from Jackson and sits on the board of Aspire Appalachia

Those who do stay will face many challenges in the coming years, a big one being the diversification of the local economy, and long term housing solutions.?

“If you’re losing…revenue and your budgets are based on a certain amount of revenue, then … there is … legitimate concern that the city could charge the people additional tax dollars to make up for the loss,” said Mayor Thomas.

But, she wants to avoid tax increases. “I don’t believe in that,” she said. “I think that we need to look for creative ways to expand the tax base and to … bring in new people and you can’t bring in new people if you don’t have anywhere to house them. And we need jobs, we need industry.”?

The push and pull between long-term economic growth and immediate survival is an “ongoing chicken-egg thing” there, she added.?

Bouncing back could take a decade, some estimate. ?

Some locals estimate it will take Jackson five to 10 years to recover from the double flooding, provided it doesn’t happen again in the near future.?

Herald’s flood home is now gutted, cold, empty. The river bank is gone and the cliff above the water is closer to the house now. Dried and muddied corn stalks, trampled into the ground, missed their chance at harvest.?

The invasive kudzu that washed in with the 2021 floods stayed and took over the back yard. It masks only partially the upside-down shed at the back of the lot. Herald doesn’t know where it came from.?

She also doesn’t know if she’s coming back to this house. She received $11,000 from FEMA in 2022 after an agent called the structure a “total loss.” The family now lives in a home about a half mile away.?

“Right now, we don’t have plans to go back,” she said. “Honestly, I want to see if it floods this winter. And if it floods next spring. I want to see how much more erosion there is. … And I keep coming back to this, but it is so true: psychologically, emotionally, I’m not ready to let go of it. Because it’s home, even though home is where I live with my family.”?

She walks through the skeleton of the flood house and she shakes her head over and over. Nothing left but beams where walls once were. She points to the place on the wall where the lost Bible sat. Downstairs, there’s still dried mud on the basement ceiling pipes.?

Maybe the structure will be home again, Herald muses. Maybe.?

But: “It’s scary…because you don’t know what’s coming next.”?

She always comes back to the water, the worry over losing everything again.?

“Maybe it will happen again and then again maybe it won’t,” she said.? “That’s the thing, that uncertainty. You just don’t know. That’s why we aren’t willing to take a chance on it. We just don’t know if we’re going to go back or not.”?

For now, the stray calico cat her family calls Floodgate – who appeared after the summer disaster – meanders in the abandoned yard.?

Floodgate the cat eats food left out by Nancy Herald’s brother in Jackson, Kentucky on December 19, 2022. Photo by Arden Barnes

YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE.

Some fear a region’s future hangs on legislature’s support for emergency affordable housing

McKenna Horsley — Wed, 11 Jan 2023 10:40:55 +0000

Flash flooding inundated much of Southeastern Kentucky in July 2022, including Breathitt County, above. (Photo by Michael Swensen/Getty Images)

FRANKFORT — Without significant state funding for new housing, “we’re going to experience the largest out-migration in Appalachian history,” Sen. Brandon Smith of Hazard told the Kentucky Lantern in a telephone interview just before 2023 began.

Yet, despite the thousands of homes lost to last summer’s flooding, no significant housing proposal emerged during the legislature’s first week in session — from lawmakers or Gov. Andy Beshear.

Smith’s nine-county district in southeastern Kentucky includes places heavily damaged by flooding, where he says one of residents’ biggest needs remains securing food.

“I have a hard time talking about it. I think people have — even on the floor of the Senate? — know I get emotional, but I have seen what’s happening here up close and so personal that I will never forget it.”

Major natural disasters have hit the eastern and western regions of Kentucky in the last 13 months, accelerating the need for housing replacement and repair. In response, a coalition of nonprofit housing organizations is asking the legislature to create a $300 million emergency affordable housing trust fund, but has yet to find a sponsor for the proposal.

Smith said the nonprofits’ plan would be “a tremendous start in the right direction” and that he was open to sponsoring a housing package. Bills appropriating state money must originate in the House.

Smith, a Republican, said many legislators care about the issue and that his message to constituents is: “We’re going to reinvest back in your community because we believe this community is going to grow and not just die on the vine like every other coal town down here, just kind of to be forgotten to history. We’re not letting that happen.”

Looking to the legislature

The only concrete action introduced in the legislature so far is House Bill 89, sponsored by Rep. Derrick Graham, D-Frankfort, which includes Beshear administration funding priorities, including money to build a veterans center in Bowling Green.

HB 89 would provide $15 million from the state’s General Fund for the state’s existing Affordable Housing Trust Fund in the 2022-23 fiscal year.

The legislature’s Republican leaders have said they are reluctant to open the state’s two-year budget in a non-budget year for any but a few priorities, including the veterans center.

The House has already approved another cut in the state income tax, at a cumulative cost of $1.2 billion a year. The state is running a record revenue surplus, pushing up the Budget Reserve Trust Fund, or rainy day fund, to $2.7 billion.

Robert Stivers

After Beshear’s State of the Commonwealth Address last week, Republican Senate President Robert Stivers said the legislature has a couple of options to address housing recovery: appropriating more money or broadening the use of funds already allocated. He estimated that $80 million to $85 million of $200 million allocated for the West Kentucky State Aid Funding for Emergencies (SAFE) has been drawn down and about $40 million has been drawn down from the East Kentucky SAFE fund. More funds may be spent soon as construction increases.

Beshear and the legislature responded to Eastern Kentucky’s record flooding during a three-day special session in August that approved a $213 million relief package. Smith unsuccessfully pushed for? an amendment providing $50 million in affordable housing aid.

Smith’s proposal was rejected at the time out of concern such an appropriation could jeopardize federal funding for flood victims, but some ?lawmakers suggested housing could be revisited in the regular session, which resumes Feb. 7.

Filling gaps in federal aid

Housing coalition members say their proposal is designed to fill gaps in federal funding and to leverage funding sources.

“FEMA was never intended to be an organization to make people whole,” said Chris Doll, assistant director of the Housing Development Alliance in Hazard. “We can discuss whether that should be the way it is. That’s the way it is,” said Doll.

The maximum from FEMA for losing one’s entire house in last summer’s flood disaster is $37,900, said Doll, whose nonprofit serves Breathitt, Knott, Leslie and Perry counties.

Doll’s boss, Scott McReynolds, executive director of the Housing Development Alliance, has estimated that 2,300 new or repaired homes are needed at a cost of more than $600 million.

It’s difficult to pin down the number, Doll explained, because not everyone is self-reporting and the number rises as homes are going from repairable to non-repairable. For example, someone might leave wet insulation in place so pipes won’t freeze only to have mold in the basement six months later.

The coalition is proposing the Affordable Housing Emergency Action Recovery Trust Fund, or AHEART. The plan calls on the General Assembly to invest $150 million in this session and another $150 million in 2024 to support replacing and repairing housing damaged by natural disasters.

The coalition also proposes that? the General Assembly beef up the state’s existing Affordable Housing Trust Fund in 2024 by about $115 million and double the deed transfer tax from $6 to $12. Proceeds, from the tax, paid each time a residential mortgage is recorded with a county clerk, goes into the state’s existing Affordable Housing Trust Fund, administered by the Kentucky Housing Corp. It now generates $4 million to $6 million a year. With the proposed change the deed tax would generate $10 million to $12 million annually for affordable housing.

If the General Assembly approves the coalition’s proposal, potential benefits could be vast, said Fahe’s Director of Advocacy Maggie Riden. Fahe is a Community Financial Development Institution (CDFI) that serves central Appalachia and is based in Berea.

Secure housing can attract employees and businesses, she said. There is also potential to blend state resources, federal COVID-19 recovery and natural disaster aid dollars together within the next five to 10 years.

An inflection point

“Places like rural Appalachia have incredibly aged housing stock, and that is true in Eastern Kentucky, and frankly, to a degree in Western Kentucky too,” Riden said. “So, if we can take this moment as an inflection point, and invest in houses that can withstand increased heat, increased cold, that are built at higher elevation, by and large, we won’t be in the same position (in) five or 10 years when another event occurs and we’re having to rebuild communities from scratch.”

The AHEART proposal puts the legislature in a powerful position to use the state’s surplus to help communities recover, Riden said, especially since federal resources can be slow to arrive.

Groups supporting AHEART include developers, financial counselors and housing groups such as HOMES, Inc., the Housing Development Alliance and the Kentucky Affordable Housing Coalition.

“When the most recent round of flash flooding occurred, it became pretty apparent that we needed a collective and really thoughtful response to rebuild in a way that really maximizes resiliency,” Riden said.

Before the most recent tornadoes and floods, Kentucky had a shortage of 79,000 homes for low-income households according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, using data from the American Community Survey.

Brandon Smith

The coalition’s funding request falls short of overall need because it takes into consideration the state’s current capacity to build and subsidize housing, said Adrienne Bush, executive director of the Homeless and Housing Coalition of Kentucky —? “middle ground between need and what communities can do.”

Doll, of the Housing Development Alliance (HDA) in Hazard, said limits include money, carpenters and land available to buy. The inflated cost and shortage of building supplies also complicates rebuilding,

Before the flood, HDA was building 20 houses a year and doing repairs on 50 to 60, he said.?“Now thousands of people need new homes and repairs.”

State funding would help housing organizations ramp up and hire more construction workers and subcontractors. “Everybody is stretched pretty thin right now,” said Doll.

Smith, a businessman who was elected to the House in 2000 and to the Senate in 2008, said that after the flood many people had to make a decision about living in temporary housing, living with family members or if they should leave the area.

He was delivering water to a food bank in Jenkins as he spoke to a Lantern reporter and said that seeing the floods’ effects on his home region has changed him.

Smith added that housing is only one need as food insecurity also has increased. “Everybody can do something to help and that’s what I encourage you to do.”

Jamie Lucke contributed to this reporting.

Voters embraced affordable housing initiatives. Advocates say Congress should do the same.

Casey Quinlan — Thu, 15 Dec 2022 23:57:32 +0000

Voters in Colorado approved a statewide affordable housing initiative in November; while voters in nine cities across the country OK’d measures to finance the construction of affordable housing, preserve existing rental properties and support renters. But as housing costs soar, analysts and advocates say more needs to be done and argue that federal action is needed.?

In November, Colorado voters passed Prop 123, which will allow 0.1% of the state income tax rate to be used to increase the affordable housing stock among other provisions to help the unhoused. This man, who was living in an encampment in Boulder last year, said he had been on a housing wait list for a long time. (Derek Miles for Colorado Newsline)

Robert Silverman, a professor at the department of urban and regional planning at the University at Buffalo, said the affordable housing crisis we’re seeing today has been many years in the making.?

“It’s a structural problem with the housing market, where housing prices keep going up, costs of construction have increased, and incomes haven’t necessarily kept up with that part of the market,” he said. “It’s been something that’s been brewing for a couple of decades now. And the policy response, although there has been some, hasn’t been large enough to really wrap its arms around the entire problem.”

Higher building costs, a shrinking supply of low-cost rental units and more people with higher incomes choosing to rent rather than buy are driving the increase in higher-priced rentals and corresponding decline in low-cost units, according to a 2020 report from the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University.

Over the past five years, rent increased on average 5.8% year-over-year but saw the steepest increase — 14% — from 2021 to 2022, according to Credit Karma’s analysis of rental data. Meanwhile, the Census Bureau’s five-year survey shows that 40% of renters put 30% of their income toward housing. Higher home prices — the median sales price for a home in the third quarter was 10.6% higher than a year ago — and high interest rates are also combining to keep people from buying a home.?

In response, voters across the country showed their concern about the lack of affordable housing by saying yes to millions of dollars in housing bonds and grants to address the issue. Among the measures passed:

Colorado voters passed Prop 123, which will allow 0.1% of the state income tax rate to go toward a number of grants and programs to increase affordable housing, assist unhoused people or prevent eviction, and provide rental assistance, among other provisions.?
In Buncombe County, N. C., voters agreed to a $40 million bond for affordable housing. While voters in Charlotte approved a $50 million bond package for the city’s housing trust fund to provide financing for affordable housing projects. Charlotte needs 32,000 affordable housing units, according to the city government’s website.
Palm Beach, Fla., voters approved a $200 million bond to build 20,000 new units of both discounted and market-rate units by 2032.
A $50 million affordable housing bond intended to create 2,000 units was approved in Kansas City Missouri. It will focus on housing that would cost between $550 and $750 in rent each month.
Columbus, Ohio, voters OK’d $200 million to go toward the building of more affordable rentals, efforts to house and assist the homeless and the preservation of existing affordable housing, as well as funds to make homeownership more affordable in the area.

“These bond issues are one way to address [affordable housing], but they’re also a political indication of the degree to which voters recognize there’s a problem that has to be solved,” said David Dworkin, president and CEO of the National Housing Conference. “When we look at the broad range of proposals that have been approved, I think we also can see a signal that people get it. There’s a problem. And we’re going to have to pay to help fix it and it’s not going to fix itself now.”

Carlie Boos, executive director of the Affordable Housing Alliance of Central Ohio, said that inflation has created an “immediate need” for the affordable housing bonds. People are overcrowding their apartments to cover rent and the length of stay in homeless shelters is getting longer as families have nowhere to go, Boos said.

“The way that inflation is pinching everybody’s budget is making construction and building for housing demand harder and harder to do. So there’s an immediate need,” she said.

Natural disasters on both ends of Kentucky have increased the demand for affordable housing and rents. In this aerial view, floodwater surrounds a house in Breathitt County in July. (Photo by Michael Swensen/Getty Images)

IMPACT Community Action, an anti-poverty organization based in Columbus, told an ABC affiliate that there were 2,000 evictions filed in September for Franklin County. The annual point-in-time count for Columbus and Franklin County’s unhoused population in January, 2022, was 1,912 people, with 342 people completely without shelter. Community Shelter Board, the? nonprofit that organized the count, cautioned that the numbers did not paint a full picture because the Omicron surge made counting more difficult.

The preservation of affordability in housing is also key to tackling the crisis, Boos said.

“We know that there’s maintenance issues and rehabilitation issues and there’s properties that are affordable naturally, but it’s because they’re substandard naturally,” she said. “We don’t want people to have substandard housing because it’s the only thing they can afford.”

But Columbus residents won’t feel the effects of the bond measure overnight, she said, which is why she said state leaders should use pandemic relief funds from the American Recovery Plan Act to support the housing infrastructure in Ohio.

The Coalition on Homelessness and Housing in Ohio has called on Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine and the Ohio General Assembly to support spending $308 million in American Recovery Plan Act funds to build more affordable housing and improve current housing, among other housing efforts.

Moving into homelessness?

Andy Paul, one of the founders for Asheville for All, a group that advocates for “housing abundance” in Asheville, the county seat of Buncombe County, said the affordable housing problems facing the city are similar to many areas of the country. Paul said that tourism and retirees have created more housing demand, and that Asheville’s expected population growth necessitates building more homes. He said he hopes that affordable housing bonds can help meet some of that need in the coming years. Buncombe County’s residents are expected to increase by 80,000 people by 2045, according to two firms, the French Broad River Metropolitan Planning Organization and Woode & Poole Economics.

The annual count of unhoused people in Buncombe County in 2022 was 637 people, a rise of 21% over last year’s count. The majority of unhoused people — 57.8% — became homeless while living in Asheville.?

“We don’t blame people for wanting to move here. The solution is to just solve the problem. But that does create pressure,” Paul said. “And it means people can bid up land value. They can bid up home prices. And so it absolutely causes displacement of people that maybe grew up in Asheville.”

Peter LiFari, executive director at Maiker Housing Partners, a public housing authority in Adams County, Colorado, said that Congress often treats housing an “afterthought,” by keeping funding for housing affordability low. According to a 2021 report co-authored by LiFari and Evelyn Lim, from Common Sense Institute, an organization that provides research on Colorado’s economy, the state has to provide 54,190 new housing units each year over a five-year period to make up for lack of building during the Great Recession and to address future housing needs.

LiFari said he is “bullish on” Prop 123, which moves money from a general fund to a fund dedicated to affordable housing and allows local governments the right to opt in. But he added there will be challenges. If not enough governments enroll, there is some possibility that state lawmakers could direct the funds elsewhere. Local governments have until Nov. 1, 2023, to opt in so that their projects can benefit from the fund. By December 2026, the state’s housing division will begin to analyze whether local governments have met their growth targets.

How the federal government could help

Dworkin, with the National Housing Conference, says that there is much more governments can do to address the affordable housing crisis.? Localities could reduce regulatory barriers, like zoning restrictions, that make it harder to build high-density housing. But he added that Congress also needs to act.

He pointed to a Nov. 28 letter from a bipartisan group of more than 50 members of Congress to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy that stressed the need to once again boost the Low Income Housing Tax Credit. The credits, which the federal government issues to states, are then awarded to developers of affordable rental housing to be used for financing. In 2018, Congress boosted the tax credits by 12.5% but that increase expired in 2021.?

The letter also advocated for lowering the test of funding a development with 50% private activity bonds to 25%, which would allow states to fund more projects. Both strategies would make it easier to increase the affordable housing stock.?

Members of Congress have been focused on coming to an agreement on various tax issues before the end of the year, including bringing back certain business tax breaks and expanding the child tax credit, but it’s unclear if the issue will be settled by the time the new Congress begins.

Silverman, with the University at Buffalo, said the Housing Choice Voucher Program, also known as the Section 8 program, also could be much larger to meet more people’s affordable housing needs.

“Half of the households that are eligible for vouchers aren’t even on the waiting list. And so there’s a lot of demand for housing subsidies for renters nationally out there and just expanding those programs would do a lot to meet some of the affordable housing needs that are already out there,” he said.?

HUD programs addressing affordable housing issues have only had incremental increases over the years that just don’t keep up housing demand, he said.

The Biden administration announced a Housing Supply Action Plan in May, including a call for Congress to provide billions in HUD grants to increase affordable housing units, pressing states and localities to use American Rescue Plan Funds to build more housing, and leaving federal properties to affordable housing developers for reuse. In November, several White House officials, including Domestic Policy Advisor Susan Rice, National Economic Council Director Brian Deese, and American Rescue Plan Coordinator Gene Sperling had a meeting with advocates and experts in housing policy to talk about rental affordability and tenants rights.

Dworkin, who attended the meeting, said, “I think the White House is very focused on identifying bipartisan opportunities to make progress on this issue.”

LiFari said policymakers at all levels of government need to prioritize this issue immediately.

“The housing shortage now, the homelessness crisis, is acute. It’s horrible. It’s a humanitarian crisis,” he said.

Kentucky tornado survivors living in limbo

Liam Niemeyer — Wed, 30 Nov 2022 11:00:25 +0000

Downtown Mayfield on Nov. 18, 2022. Damage from the December 2021 tornado still dominates the view. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Julia Rendleman)

MAYFIELD?— Makayla Puckett didn’t feel comfortable with talking about what happened until recently. She would speak about that December 2021 night and have to sometimes stop herself, the trauma too much to recollect.?

The 25-year-old mother of two kids remembers squeezing into a small closet of their Mayfield home with her partner, the train-like roar of an EF-4 tornado tearing through their small Western Kentucky community. The wind blew underneath the closet door as Puckett screamed for God to protect her family; she had never been religious up until that night when her town changed forever.

“A couple of months after it happened, I drove down there again, and I just completely bawled, just crying as I went by,” Puckett said. “That whole street is wiped out.”?

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Puckett’s sister, Stacey, was one of the first people to arrive at their damaged 11th Street two-bedroom home. She took Puckett’s older daughter, 6-year-old Delilah, to her home on the other side of town that was untouched by the storm the morning after, the sunrise showing the damage that had been done.

“She was the first person that had taken my daughter and made sure that she did not see anything,” Puckett said, her voice choking. “She is the one that has cooked us homemade meals and made sure that we were safe and warm.”

After the tornado, Puckett’s family had to move from their two-bedroom rental, the cold seeping inside because of a lack of electricity. The four of them eventually decided to move into Stacey’s home on West Willow Drive, sharing a single bedroom for several months. It’s where Puckett’s youngest, 18-month-old Khaleesi, first learned to crawl. But they eventually decided they needed their own space, especially with a recent ADHD diagnosis for Delilah.?

They found that space at Camp Graves, a nonprofit formed in the wake of the disaster to provide transitional housing for those displaced. They’ve lived in one of a row of travel trailers the past two months, the small home filled with clothing and baby pictures.?

“We’ve gotten blessings left and right since we’ve been here,” Puckett said. “Everyone needs to be looking at the next couple of years for everybody that has been affected. Because it’s going to take that long to be able to recover from this, and I don’t think we’ll ever recover mentally from it.”

Robert Johnson, 35, stands with his partner, Makayla Puckett, 25, children Delilah Jenkins, 6, and Khaleesi Johnson, 1, and Makayla’s sister Stacey Feezor outside their camper at Camp Graves where they live in transitional housing after losing everything in the December 2021 tornado, on Nov. 18, 2022 in Graves County, Kentucky. (Photo by Julia Rendleman for Kentucky Lantern)

The Puckett family’s housing challenges almost a year after a violent tornado outbreak tore through Western Kentucky reflect a reality faced by many other survivors in Mayfield, a city of about 10,000 that is trying to keep its residents, businesses and community together.?

The Western Kentucky region saw a sprawling trail of devastation from the December 2021 outbreak, including one that stayed on the ground for over 165 miles. The toll from that tornado, starting in Tennessee before reaching Mayfield, included 57 deaths and more than 500 injuries, also damaging and destroying thousands of homes.

Some survivors who lost their homes who were living in state park lodges and hotels are now in a housing limbo — living in trailers, crowded in the homes of friends or family, in their cars — waiting for a permanent home they can call their own to arrive. That day may be years away.

A surgical strike on rental housing

Mayfield was an economically depressed community before the storm, with an estimated 35% of the city in poverty — three times the national average — according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The median household income sits at a little over $36,000, around the income limit set for a family of four in Kentucky to qualify for food stamps.

Tom Waldrop, who’s been a realtor in Mayfield for over four decades, said while some neighborhoods were spared by the tornado, the majority of homes hit were low-income rentals.?

“The swath of the tornado as it came through Mayfield was almost a surgical strike,” Waldrop said. “I’ve heard numbers north of 75% of the property that was destroyed — the 400 units that were destroyed — were rental housing.”

In the initial days after the tornado, community landmarks were disfigured beyond recognition, historic downtown churches reduced to a pile of strewn bricks, the county courthouse steeple sheared off while gaping holes of shattered glass scarred storefronts. Many of those landmarks have since been torn down, leaving empty space, some still strewn with rubble, that expands across the central part of town. Other residential streets remain untouched by the disaster including the local schools, conveying a sense of normalcy in a community that’s experienced anything but.?

Waldrop serves as the co-chair for a committee focused on housing, part of a local volunteer group gathering feedback and planning the community’s recovery. He said some landlords weren’t insured and many that were didn’t receive enough insurance funding to rebuild; the higher costs of home rebuilding due to supply chain bottlenecks and federal interest rate hikes make it more prohibitive.?

Landlords may be repairing some of their rental housing, he said, but not all. Several of the federally-subsidized apartment complexes in town were hit, too.

The Eloise Fuller Apartments, formerly a hospital in downtown Mayfield that was turned into 61 apartments meant for the elderly, is being torn down and replaced with just 15 apartments. Windhaven Apartments, which had more than 50 units, hasn’t moved in any former tenants because electric lines and transformers are still being installed, according to a secretary for the company that owns the complex. The Mayfield Housing Authority has long waiting lists for its apartments; there are more than 700 requests for one-bedroom units. ?

“We’ve got to have housing, we got to have scale, and we’ve got to have it quick,” Waldrop said. “Because these people that are living with a brother-in-law, are living in a FEMA trailer, living in a hotel room in a surrounding community — it’s my belief that if they see sawdust and they see shingles and they see progress, they’ll hang on. But if they don’t see progress at scale, they’re gonna try to find other places to live.”?

Sonny Gibson, a local landlord who owns more than 100 properties in the city, said he’s heard from other landlords that are raising monthly rents for some of their apartments to make up for repair costs after the tornado. He said he probably will raise rents on some of his properties, but by no more than 10% because of the economic situations of some of his tenants.

“So many people are on fixed incomes,” Gibson said. “You can only get so much blood out of that turnip and the turnip dies. So you have to be mindful of where people are economically.”

Damage left from the December 2021 tornado can still be seen in downtown Mayfield, Friday, Nov. 18, 2022 in Graves County, Kentucky. (Photo by Julia Rendleman for Kentucky Lantern)

Finding shelter

The depleted rental stock forced at least one Mayfield couple to look almost an hour outside of the community for a place. Ashley Prince and her boyfriend Dylan had moved to Eddyville in Lyon County after the tornado demolished their three-bedroom rental on West Walnut Street in Mayfield.

The storm ripped through the early-20th-century home’s walls and buried Ashley, 26, in her crawl space underneath debris. The tornado toppled the water tower next to her home, a cascade of water pushing her out of the rubble. She tore a ligament and broke a bone in her leg, injuries that she still deals with.

Their rental in Mayfield had issues — mainly water leaks — but it was affordable at less than $500 a month. She said the three-bedroom rental in Lyon County — where the median gross rent is a little over $600, according to the U.S. Census Bureau — was going to be $1,200 a month, something they could only manage with rental assistance. But they were evicted from the place because she never received the assistance.

“Landlords are taking advantage of it, that people need housing,” Prince said, adding that “$1,200 a month for a three-bedroom house is outrageous.”

The two were forced for a few weeks to live in their vehicle, a 2002 Dodge Caravan, something they could only afford with the $1,800 they received from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.?

It was her family that ultimately helped her find some temporary stability: They moved into her mother’s place just north of Mayfield. They’ve lived there for about six months with her mother and father along with her brother and his wife who were also displaced by the tornado.

Ashley Prince, 26, and Dylan Prince, 28, stand for a picture at Camp Graves where they hope to find transitional housing. They lost everything in the December 2021 tornado. (Photo by Julia Rendleman for Kentucky Lantern)

“My mom’s like, ‘If you don’t move back in here, I’m gonna come and get you,’” Prince said. “She’s pretty much the only person we’ve really had to lean on.”

The couple recently applied to live in transitional housing in Camp Graves, the nonprofit in southern Graves County, to have their own place for themselves and her two kids.?

“I know several people who lived on the same block as me who are living with family members right now, and to have something available to live in while you’re waiting for a more permanent solution is everything. Not having to feel like you’re a burden to your family is everything,” Prince said. “I hate having to stay with my parents, especially since I’m getting up near 30 years old and I have kids. It makes me feel like I’m burdening them. They never say anything, and they don’t make me feel like I’m a burden. I just feel that way.”

Slow progress

A number of nonprofits — local and international — have tried to fill in needs for both temporary, transitional housing and more permanent housing in Mayfield, but the ultimate goal of those efforts could be a long road.

Samaritan’s Purse, an evangelical Christian humanitarian aid organization, is building around 60 homes to become a brand-new subdivision on the outskirts of Mayfield. The homes are specifically being gifted to former renters who lost their homes. Makayla Puckett’s family — who was living from paycheck to paycheck with the salary from her partner’s warehouse job — is one of the families receiving a home there.?

Tim Cottrell, who manages the construction of the subdivision for Samaritan’s Purse, said those homes will take time.

“We’re just trying to build as fast as we can,” Cottrell said. “We’re going to be here probably two years.”?

Gov. Andy Beshear allocated $16 million from the state’s tornado relief fund to support nonprofits building permanent homes, including the local nonprofit Homes and Hope for Kentucky, which?has built at least 14 homes for former homeowners who were displaced in the tornado.

The local long-term recovery group has also started an effort to repair and renovate 25 vacant homes by Christmas for former renters, an effort that the group’s executive director, Ryan Drane, calls “an extremely aggressive goal.”

“As long as there are survivors that want to become homeowners and can prove that it’s financially sustainable for them, and that we can continue to get funding and have volunteers come in, we’re going to continue this program,” Drane said. “Having people become homeowners, they really become a part of the fabric of the community and enables them to put down roots in the community, and that’s one of the main things that we need.”

The long-term recovery group plans to have displaced survivors pay rent based on their income for a year, then give them the home at a discounted rate. The survivors will also take classes in finance and home ownership, with the group offering survivors an opportunity to buy the home at the end of that year of renting.

Drane said he appreciates that the state legislature had allocated $200 million earlier this year to rebuild infrastructure, repair schools and bolster the budgets of local governments in Western Kentucky, but he wishes there was more flexibility with the funds to better meet the specific needs of each impacted community.?

He also realizes that the home rebuilding process is a long one. The Kentucky Department for Local Government is allocating nearly $75 million in federal funds through new programs, with a planned launch this spring, to incentivize landlords to repair their rentals and to help homeowners and other entities build new homes.?

“It takes a while for money to flow from the federal government or the state government,” Drane said. “Especially when you’re talking about new construction, then it takes a while to build something.”

Office manager Cassy Basham stands outside of container homes Nov. 18, 2022 at Camp Graves, which provides transitional housing for those in need, in Graves County, Kentucky. (Photo by Julia Rendleman for Kentucky Lantern)

Waiting for a future

But until these permanent homes are repaired and rebuilt, displaced tornado survivors in Mayfield remain in housing limbo waiting for their future.?

A group of local churches in Graves County has built 20 tiny homes that are almost all occupied, filled with families and the elderly. The few travel trailers at Camp Graves also are serving as transitional housing, and the nonprofit is still seeking funding to build more tiny homes of its own.?

Dakota Moore, 21, a tornado survivor, recently moved into a trailer at Camp Graves. He was working the night of the tornado at Mayfield Consumer Products, a local candle factory, when it collapsed on top of him. He was able to pull himself out of the rubble and help pull out more than a dozen of his fellow coworkers. Nine people died in the factory collapse.?

“I had about an inch and a half length of glass in my arm,” Moore said. “I didn’t realize it until one of the people that were helping me pull people out, because I gave him a flashlight, is like, ‘Hey dude, you’re bleeding.”

The candle factory is expanding a facility north of Mayfield to hire workers previously laid off because of the disaster, but is also facing charges of federal workplace safety violations along with allegations by former employees that they were retaliated against for cooperating with the workplace safety investigation. Mayfield Consumer Products denies the allegations and is contesting the federal charges.?

Moore soon learned that the duplex rental that he and a friend lived in on Sixth Street was destroyed. His friend’s mom gave him a car, a Toyota Corolla, that she was given after the tornado. He used that car to couch surf with people he knew around the region, sometimes staying the night in the car.?

“I don’t like staying in places too long because I felt like a burden,” Moore said. “I was staying with my ex for a little because she’s the only person that I actually talk to.”?

For him, having a place at Camp Graves is a relief from that burden. When he leaves his job at a nearby Dollar General, he returns to a home where he can plan a future.

“It feels a lot better than staying in my car or staying in other people’s houses.”

Dakota Moore sits in the front seat of his car that he’s slept inside some nights this year. On those nights, he would push the car seat down and use blankets to keep warm. (Photo by Liam Niemeyer for the Kentucky Lantern)