CROG consultants: regionaffordability driven more by incomes than extreme price spikes; renters most burdened

At a CROG virtual meeting, consultant Don Poland of Goman and York presented an analysis of housing markets and affordability across the 38-town CROG region and urged local officials to focus on reforms that reduce the time, cost and risk of new development. "Housing affordability is more of a problem of income," Poland told attendees, adding that "renters are the most burdened."

Poland framed affordability two ways: households may earn too little to access ownership, or housing may be priced too high. For the CROG region he said the data point toward the income problem: using a regional median home value of $364,000 and prevailing mortgage rates at the time of analysis, a household would need about $130,000 in income to keep ownership costs below 30 percent of income. Poland demonstrated the sensitivity to interest rates — reducing the mortgage rate in his model to 5…