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For years, Gina Battani has tried to find an affordable place to rent in Johnston so her children can stay in their school district, a stipulation of her shared custody agreement. 

She's found nothing big enough for her family for less than $1,600 a month — more than half of the income she receives from veterans disability compensation and monthly child support. 

On top of rent, Battani is paying for electricity and water. With money tight, she's chosen to forgo cable TV, limits how many miles she drives each month and has little, if anything, left for extras for her 14- and 12-year-old children. 

"I'm paying too much in rent, that's my issue," said Battani, who's studying for a master's in public administration at Drake University and advocates at the state Capitol for survivors of intimate partner violence through her nonprofit, RISE Beautiful Foundation. "If I could just find affordable housing it would make all the difference in the world." 

Thousands of central Iowans are in a similar predicament: They can't find an affordable place to live, whether it's near suburban workplaces or schools, and are forced to either spend beyond their means or move elsewhere and face long commutes. 

It's a national issue, felt acutely in the Des Moines metro: At least 25,000 homeowners and 29,000 renters are cost-burdened, according to a regional housing study released last year, meaning they pay more than 30% of their income on housing costs, including utilities, a threshold defined by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. 

Nearly half of those renters, like Battani, are considered severely cost-burdened, meaning they spend more than half of their income on housing. 

Suburban communities, especially, fall far behind in offering affordable alternatives for their low-wage workers. The city of Des Moines is home to 71% of the metro projects built using low-income housing tax credits, despite having 42% of the population in 11 communities analyzed by the Des Moines Register. The remainder is split among 10 suburbs. 

HUD's data does not include other affordable housing units, mainly in older buildings, and the Register's analysis did not include newer developments built without tax credits. But housing advocates say HUD's data provides a reasonably accurate snapshot of where affordable units are located since new developments, due to the rising cost of construction, rarely can be built without financial help. 

As suburban communities continue to grow, generating low- to moderate-wage jobs in retail, food service and health care, the crisis will only worsen, said Russ Frazier, president of Anawim Housing, a nonprofit affordable housing developer in Des Moines. 

Cities must take a hard look at their housing inventory in order to provide residential opportunities at all wage levels, he said, because it's clear not everyone who works in the suburbs can afford to live there. An estimated 20,000 low-wage workers in the Des Moines metro commute to the suburbs from the city for work, according to the regional housing study. 

"We certainly believe that moving affordable and workforce housing out of the urban core is very important. Obviously, that diversifies choice — just because you make less money than somebody else does, doesn't mean you shouldn't have choice in your housing," Frazier said. "And we need to get out of the business of clustering our poor." 

What is affordable housing and who lives in it?

The term affordable housing can mean a lot of things. Many assume it's housing for the poorest of poor or recall the post-World War II public housing projects that fell out of favor by the late 1960s, though there are still about 1 million units across the nation. And while they're included, it's a broader category. 

In any given city, affordable housing should be available, based on the 30% ratio, for people from minimum-wage workers and retired seniors to the highest earners, said Eric Burmeister, executive director of the Polk County Housing Trust Fund. 

Lately, Burmeister said, the discussion has turned to "workforce" rather than "affordable" housing — a phrase advocates feel focuses on housing as a right for every person and family, based on who is fueling the economy. 

"So if you have a plant or a facility that has a mix of 20% high-paying jobs, 50% middle-income jobs and 30% low-wage jobs, then the housing choices around that facility should match the income demographics," he said. 

Entry-level teachers, social workers and medical assistants would all qualify to live in housing built with low-income housing tax credits. So would all of the 1,000 workers Amazon is hiring at its new fulfillment center in Bondurant. 

A single person making $37,464 a year or less (60% of the area median income in 2020) qualifies to live in those units. Their rent would max out at $937 per month. "What I've tried to point out to people is this could be your son or daughter. They're in their first job after they get out of school, whether it’s high school or college, and the income they’re making is low to moderate income," said Clyde Evans, director of community and economic development for West Des Moines. "These are working adults. They're paying taxes and working hard." 

And it's these lower-wage jobs that have been coming to the region, making up a growing share of its total employment. The increase of metro employment in low-paying industries like entertainment, food service and accommodations, as well as education, health and social services, outpaced the rate of nationwide job growth from 2000 to 2017, according to a regional workforce housing strategy devised in response to the regional housing study. 

The biggest job gains over the next two decades are expected to be in health care and social assistance, including positions for home health aides, personal care aides and physician assistants, which tend to pay lower wages than the metro's median income, according to the study. 

To accommodate the region's expected growth across all job sectors, central Iowa will need to add 57,179 housing units. To be affordable to the workers holding those jobs, nearly half of them will need to be priced between $87,500 and $175,000 for an owner-occupied home. 

That range is below the 2019 median home value of $179,900 for Polk County in the latest U.S. Census report, and far below the $248,100 median for Dallas County, the metro's most populous suburban county. 

To be affordable, rent should be between $625 and $1,250 a month. Polk County median rent in the census report was $910, and $1,045 in Dallas County, both near the upper end of the range. 

Low-income homes are concentrated in urban core

Developers of affordable housing have long focused on Des Moines because it is generally more supportive of such projects, making it easier to win low-income housing tax credits, said Jack Hatch, principal of Hatch Development Group, which specializes in affordable housing. The Iowa Finance Authority administers the highly competitive program with about $9 million it receives annually from HUD. The Iowa Finance Authority weighs several factors for every submission, including construction costs and the population it serves. But if a project does not have municipal support, it tends to not score well. 

That's not to say these projects don't get built in suburban areas. Des Moines has 96 developments HUD terms "active," meaning they're monitored to ensure rents are capped at $937 for tenants earning 60% or less of the area's median income. But there are another 40 in Altoona, Ankeny, Bondurant, Grimes, Johnston, Pleasant Hill, Waukee and West Des Moines, according to the HUD data. 

And two-thirds of the 12 metro projects awarded since 2017 have been in the suburbs. They likely are still under construction or near completion, so they're not counted in HUD's data on active developments. 

"I would say it's only been within the last couple of years that we've seen some of those suburbs start to open up to the idea of affordable housing," Frazier said. "And so as communities start to open up to the idea and loosen their guidelines, or their unspoken guidelines, to deter affordable (housing), you're starting to see more and more development there." 

Still, the data show that West Des Moines and Ankeny, the metro's largest cities after Des Moines, are falling short of building their share of affordable housing, based on their share of the region's population, which is about 13% apiece. Ankeny has just 3% of the active and approved developments. West Des Moines has 6%. The workforce housing strategy identified both cities as not having enough housing for lowwage workers, despite rapidly growing housing stock and new jobs. 

Ankeny: 'Market-driven approach' — not policy 

Ankeny City Manager David Jones said he believes the community has more housing choices than it might appear, pointing to four low-income tax credit projects open and operating, and one, Ankeny Lofts, approved in 2018. He also said Ankeny has a supply of older housing stock that would naturally be more affordable than new construction. 

But the city does not have a formal policy in place that identifies what type of housing it needs to accommodate workers of all incomes and how its leaders can help facilitate that development. "In Ankeny, we have taken a market-driven approach to residential development. So some cities ... might be incenting developers to include a certain level of affordability, in a multifamily project for example," Jones said. "In Ankeny, we don't incent residential development at all, with being the fastest-growing city of its size in the Midwest." 

That poses a problem for developers looking to offer affordable rents, Hatch said. Financial incentives are integral to keeping rents low while making a construction budget work, he said. 

Each affordable housing development Hatch builds has up to 12 layers of financing, whether it's tax credits, tax abatement, tax increment financing or grants, on top of development costs and traditional bank loans. It's a complex process used to cover the costs of construction without needing to charge market-rate rents. 

The rent at the Hotel Maytag Apartments in Newton, for example, would be 40% more than the current $650 a month had the layers of financing not been in place, Hatch said. 

"This could not have happened without two things: The city being so committed and understanding that (this) is not low-income (housing); this is really workforce housing," he said. " ... And two, the commitment from my tax credit investor and the Iowa Finance Authority who are putting together financing tools to help get this done." 

Instead of financial incentives, Jones said, the Ankeny City Council has focused on lowering the property tax rate to make development more competitive. If the city were to provide focused tax breaks — say, for affordable housing — that would mean less flexibility to lower rates overall, he said. 

"And so to the extent that you start to move toward incenting residential development, you undermine those efforts" by lowering the tax base, Jones said. Still, the tax rate has become a deterrent for national affordable housing developer Zimmerman Properties, which opened Villas at Meadow Springs for seniors 55 years and older at 710 South Ankeny Blvd. in 2018. 

The Ankeny City Council denied a request by Zimmerman for $400,000 in tax increment financing to help offset the cost of construction. The company was able to complete the project, thanks to low-income housing tax credits and a low-interest loan from the Polk County Housing Trust Fund, but it did so without a profit, said Bob Davidson, chief financial officer. 

"I don't think we'd be able to build that same property up there today," he said. A big factor, he said, is the property taxes: Though Ankeny has the fourth-lowest rate in Polk County, Zimmerman Properties has a $111,000 tax bill for the 48-unit development. That works out to almost $200 a month per unit, and rent for a one-bedroom unit ranges from $354 to $705 a month, depending on the tenant's income. 

The company would like to construct more units in central Iowa, but "without having (tax increment financing) or some other kind of soft subsidy, the numbers just don't work up there right now," Davidson said. 

West Des Moines is working on a plan 

West Des Moines, by contrast, has put a renewed focus on affordable housing after the city conducted its own needs study, released in 2018. 12/23/2020 Des Moines' suburbs are slow to build housing that workers can afford 

The study identified four programs, all geared toward low- to moderate-income residents, starting with incentives for upper-story housing in the Valley Junction main street business district. West Des Moines plans to turn its focus now to providing grants to homeowners to repair substandard properties in Valley Junction, as well as contributing $400,000 toward a low-income tax credit housing project, Evans said. 

But favorable financing doesn't remove all obstacles. Affordable housing advocates agree that the challenge in building units for all income levels isn't just financial, but perceptual. 

Evans, as community and economic development director, said he has seen a shift toward more public support for affordable housing, though the community still has some hurdles to overcome. 

In August, neighbors filed a petition against an affordable housing project for seniors, saying they did not feel it would be "appropriate for our family-oriented environment due to multiple safety issues." Their petition said Anawim's proposed housing project would affect the safety of a nearby bike trail and would diminish their property values. (Frazier said he thought the neighbors were unaware that it was housing for seniors, and assumed it was for the homeless population that Anawim also serves.) 

While the city council supported the project, Anawim did not receive federal tax credits and does not intend to try again for them next year, he said. 

Earlier in the year, the West Des Moines Plan and Zoning Commission denied rezoning for a proposed three-story commercial and residential building with affordable units after neighbors said the project would reduce their property values. Neighbors said the building was incompatible with their single-family homes, though it’s one block off Valley Junction’s main street and city staff said it suited West Des Moines’ comprehensive plan. 

That project is now being considered for a different site because the mayor and city council agree it's needed, Evans said. 

Despite West Des Moines' efforts, the city faces a problem seen elsewhere in the metro: Even outside of Des Moines, affordable housing tends to be clustered in older areas, like Valley Junction, while the low-wage jobs are centered elsewhere. In West Des Moines, that's the Jordan Creek Town Center and surrounding shopping centers, about 6 miles away. 

 "And that's where our challenge begins, and I think it's about having very tough discussions as development grows," said Renee Hardman, at-large council member in West Des Moines. "But we have to do more, we have to continue to assess our community and work with developers that have good intentions and provide the structure to allow this to happen." 

What can be done about it? 

Various studies have identified the problem in the Des Moines metro, so now what can be done about it? 

Part of the effort will focus on education, an effort to change attitudes among suburban residents who have long fought against affordable or low-income housing in their communities. They cite worries it will lower property values and increase crime, even when there is little to no evidence to support their concerns, according to the Center for Housing Policy. 

"Unfortunately we still look at affordable housing as a burden and not a benefit," Burmeister said. "It is a burden to be tolerated, not a benefit to be to be appreciated." 

Capital Crossroads, a regional planning organization that commissioned the workforce housing strategy, has begun to meet with city managers to discuss ways they can take stock of their housing inventory, as well as create formal housing polices, which would provide a vision and framework for inclusive development across the metro. 

It may be up to each city to come up with its own plan, though a regional policy would ensure every community is doing its part, said Sen. Claire Celsi, D-West Des Moines. She is pushing several bills in the 2021 legislative session that would address affordable housing across the state. 

"A few people will say that they're for affordable housing, but when 10 (constituents) email them and say, 'We don’t want this project in our backyard,' they fold," she said. "So if they had an affordable housing plan in place ... they could use that as teeth. "You have to put it on paper, and the city council and the mayor have to make a commitment and then make it happen." 

Cities should consider offering financial incentives, including for rehabilitation of older properties; requiring a certain percentage of units in each new project be reserved for renters with lower incomes; and purchasing land near new developments or in infill areas to preserve it for affordable housing, the regional strategy says. That practice, called land banking, will be part of Celsi's proposal to the Legislature. 

The regional strategy also says the focus should be on job centers, particularly in the suburbs and in downtown Des Moines, where growth in low-to moderate-wage jobs is expected. 

Either way, Battani said she's hoping a plan is put in place so families like hers — hovering in the middle with little to no options for comfortable living — can begin to contribute more of their income to the economy and spend less of it on housing. "It's frustrating because there's not one or the other," she said. "It's either you have to fit this income guideline for affordable housing, but it's considered low income, or you just jump to $1,500. There's no in-between." 

The cost of unaffordable housing 

Lack of affordable housing has broader economic impacts than just putting a strain on a family’s budget. 

Lower-income residents who spend an inordinate share of their income on housing may not be able to afford health care, education or food, said Eric Burmeister, executive director of the Polk County Housing Trust Fund. And even those who can cover the necessities usually aren't able to save for unexpected expenses or to engage in discretionary spending that boosts the economy, he said. 

The consequences of residents being forced to spend beyond their means for housing can ripple throughout a community, said Mickey Carlson, a Des Moines community activist who holds a doctorate in affordable housing policy. 

"It impacts absolutely everything," she said. "If they are paying more than they should in rent, they won’t have money for ordinary doctor appointments, so they probably skip going to the dentist or they may skip the medicine they should be purchasing for a chronic illness, and that snowballs, and we all end up paying for it." 

Studies show it’s cheaper to pay for affordable housing up front than it is to deal with higher health care costs and other consequences, including homelessness, said Cynthia Latcham, executive director of Anawim Housing, a nonprofit affordable housing developer in Des Moines. 12/23/2020 Des Moines' suburbs are slow to build housing that workers can afford. 

Children who experience homelessness or frequent moves because their parents can't find stable housing arrangements are more likely to perform poorly in school or drop out, and to suffer from learning disabilities and behavioral problems, according to Impact of Affordable Housing on Families and Communities, a study by Enterprise Community Partners, a national affordable housing nonprofit. And clustering affordable housing limits residents’ access to opportunity, meaning they live in areas where there are fewer property tax dollars to support high-quality schools, and where they are less likely to find higher-income jobs because they’re forced into long commutes or affordable transit is unavailable, Carlson said. 

"It becomes a pay now or a pay later scenario, where we can look at trauma as being an underlying root cause for future health problems," Latcham said. "We believe very strongly that housing is health care, housing is mental health care and housing is a human right, because it is foundational to keep us doing well (in) our lives." 

Metro Des Moines' affordability eroding 

The Des Moines metro has long been considered a relatively affordable housing market, especially when compared to much larger metros. But as it grows, the increase in its housing prices is far outstripping any rise in wages. Year over year from October 2019 to 2020, the Iowa Board of Realtors reported Des Moines metro single-family home sale prices had risen 16.7%. Meanwhile, wages in the third quarter of 2020, as compared to the third quarter of 2019, were up 2.4%, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.