The latest version of the annual housing report, looking at housing access and limitations in Louisville, is out. LPM’s Bill Burton spoke with the Metropolitan Housing Coalition’s executive director, Tony Curtis, about the report.
This transcript was edited for clarity and length.
Bill Burton: Let's examine a few of the points in the 2025 state of Metropolitan Housing report. You led with the widening gap between household formation and housing construction. Will you elaborate on that point?
Tony Curtis: We took a really in depth look at workforce development, economic development, and how that lines up with housing in our community. We know we're in a housing crisis.
We need more housing, 36,000 units for the lowest incomes in our community. But we wanted to see fundamentally, where construction was occurring and where construction was needed. Where new families are coming into our community, and where renters may be actually looking for home ownership opportunities. What we saw in this was just a fundamental misalignment of where housing occurs, where housing is needed, and where housing and economic opportunity is needed in our community. It's historically, by design, been separated. I would argue, currently we're in the same situation. So we really need to pay attention to that, because people want to be able to work where they live, live where they work. Have reasonable commutes into the office and out of the office, and be able to participate in the community.
BB: The report also compared 2020 to 2025. It found a 31% increase in the median sales price of single family homes, as well as the average median mortgage increasing 83%. How has that affected homeownership in the Louisville area?
TC: It's definitely affected in a major way. When you see both housing costs and costs to have a mortgage increase by that amount in five years, it makes homeownership unattainable for a vast majority of Louisvillians. That also does a couple of things. Not only is home ownership unattainable, people who are renting and who are looking to become homeowners stay in their rental unit longer, so that doesn't free up units for other individuals who might be moving into that. You see a stagnation in the market. Is what you see.
People are staying longer where they are. They're going to wait longer to get better interest rates, maybe a better paying job, and maybe more housing that's being built. Which we ultimately know housing supply leads to lower housing costs.
BB: You've also completed the 2025 to 2028 Metropolitan Housing Coalition strategic plan. What are the takeaways from that plan?
TC: We do that every three to five years. It was a big undertaking. Yet again this year, the Metropolitan Housing Coalition is looking to see where we need to be going in the next three years. A lot of that is, how do we build capacity to really meet the needs of the housing advocacy, needs of community, education, of the community. A lot of what used to be local conversations on zoning issues, for instance, are occurring at the state level. We need to be even more aware, engaged at the state level in these conversations. Being able to build out that capacity to do that for long term capacity needs, sustainability, organization. We're involved in so many conversations. Every conversation in this community is centered around housing. Economic development is becoming more a part of that, where it used to be a separate conversation, and we see that as a good trend. We need to have that conversation, because we need to understand wages and their connections to housing affordability.
