Regional Affordable Housing Dashboard

The Polk County Housing Trust Fund published the regional affordable housing dashboard to provide relevant data about your community’s housing market conditions and who is struggling to afford the place they live.

Read on to discover key features of the new dashboard.

View the dashboard

Regional Dashboard

Features

Affordable development tracker

The map currently shows new income-restricted multifamily projects currently in the development process that have been awarded federal funds. We are exploring how to track additional types of housing production that are relevant to communities.

Regional housing goal

The housing goal presented here shows a number equivalent to 10% of the city’s projected 5 year growth as forecast by the Des Moines Area Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO). This goal provides a sense of perspective for cities to consider how they could deliver a portion of their projected housing growth with specific partnerships in place to serve low- and moderate-income households.

PCHTF's supports households earning up to 80% of the area Median Family Income (MFI) and often prioritizes lower income levels (30%-60% of MFI or below) for rental housing.

The role of income restricted housing

Cost burden occurs when a household spends more than 30% of its gross income on housing expenses, such as rent (or mortgage) and utilities. Households spending more than 30% often struggle to afford other necessities like food, healthcare, or transportation. Rates of housing cost burden are markedly higher in our region at lower income levels.

Income restricted housing helps by ensuring homes affordable to low- and moderate-income households are actually occupied by those households. Specific local strategies can help produce housing affordable to people of lower incomes. For example:

Tax or economic development incentives for affordable housing - The City of Des Moines negotiates with multifamily developers to set aside a certain percentage of new units as affordable to people with low and moderate incomes.
Low Income Housing Tax Credit development - Managed by the Iowa Finance Authority, this program supports housing developments serving renters whose incomes are generally below 60% of MFI.
Partnerships with local housing trust funds - The Polk County Housing Trust Fund invests in new affordable rental housing as well as capital improvements to existing housing.
Cities updating their comprehensive plans or land use maps - This tool may provide insight on areas to consider for future affordable housing development opportunities.

Housing stock

Features

Rental market statistics from CBRE

CBRE Des Moines has allowed us to publish their current rent and vacancy estimates which cover an important part of the rental market, providing a more current view of market conditions than comprehensive census data that is released more slowly.

Home values and rents by location

At any time using the dashboard, you can select a particular city or location to see relevant data for that community.

Existing federally backed affordable housing

Features

This map shows federally backed housing we understand to have income restrictions on all or most units. As the dashboard is published, this map shows the regional housing projects we published in our recent paper, Federally backed housing in Central Iowa. Learn more about that project at pchtf.org/preservation.

The Trust Fund will be updating this map annually to reflect the region’s evolving housing supply as well as new and changing affordable housing programs.

Comprehensive Housing Affordability Strategy (CHAS)

Features

This HUD dataset provides commonly used data to understand your community’s existing affordable housing supply in greater detail.

Rental units' affordability vs occupants' income level

This table shows how the needs of rental households match (or do not match) with the housing they live in.

Households reported in blue highlighted boxes are occupying a housing unit with lower rent than their income category allows them to afford.
Households reported in green highlighted boxes are occupying a housing unit with approximately matching rent to their household income category.
Households reported in red highlighted boxes are occupying a housing unit with higher rent than their income category allows them to afford.

Current median family income table

The HUD median family income table shows current incomes in different affordability categories for Polk County households according to the number of people in the household. For example, a 60% MFI household with 4 people would have income of $68,700/year or less.