Thanks for listening to the Kansas reflected Podcast. I'm Tim carpenter. The Affordable Housing crunches deep seated reality in Kansas, urban and rural, every corner of the state. I don't think there's any region out there that is immune, the problems have been festering for years. A Kansas housing needs assessment was finished in 2021. In the Kansas legislature authorized funding for housing development in 2022. Here we are at the end of 2023. What's been accomplished and what's next on the Kansas reflector podcast to tour this important policy issue, or Ryan Vinson, Executive Director of the Kansas housing resources Corporation. Joining us on the line are Molly Wayne Scott, Assistant Director of Economic Development for Dodge City and Ford County, and Matt Gillum, managing partner of Overland Property Group and former president of the nonprofit coalition known as the Kansas Housing Association. Welcome to you all.
Great to be here, Tim.
Thanks for taking time out of your busy day. So I think this core issue is kind of generally understood there's a deficit of affordable housing that it undercuts the ability of the current generation to buy a home. It's it's an idea that maybe 30 years ago, I'm thinking to myself wasn't so far fetched for a young family, with people and with modest journalism incomes. But now the market is a nightmare. And some Kansans would use the term crisis, it influences job growth, residency decisions, family planning, you name it. Ryan, let's start with a 30,000 foot overview of housing needs in Kansas. And I mentioned there was an assessment, maybe some golden nuggets out of that.
Absolutely. Tim, I'm just thrilled to be here today. I'll tell you, Kansas has had a housing problem for decades. You know, I look back through the newspapers from the 30s, the 50s, the 70s, each one of them talks about the housing problem in our state. And it's it's real, and it's true, but our problem in the state continues to be become a crisis when we have external events, whether it's a tornado in Greensburg, whether it's a pandemic worldwide, and you know that all it takes is one small event to exasperate an underlying housing problem that's been out there for a long time. And that's why our mission at Kansas housing is so important. Our corporation itself has been in existence for 20 years. We're a public corporation that helps Kansans access the safe, affordable housing they need, with the dignity they deserve. We know that housing is so much more than just a structure so much more than four walls and a roof. We know that a home allows people to work, it allows people to succeed to have great health care to have healthy schools, vibrant neighborhoods, revitalized downtown's and healthy communities. We know that if we're able to help people achieve homeowner ownership or even a safe, affordable house to rent, that they're going to be successful in life and that each community needs that. Because of that, Kansas housing has administered programs, both federally and state funded for a number of years that have been able to help unlock home for those that we serve.
Okay, the survey that was done, I think it pointed when I read through it, there's a shortage of rural housing, especially. And part the some of the housing stock is older and maybe needs rehab. There's a broader shortage of mid level incomes, homes for folks in that category. And we have a workforce shortage that covers the building. rehabs, Somali, can you? Can you dive in here and talk a little bit about western Kansas? Dodge City? What's the housing market? Like? From your perspective?
Yeah, thank you very much. We know we cannot do economic development without housing. When trying to recruit new businesses to our area. That's one of the first questions we get asked is do you have adequate affordable housing for our workforce? In rural Kansas, the housing the housing needs is all over the board. It's everything. We need everything to preserve our existing stock housing houses, to build new workforce housing, we need rental housing, we need homeownership units. It's really all over the board.
When I think about rural revitalization, I think about population and there's a lot of counties out there that could really use just more warm bodies. And so, but with you if you bring the people they need to stay somewhere so there's this tension between housing and business development, you must experience that. Yeah,
we do. We do. Anytime we try to recruit new business Hilmar cheese for example, when recruiting them that was one of the first things they asked is do you have housing? We say we have a housing need everywhere in Kansas has a housing need, but we have programs and policies in place to meet those housing needs. And setting records Corporation has been key to that.
So you mentioned the cheese facility, what what did you all do to try to increase the housing stock for those individuals.
So we've been using moderate income housing funds from Kansas housing resource Corporation for I think about nine years now since about 2013. We also have a program at our community college that we have students enrolled that partner with us to build housing so we're we're building our future contractors through that. The city of Dodge City also uses the Rural Housing incentive district and we partner that with our with our NIH funds to build more housing. Okay,
let's move across the state to Matt Gillum. I think he's sitting in Johnson County, but he may not. He could be anywhere. This is zoom. So affordable, affordable housing might mean one thing and Dodge City and quite another thing in Overland Park where the cost of housing is just outrageous, actually. Can you share your sense of what Johnson County's housing landscape looks like? From maybe from even from a developer's perspective, too?
Yeah, yeah, we have a unique perspective, because while I do live in Johnson County, I grew up in Salida. My business partner, also from Solana still lives in Salida. This day, we have an office here in Hollywood, but we also have an office in Salina and we develop affordable housing all over the country. So, you know, we've developed in, I think, 35 to 36 communities across the state, most of them actually being rural. So, you know, we kind of have a unique perspective, from the standpoint of seeing, you know, both the problems that the rural communities but also, you know, in the larger metros, and you know, where I live specifically, kind of Overland Park Leawood. You know, they share a lot of similarities. But there's also very big differences. Qantas has a very diverse state from a housing need perspective. I'm glad Ryan mentioned that. There's been this housing need far before the study was ever done. That is something that housing developers and folks in rural communities and across Kansas thinking, anecdotally known for forever, that we have a housing crisis in Kansas. And we're just now starting to get the resources people I think, are just now starting to talk about it at the level that we need to be. So you know, whether we're developing something in Salina, Kansas, which we are right now or Spring Hill, which is basically a suburb of Kansas City, Overland Park, your biggest barrier to entry is obviously costs costs in the construction industry have gotten out of control and unaffordable, no matter what you're developing are building. You know, from a base level, the problem looks like this, what it cost to build something in Kansas City Jonatha County, Wichita, the metros, because the same and maybe sometimes a little more in your communities is like Dodge City, or garden city or great band or salon or haze, or name, anything in between. So you have those those cost similarities, but you have a major income, and you have a major rent discrepancy. So it is downright impossible. I don't say hard, I say is downright impossible because it is to develop market rate housing or new housing in general, in a lot of the communities in Kansas, they're certainly, you know, a few Overland Park in the woods. But you know, again, you don't see single family homes, your point being built anymore under half a million dollars. They, they don't do it because there's no money in it. So, yeah, it's a very diverse state. Again, we work nationally. And I always tell folks that I think I'm obviously biased because I grew up in Kansas, and I've always lived in Kansas. But I think Kansas actually has a more unique dynamic on housing than anywhere else that we develop, and we develop again, all over the country.
I wanted to ask you the the survey in 2021 of Kansas housing issues, essentially two thirds indicated they would be supportive of public funded subsidies to get more housing that could be quality and affordable housing out there get that done. This is is that your sense of what the market really needs is, is that kind of recognition of the public investment.
And there has to be something I think it's one of those things that the economics and the dynamics just flat out and don't work without some type of help. Whether that be you know, direct invest submit from the cities or, you know, local employers that are willing to invest funds, maybe someday to get their money in return, but certainly no return on investment to KTRC. And the programs that they're administering, quite frankly, it takes a village of a lot of those different programs and people, it's, you know, Kansas doesn't have the luxury of, we have magic bullets for everything we need. We have to kind of hodgepodge a lot of things together for it to make sense for these communities. Because again, they are so different and dynamic. And what Hayes needs, quite frankly, is totally different than what dodge needs. And you know, those two totally different for what salida needs. So we have to be very prescriptive, and intentional, I think with the resources we have, which, up until recently was a pretty small tool developed. They were federal programs, we had very little state resources, if any. So our tool belts gotten substantially bigger, which is good, because we're dealing with a very complex problem. Alright,
thanks for the segue there. Let's go to Ryan and let him explain to us what the 2022 legislature did they put some, a lot of it's one time money, but they, they dumped a whole don't truckload of cash into the housing situation here. Ryan wants to tell us what the legislature did. It
was historic Tim 2022, we had just gotten our statewide housing needs assessment released. That was a year long process that involve stakeholders from rural and urban, from employers to community development representatives. And not only did we get great data from that study, but we took it to the State House, and we had conversations on both sides of the aisle. And that's the beauty of housing is that everybody needs it. Everybody recognizes that it's not a partisan issue. It's something that once people really listen and understand the challenges, there's easy solutions. But it all boils down to resources and investment. And that's what our state legislature did. They gave us $62 million for moderate income housing. Those are folks that make too much to qualify for the affordable housing programs funded by the federal government, that they don't make enough to build a home, to buy a home, possibly even to rent a home. With that moderate income investment, we've been able to roll out those resources around the states to communities like Dodge City, we're Molly's from, we were able to add or free up or moderate income housing, which is one of the goals of the state housing needs assessment. In addition, we got a $13 million Kansas housing investor tax credit passed. That also helps further moderate income housing development. And we we similarly got $1 for dollar match of our federal Low Income Housing Tax Credit, which helps preserve affordable housing. Another goal from the state housing needs assessment. So these are different pots of funds that work with different partners around the state, urban and rural developers, communities. You name it so that we can get the housing built, we can get the housing preserved. We can get people in homes in communities so that they have employers that can expand their operations, so that they have great healthy neighborhoods that can expand. We're so pleased to get over 3200 new homes developed just this last year, because of these historic state development resources that the legislature passed.
What would have been? We'll say you go back to 2019, pre COVID. What would what would the housing resources been able to accomplish at that point?
So at that point, we had $2 million a year from the state that that amounted to 69 cents per Kansan, per year, which you can imagine how far we were able to take that. And that's the beauty of the mill the doghouse. Now, unfortunately, and of course, costs have gone up, interest rates have gone up, you know, we we never just live in a snapshot of an economy that the world keeps moving forward, that with these resources, we're finally making a dent, not just in our housing crisis, but the underlying housing problem that we've had for so long. Because it you know, I talked about earlier, it all boils down to economics, if we don't have enough supply, and if we keep growing in demand, then we're not going to be able to meet the needs of our citizens. But with these resources, we're finally addressing the underlying housing supply. We're making real investments that are paying real dividends.
Okay, Molly, and, Matt, I wanted to see if you two could maybe look at what the legislature did i and see what elements of that speak to you as part of the solution here. I'm looking at this and it seems like there's a lot of money targeted to smaller population communities. But maybe I'm misreading that. So, Matt, why don't you go first? Can you speak to to the legislation and the new influx of money? And how you feel like that is helping the situation?
Sure. You know, we're in an arms race, quite frankly, because affordable housing, whether it be rental, for sale, and you know, from from low income to moderate income, it's a crisis across the country right now, I think, you know, the problem in Kansas has been far worse, because we haven't been addressing our problem that all the states around us have. So as a large national developer, even though we're based out of Kansas, I have a lot of resources going out of the state and have been for the last 20 years that that we've had this company. And now we're bringing resources back home, we're keeping resources in the state, these are homegrown talent, folks like myself, that grew up in small towns across Kansas that work in development, but they haven't been able to work in their own state, because we haven't had the resources to make these things a reality that actually help housing at the level we are today. So I see these different programs, being able to really affect housing creation all over the state. So there are programs that help target rural communities and in ways that we've never been able to have before through, you know, the MIH program at the level that it is the state credit, being able to now utilize the bond, these are resources we get from the federal government. But Kansas has never been able to actually use other than a very small Manute. Area in Colorado and all these states around us, they use their bond capacity to their fullest extent, every single year, they they maximize the federal resources they have, we physically were not able to until this recent amount of of investment from the Kansas legislature, because the economics didn't work. So they really took a resource we already had, and spent some Kansas money. But supercharged it they they put it on top of jet fuel. So it was done in a way that is extremely intelligent, because we are now utilizing a federal resource that every other state basically was already using. So it's not just that single dollar for dollar, we are getting the benefit of multiple dollars on top of that. So yes, I truly feel like the investment was needed. Again, you know, the states around us have really been investing in housing, at the levels that Kansas now is for many, many years. So we're quite a ways behind. But, you know, we are being talked about nationally now and seeing resources come into the state. So I think from both rural and urban, these are programs now able to be used. So I don't know that it helps one more than the other, potentially, you know, brings resources more into rural because they're so limited. But I do believe that it's actually, you know, kind of runs the gamut. So it was very impressive from somebody like me in the industry that sees us all over the country on what Kansas has done and how they've done it.
Barley, you can you can see, maybe more so than us, Colorado and then Oklahoma that you might compete with for businesses, perhaps, and have some sense of how that plays into the housing market. When you look at this $62 million from that was funneled through the state, do you think that's making a dent in in your area?
It's it's definitely helping those NIH funds and the flexibility of the NIH funds has allowed many of our are really small rural communities to take the opportunity to apply for assistance. A lot of the smaller communities, they don't have the capacity or the staff to apply for any sort of federal programs. And so for them being able to apply through the easy application process through K HRC. They can apply for one or two units at a time. And to them one or two units. And Fowler, Kansas is a big deal makes a big impact on their small community. And in Dodge. We've been able to go from us from building workforce housing three or four units a year to doing 30 to 48 units a year. And so that's made a real large impact in our in our housing in Dodge City as well.
That's astonishing. Excellent. Ryan, I'm kind of curious. This is what a lot of this is one time money. It seems to be thoughtfully expended. Um, what happens if the legislature says, yeah, that was so 2022, we've we've addressed that, and we're 2024 2025. And they're not doing anything.
That's That's an excellent point and a challenge for us as citizens in our state that we finally are making real headway, we've made strides to address the problem as well as the crisis. We can't stop here, we can't just go back to Days of Giving dimes on the dollars worth of problems that we have in the state. Housing Development is a long term commitment. And we need to make that commitment with resources, not just from the state, general coffers, but from employers, from local communities, from health foundations from everybody that has a stake in the game. And that's what's been amazing to me that this pandemic has really put a focus that it takes everyone working in concert together to address needs. So now we see health insurance companies funding housing, we see Community Foundation's funding housing, but the state and the federal government has to have a role in it. We call ourselves doc connectors, that Kansas housing because we help connect communities and resources to ultimately get the housing built. But if we start to disinvest, and not not keep up with the needs, and the progress that we're making, what we're going to see is that developers like Matt's team are going to be looking elsewhere, we're going to see communities that are trying to attract employers coming up empty handed, and we don't want to see that for our citizens. We don't want to see that for our state.
Well, I can throw this to Molly And Matt, are you guys optimistic about making progress on resolving some of these challenges? I think it's a long journey. But what kind of timeframe are you thinking about in terms of, do you have metrics that you look at, like, really want to accomplish this in five years and 10 years, you know, kind of look forward a little bit for me, if you would
hear, you know, development is a long process. So you know, while these these resources are available for the first time this year, you know, they were they were signed into law summer of last year. So you're you're now a ways into this, but you know, the first housing hasn't hit the ground yet, we have one of the first developments that was created through the state credit, and we were closed, I think quicker than you could be. And we got started on construction quicker, and you could be in those units still haven't hit the ground. So you know, there is a from identification of a development, project rehab, to getting the units on the ground, you're oftentimes talking about 36 months. So you know, this doesn't happen quickly. It's a very long process tedious, lots of checks and balances. But we're seeing those and we're starting to see those things come to fruition. With construction. I think it's also important for folks to realize and think through Well, you know, the state is expending this capital and this money, again, we're leveraging it on on federal, so it's going further. But we're also still we're building we're doing construction throughout the state. So we're bringing jobs that aren't just, you know, folks that are going to other states, they're staying here at home, you know, for instance, with our company and actual construction jobs. But in Salina again, where I'm from, they brought in Cambodia has made a massive investment, Schwann was in Tony's pizza has made a massive investment increase in their plants. They have a housing crisis there. And what we're hearing from those business leaders again, you know, being from the community is we're getting these folks to come and take these jobs, but we're not going to retain them if there's not quality housing, because somebody does not want to live somewhere where there isn't quality of life, they like the the options in Salina as far as entertainment and, you know, being neighborly, and the things that make us us, you know, proud to be Kansans. But if if they don't have a quality place to live, that's the first thing that is actually going to drive them out of the state even if they're making good money. So I kind of see it as a we're, we're starting to make a dent in a massive hole that has been dug over 2030 4050 100 years. But it's gonna take time it just will you know, we're gonna have to put our heads down and we're gonna have to really grind and work hard to get there. And I think we will. Other things that suffer from this or there are a lot of little not for profit community development organizations out there that you know us as a large develop Whatever we see it as as kind of opportunity and mission to help get them capacity and grow. So getting them involved so they can start taking their own projects on, which again, will, I think, spur more even outside of all of these programs and these funding mechanisms. So it really is kind of one of those deals that rising tide raises all ships will, this is one of those things, we're spurring development, we're spurring economic activity that is going to have a wide range effect across the state in a very positive manner.
Bali let me rephrase the question a little bit. Now, I'll ask this of each of you. I want to circle back and and think about maybe approaches and policies that exist in other states. Think about something Kansas isn't doing. And that would move the ball forward, it could be a, an idea that you've hatched, or something that you've can modeled from elsewhere. Molly, do you want to go first on your wish list item.
You know, we've got such great momentum right now. I think just keeping that up and keeping the funding coming. Us in rural Kansas, we're very creative when it comes to finding solutions to our problems. And I think HRC getting this massive amount of funding last year has really just brought to light housing and all the things that our smaller communities that we're doing, now we're talking about it, and we're communicating. And I think we just need to keep going down this path of having this communication and sharing our ideas with each other to come up with creative solutions to keep making making progress on our housing needs.
Okay. Brian, you want to pitch in there? No, no wave your magic one,
I'm going to wave my magic wand. It is the holidays right now. And you know, I've read enough different notes from just so grateful families that have received housing assistance through our office, whether it's their first home that they've been able to own of their own, where people that literally are able to keep a roof over their head and not face eviction, because of the emergency resources that we have. My dream is that we can go beyond the point of just reacting to every single crisis that whatever it is natural disaster manmade. My dream is that we're finally building consistent resources for all types of housing in rural and urban areas alike. That will be safe, quality, affordable homes for years to come for Kansas. So that, you know when disaster strikes, we can respond much more easily and effectively.
All right, but I think we're gonna leave it there. We could continue to discuss this issues. It's complicated. We need to be talking about COVID interest rates, evictions, lease rents, you know, quality housing, there's a lot of things we could delve into. But I want to thank Matt Gilliam, Molly Wayne Scott and Ryan Vincent, for helping us explore this really important issue. That should be front and center for the Kansas legislature. Thank you all. Thank you. Thank you. Thank You.
