It's Neighborworks week.

During the week long national event, community based organizations rally in support of safe and affordable housing.

Kentucky Edition SAT down with Community Ventures to talk about challenges and solutions to addressing the housing crisis in the Commonwealth.

Neighborworks week is really highlighting the benefits and the importance of homeownership.

We all know that the cornerstone of our community is people being able to to buy a home and being able to have a stake in the community.

We are part of the larger national recognition and be able to say, yes, we have created housing opportunities.

We're continuing to build on the move.

Murdock.

I'm making housing affordable and available.

There is such a huge housing shortage, not only in Kentucky, but all across the country right now coming out of the Great Recession.

There was such a decline in homeownership.

There was a decline in contractors.

We lost a lot of our construction people after the recession.

So we've had very little production, relatively speaking, since the 2008 2009 period.

So we're way behind on just construction.

Add to that the fact that costs are constantly going up and they're continuing, obviously, to rise.

We have to find a way to to increase density.

We have to find a way to be able to to make housing as affordable as possible.

We're probably going to have to change our our impressions and our thoughts of what's an acceptable home.

And I think we're starting to see that now.

We're seeing smaller units.

We're seeing attached units, higher density in neighborhoods to try to bring that cost down so people can at least get started in order to have economic development and economic growth.

You have to have stable housing in a community, and you have to have a workforce that lives there.

It's sort of the chicken and the egg.

Regulation and barriers make the process more difficult, make it more expensive.

Just make it that much harder to try to keep prices down and keep the housing affordable for everybody.

In many of our communities, across Kentucky, rent is as high or higher than what a mortgage payment would be.

No employer wants to see a workforce that constantly turns over, and it's just easier to move from an apartment, to go somewhere or to take another job.

Again, having that stake in the community is absolutely key to having strong communities.

So I think being able to to have the stability of I know what my payment's going to be every month, my rent, I don't have to worry about going up next year.

I don't have to worry about my apartment building maybe being sold, or something happening.

You know, it's my home.

I can do with it pretty much as I want.

I can raise my family here.

I can have my kids in the same school all the time.

And all those are absolutely critical factors to family stability and also neighborhood and community stability.