Kentucky needs homes.

The state is short 206,000 housing units, according to the Kentucky Housing Corporation, and that shortage will swell to 287,000 by the year 2029.

We talked about Kentucky's housing crisis on last night's Kentucky Tonight, and I asked our panel, what's causing the housing shortage and why are home prices so high?

Costs are up.

Inventory is down.

Right.

The Kentucky median home cost is up 49% in the past five years.

April 20th 2152 K now April 2025, the average home price or went up to 226 K, so and the inventory is down by 20 something percent since 2018.

What do you make of all of these numbers and how how severe is the housing shortage in Kentucky?

And is it any different than what's happening nationwide.

So it's very severe.

And I would say it's a crisis, a crisis because the number has gotten so large and there's nothing happening currently that would make us think the trajectory is going to change.

The biggest reason that we need more than 200,000 more housing units right now, all across the state, homeownership and rental for all incomes is goes all the way back to the 2008 housing crisis and the recession that followed.

We lost so many home builders because of the mortgage crisis and all of the foreclosures.

And those home builders, retired, got into some other line of work.

And when you lose a home builder, you're losing all of the contractors that work for them.

And so we lost a whole industry, and there weren't generations kind of learning that work and coming up behind them, taking over family businesses.

And so now we have some counties that really feel like they have to beg and plead to get a home builder or an apartment builder to come.

And we have home builders that can kind of have their pick of what kind of, home to build.

And the margins have gotten really tight for them.

There are a lot of factors, but the biggest one goes back to we are still not building, on average, what we used to build in 2006, 2007.

Yeah.

And that stems from the 2008 recession.

So I want to come to you and get this end for because you represent the home builders.

And, you know, many consumers may say, I really don't feel sorry for developers, right, that they feel like maybe they're some of them who are starting to enter the market may feel like they're priced out of the market.

So help consumers understand like the margins with developers work into and the considerations they make before they get into that kind of project.

You know, I say all the time when I speak to people about homebuilding, they drive down the street and they see a development going up.

What they don't understand is that that development was years in the making, acquiring the land, studies having to be done, and all of those go into the cost of the home.

And there are so many other factors too.

With our builders.

I mean, there's overregulation, and I hope we get to have a part of that conversation.

There's, an increase, of course, in the interest rates.

We know that's been a challenge.

Unfortunate.

That's something that's out of our control, right now.

And then the building materials, supply issue.

And, I mean, since Covid, we've seen the numbers just continue to increase.

And what we have to keep in mind, again, is that all of that goes into the cost of the home that is ultimately passed down to that home buyer, and that renter.

And we're starting to see that really slip away.

We also talked about solutions to the problem in the housing crisis.

And we hear from realtors, home builders and housing advocates, which you can watch online on demand Kentucky tonight at KETV.

Org slash k y tonight.