How should Kentucky work to solve the state's housing crisis?

A legislative task force created earlier this year is exploring the options.

In June, the Kentucky Housing Corporation told state lawmakers serving on the task force that Kentucky's housing market is short by about 200,000 houses and rental units.

Today, the same group projected that by 2029, that number would grow to nearly 290,000.

Republican State Representative Kevin Bratcher of Louisville wanted to know why Kentucky's population continues to outpace the housing supply.

The Census of Kentucky is not growing at these levels.

So is it immigration?

Is that what's causing this?

Do you know?

I don't know if that's in your bailiwick or not.

Well, only because we've been pretty steeped in this and did the housing supply gap analysis.

And I worked with the chamber.

So not that I'm usually an expert in it, but I feel like I've gotten my junior Ph.D. in housing data this year.

There are there are several drivers.

The biggest driver and you can hear about this at the national level as well, but we also have data for Kentucky, and it's in the chambers report.

They have this great bar chart that shows at the oh eight recession, we lost so many homebuilders, particularly our smaller homebuilders in Kentucky, and we have never gotten back even to the average homebuilding rental and homeownership in Kentucky since oh eight.

We have never in any year rebuilt even the average that we used to build before the recession.

The whole country went through this.

We lost a lot of homebuilders.

Many of them got into other businesses, retired or went to go work for like ball homes or dreams, like got a job somewhere but didn't, you know, didn't get back into the risk of doing the business themselves.

That really hit our rural areas, maybe even more so than our urban areas, but it hit everywhere.

That is the biggest driver.

But there are many things you could add on top of it.

Households are smaller in Kentucky.

So even if you don't have a lot more people, you got demand for more households.

Immigration probably does play a role in migration into Kentucky, just as, you know, other U.S. citizens into Kentucky.

The Kentucky Housing Corporation presented lawmakers with an overview of how other states are addressing the housing issue.

Strategies include changing zoning laws and creating new tax credits.

Today's meeting was informational only.

The task force is required to submit a report to legislative leadership before year's end.