A housing shortage is affecting every corner of Kentucky, from rural towns to major cities.

State lawmakers and housing experts met in Frankfort this week to talk about the crisis and the consequences if nothing changes.

Our Jane Leffler has more on the growing gap and how the state could respond.

More about that in tonight's legislative update.

Kentucky has some of the lowest housing costs in the nation.

But if more homes aren't built, that could change.

Kentucky is on track to have a California style housing crisis.

If we don't take action today in cities like Lexington, where I'm from, and Bowling Green.

The median home price is now at or above five times the median household income, meaning that the typical family increasingly has no path to homeownership.

Kentucky Housing Corporation, a public agency, commissioned a statewide report on the housing shortage last year.

It found that every county in the state could use more houses and apartments to buy or rent.

The total gap for 2024.

So we are calling that the current housing supply gap is 206,000 units, roughly equally split between rental and homeownership.

You'll see that.

What's different is, is that for rentals, there's a greater need for our moderate and low income households to have rental options that are affordable for homeownership.

It is almost evenly spread across all the income bands.

So there are a lot of need for income options, for income aligned options for homeownership.

And our middle and lower income renters really need some affordable rental options.

State and national housing experts say now is the time to act.

Other states have done so, and Kentucky could take some of those ideas.

Ensuring that the government isn't needlessly imposing a bunch of rules and regulations that force housing prices to be higher than they need to be.

You know, there are rules related to health and safety that might increase costs, but that's just, necessary.

But to the extent that we're increasing housing costs, without any basis in health and safety, those are areas where we can improve.

And then, probably most impressively, is the just barrage of states that have created funds, often revolving loan funds or partial grant partial loan funds to incentivize housing development across their states.

And these are rule states, red states.

Plenty of blue states are also doing it, too.

But many states are committing significant amounts of funding to goose their housing supply.

Kentucky's Housing Task Force is kicking off its second year of meetings, with the hopes of presenting legislation to next year's full General Assembly.

We're hoping this, this interim to talk about some real world things we can do, in the state of Kentucky, be less ideological and more practical on what we can do.

And our goal for this, task force is to really tee up some of these pieces of legislation, that them so that when session starts, they can just go right to committee and we can really get a lot done.

The task force will meet monthly for the rest of the year before the next legislative session starts next January.

For Kentucky Edition, I'm June Lefler.

Thank you.

June.

The Kentucky Housing Corporation will hold its affordable housing conference next month.

That will be at the Northern Kentucky Convention Center in Covington, August 20th and 21st.

To address the housing shortage.

And Woodford County sales leaders have partnered with the Kentucky Manufactured Housing Institute to sell a manufactured home they say is cheaper than a starting home built on site.

Since Covid, the price of housing, whether it's purchased housing or rental housing, has really skyrocketed, and we wanted to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem.

So Woodford County is, typically a pretty high, high, high land costs.

And, so it's hard to afford even to buy the land, let alone build a house.

What prompted this was something that faces every, every city, every county, and really just across the country.

This isn't just unique to Kentucky, but in Kentucky, Kentucky's short 206,000 homes.

Kentucky Housing Corporation estimates that by 2029, without action taken, we're going to be short, close to 290,000 homes.

And so all of these cities are coming up with ways to find solutions to that housing crisis.

So manufactured home a lot of people have called them mobile homes.

But by legal definition, there's not been a mobile home built since 1976.

And so manufactured housing is not a product anymore.

It's just a process.

You can kind of walk around and see it's the same windows, it's the same light fixtures, outlets, doors, all the same inputs that you would see on a site built home.

The difference is it's built in a facility.

And so in this assembly line setting, which creates efficiency, it creates labor advantages.

And so rather than it taking months and months or even up to a year for a site built, you don't face the weather delays, you're able to increase your scale and your volume and your quality assurances.

And so, you know, this house, from the time that it was a pile of lumber in the factory to the time that they were actually putting furniture in it on display at the Kentucky League of Cities Conference this past year.

It took four days.

And so there's distinct advantages, that it just require people getting past the outdated stigma.

So the home is only available to people who are within, in the, 80 to 120% of Ami for Woodford County, which is about 85,000 a year, to about 120,000 a year ish.

So they have to be within that range of, of household income so we can keep our firefighters, our police officers, our teachers, our nurses here in Woodford County and in sales.

So that we have a wide range of people from all walks of life in this community.

Thank you everyone.

A three bedroom and two bathroom home is priced at a quarter of $1 million.