“Where jobs go at night.” Housing symposium calls for more low-cost units, fewer building regulations

DES MOINES, Iowa — For those in the housing game, sights like the Star Lofts on Ingersoll are beauties to behold.

“We have one economy,” says Matt Hauge of the Polk County Housing Trust Fund, “and we like to say that housing is where jobs go at night.”

Twenty more units of housing — much of it low-income — in a spot that needs workers. The whole metro needs more of exactly this.

“Companies that are thinking about moving to the region,” says economist Dr. Jenny Schuetz, “want to know that there’s going to be housing for people earning a wide range of incomes.”

Schuetz says cities need to find spaces for the new housing near their centers and services.

“If the alternative is that we build all of the affordable housing on the outskirts of town where land is cheap,” she says, “then we have more traffic and worse traffic congestion as people have to commute a long time to get to their jobs.”

Schuetz will be the keynote speaker at Friday’s Housing Matters Symposium at the Des Moines Botanical Center.

She’ll also address the ways America has made low-cost housing harder to build.

“Over time we’ve made it harder to build low-cost housing in lots of forms,” she says. “For example the sort of starter homes we used to build in the 40s and 50s, those were small homes, maybe two to three bedrooms and one bathroom on a small lot — those are basically illegal to build today.”

It’s a claim that makes Hauge nod his head.

“There are a million little ways the rules of the road for building housing contribute to higher costs,” he says.

At the symposium, local housing advocates will talk land-use policies with elected officials and potential sites with developers — looking for more projects like the Star Lofts.

“If we want our communities to function,” Hauge says, “if we want teachers, public servants, fire fighters, non-profit staff to be able to find homes in our community we’ve gotta take action and make sure that housing will be there when people need it.”

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to who13.com.