The affordable housing world is crammed with numbers, from spreadsheets used to figure out the financing for a deal to a national count of people experiencing homelessness. The numbers are knowledge. They are context. They are clues to what’s happening around us.
In the past few months, several significant numbers have caught my attention. Some are devastating; some, eye-opening; some, hopeful. With so many digits orbiting the industry, it’s easy to let them float by without much thought. But take a moment to let several sink in:
- 553,742: The number of people experiencing homelessness on a single night in January 2017, a 0.7% year-over-year increase, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Homelessness declined in 30 states and the District of Columbia and increased in 20 states.
- 500,000: Nearly the amount of federally assisted apartments or rental homes that will reach the end of their current subsidy contracts and affordability restrictions in the next five years, according to data released in the National Housing Preservation Database.
- 472,000: The approximate number of homes across Puerto Rico destroyed or damaged by Hurricane Maria.
- 6,300: The number of applicants for one of 59 homes at the Acts Cyrene Apartments, a new affordable housing community by Related California and Acts Community Development Corp. in Oakland, Calif.
- $250 million: The amount of money that will be raised for affordable housing each year in California following the passage of a bill by state lawmakers that imposes a $75 fee on the recording of certain real estate documents, finally creating a permanent source of funding for affordable housing. Good job, California.
We can use these numbers to gauge progress this year and see how much further we need to go.
