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Discussion Paper
Rural Spotlight: Creating a Reservoir of Housing Resources in New River Valley
Rural communities across the nation face workforce housing shortages. Here, we define “workforce housing” as housing affordable to households earning less than 120 percent of the area median income. While the reasons behind these shortages vary from one jurisdiction to another, the effects are the same: many residents face high housing costs.
Discussion Paper
Recent Trends in Fifth District Housing Market Indicators
There is evidence that the tight housing markets of the past few years are starting to loosen, with increased supply and falling prices. However, many Americans still struggle to buy a home. Between the fall of 2020 and the summer of 2022, home price growth accelerated in the United States and in all Fifth District states after being relatively steady for a decade. Using the CoreLogic Home Price Index, price increases were most dramatic in North Carolina and South Carolina, where year-over-year increases reached historic highs of 25 percent. While price increases remain high relative to the ...
Discussion Paper
Intersecting Costs: Housing and Transportation in the Rural Fifth District
Our recent issue of Econ Focus covered a number of challenges facing small towns and rural areas, including the need for affordable, quality housing for low- and middle-income households. Despite typically lower housing costs in rural areas compared to urban areas, nearly four out of 10 low- and middle-income households in the rural Fifth District are housing cost burdened, meaning they spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing.Yet, access to housing is only part of the bigger story of households’ access to jobs, services, and amenities. Transportation also looms large. Housing ...
Journal Article
Employment Barriers in the Rural Fifth District
In Virginia, 75 percent of working-age adults are employed, in line with the national average of 74 percent. But there are significant disparities across geographies. In Loudoun County, Va., in the Washington, D.C., metro area, the share is 84.1 percent. On the other side of the state, in Lee County, just 48.2 percent of working-age adults are employed. This is true of many socioeconomic indicators: Aggregation is necessary to understand broad outcomes, but with aggregation, we lose important geographic distinctions and, thus, the opportunity to identify both challenges and solutions. This is ...
Discussion Paper
Unlocking Housing Supply: What Can We Learn About Recent Construction and Permitting Patterns in Our Region?
Since 2020, housing has become increasingly unaffordable for many families throughout the United States. Nationally, home prices have risen more than 40 percent, on average, and rent has increased by around 22 percent. While heightened demand likely fueled the rapid buildup in home prices since the COVID-19 pandemic, a chronic undersupply of housing from underbuilding in the 2010s also contributes to current housing affordability challenges.Recent rates of new residential construction have varied considerably across communities due in part to differences in the availability and cost of ...
Discussion Paper
Housing Affordability Challenges for Renters and Homeowners in the Rural Fifth District
As previously discussed in this blog, homeownership affordability has been on the decline in rural communities throughout the Fifth District. The combination of elevated home prices and rising mortgage rates have made homeownership harder to achieve. But affordability challenges aren't limited to prospective homebuyers. Many existing rural homeowners and renters — especially low-to-moderate income (LMI) households — are burdened by their housing costs.
Discussion Paper
Teacher Wages and Purchasing Power in the Fifth District
Teacher pay is notorious for being low considering teachers' vital role educating young people and preparing them for lifelong learning. At a national level, the difference between teachers' average wages and those of other college graduates has been growing over the past 25 years. But aggregate statistics obscure local variation in teacher wages. As seen in a recent District Digest article on resolving the gap in teacher supply, teachers' starting salaries vary throughout the Fifth District.
Briefing
Commuting Patterns and Economic Connectivity in the Fifth District
One way of measuring economic connectivity across locations is by examining the commuting behavior of residents. This article explores how connected counties in the Fifth District are by focusing on commuting.
Discussion Paper
From Good Bones to Healthy Homes: Housing Quality in the Rural Fifth District
We've previously explored how rural Fifth District households encounter housing affordability challenges, finding low-to-moderate income (LMI) households to be at greatest risk. A home's quality can also profoundly affect residents' well-being. Resolving housing quality issues caused by repair needs can be quite costly. If left unaddressed, housing quality issues can lead to stress or chronic illness, which in turn can hurt adults' workforce activity and children's educational outcomes. As with affordability, not all households are equally likely to face housing quality challenges. In the ...
Discussion Paper
Hispanic Postsecondary Enrollment Increases Throughout the Fifth District
Colleges and universities across the country have become more racially and ethnically diverse over the last decade. While 62.6 percent of students enrolled in higher education in the U.S. identified as white in 2010, that rate had fallen to 54.0 percent in 2020. (Note: throughout the article, white refers to non-Hispanic white and Black refers to non-Hispanic Black.) The percentage of students identifying as Black also fell, declining from 15.0 percent in 2010 to 13.1 percent in 2020. So which minority groups experienced growth? While the Asian share of enrollment grew from 6.3 percent to 7.7 ...