"The gap is going to worsen if we are not able to maintain the current resources," warned Patricia Rynn Sylvester, director of multifamily housing at the Maryland Department of Housing and Community Development.
These difficulties are part of the fallout from the ballooning use of subprime mortgages earlier in the decade. Subprime loans, intended for homebuyers with shaky credit histories, began defaulting at an alarming rate in 2007. That started a domino effect that took down the housing market, undid financial institutions, ratcheted back the money available for all sorts of loans and threw the country into a severe recession.
The sad irony is that subprime loans - long criticized by housing advocates as predatory - were trumpeted by lenders as an avenue to help workers with low or moderate incomes become homeowners. It might have looked that way to buyers because many of the loans started off with low "teaser" interest rates. But when the rates adjusted way up, hundreds of thousands of borrowers discovered there was nothing affordable about their situation.
"This is a national tragedy," said Judith A. Kennedy, president and chief executive of the National Association of Affordable Housing Lenders. She particularly faults financiers Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for pouring billions into securitized subprime mortgages to help satisfy affordable-housing goals.
The unaffordable-housing problem extends far beyond the poverty line. Consider Maryland, the highest-income state in the nation. Half the renters here were paying 30 percent or more of their monthly household incomes - before tax - on rent last year, the Census Bureau revealed last week. Forty percent of homeowners with mortgages were doing the same.
When the Baltimore-based Shelter Group opened a 96-unit affordable-apartment community in Salisbury two years ago, it got 7,000 inquiries from people. Enterprise Homes, the building arm of affordable-housing giant Enterprise Community Partners, recently finished green renovations of two older apartment complexes, one in Baltimore and the other in Columbia, and both were 100 percent leased as soon as they opened - with waiting lists. Enterprise says the wait to get into the Columbia apartments is 18 months.
