Explosive growth causing severe housing shortage | Local News

“When you add the base for the next 10 years, that’s probably another 1,000,” he said. “We’re going to see the population of this area increase to between 30,000 and 40,000 people, and there is probably nothing that I or you can do about it.”

Johnson said the adage rings true whether you grow up or die.

The choice Rapid City and the Black Hills will face over the next 10-20 years is what they do with this growth. How are they going to anticipate that growth, plan for growth, and shape growth?

Affordable housing is defined as spending no more than 30% of a household’s income on housing.

Former Rapid City lawmaker and lawyer David Lust serves as a consultant for the Strategic Housing Initiative, said his group is focused on workforce housing.

He categorized homes into three areas – heavily subsidized homes that rent for $ 300 to $ 500 a month and under. There is an intermediate zone, or labor housing, with rents between $ 500 and $ 1,100 per month. And then there is the market category above.

The government has different programs to encourage developers to build social housing, but there really isn’t any program for the middle level, Lust said.

“With the Strategic Housing Fund, we’re focusing on getting developers to build below the market in this gap, because frankly that’s a huge need,” he said.

Individuals in this gap area earn between $ 20,000 and $ 50,000 per year, Lust said.

The goal of the Strategic Housing Initiative is to keep people’s housing burden at 30% of their gross income or less. Right now, due to the housing shortage, a huge amount of people in the gap are spending 50, 60, 70% of their income on rent, he said.

“What that means is that this is a broken transmission or a broken arm far from truly homeless,” Lust said.

The economic indicators that Elevate Rapid City collects monthly show that in Rapid City alone, the average median list price for a home was over $ 350,000. A year ago, that number was around $ 230,000.

Alan Solano, president and CEO of the John T. Vucurevich Foundation, said research shows Rapid City currently has 3,500 housing units behind what is needed.

“These numbers may be a bit dated, but the problem is getting worse,” he said.

Rapid City District 34 Representative Mike Diedrich, a member of a summer legislative study committee working to identify how the state can help communities strengthen their local housing markets, was on hand for the meeting on Thursday.

The committee has met once before and heard testimony from real estate agents, builders and business developers on how to build more housing for working families and low-income families. Two more meetings are planned in the coming months.

The committee’s objective is to identify and remove unnecessary regulations and other obstacles to development.

“Anything that increases costs,” Diedrich said.

The group also believes that they should find a source of funding that could be put into the hands of local community members in an appropriate manner so that they can solve their housing shortage issues as they see fit.

“The intention is for these dollars to be in a long-term revolving fund,” he said.

Elevate Rapid City has scheduled another housing and economic development forum on August 5th. Panelists include Hani Shafi, Dream Design International, Domico Rodriguez, Main Street Square, Andy Scull, Scull Construction, Jennifer Sietsema, West River Business Council, and Jared McEntaffer, Benchmark Data Labs.

To read all of today’s stories, Click here or call 642-2761 to subscribe to our electronic edition or home delivery.