Improving Our Existing Housing Stock

Guest Opinion

By Yarrow Brown | Aug. 12, 2023

Housing quality is key to community health and economic development, but it’s often overlooked in rural communities.

What is housing quality? It’s the physical conditions of a home that contribute to the health outcomes of individuals. Edgar Camero’s blog post titled “Pathways to Improved Housing Quality in Rural Places” at Change Lab Solutions caught my eye, and it’s an appropriate time to focus on our aging regional housing stock and what we can do about it.

Aging housing stock—units built before 1980—is a housing quality issue that impacts rural households whether they own or rent. In rural communities, more than half of all households—an estimated 9.4 million households—live in units that were built prior to 1980, according to the article by Camero. Our region’s shares of renter-occupied (31.6 percent) and owner-occupied (30.3 percent) housing units built prior to 1970 are slightly higher than the state averages of 25 and 22.7 percent.

The recent 10-county Housing Needs Assessment (HNA) noted this as a threat or weakness to meeting our housing needs. The HNA pointed out an extremely low vacancy rate in our region of 0.7 percent (a healthy market should be 4-6 percent). This means we have so few housing options available, many who have the means are stepping down, and many who are lower income are forced to live in poor quality conditions because of the tight inventory.

The HNA also demonstrated that a notable portion of the households live in housing that’s considered substandard, including overcrowded housing or units that lack complete kitchens or plumbing. Nearly 2,000 occupied housing units are overcrowded, and over 1,200 units lack complete kitchens or plumbing facilities.

Three of our 10 counties have overall shares of overcrowded renter-occupied units of at least 5 percent: Wexford, Missaukee, and Kalkaska. These overcrowded renter-occupied units are higher than the regional figure of 3.2 percent and Michigan’s 2.9 percent. Missaukee also has the largest share—30 percent—of overcrowded owner-occupied units. Regarding incomplete plumbing or kitchens, Charlevoix County has the largest share (5.1 percent) of renter-occupied housing with this issue, while Grand Traverse County has the largest share of owner-occupied housing with incomplete plumbing or kitchens at 4.1 percent.

Aging housing stock can exacerbate poor housing conditions in rural places, which in turn affect the lives of households and entire communities. Rural communities face a range of housing quality issues from inadequate water access to faulty plumbing, high heating costs, poor ventilation, leaking roofs, and mold. Deferred maintenance leads to higher costs for the needed improvements.

Three levels of programs can help preserve our housing stock, which local communities can consider. These include proactive rental inspection programs, regional or county-wide housing rehabilitation programs, or federal funding programs.

I want to suggest we look at rental inspection programs, which are a practical solution for our northwest Michigan communities to improve and conserve their housing stock. Communities can create a Proactive Rental Inspection (PRI) program that aims to protect tenants from substandard housing conditions by monitoring and identifying housing quality issues before housing stock begins to deteriorate. It can also help our communities monitor the year-round and short-term rentals to create a balance and ensure sufficient year-round housing.

Proactively inspecting rental housing helps keep people in their homes, focuses on improving housing quality, and protects the tenants’ well-being. It also allows municipalities to tailor housing inspections to address specific local issues and take the burden of initiating requests or complaints off the tenant.

Lastly, these programs help preserve community stability and property values by requiring maintenance of housing properties and preventing them from becoming unsafe or undesirable to live in. Maintaining and increasing property values is important in rural communities, especially to preserve and increase local tax revenues which fund public services. It can help communities navigate complicated zoning changes that residents want to tie to owner-occupancy or concerns over maintenance of rental units.

This is not going to happen overnight. These programs require strong collaboration between stakeholders including tenants, landlords, policymakers, and community advocates to work effectively toward a shared goal. There are a lot of resources to help create a Proactive Rental Inspection (PRI) program, and three communities we can look to for examples include Bay City, Ludington, and Midland—each with a rental inspection program. There are also programs through the Northwest Michigan Community Action Agency to help homeowners with home improvement services. 

But we can’t just rely on these programs. Between now and the end of September, we have an opportunity to engage with the Statewide Housing Plan and create our own Regional Housing Plan. Through this process, we will identify our top priorities around housing and set goals to help bring more resources to our region to meet our incredible need for housing. But we need local governments to understand their housing stock and ensure both home ownership and rental units are property maintained for the overall health and well-being of our community.

Yarrow Brown is the executive director of Housing North, a 10-county housing agency serving northwest Michigan.