Houston Faces Shortage Of Affordable Rental Housing

Nearly half of Houston renters are burdened by their housing costs.

Along with the nation's 50 largest metropolitan areas, Houston has a shortage of affordable housing for renters.

Only 19 Houston area rental units are affordable and available for every one hundred extremely low-income renter households, according to a report by the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

Only the Las Vegas, Los Angeles and Orlando metropolitan areas fare worse.

Kyle Shelton, director of strategic partnerships at the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice University, said it's really a national problem, but Houston and Texas have a particular challenge.

"Part of that certainly is that the state and even locally we have not had very progressive looking policies to create tools to use affordable housing," he said. "We usually use many of the federal tools."

The report makes policy recommendations to tackle the problem, including increased funding for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and capital investment in affordable housing projects.