Hundreds gather Thursday to discuss housing solutions at Boone County housing summit

COLUMBIA, Mo. (KMIZ)

Around 200 stakeholders in Columbia and Boone County gathered Thursday to discuss how to improve the county's current housing shortage.

The city and county partnered to host the summit upon completion of a Boone County Housing Study completed by Amarach Planning Services. Results of that study showed that the biggest issue for the City of Columbia and Boone County's stock centers on affordability across all incomes.

The day started with a presentation of survey results, followed by panels on housing development and social services and multiple breakout sessions in the afternoon to discuss next steps.

Orie Hemme with Hemme Construction was one of the many people in attendance Thursday and said it's been helpful to get so many different stakeholders all under one roof.

"You get everybody in one central location, it kind of gets us all fired up about the same topic," Hemme said. "Hopefully, moving on from this, we kind of have some clearer objectives and a clear direction on what we can do moving forward to help improve our community and fix this issue."

Amarach Planning Services Owner David Boston said the largest thing to come out of the study results is that Boone County is facing a housing supply shortage, which is plaguing the market with high prices.

Boston said this shortage is largely due to a struggling construction industry as Columbia and Boone County continue to grow.

"We're, just after the Great Recession, not producing enough housing to keep up with demand, and especially in a place like Columbia or Boone County where you have such a strong employment sector ... the housing market just cannot keep up," Boston said.

Hemme was on the panel to discuss housing development and how it can be improved throughout the county.

He said infrastructure costs such as building sewer capacity and offsite improvements can significantly increase how much it costs a developer to build a home, therefore making prices higher for the buyer.

Hemme said if the city or county could help take some of that cost burden off of developers, it could allow the price of homes to be more attainable.

"Those things predominately have fallen on the developer to pay for fully," Hemme said. "And those things start adding up, it's really expensive if you're trying to build a neighborhood and hit a certain price point to be more affordable."

New data released this week from the Columbia Board of Realtors shows the average home price in September was $379,087, up 10% from the year before. Meanwhile, home sales were down 11% at 146 sales that month.

Other panelists suggested things like the city being more communicative with developers and looking at state priorities to receive additional funding.

In the social services panel, panelists discussed how homelessness is directly related to the housing crisis. They talked about creating more accessory dwelling units and increasing development in the central city area.

"As we can see more of that high density urban development happening within the central city area, it's going to increase accessibility to resources, it's going to allow for greater safety because we have more access to safety resources, instead of pushing these out to the outskirts as we've seen so far," said Love Columbia Program Director Conrad Hake.

Breakout sessions were then used to discuss areas of recommendation including preservation, empowerment, development and sustainability.

Boston is now recommending the county establish a local housing trust fund to generate local revenue that can be used to incentivize housing development without being tied to federal or state restrictions.

The City of Columbia 2025 budget includes a fund to incentivize building affordable housing.

"The priorities can really be set completely at the local level, and so you can be more responsive to changes in the local market," Boston said. "You can address the specific housing needs in Boone County and Columbia."

Ashley Switzer with Show-Me Central Habitat for Humanity said ideas about creating more grant funding would help her organization build more affordable housing.

"Habitat, along with lots of other organizations, are always looking for additional land and funding," Switzler said. "So, some of these ideas are about creating a land bank, creating opportunities for more grant funding and unique ways to use tax credits, things like that are definite ways that we can implement to be able to build more affordable housing through Habitat's program and just across the board throughout the community."

Housing ambassador at Columbia Housing Authority Kendra Jackson, who was on Thursday's social services panel, said it was good to hear from other local representatives on Thursday. She said her organization now needs to start collaborating more with other resources in the area.

"This was a great coming together of minds," Jackson said. " ... We should all take in this great information and get out and start actually doing the work," Jackson said.

The summit took place from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Thursday at the Memorial Baptist Church on Paris Road. A recap session was held from 6-7:30 p.m.

Those in attendance Thursday included representatives from a variety of housing-related sectors, including social services agencies, local government, property owners and managers, bankers, developers and builders, realtors and more.