Why Housing Matters
Home is more than wood and nails.
Affordable homeownership leads to greater economic stability, access to quality education, increased community engagement and better health. However, many people in the Greater Sioux Falls community find traditional paths to homeownership out of reach. Read to learn more about housing issues in our area and why housing (and Habitat) are so important.
Cost of Rent
Rent has increased over several hundred dollars in the last few years, averaging $1,060 in the Sioux Falls area for an apartment and $1,298 for a single-family home as of December 2023. Data in 2019 from the Joint Center on Housing Studies showed that Sioux Falls has 25,921 households that are cost burdened (households spending more than 30% of their income on housing and utilities). Additionally, 8.6% of those were listed as severely cost burned (spending more than half their income on housing and utilities).
Housing Market
Sioux Falls is experiencing an unprecedented demand for housing and rapidly increasing home costs. Many first-time homebuyers are struggling to find homes they can afford. The average home price in Sioux Falls was $299,000 as of March 2024. While there are around 1,267 real estate “units” for sale in the Greater Sioux Falls area, most are not in an affordable range for the families Habitat serves.
Homelessness
The Greater Sioux Falls area has seen an increase in homelessness with well over 1,200 adults and children experiencing homelessness on a given day. This includes being unsheltered, in shelters, in motels or doubled up with relatives or friends. Plus, over 1,000 children are identified each year by the Sioux Falls school district as being homeless at some point, if even for brief periods of time throughout the year.
Housing Impacts…
U.S. homeowners have an average net wealth that is 400% higher than that of renters with similar demographics and earnings, and home equity represents the largest proportion of wealth (34.5%) for U.S. households.
Research has shown a correlation between homeownership and increased wealth, with each year of homeownership tending to be associated with an additional $9,500 in net wealth, on average.
Children of low-income homeowners are 11% more likely to graduate from high school and are 4.5% more likely to complete post-secondary education than children of low-income renters.
Homeowners can leverage their housing wealth to finance post-secondary education for their children, especially lower- and moderate-income households. For lower- and moderate-income households, a $10,000 increase in housing wealth raises the probability of college attendance by 14%.
Homeowners are more likely to vote in local elections than renters in comparable neighborhoods, and this likelihood increases with the degree of neighborhood disadvantage in low-income urban areas.
Regardless of length of time they have owned a home, homeowners are 1.3 times more likely to become involved in a neighborhood group and to join a civic association than renters. The increased participation in neighborhood groups holds true in low-income neighborhoods, as well.
Decreasing housing costs for cost-burdened households (those spending more than half of their household expenditures on housing) releases resources to spend on nutritious food and health care. It also limits overcrowding to minimize the spread of respiratory infectious diseases.
For older single-family homes, weatherization reduces low-income households’ total energy costs by 12.4% within the first year. This is substantial given that low-income households have higher energy burdens, spending three times the share of their annual income (7.2%) on energy costs as compared with other households (2.3%).
This information on the impacts of housing was researched by Habitat for Humanity International. Click below to view their full evidence brief containing further details and sources.
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