Task force members discuss, learn about policies to spur housing

Task force members discuss, learn about policies to spur housing July 1, 2025

Rep. Joshua Watkins, D-Louisville, speaks Monday during a meeting of the Kentucky Housing Task Force 2025. Task force members discussed policies designed to spur housing development in the commonwealth. A high-resolution photo can be found here.

FRANKFORT — Legislators on the Kentucky Housing Task Force 2025 held their first meeting on Monday, discussing and learning ways to spur housing development opportunities in the commonwealth.

“We’re hoping this interim to talk about some real-world things we can do in the state of Kentucky, be less ideological and more practical on what we can do,” said Senate Majority Caucus Chair Robby Mills, R-Henderson, who is co-chair of the task force.

Wendy Smith, deputy executive director of housing programs at Kentucky Housing Corp., testified that homeownership can be an extremely challenging goal.

“We have folks who could get approved for a loan at… $170,000 to buy a home,” she said. “There used to be homes in Kentucky to buy at that amount, and there just aren’t now.”

Last year, KHC commissioned a county-by-county supply gap analysis, and every county needs more housing, Smith said. It pointed to a gap of 206,000 units for 2024, split nearly equally between a demand for rentals and homes.

“For rentals, there is a greater need for our moderate and low-income households to have rental options that are affordable. For homeownership, it is almost evenly spread across all the income bands,” Smith said.

Smith said it’s most important for the task force to set its sights on flexible resources that “move the needle” and accelerate housing production. She highlighted revolving loan funds, economic development tools for housing and employer-assisted housing.

“I’m here advocating for the building industry and the building marketplace in Kentucky. Flexible resources can move the market by incentivizing public-private partnerships that accelerate housing production everywhere in the state,” she said.

The flexibility of state-level funds over federal dollars can’t be overemphasized, Smith said.

She pointed to the Indiana Residential Infrastructure Fund as an ambitious housing goal worthy of replication. The fund provides $75 million for low interest, 20-year loans that support infrastructure projects related to rental or homeownership development. Local governments apply for the funding, which can be used for installation, replacement, upgrades and land purchases.

Sen. Jared Carpenter, R-Berea, said affordable housing is different for every person, and he asks clients what price range they seek when shopping for real estate.

“I’m doing a lot right now that are what we call affordable housing. I live in Berea, a really fast-growing community,” he said.

When Carpenter started building houses in a development in 2019, they were $189,000. However, on Friday, one of the houses sold for $289,000.

Carpenter said he made the same profit on both houses even though one cost more money. He said the costs of materials to build houses have increased substantially, along with the price of lots and infrastructure such as roads.

Task Force Co-Chair Rep. Susan Witten, R-Louisville, said there’s collective acceptance of the housing challenges, and the problems are not going away.

“The good news is that so many of the potential solutions that you all talked about, we’ve already talked about. These are in motion. We’ve been looking at other states. Our goal for this task force is to really tee up some of these pieces of legislation, vet them so that when session starts they can go right to committee and we can really get a lot done,” she said.

Mills and others sponsored legislation last year to address infrastructure costs for developers, but it didn’t gain full approval by the end of the 2025 legislative session. “You’ll probably see that coming back around,” he said.

M. Nolan Gray, a Bluegrass Institute scholar who testified on behalf of the Bluegrass Institute for Public Policy, said he lives in California now and doesn’t want to see Kentuckians face a similar housing crisis. He urged the task force to be open to successful initiatives that exist in other states.

“I’m coming to you from the future,” Gray said. “Decades of strict rules and costly mandates gets you to a place where California is today, where hundreds of thousands of people are leaving the state, where folks who remain have no path to home ownership, they’re doubling or tripling up in apartments. Folks are living in tents and cars.”

Rep. Joshua Watkins, D-Louisville, said he has a local government housing background and he’s a real estate agent. He noted that the supply gap isn’t just an urban problem; it’s widespread across the state.

“It’s a 120-county wide problem. I think it’s the biggest existential threat that the state is facing,” he said.

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https://apps.legislature.ky.gov/publicservices/pio/release.html#Housing-070125