Connecticut housing report card: Progress, yet needs

“Housing in Connecticut in 2016 is a tale of two realities: enormous progress that has produced an effective end to veteran homelessness and substantial strides toward ending chronic homelessness, along with thousands of new affordable homes. Yet high prices for housing and cost burdens for hundreds of thousands of households continue.”

That’s the top of HousingInCT2016, an annual assessment of the availability of affordable housing in the state. The full report can be read online at pschousing.org.

As it has been nearly every year since Gov. Dannel P. Malloy took office, the report by the Partnership for Strong Communities is a mix of progress and needs.

Connecticut has effectively ended homelessness among veterans and is on track to end chronic homelessness, but the state’s median monthly housing cost of $1,398 was the sixth most expensive in the U.S.

The “housing wage” – what a worker must earn to pay for a two-bedroom apartment in Connecticut – rose from $23.02 an hour in 2014 to to $24.72 in 2016. The number of affordable housing units increased by 2 percent to 172,556.