Massachusetts needs more affordable housing, study says. Lots of it.

By Andrew Brinker, Globe staff, The Boston Globe

The state is at least 440,000 units short of demand for income-restricted affordable housing.

It is no secret that Massachusetts has an affordable housing shortage. People of even modest means struggle to make rent here, and families are being rapidly priced out of the state.

But how bad is the problem, really?

According to one new report this week, the state only has enough affordable housing for 32 percent of the 652,000 low-income renter households who need it. In other words, 441,000 families in Massachusetts who qualify for affordable housing can’t access it.

The figure makes clear the bleak reality: the state’s affordable housing system is no longer a reliable safety net. It is a rare commodity awarded only to a lucky few who, in some instances, quite literally hit the lottery.

“The reality is that we need thousands and thousands more units of affordable housing for people of every income, every household size, in every place in Massachusetts,” said Jessie Partridge Guerrero, director of data services at the Metropolitan Area Planning Council, which wrote the report with Housing Navigator Massachusetts, a nonprofit that created a statewide centralized affordable housing search tool. “It’s not necessarily shocking information, but the scale of that number certainly puts into perspective how far away we are from solving this problem.”

Unsurprisingly, the state’s “affordability gap,” as researchers describe it, is the worst for the state’s poorest residents.

Of those 441,000 households who qualify for affordable housing but can’t access it, some 44 percent are considered extremely low-income, meaning they make 30 percent of the area median income — in Greater Boston that’s $48,950 for a family of four — or less.

Those residents qualify for the government’s deepest affordable housing subsidies such as public housing and Section 8 vouchers, both of which have waitlists that can stretch for more than a decade.

The result is families who end up paying huge portions of their income toward rent, or endure overcrowded apartments, illegal or unsafe units, or in extreme cases, homelessness.

For families who earn just a little more — “very low income” households between 30 and 50 percent of the AMI — there are even fewer resources, the report found, because most state and federal programs target either the poorest residents or middle-income earners, not anyone in between.

Section 8 and public housing are designated for the state’s poorest families, and the popular state affordable programs Chapter 40B and inclusionary zoning typically build units for people earning 80 percent of AMI.

The people in between, 30 to 50 percent AMI earners, make too much money for public housing, and too little for inclusionary zoning units. The result is that 81 percent of those households do not live in affordable housing, the report found.

“We call it the missing middle,” said Jerome DuVal, executive director of Housing Navigator. “We have programs for people earning more than them, and programs for people earning much less. But in this push to build more, we’ve missed some folks who need an affordable home.”

And while the state has a shortage of affordable units for families, the greatest need is for homes that can house “small households” with one or two members. That, the reports’ authors say, is at least a positive note, because those homes are smaller, cheaper, and easier to build.

The underlying problem is that the state has not built nearly enough affordable housing in recent decades. At the same time, the price of market-rate homes has soared, and “naturally occurring affordable housing” like older triple-decker units that rented for cheap, have been flipped, upgraded, or simply had rents raised.

And income growth has not kept up with the pace of housing price growth, meaning more people than ever qualify for affordable housing.

The aim of the report, said DuVal, is to encourage state policymakers to consider solutions to the state’s deep housing shortage that will stimulate building for people at all income levels. Simply building market-rate housing, while important, won’t provide immediate relief for the people who need it the most.

“The urgency to build a lot more housing is real,” said DuVal. “But we want to make sure that it’s not just about more. It’s also about ensuring we build the right kinds of housing for the right people in the right places.”