Severe Housing Problems

Housing is a critical need for all individuals, and affordable housing is a good indicator of the job market and access to quality jobs within a community. Overcrowding, poor facilities, and homelessness exacerbate the experience of multidimensional poverty and increase risks for disease, depression, and transient housing experience. Ultimately, severe housing problems can lead to homelessness and increased housing vacancies, which can result in an increased economic burden on a community and a decreased quality of life for those affected.

Peer City Perspective

Louisville currently ranks 6th among its peer cities in the percentage of households experiencing severe housing problems.

A household experiences severe housing problems if it has at least one of the following issues: lack of kitchen facilities, lack of complete plumbing, overcrowding, or severe cost burden (paying more than half of their income towards housing costs).

Louisville is in the top tier of its peer group according to a natural breaks algorithm. Cities in green are those that outperform their peers. Cities in yellow represent the middle cluster, and those in red lag behind their peers on this indicator.

Trends over Time

Fewer Louisville residents experience severe housing problems than residents in peer cities, on average. However, Louisville’s rate of severe housing burden has flattened since 2015 (and might even be increasing slightly), while the rate in peer cities has continued to decrease.

Best and Worst Peer Performers

Over the past two decades, Grand Rapids saw its rate of severe housing burden decrease by 1 percentage point, making it the best performer of the group. In contrast, the rate in Indianapolis increased by more than 5 percentage points, making it the worst performer. Louisville performed slightly worse than its peers, on average, increasing its percentage of households experiencing these severe issues by more than 2 percentage points.

Differences by Sex

In Louisville and across its peer cities, female-headed households experience a higher rate of severe housing burden than male-headed households. While the patterns for each group mirrored each other closely for many years, since 2014, the rate of severe housing burden among female-headed households began to increase, while it continued to decrease among male-headed households.

Differences by Race

The rate of severe housing burden among Black households is about twice that of White households in Louisville. Black households have seen somewhat steady improvement on this metric since 2011. Over the past two decades, Hispanic households have seen fairly steady improvement as well. The rate of severe housing burden among Hispanic households now sits at nearly 20%, down from more than 30% in 2000.

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Natural Breaks Algorithm

For each indicator, Greater Louisville Project assigns cities into one of three groups (high-performing, middle-of-the-pack, and low-performing) based on how they compare to other cities. The assignment is based on how cities naturally cluster on that indicator. Sometimes, the differences between cities are very small, and the difference between a city ranked 5th and 6th could simply be a matter of the sampling error that arises from using survey data. Thus, rather than always make a division that declares the top 5 to be the top tier, we use a natural breaks algorithm to look for a cluster of cities that is outperforming the rest, a cluster that is about average, and a cluster that is lagging. This clustering gives us a better indication of where Louisville is thriving and where Louisville has room to learn from cities that are doing better.

Z-Scores

Z-scores (or standardization) is a way to combine data with different units of measurement into a single index. The z-score is a measure of how far away a city (or census tract, etc.) is from the average city. In order to be comparable across different units of measurement, the z-score is the distance from the mean measured in standard deviations (e.g. if Louisville has a z-score of 1 it means Louisville is 1 standard deviation above the mean of its peer cities).

Data from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's County Health Rankings use z-scores and all z-scores are relative to the mean of Louisville's peer cities. (On the County Health Rankings site z-scores are relative to all the counties in each state - thus z-scores reported by GLP will be different, because we are using a different reference group). The Greater Louisville Project also uses z-scores in our multidimensional poverty index, which compares each census tract to the mean of all census tracts in Louisville.