Imagine a family of four searching for a two-bedroom apartment in the Chicago region. Let’s call them the Millers. Mr. and Mrs. Miller work in the city’s well-off northwest suburbs, in two of the fastest-growing employment sectors in Illinois. Mrs. Miller is a full-time customer service representative and Mr. Miller works part-time as a cashier while the kids are at school. Together the couple earns $38,000 a year, or 50 percent of what the typical Chicago-area family earns. The Millers want an easy commute from a neighborhood with high-quality schools and hope to spend less than the recommended 30 percent of their income — roughly $950/month — on housing.

But the Millers are unlikely to find an affordable home near a good school. And even if the Millers turn to the lower-cost suburbs, they face higher transportation costs, diminished job access, and limited availability of other services.

Clearly, these challenges are not unique to the Chicago region. In 2015, almost half of renter households (48 percent) in the United States experienced a housing cost burden, meaning they spent more than 30 percent of their income on housing. And the lower a renter household’s income, the fewer choices they have: there were just 35 housing options affordable and available to every 100 renters with extremely low incomes in 2015. Shortages are worst in large, urban counties that anchor many of the nation’s largest metro areas, but pressures have also been increasing in suburban communities where poverty has grown rapidly in recent years.

Together, these realities mean that policymakers, practitioners, funders, advocates, and other stakeholders must focus not only on boosting the supply of rental housing to ease the nation’s crisis, but also on ensuring that more of that supply is located in neighborhoods that lead to better opportunities for residents and communities.

Read the full article about advancing regional solutions for affordable housing by Elizabeth Kneebone, Robin Snyderman, and Cecile Murray at Brookings.