ISSUE 006
Ninety thousand dollars or four hundred thousand, with nothing in between
Two entries ago I guessed that some of the fastest-growing rural counties in Missouri are also the ones where nobody can afford to live, and said I hadn't checked. This is me checking. The answer is yes for at least one county I can name, and the shape of the problem is stranger than a shortage.
An idea worth thinking about
It isn't a shortage of houses. It's a hole in the middle.
Derek Weber, executive director of a northeast Missouri planning commission, described his region's housing stock to a reporter in terms I haven't been able to stop thinking about. Sixty-five percent of the homes were built before 1960, with a median price around $90,000. Another twenty percent were built after 2008, median price around $400,000. Between those two groups, very little.
That is not a shortage in the ordinary sense. There are houses. What's missing is anything a household earning a normal local wage would buy — the $180,000 house that a teacher or a shop owner or a welder could actually finance. The cheap stock is cheap because it's sixty-five years old and often needs more work than a bank will lend against; the new stock is priced for somebody who isn't from there.
This reframes what a town can do about it. You cannot fix a hole in the middle by building more of either end, and most policy levers are built for one end or the other. The figures come from a 2024 conversation and are one official's characterisation of one region, not a statewide survey — but if the shape is even roughly right where you are, it explains why a county can be growing and still have nowhere for anyone to live.
A tool I disappeared into
The state's own list of which rural counties are underserved
The Missouri Housing Development Commission publishes supplemental data alongside its Qualified Allocation Plan, and buried in it is something I didn't expect to find in public: a county-by-county table identifying the rural counties the state considers underserved, each with a severe cost burden percentage and a median income figure.
Andrew, Atchison, Carroll, Carter, Chariton, Dade, Gasconade, Gentry, Holt, Knox, Livingston, McDonald, Miller, Monroe, Montgomery, Ozark, Perry, Saline, Schuyler, Shannon, Shelby, Sullivan, Webster and Worth all appear. Knox and McDonald sit at 10 percent severe cost burden, the highest on the list. The median income column is the useful companion — Ozark County at $59,900, McDonald at $59,000 — because cost burden without income context tells you very little.
Know what this document is for before you lean on it. It exists to allocate low-income housing tax credits, so "underserved" is defined in a way that serves that allocation. It's a specific, official, county-level list and it is not a general measure of housing need.
Learn something
The distinction that makes housing statistics make sense
The National Low Income Housing Coalition publishes an annual report called The Gap, and the March 2026 edition is free. Its value for a general reader is one piece of vocabulary that reorganises everything else you'll read on the subject: affordable and available.
A rental unit is affordable to a household if rent and utilities fall under an income threshold. It is affordable and available only if it is also either vacant or not already occupied by a higher-income household. That second condition is where most of the problem hides. A town can have plenty of units that would be affordable to someone earning $32,000, all of them currently rented by people earning $70,000 who couldn't find anything else. The units exist. They are not available.
The report also corrects an assumption worth naming: the majority of extremely low-income renter householders are in the labour force, are seniors, or have a disability. The picture of the affordable housing problem as a problem of people not working does not survive contact with the data.
What we’re seeing
About 8,300 Missouri units are set to stop being affordable by 2030, and replacements aren't being built fast enough
Affordable housing built with low-income tax credits carries an expiry. Developers accept the credits in exchange for keeping rents low for a period; when that period ends, landlords can charge market rates. Jeff Smith, executive director of the Missouri Workforce Housing Association, put the number due to lose affordable status by 2030 at around 8,300 units, and said that at the rate Missouri builds through the programme, the state does not come close to replenishing what lapses each year.
That is a different kind of problem from a shortage, and a worse one politically, because nothing visible happens. No building is demolished. A rent letter arrives. The unit is still there and simply stops counting.
There's a distribution question running alongside it. Reporting on a state housing study found that rural affordable housing projects aren't perceived as a priority, despite 48 percent of the agency's spending going to rural areas — which suggests the issue is attention and application capacity rather than simple allocation. A small county without a housing authority or a developer relationship does not apply, and not applying looks identical to not needing.
Now the thing I promised to check. Two entries ago I guessed that some of Missouri's fastest-growing rural counties are also the ones where housing has become unaffordable, and flagged that I hadn't verified it. Webster County appears on MU Extension's list of the state's fastest-growing counties and on MHDC's list of underserved rural counties, at just under 8 percent severe cost burden. That is one county confirmed, not a pattern established — but it is exactly the shape I suspected, and the same table lets you check the rest.
Which loops back to the population numbers. A county that grows and cannot house the people arriving converts its own growth into a commute, and eventually into somebody else's county.
One question
Could someone you'd want to hire find a house in your county?
Not a mansion — a normal house on a normal wage. Yes or no, and the county. This is the question I keep failing to answer from data alone.
More in this pillar as it's written.
— Shana
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