The Affordable Housing Production Task Force - consisting of bipartisan elected officials, business leaders, and agency officials - delivers a list of nine recommendations to meet the state’s growing housing needs.
Many of the recommendations revolve around the need to increase housing density. Matthew Heckles is the director of the Delaware State Housing Authority and a task force member. He says current zoning laws often encourage building large homes on large tracts of land, and those homes are often out of reach for most Delawareans.
“Our market right now is - I would say it's broken," he says. "I would say that we have created a system where what can be built is that large spread out housing and that economically has to be expensive.”
Heckles says increasing housing density through new zoning laws and putting more diverse housing options into the mix are key to creating more affordable housing.
“We need more apartments. We need more townhouses. We need more condos. We need a diversity of housing so that we have builders building housing that is affordable to different people in different income strata across the state.”
In addition to changes to state and local laws about zoning and development, the report also calls for a significant investment - $100 million per year - by the state into DSHA to produce affordable housing. Heckles says the Meyer administration has already shown a commitment to affordable housing in the governor's proposed budget as well.
"Governor Meyer just released his budget reset numbers and identified a really strong housing budget. It is housing cost and cost of living for families in Delaware - a large part of that is the cost of housing contributing to the high cost of of living., and so we know that that's an area where we need to make progress," Heckles said.
He added that, barring special funding like the American Rescue Plan Act, Meyer's budget recommendations for housing are the largest in state history.
The task force also recommends incentivizing developers to build affordable housing and making sure the state has a sustainable construction workforce.
