What “housing, housing, housing” is doing politically

Yes — there are official reports. And no, the “housing shortage” talk is not only about free housing for the homeless. Officials are folding several different problems into one slogan.

The reports they actually cite

The city’s main document is the Citywide Housing Market Study and Strategy (July 2020). It still underpins later RHID write-ups, the 2024 implementation-plan metrics, Consolidated Plan language, and a lot of council/chamber talking points.

HUD’s latest independent snapshot is the Topeka Housing Market Profile as of April 1, 2025. It does not describe a collapsing market. It calls the sales market balanced and the rental market slightly tight.

Other numbers in circulation:

• AEI Housing Center (March 2026): Kansas as a whole is short about 4,200 homes — roughly 0.3% of statewide stock. That is a modest gap, not a 10,000-unit local emergency.
• City Manager Robert Perez (Feb 2026): about 900 units short downtown.
• Topeka Housing Authority CEO Trey George (March 2026): Topeka needs roughly 10,000 additional units across all price ranges. That figure is much larger than HUD or AEI and looks like several 20-year “need” buckets stacked together.
• A 2022 RHID needs memo updated the 2020 study to about 2,367 units of net demand for a “balanced” market.

So the reports exist. The size of the shortage depends on who is talking and what they are counting.

What the market actually looks like

Topeka is not San Francisco or Austin. Prices are still low by national standards, and there is not a raw “no roofs left” crisis.

Sales

• HUD: sales vacancy about 1.2%; market balanced. Average sale price about $236,000 in the year ending Feb 2025, up 7%.
• Recent local/realtor figures: median sale often in the $184,000–$227,500 range; homes sell fast (roughly 8–19 days) at or near list. Demand for existing houses is real.

Rentals

• HUD: overall rental vacancy 7.4% (down from 9.9% in 2020); apartments about 7.2%; average apartment rent about $941. “Slightly tight,” not a 1% vacancy squeeze.
• Listing sites put typical Topeka rents around $850–$1,000. Cheap compared with the country; still a stretch for low-wage households.

Population

• HUD: Topeka MSA population about 233,000, basically unchanged from 2020. This is not a boomtown absorbing tens of thousands of new households.

The 2020 city study itself said something officials rarely repeat: Topeka already had enough units to house everyone and then some, with about 6,000 vacant units (11%), and vacancy as high as 17–21% in parts of east and central Topeka. More than 40% of the stock was built before 1960. The problem they defined was quality, price, type, and location — not a missing 10,000 empty lots.

That mismatch still explains a lot: empty or worn houses in older neighborhoods, and a tight market for decent starter homes, townhomes, and clean rentals.

Production is the real constraint they can point to

Where the “shortage” claim is strongest is how little has been built since 2008.

• Shawnee County private housing permits: 540 (2021), then 199 / 206 / 218 in 2022–2024. The Chamber’s line is that average annual permits are down about two-thirds from the five years before the 2008 crash.
• City of Topeka 2024: 112 new housing units permitted inside the city. That is a trickle.
• 2025 city YTD through early November jumped because of multifamily: 350 residential units, including 250 in 5+ unit buildings. That is downtown/incentive-driven product, not a wave of $200k starter houses.
• HUD (year ending March 2025): about 330 for-sale units permitted metro-wide and only 40 rental units.

The 2020 study wanted hundreds of units a year. The city has mostly delivered far fewer, except when a big apartment deal lands.

Homelessness is a separate, smaller number

Latest official Point-in-Time count (June 24, 2026):

• 460 people / 379 households
• 202 unsheltered
• Down from a peak of 546 in July 2024 and 502 in January 2026.

That is a serious local problem. It is not a 5,000- or 10,000-unit housing gap. PIT counts also miss people doubled up, and they do not measure addiction, mental illness, or whether someone will stay housed. Treating street homelessness as if it were just “we didn’t build enough apartments” is the part of the rhetoric that does not hold up.

Subsidized housing waitlists are a better measure of income-restricted demand:

• Public housing: 744 THA units; waitlist recently cited around 300.
• Section 8: list was closed for years with 2,000+ names; THA briefly reopened it in spring 2026 after working through that backlog. About 938 Housing Choice Vouchers in use.

That is real need at the bottom of the income scale. It is still not the same thing as “Topeka has no housing.”

What “housing, housing, housing” is doing politically

Officials are bundling four products under one word:

1. Low-income / LIHTC / public housing / vouchers — waitlists, trust fund, possible extra sales tax slice.
2. Workforce / “missing middle” — duplex/triplex/quad changes, starter product that private builders have not delivered at volume.
3. Downtown and market-rate apartments — The Hutch (~192 units), Union at Tower District, tax incentives. Perez has said those two projects are “a little over 400 units” at both ends of attainability.
4. Homeless services and shelters — Compassion Impact Center, CoC funding, PIT counts.

City Manager Perez has also floated a tenth-of-a-cent sales tax: about $4 million a year, split between the affordable housing trust fund and a market-rate housing fund. That tells you the slogan is being used to justify both social housing and developer incentives.

The 2024 implementation metrics showed the city lagging its own targets, especially workforce rentals (only a handful counted toward a 400-unit goal). Affordable-rental counts looked better mostly because of emergency vouchers and LIHTC, not a private building boom.

What’s really going on

• There is an official study trail. The 2020 city study is the mother document.
• There is underbuilding of new, livable product — especially starter homes and good mid-price rentals — after 2008.
• There is cost burden at the bottom: the 2020 study said about 30% of households paid more than 30% of income for housing, and it estimated a need on the order of 5,000 units at or below 60% of AMI.
• There is not a citywide unit shortage on the scale of the loudest quotes. HUD still calls sales balanced. Vacancy in older neighborhoods has been high. Population is flat.
• Homelessness is real (~460 people) and is not the same problem as “we need 10,000 more units.”
• “Housing shortage” is now a policy umbrella: it supports zoning changes, land-bank lots, LIHTC, Housing Trust Fund money, and tax breaks for downtown apartments.

The cleanest way to hear the slogan is: officials are short of the kind of housing they want to take credit for building — subsidized, workforce, and new downtown product — while the existing cheap-but-tired stock and a small unsheltered population get rolled into the same speech.