When news spread across Montgomery County Chatter channels that Cloverdale Apartments would move its federally subsidized Section 8 units to Kokomo, residents reported that they couldn’t reach anyone in the office. Others wondered what happens as affordable housing options are further constrained.
Meanwhile, Mayor Todd Barton hopes new construction — including single-family homes in Arbor Homes’ Hawkview Community and a soon-to-be-built, age-restricted rental development called Crosspoint Villas — will help ease the overall housing pinch in our community.
“We’re working very aggressively to bring new housing,” Barton said. “Those are going to be — the price point is the issue.”
The tension lies at the intersection of what is available, what is affordable, and living wages for Montgomery County. MIT’s Living Wage Calculator estimates that a single adult in Montgomery County needs to earn $21.11 an hour working full time to cover basic expenses. For a two-adult household in which both adults work, each would need $21.64 an hour with one child, $26.39 with two children and $31.53 with three children. In contrast, a single parent with one child needs to make over $37, for two kids almost $50 dollars per hour and over $60 per hour if they have three kids. MIT’s estimates, last updated Feb. 10, 2025, include essentials such as food, childcare, medical care, housing, transportation, taxes and other basic costs; Indiana’s minimum wage remains $7.25 an hour, and local employers like Lakeside recently advertised starting wages between $16-21 per hour. Barton says CSI recently raised its starting pay to $28 an hour.
While new homes may improve options farther down the market, residents who buy new housing could leave behind homes and rentals that are attainable for younger families and other buyers with tighter budgets.
The city’s strategy rests partly on movement within the market.
“As people move up, homes at lower price points become available where the numbers do work,” Barton said. “That’s part of our approach right now.”
But Barton said developers are clear about why they cannot simply build less-expensive units: Construction labor and material costs make the numbers unworkable.
“They’re like, ‘Here are the numbers. We can’t, with the cost of construction materials and labor, build something that comes out to what people think is good.’”
Meanwhile public and nonprofit housing supports remain essential, especially for residents who cannot wait for broader market movement to create lower-cost openings — a concern that is exacerbated by outside real estate opportunists targeting homeowners for cash buyouts at only 70-90% of home value to flip or rent or contract sell without making safety-based updates to neglected properties.
Section 8 housing comes in a few forms, including project-based rental assistance (limited to the specific rental property) and voucher-based programs. The Crawfordsville Housing Authority administers Housing Choice Vouchers, which follow the person. Its program differs from project-based rental assistance, in which a subsidy is connected to a particular unit or building. Housing Authority vouchers are attached to the participant, allowing a household to take its assistance with it when it moves.
“The difference between that rental assistance and our rental assistance is that theirs is tied to the apartment,” Housing Authority Executive Director Stacey Doty said. “Ours belongs to the participant. So if they move, the rental assistance moves with them.”
That flexibility is valuable to those with vouchers, allowing them to take assistance when they move but the local program is under historical financial strain. Doty said federal funding cuts have put the authority into a shortfall, forcing it to close its waiting list and stop issuing new applications. The authority has not called new households from the list since December, she said.
“With the participants that we currently have on the program, we will not have enough money by the end of this year to even pay what we are paying right now,” Doty said.
The agency is working with HUD’s shortfall team and has applied for emergency funding. In the meantime, it is allowing its caseload to decline as current participants leave rather than replacing them. The Housing Authority served 461 households in September, down from the closer-to-500 household level it usually maintains. Meanwhile, 549 households remain on the closed waiting list.
“We closed the list. We’re not giving out any applications. We’re not calling anyone off the list right now,” Doty said. “We’re just working with what we currently have.”
Even when funding is available, the voucher system depends on landlords willing to accept it — another persistent constraint. The program offers dependable rent payments and requires third-party inspections to confirm units meet federal housing-quality standards.
“We already do not have enough landlords for the program as it is,” said Doty. “That is always our biggest challenge: keeping enough housing stock in the program to begin with.”
The authority currently pays up to 120% of HUD’s suggested payment standard, a policy that increased during the COVID-19 era because rents had risen beyond what vouchers could cover. In the years since, housing costs have remained historically high. Lowering payment standards could help close the budget gap, Doty said, but it could also cause landlords to leave the program.
“We increased it to 120 because we were not able to house anyone at the figures that were given to us because the rents were too high,” she said. “If we lower those payment standards, we would lose landlords.”
The struggle illustrates why higher wages alone do not resolve the housing problem. Barton said one local manufacturer recently raised its starting labor rate to $28 an hour and has about 200 openings it cannot fill. Other companies may respond to that competition. Those jobs can create meaningful opportunities for workers who can access them and sustain the schedules they require. But they do not describe the whole labor market.
“For people working at Wendy’s and McDonald’s and the service industry, the numbers aren’t going to work,” Barton said.
That leaves many households caught between a market that cannot profitably produce new low-cost housing and a strained voucher system unable to add families quickly. Barton said city government is considering ways to encourage affordability, including the possibility of using future tax-increment revenue to reduce upfront development costs, though property-tax uncertainty makes such approaches difficult.
For now, the city’s efforts to add housing and improve workforce pathways are long-term responses. For residents facing immediate affordability challenges, the safety net — vouchers, housing agencies and community partners — remains indispensable.
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