Craig Armstrong, development specialist for the city of Newton, recently drove home a point about the unruly conflict between economic growth in Greater Des Moines and the need for more affordable housing. 

Armstrong attended this week’s affordable housing forum that was hosted by the Greater Des Moines Partnership and featured Eric Burmeister, executive director of the Polk County Housing Trust Fund, and Kris Saddoris, vice president of development for Hubbell Realty Co., for a discussion that was moderated by Sue Huppert, chair of the Partnership’s government policy council.

Some of the information pointed to an economy that is generating lots of low- to moderate-income jobs, many of which leave workers “cost burdened,” meaning that they spend more than 30 percent of their incomes on housing costs.

Overall, the median household income of renters rose 8.9 percent between 2005 and 2015, while rents have increased 19.6 percent, led by rents in downtown Des Moines, according to statistics Burmeister presented.

To provide a little more perspective, just over 48,000 households in Polk County are cost burdened. On the employment side, seven of the 10 fastest-growing jobs in Central Iowa pay less-than-average wages and three of those job categories fall below or barely reach the cost of living for a single person. State and federal affordable housing assistance is available to households making 80 percent of the area median income. In Greater Des Moines, a family of four earning $61,500 a year is at that level, as is a single person earning $43,050.

A separate report Thursday by Apartment List, which runs a website that aggregates apartment listings from internet resources, said Greater Des Moines is falling behind in the affordability equation, with the number of cost-burdened renters rising to 46 percent last year, up from 39 percent in 2005. Read the report here.

In Newton, the problem is one of quantity — there’s very little affordable housing for the workers who have helped turn around the city’s dire days after Maytag Corp. closed operations. 

“In the last 10 years, we have erased the job losses and added 2,100 new jobs,” Armstrong said during the forum. Unemployment has dropped to about 3 percent from 11 percent in 2008. That’s the good news. The bad news is that it is difficult to find housing in or near Newton for those workers.

The Des Moines Area Regional Transit Authority’s rideshare program is running 17 vans every workday to shuttle workers from Des Moines and Marshalltown to TPI Composites Inc., the manufacturer of wind turbine blades that has fueled the turnaround in Newton.