Members of the city’s Affordable Housing Advisory Board on Wednesday identified trends and topics they hope to see addressed in an upcoming housing study, from the university student rental market to new ways to fund affordable housing initiatives.

AHAB members adopted a holistic view for affordable housing in Lawrence. While they explored bolder visions for decommodified housing options, they also considered immediately implementable policies, such as stronger code enforcement for rental inspections.

Their feedback will ultimately guide Development Strategies, the consulting firm creating a housing study intended to inform city policy.

Mariel Ferreiro, longtime AHAB member, said the study will help engage everyone in the affordable housing conversation, including tenants, homeowners, landlords, investors, businesses and more.

“If you’re tired of seeing people housing insecure, this is the path,” she said. “There’s a lot of perception of folks experiencing homelessness and people feeling like their green spaces are being taken from them. OK, if you care about those things, here’s how it connects and intersects with housing.”

Development Strategies wrapped up a series of local roundtables on housing in Lawrence Wednesday afternoon.

Andy Pfister, principal with the firm, said they will issue a public survey next month, with a plan draft on the horizon for late March 2026.

As the consulting team looks at local housing data against national and state trends throughout COVID-19, Pfister said that some of Lawrence’s statistics deviate. 

“Your median household income has been relatively stagnant compared to Kansas and the U.S., and your housing costs have increased more than the U.S. and Kansas,” he said. “… What people can afford has changed differently in Lawrence than in other places.”

Pfister also said that the apartment availability in town is “not healthy.”

Lawrence has a 2.4% multifamily vacancy rate as of 2025. By comparison, Kansas’ 2025 rate is 7.1%, while 8.4% is the rate for the United States. Pfister said that a healthy number would be between 6% or 7%.

Board members agreed that the university student population impacts these numbers, as school calendars drive August-to-August rental periods. Pfister said his team has already heard that both students and long-term residents struggle to find rentals.

Faith Lopez, AHAB member, said affordable housing for students is a need both on and off campus. They felt that many KU students are pushed into the general Lawrence housing market, and scholarship halls are the only affordable on-campus housing option. 

Pfister said the consulting team started conversations with KU that morning to discuss how its housing stock and enrollment numbers affect housing trends.

Board Chair Christina Gentry also highlighted numbers from Douglas County’s Homelessness Needs Assessment to identify priority populations for affordable housing.

According to that study, Black and Indigenous people are more likely to be unhoused, although they represent smaller portions of the overall population. Black people were 5 times more likely to experience homelessness in the county, while Indigenous people were 3 to 4 times more likely.

“If we’re overrepresented in spaces of housing insecurity and we’re the smallest, smallest populations, that speaks significantly to the lack of housing for the populations in most need,” she said, highlighting difficulties that Haskell Indian Nations University students face.

Other vulnerable populations that the board hopes to serve with the study included people aging in place, folks with disabilities, including people who can’t work and families with children and single-caregiver households.

Ferreiro said she felt that the study offers an opportunity to be innovative with funding options, as it’s risky to bank on state and federal support.

“To be quite frank, the state, the federal dollars? Not going to be here forever if things continue to go the way that they’re going,” she said. “So what we are going to need is some really deep community investment and resource distribution from folks who have the ability to do that.”

Ferreiro said one potential model is housing as a public good, not a privately owned commodity. 

“What does the investment look like when communities actually have control over the land, over the property, and how can we reimagine what ownership that word — especially sitting on land that is not originally ours — what does that look like?” she asked. “… There’s opportunity to call in financing that extends beyond affordable housing. You can have community ownership in community buildings, gardens, land conservation, in commercial spaces.”

Pfister and board members zoomed out to consider how access to good jobs, public transit and school have mutual impacts on housing.

“Housing provides access to jobs and supports businesses, but safe and decent housing also improves the ability of workers to regularly attend work,” Pfister said. “And they actually make more because they have safe and decent housing because they don’t have as many health issues.”

The board’s conversation roved through territory such as the rising cost of utilities, the need for more housing stock of all types and ways to intersperse affordable housing in new developments so residents aren’t isolated, which Pfister and his team will take into consideration.

With this feedback, information from community roundtables and other research, they will aggregate data to present to AHAB at the meeting set for Thursday, Feb. 12.

The city will upload a recording of Wednesday’s AHAB meeting to its YouTube page. The next AHAB meeting will be Thursday, Jan. 8.

In other business

The Lawrence City Commission late Tuesday approved AHAB’s recommendations for Affordable Housing Trust Fund awardees.

Read more about the funding recipients in this article.

Wulfe Wulfemeyer (they/them), reporter and news editor, has worked with The Lawrence Times since May 2025. They can be reached at wulfe@lawrencekstimes.com.

Read their complete bio here. Read their work for the Times here.

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