Affordable Housing Insights Hub
Skagit County
Throughout this page, you will find visual representations of the challenges that any one of our neighbors may be facing, such as lack of housing, unstable housing, or being burdened by their rent. This is paired with other data that aims to create a comprehensive picture around the health of the Skagit County community as it relates to affordable housing.
People Experiencing Homelessness
Having an accurate understanding of how many people are experiencing homelessness in your community will be integral to the decision-making process around resource allocation, policy, etc.
*National data for people experiencing homelessness in 2024 will not be available until Point-in-Time (PIT) Count data is published, which is expected near the end of 2026.
Based on most recent data (2024) Skagit County was 9th highest out of Washington’s 39 counties, with 390 people experiencing homelessness per capita. Compare that to the rate of homelessness in neighboring counties
Based on data over time (below), Skagit County has seen an improvement in rates of homelessness since 2010, however, there has been an increase in recent years (between 2022 and 2023).
Despite the improvement from 2010, the community consistently has higher rates of homelessness than the nation as a whole, with the exception of 2013, and is often higher than the amount of people experiencing homelessness per capita across Washington State.
Leading Indicators of Homelessness
Housing-related metrics such as residents spending too much on their rent, eviction rates, vacancy rates, and the availability of affordable housing across income levels are leading indicators of homelessness in the area.
Rent Burdened
The U.S. department of Housing and Urban Development defines “affordable” housing as “housing on which the occupant is paying no more than 30 percent of gross [pre-tax] income for housing costs, including utilities“. When a person or household is paying more than 30% of their gross income on their housing, they are considered “cost-burdened”. The data available to visualize this best is from the American Community Survey (ACS), an annual survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau. The ACS collects data on the percent of renters paying greater than 30% of their income on rent alone (“rent-burdened”), which is more significant than being cost-burdened due to the fact that other housing costs are not taken into account. In most years since 2010, more than half of all renters in Skagit County have been found to be rent-burdened (right).
Evictions
Per the eviction research network, the number of evictions per capita filed in Skagit County has been increasing each year since 2020. Of note, there was a moratorium on evictions in Washington State from March 18, 2020 to June 30, 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Rental Vacancy Rate
The “rental vacancy rate” is the number of vacant rental units divided by the total number of rental housing units in a given area. Vacancy rates can be informative as additional housing is created to determine if an area is reaching a stable housing supply (between 3-6% vacancy rate). Vacancy rate is also a lagging indicator - there is usually a 12-24 month lag between the approval to build new housing and those units coming to market.
Lower vacancy rates have been found in some research to be correlated to higher rates of homelessness, such as the book Homelessness is a Housing Problem: How Structural Factors Explain U.S. Patterns by Gregg Colburn and Clayton Page Aldern (2022).
Supply and Demand of Affordable Housing
Comparing local incomes with the cost of housing reveals where affordable options fall short. This section helps make visible the gap between what people can afford and what is available.
Area Median income
Area median income, or AMI, is the midpoint of all incomes in a given area, determined by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The importance of AMI primarily lies in the fact that it is used to determine eligibility for various housing programs and is one of the most common measures of income that is referenced in discussions about housing. Ideally, data regarding affordable housing would be based around AMI. Unfortunately, data from the American Community Survey is segmented into income groups that do not always overlap with AMI.
The two first graphs show the number of households by income and the number of occupied housing units by cost each year since 2010 (all adjusted for inflation).
In 2014, two additional brackets were added to the ACS under housing costs to allow for more granularity in higher cost brackets. When comparing the most recent data (2024) to 2010, it can be seen that the number of affordable units decreased in all income brackets below $6,249.92 and increased for all income brackets above that.
The last two graphics help us identify how many of the occupied housing units are affordable and which income brackets may have more or less units than required.
Number of Affordable Housing Units
Since the ACS divides income and housing costs into consistent brackets that do not fit nicely into affordability constraints (30% of gross income), we at Lunous fit each cost bracket into the provided income brackets, ensuring that cost of housing never exceeds 30% of gross income. It appears from this data that the lowest two income brackets (up to $1,249.92 per month) did not have sufficient affordable housing units, with 3,663 total households and only 2,507 affordable units.
**Lunous uses the HUD definition of affordable housing, which is that an occupant should pay no more than 30% of their gross income on housing costs, including utilities.
*When considering whether there is sufficient affordable housing in a community, it is important to know the incomes of households in that area, what their monthly housing costs are, and how the housing stock compares in price to those levels of income. In these visualizations, we utilized ACS datasets for reported housing costs and reported household income. While these visualizations indicate a general idea of the number of units and how they compare to income, because the data provided by ACS in this context is only for occupied units, we are unable to provide a complete cross-sectional evaluation of all housing units in Skagit County. This means that each data point in the surrounding graphs represents a household that is currently housed, how much their income is, and how much their housing costs are. Information from ACS misses a significant piece of the picture by not having data on the income of our neighbors who are unhoused, the cost of units that are currently vacant, or a way to identify if households are renting above or below what is affordable to them by HUD standards. The Census Bureau also identifies many key groups as being hard to count and/or historically undercounted in the ACS, such as low-income individuals, undocumented immigrants, minorities, and people who do not live in traditional housing. The presented visualizations are an attempt by us at Lunous to present the most robust information, while acknowledging where gaps exist in the data.