Savannah faces a crisis in affordable housing, and its low-income residents face the greatest challenges in purchasing and renting an affordable home in decent condition. While the city has more than 7,000 units where some form of subsidy is applied, there were still 23,696 households (out of 57,456 households) in 2008 paying 41 percent of their gross income on housing costs, according to a 2008 Affordable Housing study by the Carl Vinson Institute of Government.

The City of Savannah took an important step in 2008 when its Affordable Housing Task Force called for City Council to adopt an Affordable Housing policy. A top recommendation of the Task Force is to establish a local affordable housing fund that would help subsidize the production and maintenance of affordable housing in Savannah and Chatham County. 

The City's Affordable Housing and Regulatory Barrier Task Force defined affordable housing this way:  "Affordable housing in Savannah, GA is privately or publicly owned housing, in good condition, for households who generally earn less than $48,000 a year and who pay no more than 30% of their gross household income to rent or purchase a dwelling." 

The single greatest barrier to quality affordable housing in the city is money-the resources it takes to build and maintain such housing as well as household income. 

The City's Task Force estimated that creating 5,000 new units of affordable housing over the next 15 years would reduce the number of households paying more than 30% of their income (also known as "cost burdened households") by about 20 percent. The development costs for this many new units was estimated at about $550,000,000.

Still, it is not simply a matter of high housing costs, which many communities face. Low wages in many downtown service-related businesses, coupled with depressed earning power of Savannah families living in the high-poverty census tracts, combine to complicate the affordable housing picture.

With the median income in Savannah at $29,050, it has been determined that the area has the third highest required hourly wage necessary in Georgia to afford a two-bedroom apartment at the fair market rate.

The City's Housing Department provides financial and technical assistance to home owners in the Community Development Block Grant target areas in these ways:

• It renovates affordable rental housing through its Community Housing Services Agency, Inc. (a nonprofit corporation that offers low-interest loans to property owners to upgrade existing structures);
• It offers low-interest rehabilitation loans to low-income homeowners;
• And it provides relocation assistance to families that are forced to move, either temporarily or permanently, because of work to rehabilitate a property.