Marion County Development and Maxfield Research and Consulting released the 2024 Marion County Comprehensive Housing Assessment findings at meetings in Knoxville and Pella on Tuesday and Wednesday. 

The study divided the county into five submarkets to more accurately account for the local housing demand within each portion of the county. The assessment found that Marion County’s total housing demand from all five submarkets is 3,067 by the year 2035. Within that total housing demand is the need for 1,349 senior housing units, 1,027 for-sale housing units and 691 rental housing units. According to the data collected in the study, there were an estimated 19,110 jobs in Marion County In 2023. Additionally, the assessment showed a projected increase of 24.5% in the number of jobs in the county from 2020 to 2030. Maxfield Research Vice President Matt Mullins, who conducted the last study done in 2015, says that multiple factors helped contribute to the rising housing demands in Marion County.

“From what we calculated back in 2015 and 2016 to compare to today, the demand was not met across a lot of product types, whether that be single family housing market, rental housing market, or senior housing market. So today, we have even higher housing demand. That’s led by a number of things. Number one, we had the pandemic in 2020 and we had just really strong population growth and housing needs throughout the county since 2020. The population has increased by about 1,000 people, so we’ve seen this really exponential growth that has occurred in the past few years, and has really created a higher need for a lot of housing.”

Find the presentation of the 2024 Marion County Comprehensive Housing Assessment here, and hear more about the assessment on today’s In Touch with South Central Iowa.