Workforce housing is a term that is increasingly used by planners, government, and organizations concerned with housing policy or advocacy. It is gaining cachet with realtors, developers and lenders. Workforce housing can refer to any form of housing, including ownership of single or multi-family homes, as well as occupation of rental units. Workforce housing is generally understood to mean affordable housing for households with earned income that is insufficient to secure quality housing in reasonable proximity to the workplace.

Consideration of workforce housing includes these four principal factors:

The term "workforce" is meant to connote those who are gainfully employed, a group of people who are not typically understood to be the target of affordable housing programs. Workforce housing, then, implies an altered or expanded understanding of affordable housing. Workforce housing is commonly targeted at "essential workers" in a community i.e. police officers, firemen, teachers, nurses, medical personnel. Some communities define "essential" more broadly to include service workers, as in the case of resort communities where one finds high real estate costs and a high number of low-paying service jobs essential to the local economy. Workforce housing may be targeted more generally at certain income levels regardless of type of employment, with definitions ranging from 50% to 120% of Area Median Income (AMI).

Mortgage lenders typically impose a limit of 28% to 36% of household income allowable for principal, interest, taxes and insurance (PITI). Pricing calculations aimed at renters, who represent approximately one third of US households, define a desirable workforce housing cost as at or below 30% of household income. Affordability is a function of the relationship between one's income and the housing costs of the area, which leads to variation in the percentage of AMI that may be used to describe people who might need workforce housing.

Most appropriately, "workforce housing" is located in or near employment centers. The expanding distance between gainful employment and housing made affordable by the income it provides has caused people to seek housing on the periphery of settled areas. This is cited as a contributor to urban sprawl, typified by traffic congestion, lengthy commutes, convenience stores and strip retail centers, and the rapid consumption of open space due to the building of new homes taking place at the outer edges of metropolitan areas where land is typically cheaper. While prevalent in US metropolitan areas, workforce housing issues may arise anywhere that land values or other restrictions on creation or availability of quality affordable housing units are constrained by zoning, market forces or physical boundaries.

In recent decades, federal programs have focused on providing housing subsidy or vouchers, or building and maintaining public housing projects for low income households. Housing affordability for all others has been supported mainly through programs for home buyers, especially through mortgage financing. Whether seeking to rent or to buy, in areas facing an identified shortage of workforce housing, such units as can be found in close proximity to workplaces are often of poor quality. New housing built during the economic boom has included low numbers of affordable units, affordable units are often means-tested to exclude all but the poorest residents, and the less expensive housing tends to be built at a distance where land is cheaper. Proximity to work often means a tradeoff in quality of housing stock, school quality, personal safety. In real terms, living in low quality housing or marginal neighborhoods is a tradeoff between access to income and access to resources such as rising home equity or quality education.

The concept of workforce housing has its early roots in the ski towns of Telluride and Aspen, Colorado. In 1974, in response to locals not being able to purchase homes due to the disparity between wages and the cost of homes and land rising sharply due to buyers from New York and Hollywood, a conference was organized at the Aspen Institute. In Aspen a plan was developed to create a secondary and separate "local worker" housing market which was based on local wages and affordability. One standard tool invented to create affordably priced homes for local workers that would stay affordable for future generations was a deed restriction, which in its most simple form states that to qualify for purchasing a home the applicant must live in the community, not own another home in the community, must work essentially full-time and must have lived in the community for a minimum period of time. Also, the owner can only sell the home to someone that meets the same criteria. Later provisions added over the years of "trial and error" include income restrictions to qualify, and capped rates on the amount of profit an owner is allowed to make in order to guarantees that the home will remain affordable forever. Three per cent per annum has been a justifiable number over the years.

The workforce housing problem seemed to be an anomaly in the ski resorts, made worse due to limited land for development due to mountains and federally owned land, which made "sprawling" unrealistic. Instead, it seems to have been a precursor to the problems now facing vacation communities and metropolitan areas all around the country and the world. In the early 2000s record low mortgage interest rates spurred a nationwide surge in housing demand. Record housing construction and record housing prices in many communities drove land costs higher. Construction materials and labor costs, propelled by disastrous hurricanes in 2004 and 2005 that damaged or destroyed hundreds of thousands of homes in Florida and on the Gulf Coast, amplified the problem to create a critical dilemma: in many communities, average income households cannot afford a median-priced home. For a while, the low interest rates and availability of creative financing options bridged the gap between housing costs and income for some households, enabling people to obtain mortgages that consumed more than 30% of their income or to use rising equity in their home to compensate for the affordability gap. The subprime mortgage crisis and current economic downturn raise questions as to the ability financing tools and private developers to effectively solve current or future affordable housing shortages.