Finding an affordable place to live in Baltimore County is not an easy task.

A report released Monday finds that the county needs nearly 19,000 affordable housing units to meet the demand.

Terry Hickey, the director of Baltimore County’s Department of Housing and Community Development, said in an interview that the shortage of affordable housing is forcing people to pay more for rent than they should.

“It’s preventing them from saving money to become homeowners,” Hickey said.

The study finds that about 55% of the county’s renters spend more than one third of their income on housing. Then about one third of those renters are having to spend more than half of their income on a place to live.

That puts people with lower incomes in competition for available apartments that might also be ideal for downsizing seniors or a small family.

“And if a majority of our housing has been an investment in the single family home that has three, four, five bedrooms, automatically that’s not something they’re looking for in that stage of their life so everybody is competing for limited inventory,” Hickey said.

So what to do?

“What we can’t do is panic in the sense of doing reactive housing development,” Hickey said.

The 102-page Housing Needs Analysis gives the county, for the first time, the detailed numbers behind its housing issues, according to Hickey. From that the county needs to come up with a plan to deal with those issues, which include finding housing for a growing, aging population and relief for people living in overcrowded apartments.

Hickey presented the report to the county council on Monday.

“Obviously what we do as a county is going to cost quite a bit of money,” said Councilman Wade Kach, a Republican. “I would suggest that we cherry pick in the beginning. We take a look at various approaches to this problem and let’s take a look at the ones that don’t cost as much. Hopefully we can begin to turn around various areas.”