Federal cuts make affordable houses an unfilled niche

If you work in the housing markets in Boise or resort areas such as McCall and Sun Valley, chances are you’ve heard a new phrase in recent years: workforce housing.

It’s targeted to households that make 80 to 140 percent of median income, often middle-class professionals, such as nurses and paralegals. Cities have adopted policies and ordinances to encourage and even require developers to build homes in that price range.

The reasoning behind such ordinances is that the market for upper-end homes is quite profitable, so developers will build those, and the federal government provides funding programs for affordable housing for households that make less than 80 percent of the median income, so that the end of the market is taken care of.

That’s just not the case, Jim Tomlinson, principal of Tomlinson & Associates, said at a recent forum hosted by the Urban Land Institute’s Idaho chapter. “There’s a huge number of workers that aren’t at 80 (percent of median income),” he said. “They’re below 80 and they’re hugely underlooked … If you need that resource it’s just not available in the Treasure Valley.”

It’s hard for developers to make affordable housing projects pencil out, so they just haven’t been built lately, Tomlinson said. Meanwhile, as the time period runs out on older, federally subsidized housing developments, they are being converted to condominiums and sold at market rate.

Tomlinson’s statistics highlighted the problem:
• Most federal funds and tax credits for affordable housing programs go to housing targeted to households that make below 50 percent or even 30 percent of median income.
• The wait to get a housing voucher is two to three years.
• Almost 40 percent of all Treasure Valley residents are renters.
• About one in three Treasure Valley renters spends more than 35 percent of their income on rent and utilities, which federal agencies term a “crisis position.”
Tomlinson recommended things cities must do to correct the problem:
• Form a land bank or trust to bring down land costs for affordable or workforce housing.
• If property is zoned for high density, don’t scale it down because of complaints by neighbors.
• Encourage developers to convert vacant shopping centers or big-box stores to low-cost housing.
• If Boise wants to adopt inclusionary zoning, which would require developers to build affordable or workforce housing, it should make sure the whole region adopts it, or developers will just go to unincorporated Ada County or Nampa or Emmett.

To contact the author of this story, e-mail: lora.volkert@idahobusiness.net.