sopris foundation conference

Tackling the West’s Affordable Housing Problem

By Matthew Frank, 7-14-07

One of the inescapable symptoms of the rapid growth taking place in so many Rocky Mountain communities is a loss of affordable housing. It can force every-day citizens out—and often, the character of a place, too.

The affordable housing problem was the dominant theme during Saturday afternoon’s discussion at the Sopris Foundation conference at the Wilma Theatre in Downtown Missoula.

The conference, which runs through Sunday, tackles how fast-growing Rocky Mountain communities can preserve their character and become more durable (to use a new buzz word connoting resiliency as fuel prices rise). Innovative approaches in the realms of transportation, agriculture, advanced design, community, and energy are on the table.

As Missoulians know, there exists a widening gap between the median household income and the median home price. A report released in March by the Missoula Organization of Realtors shows that the median home price in 2006 was $205,000, requiring an income of about $58,000. But the median income in Missoula, for two people, is about $43,000, enough to buy something in the $145,000 range.

One of Saturday’s speakers was Peter Werwath, an expert at mitigating such discrepancies. He’s the president of Enterprise Community Partners, a non-profit working in the field of community development and affordable housing. Werwath calls the West’s affordable housing problem “a slow emergency.”

Werwath has been working in Durango, Colorado, a resort town whose affordable housing challenges are far more severe than Missoula’s—80 percent of year-round residents, if they were buying today, couldn’t afford the lowest-priced new homes.

What Werwath has learned elsewhere, and works to apply in Durango, is a “whole system” solution. Its goal is to make 20 to 30 percent of new homes affordable, and it boils down to three things:

• Reducing the costs of production as much as possible (without sacrificing quality) through, for example, “green” and cost-saving home designs.
• Filling the remaining affordability gaps through federal funding, local housing trust funds, and cross-subsidies within new residential developments.
• Convincing voters that low- and moderate-wage workers are essential to local economies, make good neighbors, and deserve a hand up.

But the same approaches can’t be applied in every town. Speaker Elaine Clegg, a Boise City Council member and smart growth expert, told the audience, “There are eight or nine different basic reasons for housing being unaffordable; if you develop a policy for one of them that isn’t the problem, then you may be doing something that’s counterproductive.”

In contrast to Durango, affordable housing is becoming an issue in a place like Boise even though it’s not a resort town and doesn’t have second-home buyers coming in and driving the prices up, Clegg said. “Prices have been driven up by all kinds of factors, including the strength of our economy.”

Clegg generally attributes Boise’s affordable housing woes to three things: housing prices rising faster than income; land prices rising almost three times as fast as both housing prices and income; and non-housing costs—namely transportation and energy—rising exorbitantly.

To address the issue of land prices, Clegg and company have looked to infill and simply building on smaller lots.

But the approaches Boise takes, Clegg said, are not solely based on affordable housing but a necessary reorganization of how and where people live in light of, most prominently, inevitable high fuel costs. For example, Clegg mentioned a policy to encourage local agriculture, “building it into the comprehensive plan so that local agriculture doesn’t become an afterthought.”

“We’re redoing the entire comprehensive plan around these principles,” Clegg said.

In addition to Werwath and Clegg, Katie Shelby gave a slideshow presentation on the innovative planning approaches used by Buena Vista, Colorado’s South Main development, which she co-founded.

During a question and answer session, Betsy Hands, a state representative and director of the Missoula affordable housing non-profit homeWORD, remarked, “One of the things that I think we face in Montana is a lack of understanding about affordable housing being a public benefit.”

Hands posed the question: In a community that passed an open space bond for millions of dollars, how do we get Missoula “to recognize the public benefit of supporting affordable housing through additional public finances?”

Clegg’s response was to first examine regulatory options. Simple things, she said, like allowing “accessory dwelling units”—smaller dwelling units located on the same lot occupied by the main dwelling unit—can be significant.

Werwath agreed, but added that every available mechanism is fair game, even the use of public funds. “I think if a community is serious about providing affordable housing they need to put up local money,” he said.

The Sopris Foundation Conference continues Sunday. Click here for the agenda, which includes a summary keynote by Wes Jackson of The Land Institute.

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