Posted on: Saturday, December 18, 2004
Workers unable to afford housing
By Sandra Fleishman
Washington Post
WASHINGTON — Plenty of people talk about the growing shortage of housing that essential workers such as teachers, nurses and police officers can afford.
The National Association of Home Builders has done more than talk. It has drawn a series of stark pictures for the top metropolitan areas in the nation.
The conclusion, from a survey released last week at an affordable housing conference in Washington: In most metro areas, "people holding three of the important community infrastructure jobs — police officers, teachers, nurses — can afford homes in less than one-half the census tracts." Retail clerks, whose pay is even lower, are priced out of 97 percent of the tracts.
The study assumed only a single income in the family rather than two wage earners. But single parents and young families with a stay-at-home parent are key first-time buyers.
Bobby Rayburn, president of the home builders group, and other national and local builders at the conference warned that the situation is likely to worsen. They called on federal and local officials to remove regulatory and land-use barriers to high-density development and to support homeownership tax and down-payment incentives. The group also supports outreach to combat "not in my back yard" reactions to development, particularly toward lower-cost housing.
The group's focus is on building for-sale houses, but Rayburn said rents also are becoming too high. Low-income housing advocates, such as the National Low Income Housing Coalition, are concentrating their efforts on defending and resurrecting federal and local rental assistance help for the most at-risk families, which increasingly includes working families. As rents and home prices go up, the concerns of builders and advocates are overlapping more.
Barbara Lipman, research director at the Center for Housing Policy, a Washington-based research group, told the conference that between 1997 and 2003, the number of families with critical housing needs — defined as those paying at least half their income for housing or living in substandard conditions — rose by 67 percent. About 25 percent were working families with at least one full-time wage earner.
Rayburn, a Mississippi builder, said: "Despite today's positive housing market conditions, millions of working families — teachers, police officers, firefighters and other moderate-income workers who are the heartbeat of any community — are finding it increasingly difficult to purchase or rent a decent home in, or close to, the communities where they work."
He said, "In many markets, the gap between those who can afford a home and those who can't is widening at an alarming rate, and the availability of affordable rental housing is in short supply."
Many workers are rethinking their career choices or moving to other jurisdictions, panelists warned. To keep employees, 180 Silicon Valley employers have united to create a housing trust to help more than 1,260 families buy their first homes and to support affordable rental projects, said Carl Guardino, president and chief executive of the Silicon Valley Manufacturing Group.
Similar employer-assisted efforts are under way, with support from Freddie Mac and others.
Yet, as lower-paying jobs proliferate, the number of those with long commutes will increase substantially, said Nicolas P. Retsinas, director of Harvard University's Joint Center for Housing Studies. "We do not see a time when the housing market will recalibrate itself to this new labor market."
