Parker Howell

After working for five years for a small, family-owned company, Heather Howard was laid off in fall 2006. She didn't immediately qualify for unemployment, and she faced payments on her credit cards and car loan, medical costs and mortgage costs – all on $1,050 a month. Her biggest fear was losing her home.

Construction has started on a 100-acre, mixed-use development in east Liberty Lake where developers plan to provide work force apartments and senior living – some of the first affordable housing in an area that's seen rapid growth. Framing is under way on the 75-unit First Liberty Apartments, the first phase of a master-planned community by Hayden-based Whitewater Creek Inc. Renamed Hawkstone, the development on land southeast of Appleway Avenue and Simpson Road is authorized to have more than 800 residences, several acres of parks and a commercial hub when completed.

Low-income renters, including those with disabilities and large families, will have more available housing after the expansion of a Spokane County apartment complex designed to be both affordable and sustainable. Nonprofit Spokane Neighborhood Action Programs broke ground Monday on a second, 51-unit phase of Riverwalk Point, its low-income apartment complex off Upriver Drive east of Spokane.

When Debbie Mills put her late mother's northeast Spokane house up for sale in November, her Realtor suggested she ask just less than market price. Mills received a full-price offer in a little more than a week. But in a time of tightening credit nationally, the would-be buyer couldn't secure financing and the contract expired. Mills expects a new, $119,900 deal on the roughly 900-square-foot bungalow to close soon, and she attributes her success to pricing.

Chatting with friends in multiplayer computer games or cranking up tunes mid-frag no longer need take online gamers out of the action, thanks to free software by a Sandpoint firm. PlayXpert LLC says its downloadable application also enables hardcore gamers to monitor system settings, research game lore and search the Web — without bogging down game play. The software has attracted "tens of thousands" of users, said CEO Charles Manning. The company says its PlayXpert interface, which appears as a semi-transparent window over games, runs without sharing game memory and functions with almost any game, allowing players to communicate and organize in new ways.

Silver and gold mining helped shape the economic and ecological landscapes of the Inland Northwest. Now, a Spokane-based startup company aims to apply new technology to the problem of how best to separate those precious metals from other mined materials. MIPSolutions Inc. says the process it's developing, which involves reusable resin beads that trap molecules of silver or gold, makes extracting those precious metals more efficient and environmentally friendly than current methods.

Washington Democrats turned out in record numbers Saturday to give Illinois Sen. Barack Obama a handy victory over his rival for the presidential bid, New York Sen. Hillary Clinton. McCain won the Republican caucuses with just 26 percent of delegates, only slightly more than Mike Huckabee's 24 percent, even though McCain came into the contest with a commanding national lead.

One of downtown Spokane's distinctive office buildings is almost entirely leased after being less than half-full in 2006. The eight-story Lincoln Plaza, at Lincoln Street and Riverside Avenue, is about 95 percent leased, said Tom Barbieri, president of property manager Goodale & Barbieri Co. Insurance and financial firm Moloney+O'Neill plans to remodel the top two floors, while a branch of discount stock brokerage Charles Schwab is slated to occupy part of the building's street-level space.

Finding promotional compact discs in the mail or on newsstands isn't novel – they've long been used to push Internet providers and bundled with magazines. A Spokane Valley media company, however, hopes its spin on a new type of flexible, thinner DVD will grab the attention of newspaper and magazine publishers and direct-mail advertisers.