Facing Poverty Not A Cup Of Tea

The social worker was new to Spokane and unfamiliar with its ways when the telephone rang. Members of the Junior League wanted to see what life was like for low-income people. Could the social worker arrange for them to meet some? The social worker did, and after the encounter, the well-meaning fashion plates were appropriately appalled by the squalid housing conditions that they had seen. We must have a tea, they said afterwards, to raise money for the poor.

What you really ought to do, the social worker thought but was too gentle to say, is talk to your husbands who run this town. Because for all its good intentions, Spokane’s official priorities just don’t coincide with its reality.

The reality is a chronic housing crisis. An urban core filled with unseen poverty. Spokane’s 3rd Legislative District has more welfare clients than any other district in the state; more than the most notorious slums of Tacoma or Seattle.

The reality is an economy whose low wages and outrageously inflated housing costs leave many families in a daily struggle for the basics of life.

The reality is a weakly supported public sector that does far less than similar cities do to provide affordable housing, and a private sector that has made some worthy efforts but, thanks to Congress, is about to experience a withering of the subsidies and incentives on which those efforts depend.

The reality also includes untapped potential. Spokane is wonderfully generous toward individual hard-luck stories. But Spokane’s institutions - the banks, the developers, the governments and the charities - are not responding on a scale appropriate to the need.

Why should they start?

Spokane promotes itself to would-be employers as a place where workers have been satisfied with a remarkably low wage. But the recent explosion in real estate prices made Spokane’s cost of living the highest in the nation for cities of this size. While wages stalled, in five years the rent for a two-bedroom apartment jumped 55 percent to over $500. That’s 93 percent of the welfare grant for a family of three, and 60 percent of the earnings from a minimum-wage job. As a rule of thumb, families generally can devote only 30 percent of income to housing.

There is human tragedy, and economic danger, behind this data. How can people be productive workers, progress in school, avoid crime or plan ahead when they can’t pay this month’s rent or buy tonight’s dinner?

Decent, affordable housing is fundamental to quality of life. More fundamental than any of the establishment’s customary causes.

Yesterday, Spokane housing advocates met to start looking for solutions. This will not be easy. But the federal government is doing less. So the well-meaning people of Spokane will have to do more.

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Webster/For the editorial board