Need Overwhelms Help Available Here

Anyone who doubts the depth of poverty in the Spokane area has only to check with the Spokane Housing Authority where, on the average, 125 families a week come to seek housing assistance for the first time.

Unfortunately, for every such family that could be helped with existing resources last year, another 19 could not.

The shortage of affordable housing is not a new phenomenon in Spokane, although it has been exacerbated in recent years as the level of personal income in this community has declined relative to state and national figures.

In Spokane County, where 45 percent of workers earn less than $14,000 a year, a household needs an annual income of at least $20,000 to afford a typical two-bedroom rental unit.

Even as new affordable housing is added locally, it is barely denting the overall need. Thousands have their names on waiting lists that already are so lengthy they offer no real sense of hope to those in need.

The effort continues just the same.

In the Hillyard area last year, the Spokane Housing Authority opened Westfall Village and Heritage Heights, which provide low cost housing to 172 families and senior citizens. Those multi-family developments are the latest in the community to be constructed with the use of federal low-income housing tax credits.

Nationally, the credits have accounted for some 900,000 units of affordable housing since the program went into effect in 1986. More than 13,000 of them are in Washington state and of those, 674 are in Spokane County.

However, although inflation has risen about 50 percent in that time, the formula on which the allocation of tax credits is based is unchanged. The population-based formula was $1.25 per person in 1986 and it’s still $1.25 per person.

That could change if Congress acts favorably on legislation that has been introduced in both the House and Senate. The proposal would boost the allocation formula to $1.75 per person. Both congressional measures would also index that amount to inflation so it would keep pace with the cost of living in the future. (A Clinton Administration version would increase the formula to $1.75 but would leave out indexing, thus setting the stage for more years of inflation-related erosion.)

For low-income families trying to move from dependency to self-reliance, stability is critical. And without adequate shelter, stability is an unreachable objective.

Increasing the low-income housing tax credit - and making it responsive to inflation - would give builders, investors and housing agencies the ability to help determined families reach their goal of self-sufficiency.