Thursday, March 28, 2024

Affordable housing crisis simplified in presentations

Chelan welcomes community land trust specialist Julie Brunner

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CHELAN – Julie Brunner provided a presentation to Council during their regular meeting, Tuesday, April 24 at City Hall.
The presentation’s topic? Affordable housing needs and possibilities in the Chelan Valley. Days leading up to the meeting, Brunner met with community members, business owners and investors throughout the community, collecting data and information to compile a report on the need of affordable housing in our community.
The presentation included some staggering statistics including, in Chelan and Manson, of the 6,966 housing units only 3,928 are households, 2,365 being seasonally occupied, 196 vacant rentals or for sale and 477 other forms of vacancies. Nearly half of the housing units available in Chelan and Manson are in some way or another unavailable to year-round residents. “The population around here has been pretty stable,” Brunner explained, “there’s actually about a six percent drop from the 2010 census to the estimates for the valley, I think that’s probably not a surprise.” She explained that over her time here, she has also seen information from the school districts indicating a loss of students and teachers as people are moving out of the valley.
Brunner led her presentation into racial and age statistics within the valley, with a dramatic decrease of students from 2000 to 2016 in the Manson School District. Income levels within Chelan show that 25.6 percent of year-round residents earn less than $25,000 a year in comparison to 23.3 percent in Chelan County and only 18.3 percent in Washington State. “So, that’s something to keep in mind when we talk housing solutions,” she advised, “we have to make sure that there are housing solutions for folks here who are (around) minimum wage.” The graphs also displayed, based on a 2016 survey, “34 percent of your housing stock is seasonally occupied,” she expressed, “so that’s a big percentage of your housing stock.” This percentage is compared to 16.1 percent within the county and 3.2 percent within the state.
In an estimate from 2016, graphs showed that in the year 2000 over 50 percent of available rentals were being rented for less than $500, while that number has been cut in half in the 2016 survey.
Median home prices have also seen some dramatic changes in the valley since 2006, where homes averaged $300,000 whereas they are now averaging over $400,000 in Chelan alone. “You can see that consistently median home prices in the valley are above state averages,” Brunner explained, “and those are big numbers. Those are median, so that doesn’t mean that there’s no housing available below that number, but it does mean that you have some high-cost housing here.” She pointed out that Chelan’s current median home price is not that far apart from her town of Orcas Island, where prices are ranging around $500,000.
“When we’re talking about putting public money, or private money in the form of donated land or property, into housing to create an affordable housing stock,” Brunner explained, “we want to make sure that we do it in such a way that it’s here, not just today but stays with us … if we’re going through all this effort to raise thousands of dollars, be it from grants or private individuals, we want to make sure that that effort is sustained.” The Community Land Trust is a non-profit organization and “is with you for the long haul,” she emphasized, “with one-third of its board members being its own residents.”
The homes built through the land trust are built for durability, explained Brunner, because they are built for a 100-year return, “and we are permanent stewards of these units, whether they’re rental, whether they’re co-op owned or whether they’re owner occupied.”
Brunner also provided a simplified version of the presentation during a public forum held the following day, Wednesday, April 25 at The Vogue, where questions and ideas from the community were welcomed.

Chelan, affordable housing, meetings, forums, public, housing

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