Housing strategies, solutions

Solving the housing crisis in North Idaho is not an unattainable goal.

It may be a "BHAG" — a "big hairy audacious goal" — but those who are working to accomplish this feat realize it will take collaboration, communication and innovative ways of doing things to arrive at outcomes desirable for the whole community.

“This is where we are in Kootenai County. We are on the very cusp of a BHAG," said Maggie Lyons, interim director of the Panhandle Affordable Housing Alliance. "We can create and preserve housing our local workers can afford to buy — over and over and over again. It has to be driven by the private market. That’s how we’ll get the results that we need. But it has to come with public participation."

Lyons was one of the speakers Wednesday who presented during the "Building a Better Future" segment of the Inland Northwest Partners' Housing Strategies for the Inland Northwest conference held at the Red Lion Hotel Templin's on the River in Post Falls.

About 75 people from varying municipalities and sectors attended the day-long event, which featured informational sessions on housing availability and affordability, private market solutions, strategies for solving housing shortages and other related topics.

Lyons said the Panhandle Affordable Housing Alliance and Coeur d'Alene Area Economic Development Corp. are working on the second phase of an analysis of Kootenai County's housing situation.

"It's a 10-year attack plan to give the county a roadmap," she said.

The analysis will address how many houses are needed for those who are in the 60-80% area median income range, how many are in the 80-100% range, the 100-120% and above; what the county is short now, by those different brackets; "and based on our growth over the next decade, how many more do we need?" Lyons said.

"Then we can give you the jurisdictions and you can give to the builders a roadmap to say, 'We need X number of homes in each of these brackets built, every year, over the next 10 years,'" she said.

A program that allows for the private market to build homes that can be preserved in perpetuity for affordability was developed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in cooperation with Grounded Solutions, Lyons said, "because they hadn't been making mortgage loans to the wage earners that they need to," she said.

"It is Fair Housing approved, and we are able to manage one of these programs," she said.

The attack plan: Lasting affordability, good stewardship of the homes and the resale being constrained for future wage earners in that bracket.

Lyons said the goal is initially a lower price.

"It retains a lower price at resale, over and over and over again," she said. "This is a deed restriction program."

This would create an inventory of permanent affordable homes, individual families would have stability without rent increases and they would have equity.

"In Kootenai County, a household earning $31 an hour is 80% AMI (area median income)," she said. "$31 an hour in Kootenai County is a really good wage. This takes you back to the whole point, that our workers do not see themselves as poor and they have zero housing inventory available to them that they can afford to buy."

Inland Northwest Partners/Inland Northwest Economic Alliance Executive Director KayDee Gilkey said the housing crisis and strategies to solve it have been a constant topic for her organization's members.

"How do you bring that all together for our members, which are all across sections of municipalities, economic development corporations, small businesses around the Inland Northwest?" she said. "It’s such a huge issue."