Several agencies are working to provide safe and affordable housing for vulnerable Washingtonians, but they face many challenges in that process. Affordable housing providers discussed those challenges during a Senate Housing Committee meeting last week.
Catholic Housing Services (CHS) partners with Catholic Community Services (CCS) to provide supportive services for people who have experienced homelessness, low-income seniors, farmworker families, and individuals with special physical and mental needs. CHS Vice President Flo Beaumon said CHS operates 63 affordable housing buildings in Western Washington, with 5,000 people in 3,027 units.
“Everybody who comes into our buildings comes from a history of poverty,” Beaumon said. “Many people have disabilities.”
CHS’ farmworker housing includes Villa Santa Fe in Bellingham—which has more than 50 units for agriculture workers—and La Casa de Padre Miguel in Mount Vernon. CCS Vice President Will Rice said there has not been enough focus on providing housing for agricultural workers in the state.
“There’s been so much focus, and rightfully so, on the need for housing for people experiencing homelessness,” Rice said. “We are one of the largest players in the state in providing (homeless) services. But one of the things that has been shorted in that process is farmworker housing and other affordable workforce housing.”
CCS recently began developing a project in Lynden that will be the first farmworker housing development it has worked on since building Villa Santa Fe eight years ago, Rice said. CCS hosted a three-day Catholic Charities USA learning event in April—which drew Catholic representatives from Florida, Tennessee, California, Mississippi, and Iowa—to discuss options for furthering their goal of developing more housing for agricultural workers, he said.
“The need is there for the families, but this is also an economic driver. The migration patterns of our seasonal farmworkers is changing dramatically. Our local farmers are not getting the quality workers they have had that have been able to live here locally. And without building affordable farmworker housing for people to stay in our communities in livable conditions, we’re going to lose them. And our agriculture (economy) is going to suffer.”
— Rice
CHS faces several challenges in operating permanent supportive housing, Beaumon said.
“Our insurance premium has tripled in five years,” Beaumon said. “But what’s really awful is that our deductible, based on experience, is now $500,000 per incident. Which means we do not have insurance unless we have complete building failure. We need to be able to sustain our housing operations. And we used to be able to, but the cost of staffing, repairs, and the fact that we basically don’t have insurance anymore [hurts].”
The issues have a significant impact on the residents who live in CHS buildings, Beaumon said.
“And it impacts our ability to hire and keep staff,” she said. “We need to be able to staff our buildings with supportive services. We also need dependable funding for (Section 8) vouchers. We need newer, more creative, and long-term support from the state so we can do the state’s work.”
Habitat for Humanity Seattle-King and Kittitas Counties CEO Brett D’Antonio provided an update on the nonprofit’s Seattle housing projects. Habitat for Humanity bought land for its 13-unit South Park development in 2018. It was completed in 2020, and has a per-unit cost of $310,000.
“We call it a unicorn because these are for-sale homes so we can rely on mortgage income that’s affordable to buyers at 80 percent. And in this case, we only needed one source of public subsidy, which was from the city of Seattle. We were able to sell these units and have them occupied at a relatively low cost. And we were able to use state subsidies like the Housing Trust Fund on other projects.”
— D’Antonio
Habitat for Humanity’s 12-unit Highland Terrace development is currently under construction, and it will have a per-unit cost of $441,000, D’Antonio said. It is also working on a 26-unit project in Seattle called the Yarrow Cottages, which will have a total development cost of $12.5 million, and a per-unit cost of $481,780.
The nonprofit also faces challenges in providing affordable housing, however, and D’Antonio said legislation that would provide a sales tax exemption for affordable housing would help.
“A sales tax exemption for affordable housing would be an opportunity to help alleviate some of those costs that are adding to the production of these units,” he said. “There’s [also] a huge opportunity to (provide) construction loans for a number of different projects.”