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In Our View: Housing Need Hits Seniors

Crunch for those on fixed incomes is, on balance, an argument for Prop. 1

The Columbian
Published: October 25, 2016, 6:03am

After the long, slow recovery from the Great Recession, our local economy is mostly doing well. Jobs are plentiful, inflation is low, and there is even some evidence that wages are finally rising.

But this good-looking frame contains a picture with some disturbing elements. Social Security recipients and federal retirees can expect only a 0.3 percent increase in benefits next year. That’s less than $4 monthly per person for the average recipient, the Social Security Administration announced last week. It’s the fifth year in a row that increases have been historically little or nothing.

Though many retirees have other income, 48 percent of married couples and 71 percent of unmarried people receive at least half their income from Social Security, according to the government’s latest data.

Contrast that with the availability and cost of housing for low-income seniors. Roy Johnson, the executive director of the Vancouver Housing Authority, painted this grim picture last week for the Clark County Commission on Aging:

• Subsidized housing for low-income seniors hasn’t kept pace with population growth. The number of Clark County residents age 65 and older has more than doubled since 2000; by 2015, we had 65,232 people in that age bracket. However, VHA has no new senior housing projects in the pipeline, and none will be considered before 2018.

• Only four of VHA’s nine senior housing complexes will even take applications for a waiting list. Once on the list, it takes a minimum of eight months to get an apartment, and in most places the wait time is closer to two years.

• In general, no new enrollments are available in the Section 8 program, where tenants can use vouchers to subsidize the cost of renting a privately owned apartment. Johnson said that, if anything, fewer people can be helped, because the vouchers have to be stretched to cover rapidly rising rents.

Making the rent, of course, is a problem for more than just low-income seniors. The going rate for a one-bedroom apartment in Vancouver is $1,053 per month, according to the 2017 Fair Market Rents report by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. A two-bedroom unit costs $1,242.

If your Social Security check is, say, the national average $1,342 a month, that’s a huge problem.

A partial solution is offered by Vancouver’s Proposition 1, currently before voters. It would increase property taxes within the city limits in order to create a fund, capped at $6 million a year, to support affordable housing projects. As written, the project would benefit people in need of all ages, not just seniors, and would sunset after seven years.

The proposition’s benefits are not without consequences, of course. First of all, it would increase property taxes, which could increase the financial stress on fixed-income seniors who own their own homes. And there is always the question of whether government is the most efficient, cost-effective way of addressing any problem. The new Lincoln Place complex — aimed not at seniors, but at chronically homeless people of all ages — cost $200,000 per unit to develop studio apartments. And there is hope for more assistance from the federal government in the form of more tax credits for developers who build senior housing. Still, The Columbian’s editorial board recommends a “Yes” vote on Prop. 1.

Whether or not this proposition finds favor with voters, more will have to be done to paint a brighter picture for low-income seniors.

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