There is good, not so good, and downright scary news on the rental housing front.
On the sunny side, Stephen Norman, executive director of the King County Housing Authority, told City officials Monday at Auburn City Hall, the recent expansion of the regional economy has kicked up the demand for housing.
As of Monday, vacancy rates across the region were down to 3.8 percent, and they are expected to keep dropping, Norman said. In the Auburn-Enumclaw housing market, apartment vacancies are down to a paltry 1.9 percent, a statistically insignificant number, housing experts say.
In 2014, rental rates have risen about 6.3 percent, and in 2015 they are projected to jump more than 5 percent. That number doesn’t even factor in high-end construction projects now in the pipeline.
Unfortunately, wages aren’t keeping pace with these positive trends, particularly with respect to low-wage jobs, senior citizen income and disabled individuals living on fixed benefits.
The upshot is that more than 80 percent of the renter households in King County that earn less than $35,000 a year pay more than 30 percent of their income on rent, Norman said. Thirty percent of an individual’s income, he said, is generally considered the point at which an apartment is affordable. And an increasing number of households in King County are paying more than 50 percent of their income today on rent.
Tied to all those numbers is a 38-percent increase over the last three years in the number of homeless students school districts have reported to the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction, or OSPI.
(“Homeless” doesn’t necessarily mean that those kids are the streets or living in homeless camps.)
Regionally, Norman said, schools reported an average of 180 students homeless at some point in the 2013 school year. The Auburn School District reported 219 homeless students. In 2013, the ASD spent more than $560,000 of its educational funds on transportation and cab fares to get homeless kids from where they were to schools.
More than 6,000 kids are homeless in King County.
“Children living in shelters or five to a room in a motel don’t do well in school,” Norman said. “Kids who are couch surfing don’t get their homework done. Kids who are living in shelters have other things on their minds than succeeding at school.”
Being homeless, whatever it involves, not only has a drastic effect on a student’s ability to learn but also on his or her future ability to land a job, Norman said.
Today, Norman said, KCHA houses 2,500 kids in Auburn.
To reduce the number of homeless students, KCHA recently opened two new centers in Auburn, one at Burndale Homes in North Auburn and another at Firwood Circle in South Auburn.
The Firwood Circle center offers job training and ESL instruction to connect adults to job-training opportunities.
The Neighborhood House at Burndale Homes runs tutoring programs for students from kindergarten age all the way to those in their senior year in high school. Today, the Neighborhood House program has 85 kids, drawn from the housing complex and the surrounding neighborhood. The program works with local schools and other entities to reduce the number of homeless kids.
“Our goal is to reduce the number of homeless students to zero,” Norman said.
Finally, there’s the issue of health care costs. Norman said the largest single driver of health care costs is care for the elderly.
“The stats in King County are staggering,” Norman said. “By 2025, the number of seniors living in King County will double, one in four people in the county will be over the age of 65, and one in three will be mobility impaired. People will be living longer, but not necessarily in good health. What we’re finding is that the next generation is significantly less well off than the current generation of retirees, primarily because of the demise of the fixed-benefit pension system.”
The question at that point becomes, when seniors can no longer sustain a home, where will they go?
The average rent on a bedroom apartment in Auburn is almost $800 per month today. Seniors who pay that much income in rent face a terrible choice: pay rent or buy food and medicine. Norman said that KCHA is seeing more and more seniors in the homeless system.
Although KCHA recently rebuilt three senior buildings with 172 units in Auburn, it is clear, Norman said, that the supply is not keeping up with demand.
“We’re building two new senior complexes in White Center and just broke ground last month on a 77-unit senior building in south Renton. The funding is simply not available to increase the pace. This is a dialogue that we need to get going at the federal and state levels. Because there are simply no funds going into accommodating the increase in seniors we are going to see in the region. And seniors who do not have stable housing cost more on the healthcare front. There is a real calculus we have do here,” Norman said.
