Gatherings focus on affordable housing, displacement
Public forum 6:30 p.m. today at the First United Methodist Church, 401 E. 33rd St., Vancouver.
Vancouver City Council workshop, 4 p.m. Feb. 23, in the council chambers, 415 W. Sixth St., Vancouver.
Council for the Homeless’ mailing lists for updates and alerts about affordable housing issues:
www.councilforthehomeless.org
The Courtyard Village Apartments complex is far from the only one in Vancouver where rents are rising and current residents are getting left behind.
Midge Latta called The Columbian recently to say new owners have notified everyone at The Pines, a gated 55-and-older apartment complex near Wal-Mart on East Mill Plain Boulevard, that rents are soon to rise there. Latta is facing a hike of $195 a month, she said, which will force her to move in with her daughter after nine years at The Pines.
Gatherings focus on affordable housing, displacement
Public forum 6:30 p.m. today at the First United Methodist Church, 401 E. 33rd St., Vancouver.
Vancouver City Council workshop, 4 p.m. Feb. 23, in the council chambers, 415 W. Sixth St., Vancouver.
She’s still luckier than many of her friends, she said. There are people at The Pines living on nothing but Social Security, she said.
“When they’re done paying their rent, they’ll have maybe $120 for food for the whole month,” she said. “These are people who are struggling. Some don’t have family members, or their family members are struggling, too.
“I want to know where are the less-expensive apartments in this town?” Latta said.
The Pines’ management company, Invest West, did not respond to a call Monday from The Columbian.
Don Morris called to say the same Beaverton, Ore.-based developer that purchased Courtyard Village and started notifying people they’d have to vacate also purchased The Fort Motel on East 13th, a dead-end street in downtown Vancouver, and rebranded it as an apartment building now called The Hudson. Morris’ rent rose from $570 to $710 a month, in addition to new, miscellaneous fees and charges, he said. There’s been no corresponding improvement in what Morris calls unhealthy conditions at The Hudson. Those rises in rent and other costs “chased a whole lot of people off,” he said.
The Hudson’s management company, Madrona Ridge Residential, did not respond to a call for comment Monday.
A new round of legal notices to vacate within the month is expected to go out soon to another group of residents at Courtyard Village, a large complex at 2600 T St. That will make the third wave of households facing displacement there.
Andy Silver, the director of the Council for the Homeless, said he’s been told by Madrona Ridge Residential that residents of the entire complex will receive such notices in the first half of this year as the owner, Metropolitan Land Group, proceeds with renovations and raises rents.
“Nobody who lives there is equipped to move,” said Charlene Welch, development and community relations manager for the Council for the Homeless, who has been working full-time with Courtyard Village residents seeking help. “They are stressed.”
These are some of the lowest-income and least-able people in Vancouver, she said. Some are elderly or disabled. Many are attempting to relocate with such burdens as bad credit, previous evictions and/or criminal convictions. Few landlords are interested in taking risks given those factors.
At least a couple of “fake landlords” have popped up on Craigslist, Welch added, offering implausibly great deals on affordable rentals — if you’ll only send money first. Repeated phone calls from the council and some on-site homework from a brokenhearted Courtyard Village tenant determined that one so-called landlord was eager to rent a property that wasn’t actually his.
That’s a crime, Silver said, but catching up with criminals hiding behind Craigslist can be next to impossible.
There are some rays of sunshine in all this gloomy news, Silver said.
Courtyard Village has sharply focused community attention on the lack of affordable housing in Clark County, he said, and the council has amassed an emergency fund that topped out at $55,000 in donations and grants. That money is being used to pay the costly ancillary expenses of Courtyard Village refugees as they move to new apartments or, in some cases, to retire the lingering minor debts that continue to hurt renters’ credit scores.
As of Friday, Silver said, the council has helped resettle 16 households out of the 31 that have received notices to vacate so far.
Also, Silver said, Courtyard Village has jump-started a communitywide conversation about real solutions to what’s clearly a widespread affordable housing crisis.
“Emergency solutions are great. Structural solutions are a harder step,” he said. “We don’t want a community where Courtyard Village is the norm.”
A Jan. 8 memo circulated within Vancouver city government outlines the barriers to building housing that’s truly affordable to the lowest of low-income residents and reviews measures other jurisdictions have taken to protect such people from sudden displacement. It notes that the region’s apartment vacancy rate is “less than 2 percent.”
On the building side, other jurisdictions have instituted fee waivers for nonprofit and public projects, lowered income and rent limits on some apartment units, started their own local housing trust funds through new low-income housing property taxes and rewritten zoning laws to require that all new market-rate developments include affordable housing.
On the tenant-protection side, Seattle now makes property owners provide “reasonable relocation assistance” for displaced low-income residents.
“We want to take a look at all these things and see how to put it all together,” Silver said.
