Affordable housing panel gets to work

• What: Vancouver Affordable Housing Task Force. All meetings are open to the public and include time for public comments.

• When: 9-11 a.m. June 11.

• Where: Vancouver City Hall, 415 W. Sixth St.

• On the Web: www.cityofvancouver.us/ced/page/affordable-housing-task-force

Some believe a crisis in local housing affordability has been underway for years already, and just got noticed by policymakers and the public. Some believe quick local action is essential. And some believe the data are skewed, the inflating market will self-correct and renters just need better information about their options.

A wide variety of opinions was clear Thursday as Vancouver’s new Affordable Housing Task Force met for the first time. The group of 21 experts — representing government, developers, landlords, real estate brokers, nonprofit social services and housing agencies — was convened by Mayor Tim Leavitt in the wake of the mass displacement of low-income renters at what used to be called Courtyard Village Apartments, where a new landlord undertook across-the-board renovations and hiked rents.

The displacement led to a community outcry — for short-term legal protections for renters, and for a longer-term strategy to bring more affordable housing to town. Leavitt said new affordable housing policies are among the Vancouver City Council’s top priorities for 2015. Don’t bother hoping for rescue by state and federal authorities, he said; Vancouver has learned in recent years that it needs to solve its own problems.

Leavitt hopes that the diverse Affordable Housing Task Force is able to rally around the community’s good and “deliver a very powerful message” — that the city has a moral obligation to care for its weakest and most vulnerable residents, he said. The group’s goals are to make recommendations to the city council regarding tenant protections in July and construction by the end of the year.

“When the Great Recession hit in 2007, all development ceased,” said land-use attorney Jamie Howsley, and the market is basically playing catch-up now. That makes this an excellent time for regulatory reform, he said, to “increase supply, decrease demand and keep rents under control.”

According to a market report from real estate firm Norris Beggs and Simpson, the apartment vacancy rate in Vancouver was 2.05 percent in the first quarter of this year. Before the Great Recession hit, community development manager Peggy Sheehan said, it tended to hover around 5 percent.

Rents in Vancouver are about as high as in the Puget Sound area, said Sheehan — who added that it was “quite shocking” to discover this in a report this year on state housing needs by the Washington State Department of Commerce, and that she went so far as to recheck the data.

According to Norris Beggs and Simpson’s numbers, average rents for units of all sizes crawled incrementally upwards for years before suddenly jumping by around 29 percent last year. For example, the average rent for a two-bedroom, one-bath unit inched from $668 in 2010 to $716 in 2013; then last year it leapt to $924.

“It’s scary to think about what it’ll be like if something isn’t done now,” said Roy Johnson, executive director of the Vancouver Housing Authority. Johnson pointed out that renters on public assistance used to have an easy time finding private landlords who’d accept their payment vouchers — but nowadays, that acceptance rate is dropping fast, he said.

To try to keep up with the market’s rising prices, he added, VHA recently raised the dollar amount that its vouchers actually pay to private landlords. But landlords are perfectly within their rights to turn down renters who come bearing vouchers. Among the possible tools that the task force may consider is banning what some call “source of income” discrimination.

The group also may consider longer mandatory notice periods before landlords raise rents or ask tenants to vacate; it may consider mandatory “relocation assistance” for tenants who are forced to move because of landlord actions like renovations and raised rents. Some of these measures are already on the books in cities such as Seattle and Portland.

While its focus is local, some members admonished the group to keep data and dynamics of the regional housing market in mind — because gentrification in Portland neighborhoods like the Pearl District and Mississippi Avenue is pushing lower-income residents toward “the periphery,” said Erik Paulsen of the Vancouver Planning Commission. That means Clark County.

Paulsen and Blain Cowley, representing the Clark County Rental Association, both questioned dire data about the vacancy rate that misses the hundreds of mom-and-pop landlords who only rent a handful of units. It’s simply not possible to get all of them to respond to queries and surveys, Cowley said, but they still make up a significant part of the rental market.

Cowley added that the Great Recession hit landlords hard too; his group has lost about 100 landlord members in recent years. “I hope everyone understands the landlords’ situation,” he said.

But Amy Hill, who works with multifamily rentals for the Al Angelo real estate company, she’s been in the business for 17 years — and she’s now seeing “a desperation level that I’ve never seen before.”

“The data is scary,” she said. “But it’s scarier than it looks.”