Wanted: Affordable housing
Group to consider feasibility of trust
fund to assist city’s working poor
By JOHN C. DRAKE
Staff Writer
The State (Columbia, South Carolina)
December 30, 2004
The United Way is urging Columbia city officials to help provide affordable housing for the area’s working poor.
A recent study showed that a person making the $5.15 minimum wage would have to work 76 hours a week to afford a one-bedroom apartment in Columbia — among the state’s most expensive rental markets.
With the Columbia Housing Authority’s waiting list for Section 8 rental vouchers closed, many low-income families have launched fruitless searches for rental assistance elsewhere.
“If you’re walking around and offering to pay $150 a month, there’s not many landlords willing to help you,” said Anita Floyd, the United Way’s vice president for food, shelter, safety and transportation. “There’s a gap between what people earn and what the market requires to support housing.”
Officials with the charity are working with the mayor’s office to create a task force that will consider, among other strategies, setting up a public trust fund. The fund could offer housing subsidies to individual renters and help finance affordable housing developments.
“I hope there will be consensus to support a trust fund,” Floyd said.
Mayor Bob Coble has agreed to work with the task force.
“The trust fund concept is one that I think would be a very good, innovative approach to trying to make housing affordable for individuals,” he said.
The city is in the midst of a communitywide summit on dealing with homelessness. The second of several meetings will take place in January.
The summit’s primary aim is to find a suitable and sustainable location for a homeless shelter. Among the options is a joint shelter that would provide a variety of services to the homeless.
Floyd and Coble agree that the shelter is the most pressing need.
“I think building a new homeless shelter is a top priority to prevent people from freezing to death,” Coble said. “Without it, I don’t think you can get to transitional housing.”
But Floyd said that permanent housing has to be part of the solution, or else the homeless shelter will be the only option for many families and individuals.
“If we don’t have permanent housing, the shelter is not a short-term solution,” she said.
DEFINING ‘AFFORDABLE’
There is no agreement on what it means to offer affordable, permanent housing.
“Affordable housing doesn’t mean public housing,” said Dave Leopard, the former director of the state housing authority who now works on a volunteer basis with the United Way. “You have so many people that work, even two incomes, that still can’t afford to live. Columbia’s an expensive city to rent a piece of property and live in.”
Generally, if rent plus utilities equals 30 percent of a person’s income or less, it is affordable, according to the federal government.
The National Low Income Housing Coalition compiles information each year on average rents and incomes in U.S. metropolitan areas.
Columbia has the most expensive rent among metropolitan areas in the state, the figures show.
In Columbia, a worker making minimum wage could afford rent up to $268 a month in 2003, according to the most recent report. A person living on Social Security income could afford rent up to $166 a month.
But the “fair market rent” in Columbia, according to the coalition, was $512. The median rent is $565 a month, according to the U.S. Census.
“That means we have to have deep subsidies, operating subsidies and rent subsidies for these folks,” Floyd said.
The most prominent provider of affordable housing subsidies is the federal government, which provides Section 8 vouchers locally through the Columbia Housing Authority.
But the Section 8 waiting list has been closed to new applications for two years. There were 1,327 families on the list at the end of November, said Ashley Elsasser, housing authority spokeswoman. The agency may begin accepting applications again at some point in 2005, she said.
LOOKING FOR OPTIONS
Nonprofit agencies have little to offer in the way of housing subsidies, so options are limited.
A local housing trust fund could help fill that gap, advocates say.
Earlier this year, Charleston created a housing trust fund, which helps nonprofits, government agencies and private developers pay for developing affordable housing.
Charleston Mayor Joseph Riley said the trust fund received startup funds from the state housing authority, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and the city’s own community development funds.
He said the city plans to ask the state Legislature for permission to add a real estate transfer fee, with all revenue going to the trust as an ongoing revenue source. The city also is considering a small increase in building fees and building permit fees to help pad the trust fund.
“We need substantially more resources available for affordable housing,” Riley said. “It is becoming more difficult for working people to find housing they can afford.”
Columbia city officials and local developers often talk about including affordable housing options in new developments, such as within East Central, a coalition of inner-city neighborhoods targeted for redevelopment.
However, they generally are referring to homeownership.
“We are doing a lot with our loan pool, having homes that are more in the range of what working families can afford,” Coble said.
Service providers say homeownership is part of the solution, too, but it does not work for everyone.
“I think that end of the spectrum is pretty much provided for,” Leopard said. “Money is available to do that now at fairly good rates.”
But people with poor rental or credit histories, unsteady income or others barriers to mortgage approval will not always be helped by homeownership strategies.
“There are just people who are not going to be homeowners,” Floyd said. “They need to be in housing so they can work and have services and have some minimum quality of life.”
Floyd said a series of meetings will begin in January and run through June, when the task force will issue a set of recommendations to the city.
Reach John Drake at (803) 771-8692 or jdrake@thestate.com.