Councilman, Coalition Want Workforce Housing for Lower-income Residents

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City Councilman Michael Brown and the Coalition for Smarter Growth want to change the District’s standards for its workforce housing programs.

“Workforce housing” has no single definition, but it is generally meant to include affordable housing within close proximity to where someone works. Brown (I-At Large) and the coalition are both asking how to define “affordable” for D.C. residents.

The Urban Land Institute (ULI) classifies workforce housing as being affordable to households earning 60 percent to 120 percent of the area median income, or AMI. The wide range of income is meant to provide housing for a variety of people and families, usually in the middle class.

“Even those folks making a little more money can’t always afford to live in the housing they want to,” said Lynn Ross, the executive director of ULI. Workforce housing typically does not focus on lower-income households because there are other programs specifically targeted at helping the poor find housing. However, in Washington, D.C., the coalition and Brown say that this typical definition of affordability in workforce housing does not help the people it is meant to.

“The term ‘workforce’ seems to define away a lot of people who are low wage earners,” said Cheryl Cort, the policy director for the Coalition for Smarter Growth. “If we intend to serve D.C. working households that need the help, we’ve got to understand who exactly they are.”

Both the coalition and Brown said the problem comes from how the AMI is calculated for the District. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development decides how to calculate the city’s AMI. The “area” considered in the AMI calculation includes the District and its surrounding counties, including Fairfax and Loudoun in Virginia, and Montgomery in Maryland, all of which have significantly higher median incomes. Including these surrounding counties in the calculation increases the AMI for the District by more than 50 percent. In fiscal year 2011, the AMI for a four-person household in the Washington metro region was a little more than $106,000, according to the Coalition for Smarter Growth. When not including the surrounding counties, the AMI was $70,400.

“Our AMI makes it very difficult for us to put affordable housing on the market,” said Brown, who chairs the city’s Committee on Housing and Workforce Development.

These skewed calculations mean that households that would typically receive help in obtaining workforce housing from the D.C. government cannot, while wealthier households not meant to be covered by the program can. “We don’t want to support a family of four with an income of $120,000,” said Kilin Boardman-Schroyer, the legislative director for Brown.

To combat the discrepancy between the District’s calculated and actual AMIs, Brown and the coalition call for workforce housing programs to help only households earning 80 percent or less of the AMI. That is equivalent to a four-person household earning almost$85,000 or a three-person household earning $76,400, according to the Coalition for Smarter Growth.

“With limited housing aid available, [funding] needs to be used more wisely to help struggling D.C. working families find a home they can afford,” said the coalition’s report, which is on the D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute’s website. Mayor Vincent Gray listed workforce housing as a priority for his administration in his jobs plan when running for office in 2010. In the plan, Gray wanted to increase workforce housing to turn  more commuters into residents.

“We cannot be economically competitive if only 33 percent of our workforce lives within the District,” the plan states. “In order to increase job productivity, grow our revenue base, and promote sustainable development, Vince Gray is strongly committed to programs designed to increase the supply of workforce housing and mixed-income housing in the District.”

Brown addressed the problem in 2010 when he introduced the Increase in Housing Affordability Act. Under the bill, which focused on all affordable housing programs in the District, all funding would go to programs serving households earning at or below 80 percent of the AMI. More specifically, at least 80 percent of funds directed toward affordable housing programs would go to programs offering housing to households earning 50 percent or less of the AMI.

The bill was not enacted, but Brown said he is considering reintroducing it. The council member said that the bill will have to pass through some “federal struggles” to become law. “We have to make sure we are not just a community of the affluent,” he said


Issues |Housing|Income Inequality


Region |Washington DC

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