Housing program sees drastic funding cuts
Deeper cuts to funding and aging
facilities are two major concerns at the Whitefish Housing
Authority, executive director SueAnn Grogan told the Whitefish City
Council during an April 4 work session.
The session was requested on March 22
after the council delayed voting on city manager Chuck Stearns’
suggestion that WHA receive $15,000 in tax-increment financing
(TIF) money for two years.
The money could be used by WHA to
rehabilitate three homes in the Railroad District that BNSF Railway
said it would donate to WHA. The work would be eligible for TIF
money because it would address blight, Stearns said.
WHA, founded in 1967 to address growing
housing needs here, has not received any city funding since 2004,
Grogan told the council. Since 1998, WHA has won more than $2
million in grants that they wrote in-house — $77 for the community
for every dollar the city invested, she said. But times have
changed.
“The Whitefish Housing Authority is
confronting deep cuts to our most important housing and community
development programs in 2011, and I expect the trend to continue in
2012 and beyond,” she said.
Mountain View Manor, which opened in
1970 and was WHA’s first project, provides 50 apartments for the
elderly and disabled. Funding for WHA’s public housing has been cut
by about 70 percent since 2009, Grogan said, and last October, WHA
spent $26,000 replacing a rusted-out, 40-year-old water tank for
the Manor’s heating system.
WHA received $80,312 in federal
stimulus money in 2009, one-time money it used to upgrade windows
and doors at the Manor to save energy. The water tank repair should
also save energy, Grogan said.
“At this time, the Moun-tain View Manor
is able to make ends meet, but we do have serious doubts about the
funding for public housing at the national level,” she said.
WHA was awarded a planning grant last
year that will help them decide if Mountain View Manor should opt
out of public housing and move to a project-based housing-choice
voucher system.
A housing-choice voucher system is
already in place here. The federally-funded program assists
low-income households by paying a portion of their rent. WHA
currently manages 16 vouchers averaging $375 per month per
participant, but the program is currently under-funded, Grogan
said. It receives $788 per month to operate, when costs are
actually $1,000 per month.
A housing rehabilitation program funded
by federal, state and local grants has helped about 50 low-income
households finance repairs to their homes, with loans averaging
from $2,000 to $42,000. The program has received about $390,000
since it started here in 1998 and is currently funded by a $30,000
federal grant.
WHA’s homeownership program has helped
24 low- and moderate-income households purchase homes in Whitefish
since it started in 2004. A subsidy was provided to help buy down
the price of the home. In 2008, WHA founded the Whitefish Area Land
Trust to create homes that remain affordable after resale.
About $1.7 million in grant funding has
been awarded to WHA for the homeownership program, but Grogan notes
that “it has proven difficult to pass the community land-trust
model through the various financial institutions and funding
hoops.”
The city’s inclusionary-zoning
provision was intended to give developers a chance to increase
project density in exchange for providing affordable housing in
their project or money to WHA. But when the recession hit in 2008,
projects that had taken advantage of the provision stalled and were
never developed.
As for the three BNSF homes, the
councilors discussed the likelihood of them ever being converted to
affordable housing units. Two were in particularly bad shape, they
agreed. WHA instead could end up selling the land for mixed-use
projects or even a parking lot for the gentrifying Railroad
District.
Grogan was well aware of changes in the
Railroad District. She pointed out that a home at the corner of
First Street and O’Brien Avenue was one of the first homes WHA
rehabilitated for affordable housing. The woman who bought it sold
it for about three times what she paid for it, and the home was
later torn down and replaced by condos, Grogan said.
Seeing that Grogan needed $20,000 this
year for a grant match, the council reached a consensus to provide
her with that much in TIF money, but she’ll have to wait until next
year to see if she gets more money from the city.