Advocates Fight For Affordable Housing

TACOMA, WA - At a time when the housing market is dominating the news, affordable housing advocates have won at least one battle. "We don't have to convince people anymore that there's an affordable housing crisis in this country," Rachael Myers, director of the Washington Low Income Housing Alliance, told attendees Monday in Tacoma at the 15th annual Housing Washington conference.

But people still need to be mobilized to do something about it, Myers said. Her group is organizing homeless and low-income people to vote and stay engaged in the political process. "Housing is an environmental issue, a labor issue and a business issue," Myers said.

Gov. Chris Gregoire got a warm reception from the advocates Monday morning and touted recent increases in funding for affordable housing. "We need to figure out ways to create housing that is close to people's jobs and less expensive," Gregoire said. That is not "pie in the sky," she said. "It's our future."

Communication consultant Michael Shadow told housing advocates they must counter the most powerful narrative in American society, individual accountability and responsibility, with the frame of community. Most media stories about housing start with a person or family, setting up the frame of the individual, Shadow said. "What you and I need to do is constantly frame every story as a community getting together story."

Advocates got a lesson on the need for green affordable housing from Nicole Katherine Sherwood, director of Perry Rose LLC, a planning, development and advisory firm that works with public and not-for-profit institutions in the Rocky Mountain region. "The desire to build cheaply also has often overshadowed concerns about what it will cost to operate buildings," she said, pointing to transportation and energy costs. Nongreen urban homes use less energy than green suburban ones whose owners drive hybrids, Sherwood said. And, she said, low-income people living in distant, inefficient homes cannot save money to move up.

Getting back to community support, Sherwood pointed to one project that won support by combining housing with rehabilitation of a historic building and development of a new library and by pointing out that it would serve some people who were considered community icons. "We really drove home the point that affordable housing is about housing ourselves," she said. "It's not about housing the other."