MARKET OPPORTUNITIES
WORKFORCE HOUSING
Block and Tackle
Skirmishes on the workforce housing front
BY LIZ ENOCHS
AFFORDABLE HOUSING FINANCE • MARCH 2008
Even as school districts and
municipal governments in
major urban areas struggle
to keep rental
housing affordable
for essential service
workers, smaller towns located
near the nation’s coastal
population centers are tackling
the workforce housing
crisis from a different angle.
In Lynnwood, Wash.,
county officials and local
employers met just this
January for a workforce
housing summit to trade
ideas on how to bring housing
into the mix when it
comes to attracting and
keeping key local employees.
To that end, the county
has set up a Web site in partnership
with the local chamber of commerce
and apartment owners to allow
visitors and prospective new residents to
search for rental housing. The initiative
works through a link to a rental search
Web site known as forrent.com, a division
of Norfolk, Va.-based Dominion
Enterprises.
In the tiny town of Falmouth, Mass.,
on the Cape Cod peninsula, local officials
are engaged in a debate over whether to
develop more workforce housing through
inclusionary zoning policies or bow down
to the NIMBY forces opposing the development,
according to blog posts from
Troy B.G. Clarkson, a former town selectman.
Meanwhile, the city of Plymouth,
Minn., offered a soft loan to help aid the
renovation of Willow Woods, a 41-unit
workforce housing property in Plymouth.
The state and county also pitched in to
help the development get built, according
to Jeff Huggett, a principal partner with
Minneapolis-based Dominium Development
and Acquisition, the firm that handled
the rehab.
In larger cities with sky-high housing
prices, the solutions to the workforce
housing problem tend to include both
rental and for-sale housing.
In San Francisco, momentum
is building for the construction
of as many as 1,000
units of a combination of apartments
and for-sale homes for
local teachers.
“We need to keep our experienced
teachers and attract
new talent—especially now,
when the country is in the
midst of an economic crisis precipitated
by a housing meltdown,”
said San Francisco
Board of Education President
Mark Sanchez.
Sanchez, who is leading a
small group incubating the
effort in San Francisco, said one
firm—Emeryville, Calif.-based
Bay Area Economics—has been chosen
from a number of respondents to a
request for proposals to work toward
putting together a deal using school district-owned land.
Using land held in public trust to
provide workforce housing was the
approach used by Bethesda, Md.-based
UniDev, LLC, in several California projects,
and appears to be on the agenda for
a project now in the works as a partnership
with Jackson State University in
Jackson, Miss.
Said Ehud Mouchly, vice president
and general manager at UniDev, “We produce
market-quality, middle-income
workforce housing at below-market
prices and rents.”
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