Too Poor for Hot Housing Market, Too Affluent for Buyer Assistance

For half a decade, Gwendolyn Halford, a 48-year-old librarian for a federal agency, has searched several Washington suburbs for a home to buy. With an annual salary of about $60,000, she is too well-off to qualify for most affordable housing programs, but she lacks the means to purchase something she likes on the open market.

So she remains a renter, frustrated by the actions of elected officials. "You are allowing developers to come in to build condo units and homes at prices that a large percentage of the population can't afford," she said. "So what is going on here?"

Across the region, government leaders have heard some version of that question. They are scrambling to provide "workforce housing" -- price-controlled homes for families with high five- and even six-figure incomes.

The Montgomery County Council is considering a bill that would require developers of sites near Metro stations to expand their projects by about 8 percent to add workforce units at below-market prices. A family of four with a salary of $90,000, under one scenario, would pay $300,000 for a townhouse. The median price for a new townhouse in Montgomery during the first quarter of this year was nearly $460,000.

The Alexandria City Council voted in November to lend a city-supported nonprofit organization $12.8 million to buy the Gunston Hall apartment complex, which officials hope will include rental units for residents whose salaries disqualify them from public housing. In the District, Mayor Anthony A. Williams's recently launched New Communities initiative would remake the struggling Sursum Corda neighborhood into a mix of 1,700 homes, a third of them reserved for moderate-income residents.

New York has for decades helped provide housing for city residents with moderate incomes, but officials in the Washington area have long concentrated their housing initiatives on the poor. The new workforce efforts "do represent the first strong moves in government helping out with housing people at middle incomes," said Tad Baldwin, an advocate for affordable housing in the District and Montgomery.

In Montgomery, where Halford hopes to buy, about 66,200 households have salaries that are 80 to 120 percent of the Washington area's median income -- $89,300 for a family of four -- which is one way of defining the workforce category. These households account for a fifth of the county's population.

For elected officials, the upside of these initiatives is undeniable. The beneficiaries are mainly public employees who can't afford to live where they work and employers who complain that housing costs force workers to commute too far or leave. Helping a firefighter, teacher or librarian buy a house is the sort of goal few politicians would fail to embrace, given the votes commanded by public employee unions.

But the motivation goes beyond politics. In jurisdictions where housing prices have soared, the need is genuine. Officials are also contending with reduced federal spending on affordable housing programs and an escalating real estate market that encourages owners of rental complexes to convert them into condominiums.

Affordable housing advocates welcome the fresh attention to the plight of people who cannot buy or rent in the Washington area, but they worry about local governments expending too much political energy and resources on the middle class.

"We certainly acknowledge that middle-income families in Montgomery have trouble finding affordable homes," D. Scott Minton, executive director of the Housing Opportunities Commission, Montgomery's public housing agency, told the County Council last week. "Imagine then what faces the county's low-income families."

"We are concerned the poor are going to get left behind," Baldwin said.