Study: Wataugans can’t afford to live in county

By Scott Nicholson

nicholson@wataugademocrat.com

A new housing study suggests that most Watauga County residents can’t really afford to live here.

The study, Out of Reach 2006, was jointly released by the Washington, D.C.-based National Low Income Housing Coalition and the North Carolina Housing Coalition, whose director Chris Estes said 58 percent of the county’s residents didn’t earn enough to comfortably rent a modest apartment.

Estes said the study compares Department of Housing and Urban Development data with information gathered through telephone surveys to come up with comparisons of wages versus housing costs.

In Watauga County, the “housing wage” is measured at $12.79 an hour, which is the amount a household would need to earn to pay fair-market rent for a two-bedroom apartment. Estes said the standard apartment is measured at slightly below the average rental cost, so the data isn’t overly skewed for condominiums or other high-cost rentals.

Estes said Watauga’s housing market was already skewed because of Appalachian State University students. The data also suggests a housing gap between the actual wage and the wage needed to rent in the county. The influence of the service-job market, largely because of tourism, keeps the average wage relatively low, at $6.77 an hour. Estes admits this data is not much of a surprise, and said other college towns faced similar crunches, citing Greenville and Chapel Hill as other examples where housing costs are higher than the local wage rates would indicate. The Raleigh metropolitan area had the highest housing wage at $16.35

By comparison, the state average of people who aren’t earning enough to pay for a two-bedroom apartment is 43 percent, though Estes said Watauga’s average rent increase of 20 percent since 2000 is comparable to the statewide increases.

Rob Holton, a local property rental manager as well as chairman of the county’s Economic Development Commission, said many of the issues are related, and high land values, high cost of development, and the difficulty for workers to find affordable housing create a vicious cycle. Holton also suggested that land-use regulations, though well-intentioned, add to the overall cost of construction and further the problem. Holton said the aging of the working population might lead to a shortage of jobs because younger workers won’t be able to afford to move in and replace them once they retire. However, he predicts wages will eventually rise because workers will still be needed.

Holton said government and private entities needed to work together to address the problem, as the county is exploring for its Brookshire Road property. One idea is to provide infrastructure for the project, then let a non-profit agency build the homes, which might be earmarked for those as a certain income level and could only be resold to those in the same income bracket.

Holton said long-term solutions depended on adopting a homestead exemption act to help protect existing, year-round homeowners and providing water and sewer service in certain areas that are more suitable for dense development. However, the problems of topography and the continual pressure of second-home owners are issues that won’t go away.

Holton said the cost of two-bedroom apartments ranged from $500 to $1,200 a month in Boone. He said the escalating cost of insurance and taxes also added to the cost of providing more housing. Housing costs have also been blamed for difficulty in recruiting young professionals and teachers to the area.

“It’s more complicated than a supply-and-demand issue,” Estes said. “It’s the quality of life of a community. If you build with a plan, it’s easier to move about. You don’t want to let random impacts create a community where you don’t want to live and where you can’t find a work force.”

Estes said affordable housing affected business location, traffic, and visitor desirability. “The work force has to come from somewhere,” he said. “If people live out of the county and have to drive in, you’re creating more traffic and the tax base leaves. The fact is, we don’t live by ourselves. We live in communities, with community education, fire and police protection, and other services, and it requires collaborative thinking to address that.”

Estes said the federal and state governments should provide more funds for affordable housing and that local governments could also play a role, whether through providing land or offering incentives to developers, tactics which are currently pursued by both the Town of Boone and Watauga County governments.

Boone planners often are more favorable to projects that claim to offer affordable housing, and the county has proposed a partnership to build affordable housing on county-owned land. Water and sewer access is another factor, as it can lower the cost per unit in housing construction.

Ashe County is seeing rental rates rising faster than the state average, at 38 percent, nearly double Watauga County’s rate and the state average. Avery County’s is comparable to Watauga’s, which Estes attributed to an older population that is more likely to be homeowners.

Estes said the elderly would continue to find it difficult to put a roof over their heads. “For seniors on fixed incomes, those folks are completely locked out,” Estes said. “There’s a waiting list for Section 8 (HUD subsidy) vouchers.”

Other people considered to be in difficult housing situations are those with disabilities, single-earner households, and people who are in a crisis such as domestic violence.

North Carolina’s housing wage ranks 22nd in the country.  Nationally, a household needs to earn $16.31 per hour to afford a two-bedroom apartment.