Mammoth Lakes Housing to help middle income?
While the struggles of low-income workers to afford housing in California are well documented, the similar struggle of middle-income workers is just beginning to make the news. Appropriately, Mammoth Lakes Housing (MLH) Executive Director Jennifer Halferty highlighted MLH’s future focus on middle-income households in her annual presentation to Town Council on Jan. 7.
Halferty explained that California is currently experiencing a loss of not just low, but also, middle-income homeowners to other states. According to a January LA Times article, “California’s high housing costs drive out poor, middle-income workers,” federal data shows that the high cost of living in California has pushed hundreds of thousands of low and middle-income workers to other states.
This news should come as little surprise, given that, according to Coldwell Banker’s Listing Report, more than half the nation’s 50 most expensive residential real estate markets are in California.
Meanwhile a recent Associated Press article entitled “In resort towns, working class squeezed out as rich move in,”on Aspen highlighted how the increasingly unaffordable real estate market can affect mountain towns in particular.
“It’s a mirror image of Detroit, where wealth, not poverty, is driving population down,” the article quotes Mick Ireland, a former three-term Aspen mayor.
“I think we’re seeing that in Mammoth, too,” said Halferty at Wednesday’s Town Council meeting.
Given the growing need for middle-income assistance, Halferty said MLH plans to look at ways it can create a program to help residents in the middle income bracket, “where you don’t tend to see any grant funding available,” she said.
“What we’re kicking around, and this is more of a concept at this point, would be some kind of down payment assistance program,” she elaborated in a follow-up with The Sheet. “It could be for any property in town, with a focus on the middle income level.”
Halferty said MLH would be looking at the Measure A political commitment funds, unrestricted funds that have historically had a portion set aside for workforce housing. But since the town settled with Mammoth Lakes Land Acquisition in 2012, Halferty said some of these funds were taken out of housing and put into the General Fund.
“We’d like to find a way to get that back into housing,” she said.
“I’m encouraged to hear you’re looking at the middle,” said Council member John Wentworth at the Jan. 7 meeting. “I think that we’ve certainly heard from a lot of folks that we have some interesting housing challenges. I’m encouraged to hear that the Board is maybe looking beyond the traditional scope [of MLH].”
Halferty noted that MLH is still tackling the traditional need for affordable workforce housing in Mammoth. MLH secured $2.7 million in new funding this past year for housing in town, part of which is a programmatic $1 million grant to provide mortgage assistance and rehabilitation of manufactured housing (i.e. mobile homes).
“I think that speaks volumes to our strength as a non-profit, and our professionalism,” Halferty said.
Overall, she pointed to MLH’s achievements even in a year without active grants; “We were still able to help two households with first-time homebuyer loans, just by recycling old grants,” she said.
When homeowners repay their MLH program loans, the money goes into a reuse account, Halferty explained. The money must then be used in a similar fashion. “I think that’s a great demonstration of how we can still help people, and that money gets re-filtered out into the community,” she said. “We’re helping families today, but in essence, we should be able to help families for a long time.”
Halferty said MLH also filled 15 out of 82 rental units this year. “That’s a not a lot of units, we just don’t have a lot of turnover,” she said. “I think that’s indicative of when people find good, safe, clean, affordable homes, they want to settle into the community and stay put. So we think that’s a good thing.”
