Costs hit us where we live

Each day, former Seattle Mayor Norm Rice leaves the house he wouldn't be able to buy today, and thinks about those who can't buy at all.

Last weekend, he joined PBS and KCTS in taping a "By the People" meeting at which 100 citizens tried to get a handle on housing costs in King County. "Not housing just in terms of homelessness," Rice clarified the other day. "But housing and, for want of a better word, the challenges facing us."

"Challenges." That's putting it in a gift box and tying it with a bow, isn't it?

The lack of affordable housing in Seattle isn't a challenge. It's a crisis no longer limited to the working poor.

King County's median single-family-home price last month was $450,000. With 10 percent down at 6.25 percent interest and a 45 percent debt ratio, a buyer would need to earn $99,000 a year, according to Lori Richmond, a certified mortgage planner with Golf Savings Bank in Seattle.

So a home of one's own is the daily worry of middle-income, college-educated, checkbook-balancing, crosswalk-conscious people who read the real-estate ads like old folks read the obituaries — with deep sighs and shaking heads.

There just seems no way in. Which forces the question: Should the city subsidize housing for middle-income residents who are priced out?

"I think it is going to be the defining debate in the next levy," Rice said. "The taxpayer can relate to homelessness and low-income housing, but they can't relate to subsidizing some moderate-rate housing."

It's time to get over that.

Rice is taking his shot in a couple of arenas: He chairs the Citizen Review Committee at Yesler Terrace, the first racially integrated housing project in the nation.

Now 67 years old, Yesler Terrace is being redeveloped to be income-integrated, as well, with higher-priced units. (Advocates of low-income housing are, inevitably, fighting that.)

And at the Evans School of Public Affairs at the University of Washington, Rice has made housing part of his crusade for "sustainable communities."

At the "By the People" event, participants listened to a panel discussion with a mortgage broker, a developer and a representative from the Seattle Housing Authority.

They then broke into small groups to come up with survey questions that Rice hopes to use in developing a housing strategy for the city.

"I think people were excited," he said. "But the one failure is that they don't know what is going to happen now."

We could make something happen in 2009, when voters are presented with a new levy.

Seattle has voted four times to tax itself in the name of affordable housing. We're open to it, and we're good at it. The $86 million levy passed in 2002 has so far helped 7,500 people find or keep housing, according to the Seattle Office of Housing.

Right now, the office is meeting with neighborhood councils to gauge what should be on the next levy. Speak up.

Helping middle-income people into their own homes should be on the city's table. Otherwise, there will be none of them left to sit around it.

Nicole Brodeur's column appears Tuesday and Friday. Reach her at 206-464-2334 or nbrodeur@seattletimes.com.

Who knew he was a Kiehl's man?