Spokane housing remains out reach for many

Rent’s due. Spokane’s housing market continues to punish low-wage earners on their quest for affordable apartments.

Higher costs for utilities, a recent spike in rents and salaries failing to keep pace have combined for an economic quandary, said Pam Parr, executive director of Spokane Housing Authority.

“It makes you wonder what those people are giving up to afford a place to live,” Parr said. “It’s not sustainable.”

Housing is commonly deemed affordable if rent and utility costs make up less than 30% of gross income.

Right now, only about half of Spokane County residents meet this criteria.

“People living like that are struggling,” she said.

A study by Eastern Washington University’s Institute for Public Policy & Economic Analysis showed that about 42,000 renters in the Spokane County are burdened by their cost of housing.

Some 54% of renters pay more than 30% of their income on their home. Of those, some 26% pay more than half of their income to stay in their homes.

These are the highest on record, said Patrick Jones, the executive director of the program.

Jones said Spokane County has a housing shortage of single- and multifamily housing.

Parr agreed and said both types of housing need to be added to the housing supply to help make housing more affordable.

But Jones pointed out that there is another way to make housing more affordable – increase their incomes.

His team found that in 2022, the median income of Spokane County households was about $69,000.

That’s a jump of about $9,000 from 2019. But this lags behind the national median income of $74,755 and well below the same measure for rest of the state of Washington, which was $90,325 for 2022.

Jones, whose study incorporated data from the American Community Survey released last December by the U.S. Census, attributed the lower local figures to a shortage of high-paying jobs.

According to Jones, the highest-paying job sectors are professional and technical services, information technology, and finance and insurance.

But the Spokane region’s economy is largely based on health care and manufacturing, he said.

“People think of health care as generally a high-paying sector, but there are many jobs in health care that are not,” he said. “So, I don’t see that the growth of that sector helping the local economy, though it has been incredibly important.”

Manufacturing also has not helped bridge the gap, he said.

“I’m proud to say it’s in the top five of all our sectors by employment,” he said. “But it pays just a little higher than the average earnings in Spokane, which is quite a bit different than manufacturing in the central Puget Sound area.”

That area, home to Microsoft, Amazon and a burgeoning tech industry, have created many more high-paying jobs, which Spokane has struggled to replicate.

“The Seattle area is blessed with just an amazing concentration of Fortune 100 companies,” he said. “And they pay very well.”

In comparison, Lilac City companies paid an average of about $60,000 to their workers in 2022, their findings showed.

But adjusted for inflation, annual wages paid by Spokane-based employers declined. Higher costs paid by consumers meant that their standard of living dropped even with the pay increases.

Those cost-of-living disparities were compounded by higher costs for housing.

According to the study, the median price for a home in Spokane County in the final three months of 2023 was slightly higher than $415,000.

For comparison, the median price of a home in Spokane County had gone up $138,000 from the same period in 2019, according to the EWU findings.

The Housing Authority director, Parr, said the higher home prices have forced residents to stay in rentals.

Those higher-paid residents, who are just below the threshold of affording a home, often are occupying apartments that could go to others.

“Some of the more naturally affordable units are being occupied by them instead of people that have lower incomes,” she said.

As an economist, Jones rarely uses the word “crisis,” but believes it applies to Spokane County’s housing market.

“I actually recoil from using the word,” he said. “But I think we have to apply that terminology for housing, whether it’s owner-occupied or renter-occupied.”

Despite the bleak picture the economic indicators create, Jones and Parr remain optimistic.

While the costs of utilities continue to rise, rents seem to be leveling, Parr said, which is keeping Spokane relatively affordable compared to larger metro areas.

“That’s why people from other places come here,” she said. “It is a wonderful place to live.”

Jones said Spokane has grown more attractive since he moved here in the late 1980s.

“It’s a better place than it was,” he said. “I think there has been a lot of positive change over the last 10 to 20 years. I’ve been very heartened by what I’ve seen.”

Jones believes Spokane still offers a much better standard of living than Seattle and San Francisco, where some of his friends live.

“It’s like they are living in Manhattan-congested conditions,” he said of his friends. “Though I don’t have public transportation to use, I have a relatively stressless commute to my downtown office.

“And, that’s worth a lot of money to me.”