Housing

The Kodiak Island Borough has the highest rent in the state. That’s according to a publication from the Alaska Department of Labor & Workforce Development that looks at the cost of living in Alaska and economic trends for July 2016.

Alyssa Rodrigues, an economist with the Alaska Department of Labor and Workforce Development who works in the research and analysis section, said the Coast Guard presence may have an impact on rent in Kodiak.

“If you have a large population of people who are getting a particular allowance, it almost sets a floor. So, if someone, just for example, had a housing allowance of $2,000 a month, then most people wouldn’t want to rent for anything less than that, because they know that they can get that from someone who has that housing allowance,” she said.

She said the availability – or lack of availability – of rooms and apartments can also push up rent.

“So, if you have most of the places that are for rent already occupied, then it’s going to take more for somebody to decide that they want to open up their home or that they want to rent out that particular property, so when you have a low vacancy rate, it kind of boosts up the price as well. It just creates more competition on the demand side,” she said.

And constructing new buildings to provide more housing isn’t always the easiest solution, especially when there’s not a lot of property.

Rodrigues said that’s an area Juneau has struggled with.

“Just because of kind of the land. They have a limited amount of flat land that’s kind of easy to build on, so it’s difficult when you need additional housing to find somewhere to build it without going really far out and then perhaps people don’t really want to live so far away from the main city.”

And it’s not just rent that makes living in Kodiak expensive.

In comparison to Juneau, Fairbanks, and Anchorage, the City of Kodiak tends to be the priciest place to buy groceries. According to the publication, the U.S. average for a half gallon of whole milk is $2.25.

For the same product in Juneau, Fairbanks, and Anchorage, the half-gallon costs anywhere from $2.30 to $2.50, while for Kodiak, it’s roughly $3. Kodiak prices for other common products like bananas, orange juice, beef, and eggs are also higher on average.

Rodrigues said that’s probably in part because importation to rural Alaska is costlier than for bigger cities, like Anchorage, where there are many grocery stores and therefore more competition.

“And we just have big economies of scale, so instead of having small shipments and having to pay maybe a little bit more per pound, say, for things to come, we can load up huge barges and really capitalize on the fact that there’s just so much being shipped to one place and reduce the overall transportation cost of each individual item or per pound. That sort of thing,” she said.

It tends to drive up cost when one business holds a monopoly over a market.

Another standout statistic is that — while doctor and dentist visits are more expensive in Juneau, Fairbanks, and Anchorage than in Kodiak — the cost of veterinary exams are significantly higher.

Anchorage is the second most expensive out of the four at about $62 per visit and it costs an average of $76 per exam for Kodiak. The primary cause may be that Kodiak offers only one veterinary clinic.

In 2015, the Missouri Economic Research and Information Center rated Alaska the fourth most expensive state in the nation.

Anchorage’s homeless shelters and social services are drastically and unexpectedly overwhelmed as a consequence of a shifting policy pushing people out of homeless camps.

Summer is usually a relatively quiet time for direct service providers working with the city’s homeless population. Typically people are living in camps or doing seasonal work, according to Lisa Aquino, the executive director of Catholic Social Services, which oversees the Brother Francis Shelter in downtown Anchorage. This summer the shelter has consistently been at maximum capacity.

“Almost every day there’s 240 people inside,” Aquino said.

That number doesn’t include the 50 to 70 people a night the shelter can’t accommodate, who have been sleeping outside.

Aquino was one of three social service providers to testify before the Anchorage Assembly’s committee on homelessness Wednesday. They all said they are seeing the same large influx of people in need of help, taxing staff, and making it hard to keep up with even basic things, like serve enough food during meal-times.

Part of the reason is growing pressure on unsanctioned camps in parks and along trails throughout the city.

“There’s been a real concerted effort by the municipality, by the police department, to crack down on camps,” Aquino said. “They’re letting people know to leave camps and that they should come down to Brother Francis Shelter and Beans Cafe and connect with services.”

The dry conditions and elevated fire dangers are other factors driving the crackdown on camps. Multiple fires within the municipality have broken out this summer, with at least one blamed on homeless campers.

Lisa Sauder, the director of Beans Cafe, told the committee the situation is creating new problems, like people coming to the campus with all their possessions. Without campsites, people have nowhere to store their things. Sauder explained Beans has freed up a portion of storage space so people can secure their belongings while they get food.

Service providers also say they are also seeing a higher volume of people coming to the facilities.  Covenant House Executive Director Alison Kear said in 20 years of work she’d never seen so many people arriving during the summer, including a drastic uptick in minors between the ages of 14 and 16-years-old. Aquina with BFS said they’re seeing more and more senior citizens coming into the system for the first time.

Assembly member Bill Evans chairs the committees on homelessness and public safety. He said during a short interview, the point of the city’s focus on driving homeless individuals out of camp sites is intended to “consolidate” people around social services.

However, without sufficient housing options brought online yet under the city’s broader Housing First strategy, it has created an unforeseen short-term problem.

“Between now and then, unfortunately, there’s no quick fix,” Evans said. “We have a long-term program in place that we think will address this, it’s going to be difficult this summer, it’s going to be difficult for about a year now. But things are looking up in the sense we have new grants in that I think will curb this in the long run.”

Evans hopes that 30 to 50 housing vouchers will become available soon, taking some of the pressure off the service providers in the area.

Meanwhile, the agencies said they barely have enough resources to keep up with a problem nobody saw coming, and that they expect it to last for weeks.

The federal government wants to know, among other things, how tribes use federal resources to improve housing.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development plans to create a special committee to gather that information. Lourdes Castro Ramírez is head of HUD’s Office of Public and Indian Housing. She said her office will bring together people running federal programs and tribal representatives around the country at least twice a year to discuss priorities for Native housing.

“We believe that the creation of a committee that allows for regular feedback, regular discussion — and really, also an opportunity to identify best practices and models that are working across Native American communities — will help further our impact and will also help inform the future of Native American housing programs,” Ramírez said.

There will be up to eight tribal representatives and at least one of them will represent Alaska.

Ramírez said federal funding for housing programs has become scarce and it’s especially important for her agency to have a firm understanding of how Native communities use that money.

The deadline to comment on the agency’s planned Tribal Intergovernmental Advisory Committee is July 23. Comments can be left on the Federal Register website.

Unalaska’s City Council wants to look into expanding tax breaks to encourage renovations that create new housing.

Currently, the city only provides a sales tax exemption to newly constructed residential housing and that does not apply to renovated, former commercial or industrial buildings.

“You know you see this all the time in the big cities where some of the turn of the century brick buildings (in) New York City or Seattle have been turned into nice lofts or fancy living accommodations,” said councilor Frank Kelty. “And I know a lot of those places give tax breaks. So I think this is something to be looked at. I don’t think it is something that will be an overwhelming hurt on our sales tax revenues.”

He says he would be in favor of this.

City Manager David Martinson calls the real impacts of the exemption minimal, if new residential homes can be created.

When Caitlin Cheney was living at a campground in Washington state with her mother and younger sister, she would do her homework by the light of the portable toilets, sitting on the concrete.

She maintained nearly straight A’s even though she had to hitchhike to school, making it there an average of three days a week. “I really liked doing homework,” says Cheney, 22, who is now an undergraduate zoology student at Washington State University. “It kept my mind off reality a little bit.”

More than 1 million public school students in the United States have no room to call their own, no desk to do their homework, no bed to rely on at night. State data collection, required by federal law and aggregated by the National Center for Homeless Education, shows the number of homeless students has doubled in the past decade, to 1.3 million in 2013-2014.

A new report by the nonpartisan advocacy group Civic Enterprises brings the voices of these students to life.

“I’ve been working on the dropout problem for more than a decade,” says co-author John Bridgeland. “I discovered homelessness wasn’t on our radar screen and it wasn’t on others’ radar screens, notwithstanding this 100 percent increase.”

But the Every Student Succeeds Act, or ESSA, includes both new mandates and some extra money to assist districts in helping more students like Cheney.

The challenge starts with finding them. As other research has shown, students with insecure housing aren’t all living in shelters. They may be doubled up with relatives or moving frequently from place to place. And they may be housed with their whole families, or going it alone.

This study relied on interviews with 44 currently homeless youth and a survey of 158 more who were homeless at some point in middle or high school.

Ninety-four percent reported staying with different people such as relatives or friends, and 44 percent stayed in a hotel, while half had spent some nights in a car, park, abandoned building or a public place like a bus station. Often, schools have a practice of asking for proof of residence only once at enrollment, which doesn’t capture transitions or instability.

A second issue in identifying these students is stigma. Two-thirds of the students in the study said they were uncomfortable telling people at school about their situation.

That was the case for Cheney. “I knew that there was a good chance my sister and I would be separated in the foster system,” she recalls. “I couldn’t allow that to happen. I got the message from my mom that I shouldn’t be telling people at school, and I should try to resolve my issues on my own.”

Homeless students are disproportionately youth of color and LGBT. Other research cited in the report says 40 to 60 percent have experienced some kind of physical abuse, while 17 to 35 percent have experienced sexual abuse. And academically they are far behind their peers.

Both resources and red tape can be barriers in the way of helping these students. But on the bright side, says Bridgeland, “We’re looking at schools as a hub for connecting students and families to housing, mentoring, tutoring, mental health and other services.”

For nearly 30 years, a federal law called the McKinney-Vento Act has been meant to ensure that homeless students have the same access to school as anyone else. The law requires that each school district designate a liaison to ensure enforcement.

This report surveyed 500 of those liaison staffers and found, however, that 90 percent are effectively moonlighting, spending less than half of their time on duties related to identifying and helping homeless youth. At the same time, only 36 percent of liaisons reported that they work “a great deal” with community organizations, which would be presumed to be the best way to connect families with the housing and other services they need.

Maybe that’s why just 1 in 4 of the youth surveyed, and 29 percent of liaisons, said that schools did a good job connecting students with housing, their stated top priority. Among the youth, 58 percent said that their schools “should have done a lot more” or did a poor job.

“When I see a finding like that I freak out that this is so bad,” says Bridgeland. “But the action-oriented part of me says, wait a minute, here’s where the opportunity is.”

Bridgeland and Civic Enterprises are part of a network of organizations that have been heavily involved in efforts to bring down the high school dropout rate, which has fallen significantly in the past decade. Bridgeland says homeless youth are going to be their next major area of effort.

First of all, the numbers, which have doubled, are likely to grow even bigger thanks to better reporting under new ESSA requirements. Under the federal law, districts must perform outreach to housing-unstable students multiple times during the school year, post public notices of homeless student rights and, most significantly, they must break out high school graduation rates for homeless youth.

Other changes in the law that are likely to focus public attention have to do with how easy schools make it for homeless youth to continue their education despite disruptions.

About half of homeless youth in this study reported having to change schools in the middle of the year. Bridgeland says it’s been common for paperwork requirements like proof of residence to keep students out of class for up to a month.

But with modern data systems, ESSA now requires schools to put students in classes immediately and contact their previous schools for records. Schools must also help homeless students make up work and come back to school regardless of absences.

Another significant issue, of course, is money. ESSA includes a 20 percent increase in funding for McKinney-Vento enforcement. Money will now be set aside from Title I funding to help attract, engage and retain homeless students. There will also be money to train more front line school staffers, from teachers to cafeteria workers and bus drivers, to recognize and help homeless youth.

But money isn’t the only solution. Just over half — 54 percent — of the formerly homeless youth surveyed in this report said both material and emotional support are equally important to helping them continue their educations.

Caitlin Cheney says school was “a solace” for her. Besides her grades, she excelled in extracurricular activities like ceramics and a board-game club, but she said she could have used more support.

“I just wish that when kids are falling asleep in class or unable to do some assignments, or spending more time in lunch eating their only meal of the day, that teachers would ask what’s going on,” she says. “I wish that more teachers had more compassion for some of the situations that students might be going through.”

Bridgeland says the centrality of school for many homeless young people is a sign of their resilience that gives him hope. In the interviews, he says, “there were [stories of ] kids begging their parents or guardians to let them stay in their home school, or let them back in or make sure they could get a ride.”

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Before the mortgage crisis hit, real estate seemed like a sure bet. Pretty much anyone could buy a house: no money down, thousands of square feet, second and third vacation homes were not out of the question. Then the bubble burst.

Homeowners across the U.S. confronted the reality that their houses were worth a fraction of what they paid for them. Now, a decade later, even though the recession is over, more than six million homeowners are still upside down on their mortgages.

This week on For the Record, we hear the stories of two people who lost their homes in the mortgage crisis – and how they’re coping today.

Brian Burns, Las Vegas

For 26 years, Brian Burns watched Vegas grow. He saw the desert dirt roads transformed by construction projects. The land was available and cheap. By 2004, housing prices soared.

“The builders couldn’t keep up with the demand,” he says. “Land prices went thru the roof.”

Burns and his then wife had bought into the dream. They lived in a huge house he estimates was 3,500 square feet. “There were parts of the house you never even saw – that’s how big it was,” he says.

When a realtor friend convinced him to sell, he was blown away by the profit he turned.

“That house that I bought for $250,000, my friend sold for $645,000 three years later,” he says. “I had never had remotely that much money in my life. Probably never had more than $10,000 to $15,000 in the bank before. And I took $40 out one time and I showed my friend my ATM receipt and it said $228,000 balance. And we just looked at each other and laughed, it was ridiculous. I didn’t know what to do with it.”

He decided to keep it in the bank and buy another, smaller house in a brand-new development in the town of Henderson, Nev. Sure, the tan, stucco tract-style housing didn’t have a whole lot of charm, but Burns didn’t care. He convinced some of his friends to buy other houses in the neighborhood. He had cash in the bank, excellent credit, and he put no money down.

Before we return to the second half of Brian’s story, let’s bring in a second voice.

Guillermo Galindo, Medford, Mass.

In 2005, Guillermo Galindo and his wife bought their house in Revere, Mass., for $450,000. They put about 5 percent down and ended up with a manageable monthly mortgage payment of about $2,000.

He worked delivering medical supplies, and they got monthly payments from a family who rented the unit on the second floor. Galindo and his wife lived there for a few years with their baby daughter, and life felt pretty stable.

But that security began to crumble in 2008, when his employer started cutting his hours. The interest rate on his adjustable mortgage started creeping up. Then, he lost more income from his second floor tenants.

“The people upstairs, to top it off, this girl had a baby and then she had problems with her husband,” Galindo says.

Eventually, the young woman’s husband abandoned her and the baby.

“At the end she was just was left alone and she stopped paying rent,” he says.

He wouldn’t kick her out, but that meant Galindo was now really struggling to make his mortgage payments. Around the same time, he found out that his home had lost a huge amount of its value, about 50 percent, so he got in touch with his bank hoping to work out a deal.

“They asked for more papers, I send them all. It was back and forth, back and forth, until they said they couldn’t help me, that the price was that. And they couldn’t do anything,” he says.

Across the country, Brian Burns had also seen the value of his home plummet in Las Vegas.

“I think everybody’s dream, when you are a normal person — not super rich, not super poor — is that your home is kind of your biggest asset,” Burns says, “that you feel like, ‘I’m going to play by the rules, I’m going to pay my mortgage, it’s just going to continue to increase in value.’ Maybe not by leaps and bounds, but by no means should it be worth a third of what you paid for it. And it started to scare everybody.”

He found out that the house he bought for $320,000 was now worth only $140,000.

At the same time, his work as a graphic designer was drying up. Eventually, he chose to stop paying his mortgage. He didn’t feel good about it.

“I wasn’t raised that way to not honor your obligations, and do the right thing and pay your bills on time,” he says. “My credit score was perfect. In fact, when I bought that little house, the guy said, ‘We’re willing to give you no down because you have one of the best. I’ve been doing this for 20 years and your credit score is 850 points or something like that and I’ve never seen one that high.’ ”

He could have used his savings to keep paying his mortgage payments, but he thought that was a bad idea.

“The analogy I use back then is, I’m not going to pay Mercedes prices for a Kia. Why would I pay $320,000 for a house that’s never going to be worth that?”

The decision destroyed Burns’ credit, he let the bank take his house and he moved to Oregon to start over again.

Meanwhile, Guillermo Galindo was in a different situation because he didn’t want to leave. His life savings were wrapped up in this house, and that’s where he wanted to raise his daughter.

“I thought I was going to pass [the house] on to my daughter,” he says. “I thought it was going to be something that would last for my remaining life.”

He kept talking with the bank, trying to figure out how to stay. Eventually they sent him a letter saying they were foreclosing. He fought it for another five months and finally said, fine, take it.

They gave him $3,000 and he handed over the keys.

“It was very depressing for me,” Galindo recalls. “I was trying to show my best face to my wife and my daughter. I remember we had a dog because that was one of the things that I promised my daughter if we had our own house … And it was really, really, really heartbreaking for me to find the words to tell my little one, was probably 3 years by then, that we were going to have to get rid of the dog. So, believe it or not, I wasn’t even thinking on anything else but that how we were going to tell her her dog was gonna have to go.”

Today, Brian Burns is back in Las Vegas, where he rents an apartment with his fiancée. They feel really gun-shy about buying anything, mainly because it doesn’t seem like the housing crisis is over in Vegas. Roughly 20 percent of homeowners are still underwater there, and it doesn’t look like a recovery.

“I drive up into suburbia, and there are streets still of empty houses. No curtains, no nothing, weeds in the yard,” Burns says. “There are still a lot of empty houses in this town.”

Over in Medford, Mass., Guillermo Galindo also rents an apartment. There are two main rooms — one where Guillermo and his wife sleep, the other they use as a daycare facility. When all the children leave at 6 p.m., Guillermo’s now 12-year-old daughter converts it into her bedroom.

“My daughter is still thinking about having a house, and the first thing she’s going to do is to get a dog,” he says. “I feel very proud of her. She’s getting high honors. She’s been adapting really good.”

Galindo’s credit rating is still in the tank because of the foreclosure. And they don’t have any money for a down payment, so buying another house is not an option right now, and might not be for a long time.

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.