From the ground up: Common Ground Community Housing Trust creates affordable housing in Wenatchee area
By Alan Moen
Wenatchee World
Thom Nees, executive director of the Common Ground Community Housing Trust, has a plan to address the ongoing problem of the lack of affordable housing in Chelan and Douglas counties.
Speaking at a recent Our Valley, Our Future meeting of community leaders, Nees said the state is requiring (Chelan and Douglas counties) to provide 17,000 new homes in the next 20 years. More than half would need to be for those earning 80% or less of the average median income in the area.
He also said at the Sept. 7 Game Changers Summit the majority of homes are being sold or rented at market rate, which many essential workers cannot afford and people are being forced to live too far away from where they work.
According to Rocket Homes, the median price for a house in Wenatchee in August 2023 was $475,000, up $31,250 (7%) since the same time last year. Only in Malaga was there a 14% decline in home prices during the same period.
Fair Market Rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Wenatchee is $1,262 per month, a 12.08% increase year-over-year from $1,126 per month last year.
The Fair Market Rent organization, which uses national Housing and Urban Development statistics each year, has said that housing rentals in Wenatchee are currently more expensive than 91% of other urban areas in the country.
Given this situation, Common Ground plans to address the local affordable housing problem literally from the ground up.
“We are taking land out of the equation by buying the property to build homes on,” Nees said. New owners will instead have to pay for houses alone, not property.
Common Ground is building eight cottage-style 800-square foot, one- and two-bedroom homes in Wenatchee that will sell for $160,000 to $180.000. In addition, the Chelan County PUD will waive hookup fees for homeowners, Nees said.
“Close to 50% of these homes will be for median income people. Our solution is permanent affordability,” Nees elaborated. “In 50 years, these houses will still be affordable.”
According to Nees, Common Ground plans to build 60 of these homes here in the next five years.
“We have to develop public-private partnerships, to make people realize that this is our problem. We have to have a long-term solution to this.”
Freelance writer Alan Moen searched for 10 years before he and his wife found an affordable home in the Entiat Valley.