The working renter gets squeezed out

Cindy Hansen has a full-time job with a small Seattle catering company. She spends her days in the company's kitchen, helping to prepare party meals and fixing sandwiches for the high school kids who come in during lunch breaks from Roosevelt High School across the street.

Hansen makes $11 an hour, well above the state's $6.72-an-hour minimum wage.


	Cindy Hansen, left, and son Elliott, 5, live in an apartment in Capitol Hill. Hansen is a single working mom who makes good money but needs help with the rent. Renee C. Byer / Seattle Post-Intelligencer Click for larger photo

Still it's not enough to afford a market-rate, two-bedroom apartment in Seattle, one big enough for Hansen and her 4-year-old son, Elliott.

"I work hard, I do everything I'm supposed to and I still can't make it on my own," she said.

To afford a two-bedroom apartment in the Seattle metropolitan area, Hansen would have to make $16.25 an hour, according to a study released this month by the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

The coalition considers an apartment affordable if it costs no more than 30 percent of a renter's monthly income.

Rents are steepest in the neighborhoods that make up the city's core and on the Eastside, according to data from Dupre + Scott Apartment Advisors, a firm that keeps tabs on the local apartment market.

In what the firm calls central Seattle -- a broad swatch of the city that stretches from the Lake Washington Ship Canal south to Safeco Field and includes Queen Anne, Capitol Hill, and Belltown, among other neighborhoods -- a two-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment rents, on average, for about $1,190 a month, according to Dupre + Scott's Mike Scott.

That means a renter would have to make about $24.80 an hour or work almost 148 hours a week in a minimum wage job to afford an apartment there, using the housing coalition's formula.

But there are only 168 hours in a week.

A worker who makes $8 an hour, Scott said -- which he pointed out is still above minimum wage -- would only be able to afford rent of $380 a month, based on the 30 percent rule.

Only about 2 percent of the apartments in the whole Puget Sound region rent for less than $400 a month in the non-subsidized market, Scott said.

"That's virtually nothing," he said. "If you're making minimum wage and are looking in the private market, there just isn't anything."

That's why many people, like Hansen, turn to private and public programs that offer low-wage earners subsidized housing.

With help from the Capitol Hill Housing Improvement Program, Hansen and her son live in a spacious two-bedroom apartment.

Hansen pays just $511 a month in rent for the Capitol Hill apartment.

Her home is warm and inviting -- and right now decked out for Halloween. Clear plastic skeletons strung together and lit by tiny light bulbs stretch across walls in the living room and kitchen.

Colorful plastic monster faces -- Dracula's and Frankenstein's among them -- hang from a bookshelf in the living room.

Small, white, candy-filled skulls are lined up neatly on the kitchen counter.

The apartment, like Hansen, who refers to herself as "one of the happy people," is cheerful.

She likes her job and the flexibility that it gives her to spend time with Elliott.

Still she admits that she is worried about her income over the next few months, as the catering company has seen its business slow down with the economy.

"It's always been up and down," said Hansen, who has worked for the caterer for most of the four years that she has lived in Seattle. "But this is the worst I've seen."

Hansen said she expects to see her hours cut back considerably in November.

"I'm shaking in my shoes," she said, adding that November is usually a busy month for the company.

But the struggle to bridge the gap between salary and rent is nothing new for people in low-paying jobs, said Jim Lapan, who like Hansen lives in an apartment subsidized by the Capitol Hill Housing Improvement Program.

"The disparity has always been there," said Lapan, who shares his two-bedroom apartment with his wife, Susanna, and his son, Martin.

Lapan describes himself and his wife as "theater artists" who have day jobs to make ends meet. Lapan makes $12 an hour putting up "for sale" signs for a real estate company and his wife earns $9 an hour selling eyeglasses at a Pike Place Market boutique.

"When we were paying market value for rent, it seemed as if at least 50 percent of what we made went to rent," Lapan said.

"It's really hard to see beyond the next paycheck when so much of that money is spent before you get it. Now that our rent is a manageable percentage of our income, we have the option of saving."

But the problem of unaffordable housing extends beyond the Seattle area, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition's study.

While Seattle apartments are more expensive than the average U.S. apartment, the city is nowhere near the top of the list of least affordable cities.

There are 34 cities, including San Francisco, San Jose and Oakland, Calif., New York, Washington, D.C., and Atlanta, where it is more expensive to rent an apartment than Seattle, according to the coalition's report.

"When I saw that the Seattle metro area ranks 35th, I was surprised," said Nancy Ferris, communications director for the coalition. "Several of the cities (that are ranked as more expensive to live in) such as Newark, N.J,. and San Diego, don't have Seattle's national reputation for high housing costs."

Ferris said that Washington state's relatively high minimum wage -- which is $1.57 above the federal minimum wage of $5.15 an hour -- helps mitigate the situation.

Still, those who help low-income wage earners find homes, like Sharon Lee, executive director of the Low Income Housing Institute, say that the situation continues to worsen in the Puget Sound region.

She pointed to neighborhoods such as the Central District, as particularly problematic. Rent there has climbed from an average of $671 a month in March 1997 to an average of $1,029 in September, according to Dupre + Scott data.

"We think that there are a lot of neighborhoods in Seattle that at one point were very much affordable to families, where the rent increases have been the highest," she said.

"People can't afford to stay in these neighborhoods and so they move out of the city. It's very, very sad."

Lee said that her organization, which has 33 properties and more than 1,000 units in the region, including one-bedroom and two-bedroom apartments that rent for between $300 and $400 a month, at times has had five-year waiting lists.

When asked about the cost of living in the city, Bill Rumpf, deputy director of the city's Office of Housing, summed it up simply:

"There's a real mismatch between low- and middle-income jobs and the housing market," he said.