4/9/2022
The biggest news is that Monday at 6 pm will be our last best chance to have input on funding projects that will protect our citizens next winter. Please see my previous posts for times and URLs. And read the two articles below - from both KREM and The Inlander - to get you up to speed on this issue. Our last best chance!
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KREM
The Inlander
The Wall St Journal
The Spokesman-Review
Food prices soar to record levels after Ukraine war
Journal of Business
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KREM
SPOKANE, Wash. — The city of Spokane put out a call to non-profits, asking them to come up with a price and a plan to run a new emergency homeless shelter.
Jewels Helping Hands responded with a different idea. Instead of a big building, they're suggesting more than 120 tiny homes to replace hundreds of tents along I-90 and Freya.
"All of them said is the reason they are in tents is because it's a door to shut," Jewels Founder Julie Garcia said. "It's their own private space and pallet shelters have been successful in producing thriving communities and not such a terrible optic for the neighborhood they are in."
Pallet shelters were created by a company in western Washington. They have a ten-year lifespan and take just an hour to set up. The units are mold resistant, can be hooked up to electricity and insulated up to -40 degrees. The 64 square foot units can sleep two people.
Jewels estimates it would cost $11 million to fund the project during the first year ($1 million for the tiny homes and $10 million for staffing and social services that would be located on site).
The property is owned by the department of transportation. WSDOT officials have made it clear that don't want the homeless camp there, but a spokesperson told us WSDOT is not going to put campers in a worse position by removing tents right now.
"Driving in our city and seeing 150 tents on the side of the freeway is not an optic anybody wants to see, nor is it humane," Garcia said.
Garcia says the tiny homes would be more visually appealing, especially for families in the neighborhood. Garcia says volunteers continue to teach campers how to be good neighbors.
"People experiencing homelessness are in survival mode," Garcia said. "Our brains don't even process things the same way so their concern is always how is this going to effect me? They don't seem to think yet how does this effect the neighborhood that's surrounding me."
Next week, the city of Spokane is expected to select an organization to run the new homeless shelter. Jewels Helping Hands is confident they will be selected, even with the $11 million price tag.
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The Inlander
Courtesy photo
Pallet cabins aren't intended to be permanent housing, the manufacturer says, but one selection in a menu of options.
Wisps of smoke rise from the middle of a field in East Spokane on a Friday afternoon, as a man with a grizzled beard sits on half a couch and tries to cook canned food over a campfire.
A little over four months ago, Camp Hope — a homeless shelter and protest in front of City Hall — relocated to this encampment across I-90 from Fred Meyer near Freya Street.
Today, the site has exploded into one of the biggest tent cities Spokane has ever seen, with over 300 estimated residents. More than a hundred tents sprawl across the property, joined by ramshackle RVs and beaten-down cars with crumpled doors, filled with sleeping bags and other provisions.
Julie Garcia, co-founder of the often-controversial homeless service provider Jewels Helping Hands, points to how little trash is on the ground as proof that the people here really do care about making this community work.
But she also knows there have been serious challenges, like two fires on the property. She knows the fire department would prefer the campers not light fires at all.
"The problem is, what's the alternative?" Garcia says. "The reality is they have to stay warm."
There are "No Trespassing" signs here, but without an alternative place to house these people, the owner of the property, the Washington State Department of Transportation, hasn't wanted to kick them out.
"They're not going to move them if there's no space for them to go," Garcia says.
In March, the city of Spokane put out a call for operators to apply to run a proposed permanent emergency shelter space with at least 250 beds.
But there's a problem: Garcia argues that the vast majority of the chronically homeless people at Camp Hope are people unwilling or unable to stay in a traditional homeless shelter, except during the coldest weather. Some of them were banned by local shelters like House of Charity years ago. Others object to shelter curfews or say they don't feel safe, citing experience with robberies or assaults.
"I've had a lot of things happen to me in shelters," says April Pierce, a homeless woman holding the leashes for two dogs at Camp Hope. "I would rather be on the street, on the sidewalk, in 30 other different places, rather than the shelter."
So last week, Jewels Helping Hands submitted a longshot alternate proposal: Hope Village. They'd join forces with former City Council President Ben Stuckart and a wide variety of local service providers, including City Gate, Family Promises and Truth Ministries. And instead of the pressure-cooker environment created by one building, they'd have more than 250 individual low-cost tiny houses from a company called Pallet, where a single homeless person or a couple could stay.
The Inlander asks Pierce if she'd be willing to stay in one of those spaces.
"In a heartbeat," she says.
Courtesy photo
From the outside, Pallet shelters, built by a company based in Everett, look like little more than sheds with windows. But while they're tiny, at 64 square feet, they come with essentials: a bed, heating for the winter — no need to light dangerous fires outside — and, optionally, air conditioning in the summer. And the doors can lock, giving the guest a feeling of security at night, and the trust that they can leave their possessions during the day.
Tiny homes, of course, aren't new. The Pallet difference, company spokesman Brandon Bills says, comes down to speed and scale.
"They're built panelized, kind of like Ikea furniture. They're assembled in about 30 minutes each... We're building between 50 and 100 cabins a week," says Bills. "We say no one should go unsheltered when a village can be built in a day."
Over 70 communities have created Pallet shelter villages, including Everett and Moses Lake.
In fact, just last year, Mark Richard — then president of the Downtown Spokane Partnership — told the Inlander that he had encouraged the Spokane to look into Pallet homes shelters as a real possibility.
"These are small, safe, heated units where a person with a pet and a significant other can go," Richard said at the time. "They deserve a secure place, just like the rest of us do."
He also pointed to the fact that the shelters could easily be disassembled. That meant that if, for whatever reason, the shelters didn't work in one location, they could be moved or repurposed.
Richard said he'd talked about it informally to both Mayor Nadine Woodward and City Administrator Johnnie Perkins. In an interview in February, however, Woodward said she'd never heard anything about Pallet shelters from the Downtown Spokane Partnership.
Sheldon Jackson, a local downtown property owner fed up with the city's failure to address homelessness and property crimes, has seized upon the Pallet homes as an area where he agrees with Garcia — even looking into the possibility of building similar units himself.
"I think it's a great idea," Jackson says. "I think you're going to find that we can build these things so much cheaper than we can build shelters — and faster."
The first round of Pallet shelters in Everett opened in July 2021. Julie Willie, Everett's community development director, says they've been successful enough that they're about to open another round. She says the city was able to persuade neighborhoods to accept nearby Pallet villages, often the biggest hurdle to opening a shelter, by pairing them with localized restrictions on camping and sleeping in the area.
"I had one businessman tell me, 'This is the best thing that's happened to my business in 40 years,'" Willie says.
And, yet, for all the promise of Pallet homes being a place where homeless couples could stay together, in practice Willie says that didn't work very well. Some couples had been together out of necessity — they needed someone to watch their stuff while they were away. Once the lockable Pallet homes gave them additional security, their relationship dissolved. The cramped quarters probably didn't help.
"It's only 64 square feet," Willie says. "The most loving couple could probably not handle that."
So there are rules at the Pallet home village in Everett: No guests staying in the units. No on-site drug use. You can bring your existing pet but cannot get additional pets. And these kinds of rules mean that there are some people who would rather sleep outside than accept those kinds of restrictions.
And Willie cautions that cities should be careful about, say, trying to launch 300 Pallet shelter units at once. The buildings may be inexpensive (roughly $5,500 to $10,000 per unit), but the amount of staffing required to run the camp effectively — and to help transition people out of the temporary Pallet shelters and into permanent homes — isn't.
"Intensive case management is absolutely mandatory," Willie says.
After all, these units don't have toilets, running water or a kitchen. They're intended to help stabilize homeless people until they're able to transition to more permanent housing. But that's only possible if that housing exists. In Spokane, it doesn't.
"There is nothing more permanent than a temporary solution — like Pallet homes — if there is not an adequate supply of affordable housing," says Meg Martin, executive director of Interfaith Works, a homeless shelter operator in Olympia.
Daniel Walters photo
Jewels Helping Hands co-founder Julie Garcia.
Garcia says she doesn't think the city is seriously considering Jewels' Pallet homes proposal as an alternative.
Still, in recent months, city spokesman Brian Coddington says, the city's housing and human services department has been talking about the potential of using Pallet shelters in Spokane.
"It's got some really intriguing possibilities, partly because it's so flexible," Coddington says.
And Garcia gives Woodward credit for personally inviting Jewels to a discussion last week about homelessness.
"I'm not a fan of the mayor. I'm not. But here's the reality. Today, she called us all to the table," Garcia says. "That's a start."♦
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The Wall St Journal
The pandemic has helped catapult Americans in low-paying roles into more upwardly mobile careers
Apr. 8, 2022 7:35 am ET
As the labor market reorders, more Americans are making the leap from blue-collar jobs and hourly work to “new collar” roles that often involve tech skills and come with better pay and schedules.
More than a tenth of Americans in low-paying roles in warehouses, manufacturing, hospitality and other hourly positions made such a switch during the past two years, according to new research from Oliver Wyman, a management consulting firm that surveyed 80,000 workers world-wide between August 2020 and March 2022. Many of the new jobs are in software and information technology, as well as tech-related roles in logistics, finance and healthcare. New data from the Current Population Survey and LinkedIn also suggest the pandemic has helped catapult more workers into more upwardly mobile careers.
Tech job postings have boomed over the past two years as work, shopping and other aspects of daily life have gone more digital. At the same time, millions of Americans quit their jobs, with some sitting on the sidelines and others finding new ones with higher salaries. Companies have struggled to hire all the talent they need, so many have dropped prequalifications like prior work experience or a four-year college degree.
Those pandemic shifts kicked in as broader macroeconomic forces were already creating new job-market opportunities and pressures. The percentage of retirees in the U.S. population has climbed sharply over the past decade and ticked even higher in the Covid-19 era, with millions of baby boomers leaving the workforce. Declining immigration has added to shortages, particularly in tech, healthcare and other fields that depend heavily on foreign-born employees. Thousands of businesses are in the thick of a digital revolution that is requiring them to fill new roles and adapt existing ones to integrate more data and automation.
Altogether, these forces have led to a giant shock to the workforce. “I don’t think we’ve seen a talent transition of this magnitude, really, since the disruption of World War II,” said Ana Kreacic, chief operating officer of Oliver Wyman Forum, the consulting firm’s think tank, which conducted the research. Back then, the wartime economy created new opportunities, including for women, and the GI Bill funded the higher education of millions of returning soldiers and launched them into the middle class.
Alexis Ayala, 27, enjoyed the hustle of retail sales in his job at a cellphone shop in San Francisco before the pandemic. He had immigrated from Mexico as a toddler and, like his parents, didn’t go to college. When Covid-19 broke out and dried up his commissions, he found work hawking cable-TV plans but yearned for more.
He heard about a position at a software maker that came with the promise of on-the-job training. He didn’t have any tech experience but his friend, who already worked there, assured him that they were looking for people who could learn on the job.
‘I’m one of those tech guys now,’ says Alexis Ayala.Photo: Helynn Ospina for The Wall Street Journal
In January, Mr. Ayala started as a business development associate at Okta Inc., which provides tools that allow secure access to business applications. Once hired, he learned the technology behind the company’s identity-verification products, plus skills like making PowerPoint presentations. By next year, he hopes to be promoted to account executive and make six figures selling software to corporate clients, well beyond the $80,000 he made in his best year of retail sales.
“I put myself on the other side,” Mr. Ayala said of the tech workers he used to sell to. “I’m one of those tech guys now.”
Mr. Ayala said he relishes the trappings of corporate life at the office, including standing desks, an on-site gym and free snacks. Only a year ago, he was working out of his car, selling cable plans door to door and relying on gas stations and fast-food places for bathroom breaks. At home, where he lives with his parents and three of his younger siblings, he takes pride in showing off his bedroom-office setup for his remote work days. His siblings, he said, “see I’m doing great, and that’s important. I’m the oldest and I want to set a good example.”
Okta said it removed college-degree requirements for a number of sales positions last year to cast a wider recruiting net. It also formed a new business development associate program that Mr. Ayala joined to bring in and develop such candidates.
The company said it is hiring more broadly to keep up with its growth targets—it aims to roughly triple revenue to $4 billion by 2026. Like other bigger businesses, it is also seeking to further diversify its workforce, and hiring based on skills and potential, not a college degree, has helped. “We’re moving more to looking at motivation and skills and experience, not ‘What college did you go to?’ ” said Rachele Zamani, whom Okta hired last year to launch and manage the business development associates program.
Many employers from International Business Machines Corp. to CVS HealthCorp. now say they are happy to help relatively inexperienced new hires get trained up in coding, cybersecurity and healthcare technology to fill positions. The workers who made the “new collar” switch skews about 67% male and 77% between age 25 and 44, according to the Oliver Wyman poll. Sixty-seven percent live in cities and 70% describe themselves as optimistic about their career prospects.
Mr. Ayala at Okta’s headquarters in San Francisco.Photo: Helynn Ospina for The Wall Street Journal
Many said they made the pivot because the pandemic made them realize they value flexibility over when and where they work. Although fewer of them said getting paid more was a priority, most new-collar workers find that their compensation has grown.
After losing his Atlanta bartending job in March 2020, Zack Williams, now 36, took a landscape construction gig to tide him over. He contemplated work as an electrical line repairman but knew it could be dangerous and required frequent travel and holiday work.
Then in August 2020, he met a woman named Lindsey on a dating app. She worked at the Flatiron School, one of more than 110 coding boot camps that have sprung up around the U.S. over the past decade, according to Course Report, which tracks the industry. She suggested it could be a good fit, especially after she learned that Mr. Williams won a technology prize in high school.
Mr. Williams was nervous at first about the intensity of the nine-month $15,000 program, but he said he took to it easily after completing his first project, constructing a digital tic-tac-toe game.
Armed with a software engineering certificate, Mr. Williams started a new role in January as a software engineer at media company Gannett Co., building web applications for a salary that’s more than double what he earned as a landscaper and 20% higher than what he asked for during his job interview.
“I said, ‘I don’t think we need to negotiate, this is way better than I was expecting,’ ” he said from his home office, where he works alongside Lindsey, now his wife.
In the Oliver Wyman poll, U.S. workers who described themselves as blue collar prepandemic said that enrolling in a specialized course or boot camp, or acquiring another credential, had unlocked new kinds of jobs in sectors such as tech, data processing, healthcare and electronics manufacturing. LinkedIn Learning, a major online credential platform, saw completions of certificate-eligible classes, such as project management, rise more than 1,300% between 2020 and 2021.
The number of former front-line workers with LinkedIn profiles who made the transition to more middle-skilled jobs—say, a sales representative switching to an account manager, or a construction supervisor moving to project manager—was up 12% since 2019, LinkedIn said.
Some of the biggest increases in such career switches have been out of predominantly male fields, according to an analysis of Current Population Survey data by Brad Hershbein, a senior economist at W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank focusing on labor markets. In the fourth quarter of last year, 41,500 workers in construction, oil-rigging and extraction jobs reported moving into professional work—a 65% jump over the same period in 2019. Among maintenance and installation workers, 20,200 made the same leap—which was 56% more than in the fourth quarter of 2019.
While the new job-market dynamics have left employers scrambling to find enough low-wage employees, they are helping many longtime retail staff, restaurant servers, forklift drivers and other laborers move into careers with better pay and less risk of being automated away one day.
Andrew Rozema, head of the computer information systems department at Grand Rapids Community College in Michigan, said many of the students in his classes had been laid off from jobs in fast food or hotels during the early lockdowns. They had a little time—and the cushion of federal employment benefits—to rethink their options, he said. “They saw how many jobs can be remote,” he said.
As many as 32 million Americans lack a four-year college degree but have the skills or experience to parlay into higher-income jobs, according to a 2022 study by Opportunity@Work, a nonprofit social venture whose mission is to help more people without a college diploma onto higher-earning career paths. The key is spending the time and dollars on training, and spotting the potential in applicants who lack traditional criteria.
“That’s a huge opportunity for a lot of employers right now, precisely because there are so many companies sleeping on it,” said Byron Auguste, CEO and co-founder of Opportunity@Work.
Some companies have re-evaluated job requirements. In a January study, the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia compared online job postings from five months before and after the pandemic’s arrival and found that when compared with the pre-Covid era, there were 2.3 million more open jobs in the pandemic period that paid above the national annual median wage of $36,660 without requiring a bachelor’s degree. Much of that had to do with simply having more U.S. job openings, but lower education requirements also played a role, the bank said.
Ms. Estanislao made 600% of her sales quota her first month after completing Okta’s development program.Photo: Taylor Glascock for The Wall Street Journal
One of the first recruits to Okta’s business development associate program was Joanna Estanislao, a Chicago-area bartender and server who was furloughed from her job at the start of the Covid era. She’s supported herself since her teens but couldn’t afford college, though she longed for a corporate career. Ms. Estanislao assumed her best bet was becoming an administrative assistant and working her way up.
“I knew I had the grit, I just wasn’t sure of the path,” she said.
Reflecting on her hospitality work, she realized she had always been selling—promoting new products, cultivating a loyal customer following and figuring out how to read a room. Her first month after completing Okta’s business development program last summer, she made 600% of her sales quota and has since won another promotion.
She gives colleagues advice on dealing with customers that she picked up from her years in hospitality: “You pretend right away you know them,” she said.
Faking it until he made it didn’t come naturally to Tyler Wallace, 22. As a teen, he wanted to become a nurse, but dropped out of college his sophomore year because he couldn’t afford it. After cycling through a series of jobs, including Chipotle worker and roofing contractor, he was hauling furniture as a mover in Chicago when the pandemic hit. Worried his future would be filled with jobs that never let him get ahead financially or professionally, he talked to his fiancée about potential career changes and settled on pursuing a job in technology.
After dabbling in some free online training through Pluralsight, a software skills platform, and watching YouTube tutorials, Mr. Wallace decided to enroll in a $12,000 coding boot camp in July 2020. He completed 100 hours of preliminary coursework and used a financing option to buy an HP laptop, rising at 5 a.m. daily to study. In between classes, he supported himself with Instacart and DoorDash deliveries. He was hired in November by PNC Bank to be an application technology lead, and now maintains servers while working from home.
Figuring out which skills he needed to confidently know “this is my worth, and this is how I’ll be able to add to a team” was the biggest challenge, he said. “My impostor syndrome, that was huge for me to overcome.”
The more predictable hours, higher salary and paid time off have let Mr. Wallace and his fiancée, an events marketing specialist he met when they were both in seventh grade, plan a more elaborate April wedding, as well as a honeymoon with stops in Jamaica and Europe. Mr. Wallace said he still picks up the occasional Instacart or DoorDash delivery. It’s a habit that’s been tough to shed after years of financial insecurity, but one that he hopes to give up after the wedding.
Write to Vanessa Fuhrmans at vanessa.fuhrmans@wsj.com and Kathryn Dill at Kathryn.Dill@wsj.com
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The Spokesman-Review
Food prices soar to record levels after Ukraine war
By Nichole Winfield
ASSOCIATED PRESS
ROME – Prices for food commodities like grains and vegetable oils reached their highest levels ever last month largely because of Russia’s war in Ukraine and the “massive supply disruptions” it is causing, threatening millions of people in Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere with hunger and malnourishment, the United Nations said Friday.
The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization said its Food Price Index, which tracks monthly changes in international prices for a basket of commodities, averaged 159.3 points last month, up 12.6% from February. As it is, the February index was the highest level since its inception in 1990.
FAO said the war in Ukraine was largely responsible for the 17.1% rise in the price of grains, including wheat and others like oats, barley and corn. Together, Russia and Ukraine account for around 30% and 20% of global wheat and corn exports, respectively.
While predictable given February’s steep rise, “this is really remarkable,” said Josef Schmidhuber, deputy director of FAO’s markets and trade division. “Clearly, these very high prices for food require urgent action.”
The biggest price increases were for vegetable oils: that price index rose 23.2%, driven by higher quotations for sunflower seed oil that is used for cooking. Ukraine is the world’s leading exporter of sunflower oil, and Russia is No. 2.
“There is, of course, a massive supply disruption, and that massive supply disruption from the Black Sea region has fueled prices for vegetable oil,” Schmidhuber told reporters in Geneva.
Smoke from an oil refinery rises over a field of sunflowers in eastern Ukraine on July 26, 2014. Prices for food commodities reached their highest levels ever last month.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
By Dan Parks
CHRONICLE OF PHILANTHROPY
Last Mile Food Rescue in Cincinnati started shopping in November for a refrigerated box truck to move perishable donations from food retailers to distribution sites.
The purchase would take some of the pressure off overstretched volunteers, who would have to make three or more runs in their cars to haul as much food as a single truckload.
But Last Mile is experiencing sticker shock. Prices for the kind of truck its leaders have in mind have soared thousands of dollars in recent months, to as much as $80,000.
For an organization with an annual budget of $650,000, that’s too big a hit to absorb.
Frustrated, the charity started looking for used trucks, but the prices of used vehicles have shot up as well.
“We look every day,” said Julie Shifman, Last Mile’s executive director. “We hope that we will be able to afford it, or a major donor might be able to come in to help us.”
Last Mile is far from alone. Nonprofits of all kinds are getting hit hard by inflation, experts say. Price and wage increasesare hurting nonprofits in multiple ways, making it harder to keep up with their own basic operational expenses while also forcing them to curtail the services they provide.
At the same time, there are early signs that the burst of generosity donors showed in the first year of the pandemic may beslowing considerably.
“It’s not a pretty equation,” said Shannon McCracken, chief executive of the Nonprofit Alliance, an advocacy group.
Nonprofits that provide annual costof- living increases for their workers, as many do, are getting hit with higher payroll costs of about 6% even without any increase based on merit or seniority, McCracken said.
David Lipsetz, CEO at the Housing Assistance Council, said inflation has eaten into the number of affordable- housing units his organization can provide.
The council underwrites loans for housing developments at below-market rates in some of the poorest regions of the country, and it strives to maximize the amount of housing it can build with limited resources.
In this image provided by Last Mile Food Rescue, food is distributed at a food pantry in a Cincinnati parking lot in November 2021.
“We’re operating on extraordinarily thin margins,” said Lipsetz. “We are putting those loans out the door as cheaply as we can.”
When the price of building materials goes up 10%, said Lipsetz, there’s usually no room in the loan to accommodate that increase.
Lipsetz said that sometimes his nonprofit can rework the terms of the loan or find additional sources of financing, but it doesn’t always work out.
“It’s stalled countless projects for us, right in the middle of a period of time when housing and shelter are the most important things needed to weather the storm of a pandemic,” said Lipsetz. “For us, a modest increase in costs can shut down a project in an area of the country where it’s needed the most.”
Jesse Tree, a nonprofit in Boise, Idaho, that pays rent for people who are on the verge of being evicted, has seen sharp increases in demand for assistance inrecent years.
Ali Rabe, the organization’s executive director, said research shows housing prices in her region shot up 75% from 2015 to 2020 at a time when local wages increased 18%.
The situation has only gotten worse since 2020, said Rabe. Work-at-home policies spurred by the pandemic allowed highly paid urban dwellers to relocateto rural areas, she said, and housing prices shot up another 40% or so last year.
Local courts in the Treasury Valley region of southwestern Idaho, which Jesse Tree serves, hold about 20 eviction hearings a week, said Rabe.
“We can only help about a quarter of people who apply for assistance,” she said.
A government grant provided through federal Covid assistance helped the nonprofit maintain operations, but that grant expires in September, said Rabe. The nonprofit is hoping donors will fill the gap, she said.
Nonprofits by their nature are in a poor position to adapt to rising costs, expertssay. Kelley Kuhn, CEO of the Michigan Nonprofit Association, said nonprofits that provide basic goods and servicesare being hit the hardest.
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Journal of Business
Project set to gear up in Kootenai County by July, advocates say
Erica Bullock
A lack of affordable housing for local workers in Kootenai County has prompted community leaders to launch a new project matching senior homeowners who have extra space in their homes with local workers in need of housing.
The project is tentatively named HomeShare Kootenai County and is anticipated to be launched in late July by the Regional Housing & Growth Issues Partnership, says Coeur d’Alene city council member Kiki Miller, who also founded the project.
“Home sharing enables two or more unrelated people to share housing for their mutual benefit. One offers the other a private room in exchange for rent, help around the house, or a combination of the two,” Miller says in a press release.
Miller says the University of Idaho’s Housing Availability and Affordability Study for Kootenai County in December revealed a growing number of individuals have been displaced from local housing in the last 18 months, and the trend is expected to continue.
She says the HomeShare Kootenai County project is one of a number of options the Regional Housing & Growth Issues Partnership has planned to address the housing crisis.
“With the crisis that we’re in, this could open up some inventory and help our seniors stay in their homes longer,” Miller says. “Some of the home shares would be part in-kind work where the tenant would agree to do some chores. Or a homeowner could feel more comfortable if they are a snowbird, with someone living in their house while they’re gone. Every match is going to be unique.”
The home-sharing project will operate initially out of the Hayden-based nonprofit ElderHelp of North Idaho and eventually may become its own nonprofit organization, Miller says.
Many nonprofits will be involved in supporting the home-sharing project, including Community Action Partnership, and the Area Agency on Aging, which support seniors primarily, Miller says. Nonprofit organizations CDAIDE Inc. and Love Inc. also will support the home-share project through their connections to local workers in need of housing.
“Those nonprofits will be the conduits to match up empty nesters, seniors, or folks of any age who have the ability to say, ‘I want to participate in providing housing,’” Miller says. “So they’re able to be matched up, vetted, and profiled by ambassadors of the HomeShare Kootenai County project … to have a home seeker and homeowner feel confident and safe that they’re going to be good housemates.”
She says the Kootenai County home-share project will be the first in Idaho. It will follow guidelines from the National Housing Resource Center, which provides a model that other national home-share programs follow.
“We aren’t trying to reinvent the wheel and put a lot of unknowns out there,” she adds.
Participants will be vetted, complete a background check, and will undergo a needs and wants assessment to help with successful housemate matches. Participants also will have the support of a mediator if the match isn’t working out.
She says plans to fund the home-sharing project are still in process, but there are a variety of funding methods to consider. “Part of it could be a management fee taken out of a minimal amount of rent for the homeowner. There are many grants that could start up the program.”
Research is underway to assess the number of rental properties available in Kootenai County as well as what the current need for rental housing is.
“What we’re focusing on is local workers. What we know is that we have had a huge influx of people into North Idaho, and we’d love to say there’s housing for everybody, but obviously there’s a national crisis. Our focus is to provide housing for people who have to live where they work. That would be like our public safety workers, hospitality workers, our teachers, people who can’t work remotely, aren’t retired, aren’t using a second-home property, that’s our focus.”
Miller says the nonprofit CDAIDE works with hospitality workers, a high percentage of whom are renters. “We know there’s a need in a tourist town to support that industry, and we’re hoping this could be one of the ways we can do that.”
North Side location has been mostly vacant since 2016
Virginia Thomas
A Value Village thrift store will occupy the former Hastings music and bookstore space at 1704 W. Wellesley, near Shadle Park High School on Spokane’s North Side.
A sign permit filed with the city on March 23 calls for four illuminated Value Village signs at the address.
A representative for the Bellevue, Wash.-based, for-profit thrift-store chain owner Savers Inc., which does business here as Value Village, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
However, Darcy Newton, project manager at Portland, Oregon-based Ramsay Signs, which is listed on the permit, confirms Value Village plans to open a store there.
According to Spokane County Assessor’s records, the 42,600-square-foot former Hastings space is part of a nearly 48,000-square-foot retail building that houses a Pizza Pipeline restaurant and B&B Driving School. The building is owned by Black Enterprises Inc., which NAI Black CEO Dave Black co-owns.
As previously reported by the Journal, the Spokane Public Facilities District has agreed to buy the Value Village thrift store site at 708 W. Boone in order to create a new, 500-stall surface parking lot that will serve Spokane Public Schools’ new $31 million-plus sports stadium, which is under construction near the Spokane Veterans Memorial Arena.
Savers is a privately held, for-profit company that operates more than 320 thrift stores in the U.S., Canada, and Australia that employ more than 19,000 people, its website says.
The company also operates a Value Village store at 12205 E. Sprague, in Spokane Valley.
Amarillo, Texas-based Hastings Entertainment Inc. closed the Wellesley Avenue store and its 122 other store locations after declaring bankruptcy in 2016. Hastings also had stores on Spokane’s South Hill, in Spokane Valley, and Coeur d’Alene.
The former Hastings space has been leased to a Halloween Express store briefly each autumn since 2016, but the space has otherwise remained vacant.
$3.5M project will add multifamily living units on Spokane’s North Side
Erica Bullock
A Spokane couple plans to construct a three-story, 23-unit apartment building at 155 E. Cleveland, in Spokane’s Logan neighborhood, says property co-owner David Tucker.
Tucker, who co-owns the property with his wife Tamala Tucker through the entity 155 E. Cleveland Ave Investments LLC, says the apartments will be constructed with standard materials.
Permit data on file with the city of Spokane show the construction is valued at $3.5 million.
The project site is surrounded by residences to the north, west, and east, and a Washington state Department of Transportation office to the south.
In all, the apartment building on Cleveland Avenue will have 18 two-bedroom, two-bath units and five one-bedroom, one-bath units. The one-bedroom units each will have about 600 square feet of living space, and the two-bedroom units will be about 900 square feet, according to site plans.
Permit data shows the apartment building footprint will be 6,300 square feet with over 19,000 square feet combined for all three stories.
Tucker says each unit also will have a patio or a balcony attached, and the property will include 28 parking spaces and 14 carports on site.
Baker Construction & Development Inc., of Spokane, is the contractor, according to permit data. Evan Verduin, of Spokane-based Trek Architecture, is designing the project, and the Spokane office of DCI Engineers is providing engineering services.
Environmental documents show the site is mostly vacant. Tucker says there are two sheds on the property that will be demolished before construction work begins.
Tucker says construction on the project will start by June 1 and be completed next January or February. He says the project was expected to begin this spring but was delayed due to rezoning issues. The site was previously zoned for single-family residential and is now zoned for multifamily residential.
The project site is less than a half-mile west of a planned 72-unit apartment complex at 519 E. North Foothills Drive, which is being developed by Spokane-based 4 Degrees Real Estate.
The two planned apartment projects will bring about 95 units to the neighborhood by the late winter.