Creative tools make housing affordable

Last summer, Chris France finally purchased a piece of the American dream, in the form of a 1951 two-bedroom fixer-upper in Laurel.

“It’s always been one of my pictures of success,” says Mr. France, 30, the transportation

coordinator for a private school in the District. “Having a decent job, a car and owning my own house.”

What he ended up with was not quite what he started out looking for. His new home was a bit farther out than he would have liked, making his commute into the District top out at well more than an hour on bad day. And the place was smaller than he wanted, with only one bathroom and a kitchen that needed a lot of work.

“Logistically, it was the closest thing I could afford in a single-family home,” says Mr. France, who had hoped to purchase something in Silver Spring or College Park.

He’s not alone. Generally, house prices are rising faster than incomes. More and more Americans are finding themselves caught up in a housing crunch that has them priced out of neighborhoods near jobs and desirable schools and forced into spending hours on the road commuting to work.

A report, “Paycheck to Paycheck: Wages and the Cost of Housing in America,” released in July by the Center for Housing Policy, the research affiliate of the National Housing Conference, says the problem is spreading beyond the familiar high-priced areas of the Northeast into the heartland.

“The housing crunch is nothing new,” says Conrad Egan, president of the National Housing Conference, a coalition of private- and public-sector housing leaders working for sustainable housing. “But it’s becoming much more a nationwide phenomenon, affecting the South and Midwest along with New York and Boston.”

Some of the largest metropolitan areas have seen prices rise by one-third since 1997, according to a 2002 report in the Economist magazine.

And not just the nation’s poor are affected. Teachers, nurses, firefighters, police officers and others in the working class bear the brunt of increased housing costs. Retail workers and those on fixed incomes are also affected.

But information from the “Paycheck to Paycheck” database, produced in conjunction with the reports, shows just how difficult finding housing is for area residents with moderate incomes (www.centerforhousingpolicy.org/p2p).

The annual income required to support the purchase of a home worth $286,000 is $89,139, according to the study. The Web site also allows viewers to check affordability in the rental market based on preselected or customized occupations.

High homeownership and low vacancy rates in the Washington area have helped to push house prices beyond the limits of many middle-income families. And it’s not just D.C. families who are feeling the pinch. Many suburban Maryland and Virginia residents are hard-pressed to find a home they can afford.

For Martha Gay, a corporate executive who recently began another career as a teacher in a private school in Fairfax County, the costs are clear.

“Our quality of life is nowhere near what it used to be when we lived in Vermont,” says Ms. Gay, who exchanged a 1790s farmhouse for a 1,300-square-foot three-bedroom apartment when a job opportunity brought her family to Fairfax.

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