MR. KANTOR: I'm Stu Kantor from the Public Affairs Department here at the institute.
Our topic today is "Health, Housing, and Human Services: Exploring Strategies for the National Capital Region." Health, housing, and human services share much more than their initial sound. They are interrelated, interdependent mainstays of the well-being of 4.2 million people who live in the District and nearby communities.
Our panelists will scan strengths and weaknesses in these areas as the region enters 2006. They will also discuss how the challenges in each sector rub up against each other and to how advances in the year ahead may require looking beyond jurisdictional boundaries.
Guiding and goading our panel this afternoon will be James White, a familiar, welcomed voice making our afternoons and evenings smoother and smarter. James is the local host for WAMU's broadcast of NPR's "All Things Considered." To his distinguished career and resume as a disk jockey, engineer, producer, reporter, and news anchor for NPR WAMU, WRCAM, and Metro Networks, we hope James will add Urban Institute moderator.
Our first presenter will be Peter Tatian, a senior research associate in the Institute's Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center. Peter is one of the engines propelling our National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership and U.I.'s NeighborhoodInfo D.C. Partnership.
Barbara Ormond will be our second speaker. Barbara is a research associate in the Health Policy Center here at the Urban Institute. She is the coprincipal investigator in a study examining ways to
expand access to health coverage in the District. She has also studied the structure and financing of urban and rural health care systems across the country.
Carol De Vita is a senior research associate in U.I.'s Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy, where she studies nonprofit organizations in the metro area and around the country. She directed
the first survey of religious congregations in the D.C. region, studying their ability to respond to changing community needs and government priorities.
Our last speaker will be Dave Robertson. Dave is executive director of the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments (COG), which develops regional responses to such issues as affordable housing, the environment, economic development, health and family concerns, population growth, public safety, and transportation. COG is composed of 19 local governments, plus area members of the Maryland and Virginia legislatures, the U.S. Senate, and the U.S. House of Representatives.
Now, to our moderator, James White.
MR. WHITE: Thank you very much, Stu. Thank you for having me here.
First off, two things I'd like to say. Hail to the Redskins! (Laughs, laughter.) I'm glad I'm not in Dallas. And I'd also like to say happy New Year to everyone, and thank you for coming out. It's
indeed an honor to be asked to come to moderate this—I guess we can call this a truly first Tuesday forum since this is the first Tuesday of the year, and it's good to be here. I want to also thank Tom Mentzer for asking me to come in the first place.
And after our discussion by our four panelists, we will be taking questions, so get your questions ready. And you know, what better way is there to start off this new year then by a discussion centering on issues of health, housing, education, human services—issues that we're confronted with on a daily basis, issues that even come up in the news on a daily basis, and something that also has a profound impact on various communities within this greater metropolitan area that we live in.
So with that in mind, we're going to get started with Peter Tatian. Again, he's a senior research associate with the Urban Institute's Center on Metropolitan Housing and Communities.
Peter.
MR. TATIAN: Thank you, James. And good afternoon, everyone.
I am going to, in the brief time I have, just talk a little bit about some of the housing issues that are facing the District and the region, and in particular focus on the higher cost of housing.
I'm sure we're all aware of the extent to which housing costs have been going up recently. I'll discuss the extent to which that's exacerbating two problems related to the topic that we're talking about today.
First of all, it's making it harder for us to reverse the loss of the middle class, middle-income people in the District of Columbia, which in turn results in a loss of revenues that might be
available for social programs. And then, second, it causes and encourages more displacement of families, and that can—in addition to creating hardship by itself—complicate the delivery of social services such as health care.
We need to have both local and regional approaches to both of these challenges. And as was mentioned earlier, I'm going to be drawing on information that's from both Urban Institute and other
research, also from our NeighborhoodInfo D.C. project, which is a partnership between the Urban Institute and the Washington, D.C., Office of the Local Initiative Support Corporation, or D.C. LISC. And you have some more information about that initiative in your packet.
In brief, again, I'm sure we're all aware that there's been a very rapid increase in housing costs in the District and in the region, both in rents and home prices, since about 1999 or 2000. This is driven by the very strong regional economy that we have. But the problem is that housing costs are rising much faster than wages are rising. Home prices in D.C. have risen about 16 percent per year in real dollars since 1999. That's an extraordinary increase, by any measure, to be going on for such a long period of time. As a result, in 2004, almost half of all the single-family homes in the District sold for over $400,000—well out of the reach of many families who live here. We see similar high and increasing prices in the rental market. The D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute, for example, found that between 2000 and 2003, D.C. lost about 5,000 apartments with rents under $500 a month, while during the same period, the number of apartments with rents over a $1,000 increased by almost 7,000.
Again, this increase in housing costs is being driven largely by the strong regional economy that we have here, one of the strongest in the nation, in fact. We don't really see any signs yet that
this is slowing down or reversing. But again, as I noted, wages are not really keeping pace, despite the strong economy, with the housing costs that I just cited. In fact, lower-paying jobs are increasing wages very slowly or even decreasing. For example, food preparation workers had an average hourly wage of $9.34 in 2000, but by 2004, this job paid less than $8.84. So that was a
decrease. And even lawyers—not that I want anyone to leave the room being worried about the lawyers too much—but they had an increase of about 23 percent in their wages between 2000 and 2004, which is not bad, but again, it's still slower than housing prices are going up.
In response to these issues, a number of things have been going on. The mayor and the District Council have established, this past year, a Comprehensive Housing Strategy Task Force, whose job was to formulate a comprehensive strategy for housing policy for the District—the first we've had in anyone's memory. And these recommendations are going to be finalized early this year, but they will include a variety of policies designed to create an "inclusive city," using the words of the task force, by implementing policies intended to preserve and expand affordable housing
options in gentrifying neighborhoods, such as in Northwest; and by preserving affordable housing and promoting more investment in neighborhoods under less pressure of gentrification, such as in Northeast and Southeast.
All of this points to a need for more balanced growth throughout the District and the region. Indeed, many suburban jurisdictions are now very concerned about the demand for housing in their
areas. In Montgomery County, in Prince George's County, and in Fairfax, housing prices are also rising and pricing out many people who might be wanting to work and live there. So we need to consider more regional approaches that might, for example, encourage more transit-oriented development in the inner suburbs, for example; that might be one possibility.
So as I mentioned, the housing situation is leading to two important challenges for the District.
One is to attract and retain middle-income households, which have been shrinking in number in the District for a number of years now. Middle-income homeowners provide more stability for city
neighborhoods. And this is recognized in the task force recommendations, which also put an emphasis on this group.
Just to give you another example, a family living on an average salary of a schoolteacher in D.C. cannot afford 80 percent of the homes that are being sold in the city. And since many poorer families in the District are headed by a single woman, this is not an unrealistic sort of situation for one wage earner to have to worry about.
It's also important from a financial point of view for the city. The number of jobs in the District is up to about 683,000 in 2005, which is an increase of 30,000 jobs since 2000. But despite the fact that we have more jobs in the city, the unemployment rate here continues to go up. Unemployment is up to 8.2 percent in 2004, which is well above the regional unemployment rate of 3.3 percent.
Since the city can't tax income earned by commuters who work in D.C. but live elsewhere, it's important to try to maximize the number of people who live and work in the District. And this can
be done by connecting more District residents to those jobs that are in the District already, but also to try to encourage perhaps more people that living and working in the District is a good idea. And so obviously there's a number of things that have to happen for that to take place, but affordable housing and reasonable housing is one of them.
Finally, the last thing I want to highlight is just the extent to which this higher-cost housing can exacerbate these problems by encouraging more displacement of families. Poor and at- risk households are more mobile, and this can complicate delivery of social services like health care, and can also disrupt children's education as families have to move around.
Households in Wards 7 and 8 are much more likely to move than other households in the District. According to the Census, 62 percent of people living in Ward 7 and 52 percent in Ward 8 had moved within the previous five years after the 2000 Census. This is higher than the city average of about 50 percent. So we are a very mobile city to begin with, but there's more mobility in these wards with more poor people living in them. And while there's no direct research in D.C. about the connection between mobility and social problems, we do have some very compelling research from the
Providence Plan in Providence, Rhode Island, which has looked at mobility and connected it to a number of outcomes in education, health care, and other areas.
In Providence, they found that children born to women who were economically or educationally disadvantaged, such as a single mothers or teenage mothers, were much more likely to have moved recently than other types of children or children in other families. And the children who are
more likely to move had worse outcomes in a number of areas. For example, they had fewer office visits to health care provider and they were more likely to repeat a grade in school.
So first of all, this provides a great challenge in terms of providing services because we have to recognize that we're dealing with a mobile population. We can't count on them being in the
same place all the time. So that implies better coordination within the city, but also across the regions. People can move from the District to other areas, and vice versa.
Finally, to reconnect back to the housing, the policies that can increase the availability of affordable housing can act then to minimize the extent to which people are forcibly moved. This will make delivery of social services easier, but also may reduce the incidence of negative social outcomes. So while we don't know for sure, based on the current research, which way the causality works—for example, do people move more frequently because they have more social problems, or do they have more social problems because they move more frequently? We don't really know that. But
there are some good reasons to suspect that if we can introduce a greater stability into this population, then that would lead to better health and educational outcomes, if only because it's easier to provide services and, again, education won't be as disrupted by a family's moving about.
MR. WHITE: Thank you very much, Peter.
Next we're going to hear from Barbara Ormond, research associate with the Urban Institute Health Policy Center. And Barbara will focus on the cost of insurance, or in some instances the cost of
uninsurance. Explain that.
MS. ORMOND: As Peter was mentioning, we're talking about regional and local approaches, and the housing issues that he was talking about were much more regional.
And insurance regulation is a state function. So much of what I'm going to be talking about is—we have to look at it on a jurisdiction-specific basis.
The research I'll be talking about today was undertaken as part of a collaboration between the Urban Institute and the D.C. Department of Health. They're looking at ways to expand insurance coverage in the District of Columbia.
And over the past two and a half years, we've brought together the usual suspects in the health care scene—that is, the representatives from the health care providers, the health care insurance plans, advocates, and the local government—to discuss ways to expand health insurance coverage in the District. But we've added to this mix representatives from the business community, which has proved to be very enlightening on both sides, with each group coming away from this discussion with a better understanding of the constraints and the opportunities that the other faces.
This health care coverage advisory panel expects to submit its final recommendations later this month. And today I'm going to talk about just one aspect of what the panel has learned in this process.
First, I want to talk about who are the uninsured. And the uninsured vary a lot across racial and ethnic groups, by educational attainment, by income, and so on. And you'll find a lot of data on
these characteristics in a recent report that we did, and I hope that you picked up a copy on the way in if you didn't find one in your seat when you sat down.
And I'm going to focus today on the relationship between insurance and employment. Most of the District's uninsured are employed. I'm also going to talk about policies currently under discussion
to expand health insurance coverage.
Insurance coverage affects the labor market, and the labor market does not respect jurisdictional boundaries. Thus, the policies are likely to have regional effects, and they're also surely opportunities for regional cooperation.
The uninsurance rates in our region are very similar across all the jurisdictions. Seventeen percent of people in the District and Virginia and 18 percent in Maryland are uninsured. And as Peter noticed, the regional economy is very strong, so it's not surprising that these rates compare very favorably with the national rate of 20 percent of U.S. residents who don't have health insurance. And these data come from the 2002-2003 Current Population Survey.
But where people in these three jurisdictions get their health insurance varies greatly. Seventy-two percent of Maryland residents and 68 percent of Virginia residents get their insurance from their employer. The comparable figure for the District is only 63 percent.
So now that we have the same uninsurance rate, there must be somewhere that that extra insurance is getting made up. This shortfall in the employer-sponsored coverage in the District is made up by a much higher rate of public coverage, chiefly Medicaid, which is a joint federal-state program. Thus, all area residents fare well relative to the national average, but the District is shouldering a much larger burden in the share of insurance for its residents than do its neighbors.
So why is the rate of employer-sponsored insurance so low in the District? Logically, the first place is to look at employment rates. Unemployment is higher in the District than it is in the region. And I'm going to be using 2003 numbers, not 2004 numbers. So they'll be different from the ones Peter cited. I guess we should have coordinated.
About 7 percent of District residents were unemployed in 2003, versus about 4 percent in Maryland and Virginia. So this explains some of the difference in insurance coverage, but not all.
In fact, one of the most striking findings from the 2003 Kaiser Family Foundation survey of District residents' insurance status is the strong connection that the uninsured have with the labor market. More than half, 54 percent, of uninsured District residents are working. In addition, among those who are not working, nearly half report that they are temporarily unemployed. That means that fully three-quarters of the District's uninsured have current or recent ties to the labor market.
So does employer behavior explain the rest of the difference? Not really. A larger share of firms in the District offer insurance. It's about 74 percent of firms offering, compared with 58 percent in the nation as a whole and 62 percent in both Maryland and Virginia. But remember that two-thirds of the District's workforce lives outside of the District. Two-thirds of the Urban Institute's workforce lives outside of the District. It might be true of this panel, but I'm not sure. So much of the insurance provided by District employers actually goes to Maryland and Virginia workers. So what do we know about why firms cover their employees? Well, we conducted a survey of small businesses in the District in order to better understand the decisions that they make. We compared very small businesses—that is, those with fewer than 10 employees—with less small businesses that had between 10 and 50 employees.
And what we learned is that very small businesses are more likely to have a higher percentage of their workers as District residents. And while they're less likely to offer insurance to their workers, if they do offer it, they're more likely to offer it to all of their workers, and they're also more likely to pay the whole premium, leaving nothing for the employee to contribute.
In this survey, we also asked what factors influence small businesses' decisions to offer insurance. And among the small businesses that don't offer health insurance, not surprisingly, over
three-quarters say cost was a major reason. A smaller share, just over half, said that it's very difficult to find information on what insurance is available for small businesses.
So what can be done?
The Health Care Coverage Advisory Panel is considering several proposals to assist small firms. These include low-cost initiatives, such as ways to make it easier for small firms to find information about their insurance options. And Virginia has already developed a web site—and it's a very good web site—to provide such information to its employees, and we'll be using that as a model in the work that we do. There are also higher cost interventions, of course. These seek to address the high cost and the variability of insurance premiums that small businesses face. Subsidies to help low-income workers purchase employer-sponsored coverage are being discussed, as are opportunities for low-income workers to buy into some of the public programs that the District has. These policies might apply to all workers in the District, but it's much more likely that they will just apply to District workers.
There are also longer-range proposals under consideration that might help address the issue of the continuity of coverage; that is, what happens to an employee's insurance when he loses his job or changes his job. Such a proposal could very profitably be developed to cover all three of the jurisdictions here.
Who are these policies targeted at?
The District already offers coverage for all of its residents up to 200 percent of the federal poverty level, either through Medicaid or through its innovative health care alliance for residents
who don't qualify for Medicaid. And just for your information, 200 percent of the federal poverty level is currently about $32,000 for a family of three, which is not much here in the District. Therefore, like some of the housing initiatives that Peter was mentioning, these new initiatives are targeted at what you might call the middle class, families with incomes between 200 and 400
percent of the poverty level. And, of course, workers who work in firms that use these policies with incomes under 200 percent of the poverty level might benefit as well.
Such changes would likely have regional implications. For example, subsidies for insurance coverage could influence firms' decisions about where to locate or could influence employees' choices of where to work. If the policies apply only to District residents, they could influence who firms decide to hire.
And finally, the District is a small jurisdiction. And the mobility that Peter was talking about applies to businesses as well. A firm can literally move across the street to take advantage of or to avoid local policies, and not disrupt its relations with its workers, its suppliers, and its customers. Where firms locate and how many of their employees are District residents have implications for the tax revenues in all three jurisdictions.
Local actors recognize significant opportunities for regional cooperation in this arena. Representatives of the three jurisdictions will meet this spring at a meeting sponsored by the Board
of Trade to discuss ways to coordinate efforts to expand health insurance. Harmonizing public policies across the three jurisdictions in this area should be advantageous to all of the regions' residents.
MR. WHITE: Thank you very much, Barbara.
Now we're going to hear from Carol De Vita, a senior research associate with the Urban Institute Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy.
MS. DE VITA: Thanks, Jim. Good afternoon, everyone.
D.C. is really making some significant strides in improving the quality of life for its residents, and I'm going to talk about that a little this afternoon. My remarks are going to focus on services for children and youth. However, if you want to raise questions about the general human service field in the question-and-answer session, I'd be happy to try to address those as well.
The latest D.C. Kids Count book, which is this orange one which is in your packet—it was issued in December by the D.C. Kids Count Collaborative, which I'm proud to say the Urban Institute is a member of.
It documents the progress that children and families are making in the District of Columbia. Of the 40 measures that were tracked, 22 of them showed improvements. Things such as the poverty rate for children had decreased somewhat. There were fewer births to single women and to teenagers. The immunization rate was up. And violent deaths to teenagers was on the decrease. Many of these gains would not have happened without the nonprofit sector's involvement and leadership. Nonprofits in the community play a very important role in making sure that the lives of children and families have
important services that are in need. Every day these nonprofits are doing something to increase the well-being and the rate of success or the probability of success for children in the region.
But the D.C. Kids Count report also highlighted a couple of areas that still need improvement. And one of those was education. And I'll return to that a little later.
We've taken a closer look at the resources that are available for nonprofit organizations in the region, and I want to share with you our findings. In your packet there is a report called "Vital Signs" that has a green cover, that was issued this fall. It provides, I think, an excellent analysis of the number and types of resources that are available to the nonprofit sector within not only the region as a whole, but within the 11 jurisdictions that make up the region.
You might be interested to note that when we did this analysis, we took out the national headquarters and the national groups that are not really focused directly on services at the local community level. So this report really reflects more or less the grassroots or community-based services that are available to people not only in the District, but across the region.
I've updated some of the numbers in "Vital Signs" to make it more compatible with the Kids Count report. And there's a separate handout sheet that shows you some of those numbers. And that's what I will talk about today. To do that, I use information from the U.S. Census Bureau, as well as data from the National Center for Charitable Statistics, which is housed here at the Urban Institute.
There are three things that I want to share with you. One is to look at the number of nonprofits in the region; second, to look at the financial resources; and third, I want to talk about a possible scenario of how better cooperation and coordination might help improve the circumstances
of children and youth. Let's start out with the numbers—something Urban Institute people do a lot of, looking at numbers. If you look at the number of nonprofits serving children and youth, they're spread fairly evenly across the three major jurisdictions—across the Virginia, Maryland, and D.C. areas. But if you look more closely at this on a per capita basis by jurisdiction, you start to see a lot of disparities. We were particularly interested in areas of most need, and looked at children in poverty. And as we all know, I think, in this room, D.C. has a very entrenched problem with poverty; it has a very high poverty rate. In fact, the poverty rate in the District is two and a half to three times higher than the surrounding jurisdictions. The latest data available on poverty is 2003, and the District had a child poverty rate of roughly 30 percent. The next highest poverty rate was in Alexandria, and it was about 14 percent—so half the level of poverty that District children experience.
When we looked at the number of nonprofits per children in poverty, what we found is that the District ranks seventh out of the 11 jurisdictions of communities that have services ready and available for people to access.
Clearly there is a spatial mismatch between some of the programs and some of the ways that they are distributed across the region. Many of these nonprofits handle the day-to-day problems that
all of us may share—child care for young children, after-school and mentoring programs for older children—but the District, with its high poverty rate, also has to combat the tremendous odds that people face in lifting themselves out of poverty.
Because physically having a nonprofit locally by is only part of the story, we also looked at the resources and the financial base that these organizations were working from. Now as a whole, the
D.C. area seems to have a lot of money going into programs for children and youth: $600 million. But when again you look at that on a per capital level for the number of children in poverty, the District drops considerably in that standing. The District is spending as much as the other close-in
jurisdictions—Montgomery County, Alexandria, Arlington—and those jurisdictions have half the poverty level that the District has. Prince George's County, in fact, is one area that has exceedingly low rates of spending. This is especially interesting because we really don't have a good explanation for why that's happening. But I think that because it has so many fewer dollars going to its children and youth program, it is something that needs further attention.
Given the entrenched nature of poverty, I think we may be asking the District and PG County to be doing a tremendous task with only a marginal amount of dollars, given the size of the problem that
they're trying to address. Now, while I'm not about to say that doubling or tripling anybody's budget is going to be the magic bullet for solving this approach, money is important, and so one needs to take that into consideration. But the spending patterns that we have observed, obviously, are part of the story that we need to keep in mind when we talk about human services and programs for children and youth.
It should also be noted that the nonprofits in all of these jurisdictions were facing some financial problems during this period of time. About half of them ended the 2003 operating year with a fiscal loss. Now, we don't know how much of that is the magic of accounting and how much of that is a serious problem. But again, we can see from the data that this is not a group of organizations that are working from a very solid and stable base of financial resources.
Like health and housing, these issues cut across jurisdictions, and I think it really bodes us to think more regionally rather than jurisdiction by jurisdiction. Although there are many scenarios
that one could explore, let me throw one out for just starting conversation, and that would be the area of education. Clearly, the D.C. Kids Count book has shown that the measures there are stagnating or declining in the District, and if the policies of the District to try to stabilize and increase their middle-class families are something that we're going to take seriously in this
region, then education is something that needs to have close attention. Nonprofits are already providers of educational services. One-quarter of all the nonprofit organizations that we looked at that serve children and youth are providing and specializing in some kind of an educational program. So there's already a very large, in-place group of nonprofits that are working in this field.
But nonprofits alone can't solve this on their own. It's going to call for concerted cooperation and coordination across the governmental sectors, the business sector, and throughout the nonprofit
community.
One example might be that the foundations in the area may want to consider making education a focus point of their work, coordinating across regions and seeing if they want to place more of their resources in particular programs or particular areas. The work that nonprofits do in this area could certainly complement and supplement the traditional public education and private education programs that we have. But the local school boards and governments and our business leaders also need to make this a systematic and aggressive campaign to increase education in order to make a difference for the children of the area.
This can't be done just for the children in the more financially well-off areas. These investments need to be focused also in—perhaps most of all—in the poorer neighborhoods of the region.
I think through greater cooperation, through more close planning across sectors and across regions, we might have a real possibility here, if this is sustained, I would say, through a 10-year
effort to make the slogan "No child left behind" more of a reality for the children in this region. Because at the moment, we can see from our data that some of those children are not in an as well-off, advantageous position as they could be or should be.
MR. WHITE: Okay. Thank you very much, Carol.
And now we will hear from David Robertson, executive director of the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, someone who has to hear from everybody around the area, not just one
constituent.
MR. ROBERTSON: That is indeed the case. But fortunately, we have a lot of partners, and I see many of them in the audience this afternoon.
What I'd like to do is talk about three points that I think have some hope for some of the issues that you heard from the other panelists. I won't be giving you a lot of data, although COG does have a lot of data to share. But hopefully what I'll try and do is showcase some challenges and perhaps some opportunities out there for the new year, and, I think, really the long haul.
One I would argue with my colleague here to the right is, we're not talking, for many of these issues, a 10-year horizon; we're looking 20, 30, and 50 years out. And we have to find strategies that people hang with us for the long haul, because I think expecting that many of these issues can be addressed in the cycle of elected official leadership of four-year terms or even eight-year terms, I think, is going to be a significant challenge.
My points are, I guess, in summary—and then we'll touch on them in a little more detail—I would agree with the panelists and, I suspect, agree with many of you in the audience that housing, health, and human service issues, many of them—not all, but many—are best addressed at the regional scale or regional level, or certainly have regional aspects. So that's sort of a given, at least from my perspective.
The second is that the governance arrangements that we have in this region and frankly in much of the country really don't lend themselves to regional solutions or regional approaches, but
that fortunately we have—and this is the third point—in our National Capital Region and around the country have cobbled together, sometimes on a very ad hoc basis, sometimes in a more formal way, some solutions, some models, some best practices that I think show that regions' different communities can come together to address problems on a regional basis and can have measurable progress or success.
Going back to those three points—I said I wouldn't give you much data—I will give you one bit that comes from our COG regional forecasts of growth and that we are projecting by the year 2030 that we will have approximately 2.1 million residents more in our region and about 1.4 million jobs. So any problems or challenges we have are likely only going to get bigger. If we have health disparities, chances are we will have more folks with health disparities. If we have a shortage of affordable housing, we are probably going to have greater shortages of affordable housing.
So that growth—you know the saying "A rising tide lifts all boats"—so good things go up, but some of the bad things, some of the challenges we have are likely to go up as well.
One of the things that we've tried to do in the National Capital Region is to identify who are the partners or stakeholders that we can work with to effect some of these changes, because we know that our regional governance structures aren't necessarily well-suited to the solutions that we seek. I think a good example is played out sometimes at the national level. Everybody sort of understands what a state is and what it does; people understand what a county is and what it does, and a city. And those organizations are represented by very effective folks—the National Governors' Association, National Association of Counties, National League of Cities, U.S. Conference of Mayors—groups that I'm sure all of you partner with or represent as well.
But the stakeholder or the voice for regional organizations, regional-serving organizations is really not as loud, not as vibrant, perhaps, as what it should be—the National Association of
Regional Councils, the Association of Metropolitan Planning Organizations. And with the exception, perhaps, of transportation planning, I think that's pretty much evident in federal legislation. We have a pretty strong regional transportation planning law in this country that devolves a fair amount of role and funding and responsibility to regional transportation entities such as the Council of Governments and our Transportation Planning Board.
But when you think about areas of affordable housing, when you think about economic development, certainly health areas, job creation, and planning, there really isn't a strong federal sense of
leadership or direction to regional-serving organizations. And I think that is one issue. Administrations come and go, but really, for the past few administrations, we haven't seen a whole lot of support for that at the federal level, and so it falls to community-serving organizations, local governments, and others, again, to cobble together some strategies, some tools that they can help in their community.
We do have a couple of those in our region, again, in part because of many of the folks in this room as well. One that I think bears a good bit of attention and will bear additional fruit, I think, in the weeks and months ahead was the "Reality Check on Growth" effort that some
of you may have been associated with. I mentioned those data bits of growth projected to 2030. What we did through "Reality Check on Growth," led by the Urban Land Institute, supported by COG, the Board of Trade, and many others, is to say, okay, let's start from the assumption that growth is coming, and growth is generally a good thing. I grew up in the Detroit area. I can tell you what negative growth is like. And some of you that may come from Rust Belt areas or other areas, we know what lack of growth is like. That's not a good thing. So if we say growth is generally good but it's a matter of where you put the growth, how do we as a region really come together with a common voice to begin to plan that in a really more coherent, effective way?
We picked up on many of the themes that have been raised before; the excellent work of the Brookings Institution in "A Region Divided." We see some very serious disparities in our region; fracture lines generally sort of East and West. How do we begin to bridge that region divided? And the assembled masses—government, civic, and business—that met around "Reality Check on Growth" really identified some promising strategies to bridge that gap, to put more growth and investment in the Eastern part of the region, to build up transportation and other infrastructure in that part of the region, and to find ways to balance the growth and development so we don't find our region increasingly a region of "haves" and "have nots."
Another model or effort that I think holds some promise as well is an effort that was launched by the Council of Governments a couple of years ago called Regional Activity Center Maps. Again,
building on the forecast in growth that we see is coming, how can we begin to concentrate growth and development in areas where we can serve it more readily by transportation investments? We know the communities that seem to work; many of them are in the closer urban areas. But the areas of growth—Loudon and Prince William Counties, they're not going away. The people that are moving to those communities are not moving out of ignorance, they're moving out of choice. They believe they can get better quality schools, more public safety; they believe that they can have a quality of life that they want, but albeit at a price—a price of commutes of an hour or more. How can we begin to balance again those transportation and land-use investments so that we make those commutes, those investments on a more sound basis?
Another bit of information that we've produced that is going to be helping to feed the upcoming Board of Trade Potomac Conference, which has been a quite successful forum for addressing these issues, is a number of alternative land-use scenarios that the Council of Governments has developed,
sort of what-if scenarios. What if we were able to concentrate more of the job growth in the inner communities? What if we were able to concentrate more of the housing in the inner core areas? What if we were able to stem the curb—or the importing of workers to our region from far-flung areas such as Pennsylvania and West Virginia? What if we were able to provide greater housing
opportunities for them? How would that address things like congestion, air pollution, and other efforts? Those scenarios, looking at a number of land-use and transportation combinations, will be the basis of the upcoming work, some of the discussion at the Board of Trade's Potomac Conference, building on the work of Reality Check to see if we can again devise some real win-win scenarios
for our region so that again we don't become a very Balkanized region in terms of haves and have nots.
We've also, in the area of affordable housing, created a couple of years ago a Washington Area Housing Trust Fund, which is the first regional effort to raise monies at the regional scale and
invest in affordable housing projects and initiatives, both preservation and new construction. We think that is something that holds great promise, and really came out of a regional affordable housing conference a couple years ago where we learned of a successful model in the Silicon Valley area, where they face equally high housing prices and pressures.
There are a number of other initiatives that are being addressed regionally through COG and, again, through many of our partners. We've heard about the initiative by the Board of Trade on health care issues. We've been addressing a number of issues related to crime and education. I mentioned on the planning conference call that took place among the panelists that I believe very strongly that until we address the gaps and the challenges on education in this region, all of the work that we're doing in terms of growth and transportation and affordable housing is going to be if not for naught, certainly a much steeper climb. Because I've yet to see a parent that doesn't consider education as their number one choice when they choose to live or work in a particular community.
So I mentioned that there were challenges at the outset. I think there are. We don't have good governance arrangements in place in this country, in this region. There are bi-state regions, there are tri-state regions, but there are very few—in fact, none other than this region—a tri-state region that also has a National Capital Region, a federal district that's controlled by a somewhat bizarre and—but constitutional, they tell us—mechanism. (Laughter.) And so I think that poses a challenge, but fortunately, we have regional-serving institutions and organizations such as the Council of Governments, such as the Board of Trade, such as the Association of Funders in our region, nonprofit consortium, and others that really are trying to cobble together, with a lot of input and support, the type of regional solutions that I think are necessary to some of these issues of housing, health care, and human services.
So let me stop there. I'm sure you have many, many questions.
MR. WHITE: Oh, well, thank you very much.
I'll tell you, I had a question.
We're talking about folks who are working, employed, but yet they are uninsured. What brings that about? Are they refusing the insurance, or—I know you had said there are some small businesses that may not be able to afford some of this, but for those that can, why are they turning down the insurance?
MS. ORMOND: Well, if you look at someone who's earning, say, $32,000 a year—and the cost of insurance for family at a very affordable premium would be $3,000, and that can go on up to $11,000. When you have to do that on a salary of $32,000, many people can't afford to take up the offer that small employers will make to them. In addition, many small employers can't afford to offer this because as the price continues to rise, it becomes a larger and larger part of each business's budget. And one of the questions that we asked in our survey of businesses was, what proportion of your revenues go to health insurance costs? We gave a multiple choice: 1 percent, 2 percent, 3 percent. And they were all sort of topping out at our 6 percent and above level. The cost of insurance is the major question.
MR. WHITE: And how about the housing situation, affordable housing? I want to look at it from another aspect, and that deals with renters only because in this metropolitan area, a lot of folks cannot afford the housing, of course. What about the rental situation because I hear that the price of renting is going up, skyrocketing, in a lot of instances. How is that being affected?
MR. TATIAN: Well, absolutely, that's very true. I mean, as the cost of home ownership goes up, renter housing is following that as well. As I mentioned, it's been documented we've lost a number of affordable rental units, and I think that more directly gets to the displacement point that I was talking about earlier, which is that, I mean, as rents go up, people are more likely to get pushed out of certain neighborhoods or certain areas. And we know of certain situations where landlords have, you know, put pressure on people to move them out because they want to turn the building into condominiums, they want to do other things to raise the income that they're getting from their property.
So a number of the task force recommendations, for example, address these things directly. There's, for example, a desire to preserve housing that's already affordable through various HUD programs, Section 8 project assistance, for example, and placing an emphasis on preserving those. And we've seen in the Washington Post this past December some discussion about tenants who organized to purchase their buildings in these situations and some successes there. And the District does have a very good law that has been improved this past year to allow tenants to do that in situations where they're threatened with eviction.
MR. WHITE: We want to open the floor now for questions and answers. If you can wait for the microphone and also give your name and the organization that you represent for our Q and A.
Q: My name is Ellen Bosman. I'll introduce myself as a former chair of the COG board. I'd like for Carol to expand further on talking about education. I know there are a lot of nonprofits doing after-school programs. Were you thinking about education both in the K-12 school days sense or in a 24-hour period—nonprofits doing things outside of the formal school day?
And I'd like to have you expand on what might work regionally, what the first steps might be to improve the situation through some kind of cooperation regionally.
MS. DE VITA: The way our definition of education unfolds, it has everything from preschool programs and child care services through more traditional after-school programs, weekend programs, and youth development-type services. So it has a very broad range. What I would envision is certainly for these groups to continue the services that they're currently providing, but have better cooperation. We may need to see, because children go back and forth across jurisdictional boundaries, a closer cooperation in how services are delivered.
It could be any range of things. You said 24 hours. Some of the groups, I think, probably would consider themselves providing 24-hour service in various ways. So it doesn't have to be confined to
the normal school day program. I think this is a time that one could think more creatively and expansively.
One of the things we find, at least in preschool, is that a lot of the preschool programs in the District are actually serving children whose parents live outside of the District—people bring their children into the District with them when they come to work, they put them in child care programs here, and then, you know, in the evening, they go back to their suburban community. So that when you look at the resources that the District, in particular, is spending, it's not always just for children living in the District. To my knowledge, no one has ever tried to measure that. It would be a pretty difficult thing to measure. But that is the kind of regional flows that we get on just a natural basis.
So what I'm proposing is that perhaps more—whether through COG or through the Washington Regional Grantmakers Association, groups such as that, that take a regional perspective, may want to
talk among their own membership about how better to coordinate the range of services and the types of services and the funding of services, the types and locations of those, to spread the availability of services in a more equitable way.
MR. WHITE: Next question.
Q: Thank you. Chuck Bean with the Nonprofit Roundtable of Greater Washington. And I guess picking up on Carol's thesis, our idea that cooperation and collaboration will really be the key—maybe with David's situation of bringing in lots of local jurisdictions to cooperate—we know, even within one jurisdiction, agencies may not cooperate, may not collaborate. And we know in the nonprofit sector, even in a neighborhood, two nonprofits may not cooperate.
So what are you seeing as barriers to collaboration or cooperation? And how might some of those barriers be overcome?
MS. DE VITA: A $64,000 question there, Chuck.
I think funding is a barrier, because each nonprofit needs to raise funding for its program, and so there's probably more of a sense of competition than cooperation that comes in that regard. I think if there could be more general themes of service—certainly with children, as kids progress in age, they need different kinds of services and maybe better coordination to get them through the life cycle pattern of now that you're done with preschool, what's the next program out there as you're entering kindergarten, first, second, third grade, and on through the school years? That kind of coordination might be something that groups might be interested in discussing and looking at. That may strike them as less competitive and more collaborative.
MR. WHITE: Next question?
Q: Alice Rivlin, Brookings Institution. I just wanted to press on this regional issue a little bit more. We always talk about regional cooperation as a good thing for solving any problem, but exactly what does that mean? Does it mean more than voluntary talking to each other across jurisdictional or organizational lines? It's always seemed to me that unless you had a regional
authority of some sort with a dedicated revenue source, that you couldn't get very far. Is anybody thinking like that?
And particularly Dave mentioned this regional trust fund for affordable housing. I believe that's what you said. How is that financed? And where does the money come from? And what is the
decisionmaking process for who gets it? Is that a start on a regional approach to affordable housing at least?
MR. ROBERTSON: Let me touch on that, and I think we have a plant in the back of the room that can help answer that a good bit, because he was involved in the establishment of our regional housing trust fund.
I also agree that to some extent you're going to have to put teeth into some of the talk that we have around regional serving institutions. I think talk is good, and that's always a first step, but
I think the notion of stronger compacts or authorities or devices of that nature are going to be necessary in the long run to help effect some of the policies and initiatives that we likely want to see.
I think on a collaborative basis we can achieve a lot. But we always sort of get up to the line and then it's hard to sort of get over that. I mean, COG itself is a voluntary association of 19
local governments. Any one government can choose to pull out. In fact, in our history—and Ellen mentioned she's a former COG Board chair—in the not too distant past, Montgomery County—you wouldn't believe it, but Montgomery County in the early days of the Council of Governments pulled out because there was a change of administration. Now, it's inconceivable that that would happen now, but regional consensus—you can only go as fast as your slowest jurisdiction. And so that is a real challenge.
On to the issue of the housing trust fund—and, Conrad, I think you're in the back and can talk about that. But we, a couple of years ago, concluded—and again, it wouldn't be news to anybody in this room, that local governments really couldn't do it on their own in terms of developing affordable housing; the gaps are too great, and we needed to bring in more private sector capital, more private sector voices in this issue, and to really provide, similar to what they did in the Silicon Valley, a regional trust that could fill the gap. Oftentimes, many low- or
moderate-income housing preservation or development projects fail for just a little bit of money that could push them over the finish line. And so what we wanted to do is, in support with local governments that would sort of pre-identify the programs, pull together some additional financing. The funding targets, the folks that we've gone after is the federal government, recognizing that the federal government, arguably, is certainly the single largest employer in the region. It's not—the private sector is the greatest employer, as the Board of Trade would tell you. But the federal government is significant and will remain significant. We've also gone after foundations and other groups to sort of seed this with capital and a number of other resources.
But I don't know. Conrad, did you—?
CONRAD EGAN (chair, Fairfax County Redevelopment and Housing Authority): Dave, thanks. I'm Conrad Egan. I have the privilege of serving on the Board of Directors of the Washington Area Housing Trust Fund. I also chair the Fairfax County Redevelopment and Housing Authority. So I speak with at least those two hats.
I think the trust fund is a rather unique model. And I appreciate your raising it, Alice. We decided when we were getting started that we would focus on the employers in this area as the major funders for the trust fund. And who's the biggest employer? Well, it's the federal government. So we were successful in getting almost a million dollars of funds appropriated in two separate appropriation cycles from Congress. That was kind of our seed capital. We've also got virtually all of the major lending institutions, the big banks, involved in making capital available.
So our specialty is taking the zero-cost capital we get from the federal government and the relatively low-cost capital we get from the lending institutions, and packaging that up in small 2 percent loans that we make available to mission-driven purchasers of affordable housing—they don't have to be nonprofits, but most of them are—so they can move in quickly and grab a property that's on the market, get it under control, using, as Peter said in the District, the tenants' right of first refusal, usually, but other devices elsewhere throughout the region. And then that money gets paid back rapidly, because when they complete the deal, then they pay us back. So we've done about a dozen deals. We've had three or four of those initial loans already paid back.
I would say that one of the unique aspects about the trust fund that might bear some emulation is that we're not leaning on the jurisdictional governments to fund the capital needs of this trust fund; we lean on them to pay the operating costs on a kind of a per capita basis. So each of the jurisdictions, for a relatively small number—$10,000 to $20,000—pays the operating costs of this trust fund, and then we go out and raise the money that we put to use in trying to preserve and produce affordable housing.
We've not yet gotten, unfortunately, more elements of the business community involved. That's our next objective. We thought we were making some progress there. We put Bob Peck on our board, and
then he decided to leave the Board of Trade. So we're going to have to kind of start over with a different strategy there.
But I think there are some aspects of this particular regional cooperation model that might bear emulating in some of the other areas.
MR. WHITE: This gentleman here.
Q: Bob Lerman, the Urban Institute.
The New York Times had an article the other day about how in most of the country, housing affordability has actually improved except for the coasts. Ed Glazer, a Harvard economics professor, wrote a piece arguing that a big chunk of the rapid increases in these far East and far West areas has to do with special regulations, zoning, a whole range of restrictive policies that limit the supply. And it does raise the question: okay, prices are going up. When prices go up in any other
situation, there's an increase in supply. And so the question is, what can be done in a serious way to substantially reduce these restrictions on supply, especially in the context of a whole range of participation—groups that try and—you mentioned in the report that might try to block the construction of additional housing?
MR. TATIAN: Well, that's a very good point. Thanks, Bob.
Well, in fact, I mean, we note in the—and I failed earlier to plug one of the reports, so I'm going to plug it now—which is "Housing in the Nation's Capital" report, which is now in its fourth year, I think, and is funded by the Fannie Mae Foundation, which documents a lot of these issues of both production and prices of housing. And we've noted in there that the District really is stepping up in terms of producing more housing, that we're producing more housing in the city than we have in a number of years. And in fact, you know, we've lost a lot of housing over the past several decades, so that's been part of the reason why we're now in this price crunch because the demand has gone up very quickly and the supply is a little bit slower to respond.
But I think that—you know, we—you know, there may be some ways to loosen that up. And I think in the task force recommendations there are some recommendations about streamlining the process for approving and spending money for building subsidized housing, which I think would be good. But I think it's also—you know, again, getting back to the regional point that the other jurisdictions—really, I think more of the constraints are there in terms of there's a lot of concern about we don't want to grow too fast, we don't want to have too much housing in one area. Well, as Dave said, there's going to be 2.1 million people coming here, and they're going to need to live somewhere, so we really need to think as a region about where they're all going to live, and is everyone, you know, doing what they can to accommodate the new people.
MR. WHITE: Another question?
Q: I'm Margaret O'Brien with the Consumer Health Foundation. I have a question. And I appreciate, Barbara, all your work over the years.
Regional health disparities is huge for our region. Where there's high rates of coverage, we also find high rates of health disparities, both in health status and the quality of care. So my question is this: I struggle as to where is the place—what is the structure to start really digging into issues which create these disparities, like all the issues you're talking about? But there—and how do we just start getting that going? I think I'm going to ask you that, David. (Laughs.) Just like the Reality Check, or just like the Housing Trust Fund, how do we do this in terms of this whole area of reducing health disparities or—
MR. ROBERTSON: Well, I'll take a stab, but I think others certainly will be equally or if not better able to respond to the question.
I would put it in the regional context—and as you know, a couple years ago, your organization, other funders, worked with COG on a report card. There's nothing like grades, for those of you that are parents—your kid comes home with a report card; that focuses everybody's
attention on performance and what's happening or what's not happening.
And so there's nothing like a regional report card to get people's attention to look at what's working in our region, what's not working in our region.
So I think we're going to have to make it clearer to the decisionmakers in our region, both public and private, truly what the costs are because in the case of health care, so often the health care costs are not paid by the family or the business, but it's all passed through. And it's a little bit of a—you have to follow the line to see where the money—the trail—follow the money trail, and it's so complicated in terms of the nation's health care system. I mean, that's just another whole issue, trying to figure out how we deal with it at the regional level.
I think the Board of Trades Initiative holds some promise because I think it's dealing with not only health prevention—I think that's not been an area that has been given a whole lot of
attention—but healthy behaviors, and we all made probably our New Year's resolutions: we're going to go to the gym or we're going to eat better or all the things that we said we were going to do. We need to hopefully have made progress on those by the end of the year to see how far we got.
I think governments have not played a significant role because primarily public health has been about infectious disease prevention and restaurant inspection and things like that. So up to now, local governments haven't had a significant role, but again, they're oftentimes the folks that pay for through government subsidies or other programs the consequences of poor health behaviors.
So I think we're going to need some clearer way to articulate and measure the problems, and then identify, whether it be on the prevention or other method, some ways that we can find some solutions. But again, the challenge I think with health care is it's such a big problem to get your arms around. I mean, if it was easy, we would have tackled this in this country years ago, and we have not found the right tools to do that. And I think to expect that regional-serving institutions will find a magic bullet that has eluded a national government for many, many years, I think, is a stretch, but it's not to say we shouldn't try.
MR. WHITE: Another question?
Q: Kevin (last name inaudible) with The National Academy of Sciences. I wonder when you areconfronting various problems, what factors go into deciding whether or not to take a local or a regional approach to it? I wonder, particularly—I mean, you could look at the question of where should low-income people live to find affordable housing, decent schools, and job opportunities. And we keep talking about programs for these people in the District, but you look at it and the way things are now, this is the last place I would want to go because the job skills that are required are often high-order academic skills that low-income workers don't have; the schools aren't performing well; and the housing is expensive.
Would you then think, well, maybe these people should be living in outer suburbs where there's new development, and there's a different type of job mix, and so on? But I wonder, you know, there's
sort of rational ways of looking at this, and ways that take into the political/social culture of the area that determine how you try to solve problems.
So I wonder, as you look at these issues, what makes you decide to look at a regional versus a local solution.
MR. TATIAN: Okay. Well, I'll take a stab at that. I think you look for the regional opportunities where you can find them, and I think, as Dave and others have pointed out, not everyone is at the same place, yet so it's hard to do that. I mean, I think, for example, in the area of assisted housing, there's a number of approaches that could be more regional in the way we do things; for example, with rental assistance people get housing vouchers. There's a good argument for—that could be a regional sort of a system as opposed to each jurisdiction handling it because people look for housing throughout the region. But that's not been something that has been embraced warmly by the folks who run those programs.
So I think you've got to just make more of the arguments, and we've got to make them more clear about what are the trade-offs of doing those things. I mean, again, as Dave pointed out, there's
going to be 2.1 million more people coming to this region. Are we going to continue to sprawl out and grow that way, which is going to be very costly for all the suburban jurisdictions to do that, or are we going to try to think more creatively about how we approach that situation?
I don't know if—
MR. ROBERTSON: One brief quick additional point. When I moved last time, maybe about 10 years ago, I had choice. I actively considered neighborhoods in the District, I actively considered Bethesda, I actively considered Arlington. I wound up choosing Arlington. That's because I had access to information and a whole mix of not only information, but economic means. A lot of folks don't have access to those same tools or information.
A couple of years ago, we, on a demonstration basis, embarked on a regional mobility counseling program for folks with Section 8 vouchers. And the idea was that if you go to the Prince George's County Housing Department and you get your voucher or certificate, chances are you're going to get good information from Prince George's County of housing opportunities in Prince George's County, but they're not going to have a whole lot of information about Arlington or the District or Montgomery County. And what we said is the same resources that folks of higher economic means have, folks should have at lower economic means, to know are there jobs in those other areas, where are the good schools, what's the crime issue? I mean, you know, realtors—when people buy houses, they ask about school quality, they ask about crime rate, and realtors have information. Oftentimes folks that are on assisted housing don't have that same information. On this demonstration basis we said we should lower those jurisdictional barriers. And so if you're in the District of Columbia and you've got your voucher, you should get information, if you want, about all of the neighborhoods in the national capital region and then make the choice that's best for you and your family.
That was a federally funded demonstration through HUD. The program, like a lot of demonstrations, came and went, and we had good information. But I think the conclusion that we came to is that choice is a very empowering thing, and when you give information to folks, more often than not, people will make a pretty good decision. But in the absence of information, people are going to live maybe in neighborhoods that aren't working for them from a job perspective, from a family perspective, from a health care perspective—a lot of issues. And information is good, and to the extent that we can provide that through, again, regional approaches or regional-serving institutions, we think that's a good thing.
MR. WHITE: Has there ever been a thought of some form of a web page where all of the jurisdictions can come together with all this information, where anyone can just go to for Prince George's County, Prince William County?
MR. ROBERTSON: Sounds like a plug for 211 and Chuck in the back. But there are groups that are trying to really knit together the various information and referral systems in our region. And Chuck, in the back, can certainly talk about that.
MR. WHITE: Yeah?
MR. BEAN: Yeah, what 211 is, is like dialing 411; it's 411 for health and human services. And it's up and operational in the District, Northern Virginia, each of the jurisdictions. Each have their own hotline, so you've got to figure out 703-XXX in Alexandria, Arlington, Fairfax. But they're working on it. They're working on 211. And in Maryland, they're looking for a statewide rollout with Prince George's County being one of the demonstration projects. So we look at it, you know, we're in one economic area, one media market, and it would be a better region if you could just say, "If you got this problem, dial 211," no matter if you were in the District, Maryland, or Virginia.
MR. WHITE: Do you have a question?
Q: Hi. Nisha Patel with the Washington Area Women's Foundation. We are a regional foundation. And we actually recently launched a regional initiative called "Stepping Stones," which Peter is very involved in because he's helping us with the research piece of that. And that initiative is focused on increasing the economic security and financial independence of low-income, women-headed families—so much of the population that's been talked about today, a lot of the families where the low-income kids are living.
And a couple of times on the panel, I heard references to making things more equitable across the region, looking at spatial mismatches, where available educational opportunities and child care are, where the folks are that need those opportunities.
I'm wondering if that's really the right question because I don't—I would be surprised to hear someone in a suburban jurisdiction, for example, say, "Oh, we've got a glut of child care slots here. We've got too many resources."
So is the question really about redistributing things, or is it about increasing the pie and increasing the resources? I mean, I think that's one of the things we as a foundation hope to do. And so I just wonder if people on the panel could respond to that.
MS. DE VITA: I'll take a shot at that.
Certainly if you can increase the pie, that is the ideal situation. Then there is more there to work with. But we've been in such financial constraint periods that the reality forces the discussion a little bit toward redistribution. How one redistributes across jurisdictions obviously gets dicey because no jurisdiction's going to want to readily and easily give up what they already have. But I think that we do need to recognize this movement that we've been talking about, whether it's in terms of where you live, where you work, where you go to school—there is an awful lot of mobility across jurisdictions, and so some greater cooperation among the jurisdictions, whether through this trust fund idea or others, may be part of the dialogue that needs to go on here. But increasing the share in the pot would be the ideal situation, I think, and the ideal solution.
MR. WHITE: Another question?
Q: Sonia Connolly, I'm a District resident. And I wonder—a question, really, for Peter, perhaps—if there is a tension between the desire of and perhaps the need to increase affordable housing on the one hand, and the need to increase the number of higher-income taxpayers to support the services that are needed in the District.
And sort of going along with that, then there's this question of voting and where do people want to really live. And is it the case that what seems to be happening when people vote is that they are young singles and perhaps empty nesters who are spurring a great deal of the demand for housing in the District, and there is a very—we can see as we go up and down Massachusetts Avenue, a large increase in the supply? So I wonder if you'd like to address that issue.
MR. TATIAN: Sure. That's a very important issue. I think that there is a tension, but it also can be an opportunity. And I think that that's one of the things the task force is trying to build on, is that while these new folks who are coming in—yes, they're not demanding the lower-income housing, but they're bringing the resources and investment dollars that are going to be needed to build on that. And so things like—for example, the task force has proposed an increase in the recreation tax to add some additional money to the housing production trust fund so that that way, you know, these more affluent buildings in downtown that are going to the empty nesters and single folks that you mentioned are going to be directly financing more production of affordable housing in communities to the District.
And I think that we need to think more about how we distribute the affordable housing as well, which is, you know, something the task force as well as we've talked about—so that it doesn't all default to going to the same neighborhoods where it has been before. So we need to have subsidized housing in lots of neighborhoods in the city so there is more of a mix with these newer folks who are coming in and the existing residents.
But I think that we can accommodate both, and I think that if we have smart policies in place, we can achieve that. So I don't think it has to be one or the other.
MR. WHITE: All right, we have time for one final question.
Okay, well, I'll come up with one. (Laughter.)
I was thinking about the situation of the transientness of the area, and the fact that, okay, in Washington, D.C., you have folks who are here for maybe a four-year period, and then are maybe voted
out—which didn't happen, but, you know, that's another story. (Laughter.) But what about that sort of a transient—does that create a problem for the jurisdictions when you talk about coming together, working together because of the fact that you might have one number this year, and four years later, you'll get another number? For instance, I think the Census is now saying the District proper lost 4,000 residents recently in their latest census. So does that create a problem when you come up with all your statistics, your strategies?
MR. ROBERTSON: Let me touch on that quickly, and the others can jump in as well.
I think there are two issues associated with your question. First is the volatility or change in the people that live here. A lot people come and go. I used to work on the Hill, so that—every two or four years, you know, people get voted in or voted out. Your staff comes, your staff goes. That's a good thing. It sort of freshens the mix a bit in the national capital region. But it's hard for folks to put down roots and invest in the community and take the time. I mean, folks are very busy.
You know, I used to be on a homeowners' association board, and you know, to try and get people to invest just in that little bit of time, much less civic enterprise, is a real challenge, I think.
The other piece is the elected official leadership is always changing. And so to forge those political compromises and solutions that you need to affect the problem—programs that we've talked about—we have a new governor in Virginia. There will be elections this year in Maryland for governor. There will be elections in D.C., a lot of turnover in the—the mayor, certainly, and many of the council folks.
So you know, to pull together five or six elected officials that are all on the same page and to effect that kind of policy is a challenge for our region. That came up at Reality Check, where, you
know, we had a lot of good leadership involvement by elected officials, but some of those elected officials are going to be moving out or up, and we just don't know where that's going to take it. And we need those folks, we need the leadership to move these things forward, but it's always changing. Makes my job interesting, and certainly a little bit of a pull, sometimes. But I think
that's—both the volatility of the population and the volatility of our leadership means that these are going to be long-haul solutions.
MR. WHITE: Well, I think that is going to do it for today. I want to thank you all for coming. I appreciate your being here. (Applause.) Thank you very much.
I also would like to thank David Robertson, again, executive director of Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments; Carol De Vita, senior research associate, Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy for the Urban Institute; Barbara Ormond, research associate, the Health Policy Center, the Urban Institute; as well as Peter Tatian, senior research associate, Center on Metropolitan Housing and Communities for the Urban Institute.
I also want to again thank Tom Mentzer for giving me a call and asking me to come and participate in this. This is my first time doing this at this level, and I hope I did okay. But I appreciate being here very much. Thank you again for coming.
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