The Methow Conservancy recently announced the donation of six acres in Winthrop's Heckendorn neighborhood to the MHT. Located near the Meadowlark Natural Area and Sullivan Cemetery, this land will enable MHT to develop a permanently affordable neighborhood for full-time residents.
This community forum hosted by Methow Housing Trust, Resilient Methow, Methow Valley Long-Term Recovery and VIP Insurance will be on Wednesday October 30th, 6:00pm at the Winthrop Library.
Since its inception in 2017, Methow Housing Trust has made huge strides to address the need for affordable housing with the development of five neighborhoods, the construction of 49 homes, and the expansion from one staff member to five.
MHT’s core program requires expertise in land acquisition, neighborhood planning and permitting, neighborhood design and project management. As the need for focused leadership in this key area grows, Danica Ready, MHT’s founding director, has decided to make that part of her current role her primary focus.
The aim of local housing easements is to create and preserve housing for people who live and work in the valley. The idea is to establish permanent easements on properties that would require occupants of housing on those properties to be full-time residents.
We are a community that believes in belonging, and builds toward it. In times of adversity, we operate from an unyielding willingness to adapt, to innovate, to include and unite rather than exclude or polarize. Thank you to the 250+ households shaping the Methow’s housing future through participation in the Methow Housing Trust’s Campaign to Build Belonging. You made a statement that will have lasting impact.
Housing Trust to build 11 affordable homes in Twisp
“We have always been committed to helping with local housing, but can’t do it alone,” Konrad said. “I have been watching what the Methow Housing Trust does with their program, and have two employees that already live in MHT homes in Twisp. They are fulfilling an important community need, and we wanted to help them continue to successfully build more homes for local folks as soon as possible.”
“The Konrads have been such leaders in housing for a good long time. We are proud to have their trust and partnership on this project,” Ready said.
2021 marked a community-wide call to action to address growing disparities in access to housing in the Valley, which are felt (and heard) in new ways, and with new urgency. The sense of belonging afforded by secure housing is increasingly hard to come by, especially for year-round residents whose income is derived locally.
“This partnership has been brewing for over two years, but the events and market trends of this past year made it a clear priority,” said Housing Trust Executive Director Danica Ready in a statement. “MHT has learned, from informal conversations with our partners in affordable rental development, that a key to their grant-seeking success is being able to declare secured land for their project at the time they apply for funding. We have so much respect for the leadership and work of HAOC, so it was an obvious partnership to pursue.”
“The housing crisis we are currently facing … is not new news for us,” Nancy Nash-Mendez, Executive Director of the Housing Authority said. “The thought that through this new partnership, there will be 40- plus families having a place to call home by the end of 2023 is very exciting.”
In our North Cascades valley home, we are starting to work out a kind of pathway forward. The conversation is active. The Town of Winthrop recently signed a resolution declaring a housing crisis in recognition that “inaction will result in irreversible damage to the fabric of the community.” Clearly, housing is at the epicenter of our community’s consciousness, with the median home sale price doubling in the past five years from $270,000 in 2016, to $563,000 in 2021 (YTD), and businesses closing their doors more and more hours and days of the week due to a lack of workforce availability.
There is no time to lose if we wish to ensure that a genuine sense of belonging is still attainable to all of our community members, regardless of a person’s age, income or when they decided to make the Methow their home town.
Recognizing that the local housing crisis in the Methow Valley is dire and complex, a group of nonprofit leaders has come together to try to learn from other communities who have faced similar challenges and find solutions that can work here.
In late fall 2020, Danica Ready, the Executive Director of the Methow Housing Trust, asked Kelly Edwards from Room One, Don Linnertz from TwispWorks, and Jasmine Minbashian from the Methow Valley Citizens Council to join her in exploring what other rural, resort communities have been doing to address affordable housing for locals. In February 2021, the group added Sarah Brooks from the Methow Conservancy to aid in facilitation.
“The need for affordable homeownership units has grown exponentially with the rapid transformation of our local real estate market this past year, along with the obvious need for a diverse menu of affordable rental options for our local workforce - both longtime and seasonal,”
Hello! I’m Sarah and I am the Director of Outreach here at the Methow Housing Trust. I’m also a MHT homeowner. Last month I talked to many wonderful community members while tabling at grocery stores. I wanted to share some of the frequent conversations had. I imagine many of you have similar questions to those I spoke with. I’ll be posting the Table Talk Q&As over the next few days on our MHT Instagram and Facebook pages. Read on to see them all here.
As the housing crisis in the Methow Valley continues to grow, community investment in the Methow Housing Trust has created 21 permanently affordable homes for ownership by Valley residents. See highlights from the Methow Housing Trust 2020 Annual Report in our most recent blog.
