This working mom earns $15 an hour. Her search for affordable housing is ‘impossible’
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Affording Boise: Rental housing
Soaring rents. Skyrocketing home prices. The double-digit rates of increase in the costs of Boise-area housing create increasingly urgent problems for low-income, working-class and even moderate-income Idahoans who need places to live. Affording Boise is a series of Idaho Statesman special reports on housing. This collection focuses on rental homes, including apartments. A separate collection focuses on homeownership.
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Katie Mengel felt the worst body aches she could imagine. Her fever hit 103 degrees for three days. A headache lingered for a week and a half. She focused on recovering. But there was another issue, one that constantly clogs her mind.
After contracting COVID-19 in early February, Mengel had to miss five days of work as a greeter at Kendall Auto Mall in Nampa. No sick pay. No immediate assistance. Just five days of work — making $15 an hour — poof. Gone.
Mengel felt stressed out — a familiar feeling for the 31-year-old single mother with an 11-year-old son, Kaydyn, and an 18-month-old daughter, Lorelei.
“How am I going to pay my rent?” Mengel recalled thinking. She spoke as she stood near a sign in her kitchen with a painting of a sloth and the words: “Hang in there.”
Paying rent each month for Mengel is a challenge. It’s become increasingly challenging for many in the Boise area as rents have risen.
The median price of a three-bedroom apartment in Boise is $1,552, according to a recent report by ApartmentList.com. The median price for an apartment of any size is $1,245, a 34.1% increase from March 2020.
High demand and low supply is evidenced by a 1.6% rental vacancy rate in Ada and Canyon counties, according to the National Association of Residential Property Managers. The changes have pushed longtime residents to the edge.
Mengel’s family is among those who have been significantly hampered by housing costs. Mengel has lived in three places in the past three years, from Boise to Garden City to Nampa. The changes have affected Kaydyn’s education and the family’s stability. Nearly all of Mengel’s money is spent on basic necessities like rent, bills and food. There’s barely any room in the budget for anything else.
Last May, the family moved to a 960-square-foot, four-bedroom duplex in Nampa, a home manufactured in Caldwell of shipping containers. Boise’s IndieDwell made it for Leap Housing Solutions, a nonprofit that aims to create more affordable housing options.
With the help of federal subsidies, Mengel pays $1,085 per month, which she estimated is half of market rate.
When Mengel moved in, the income requirement for the unit was earning no more than 50% of the area median income. Boise’s median income for a family of three is $67,800, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Mengel’s $15 per hour pencils out to $31,200 before taxes.
Mengel moved to Boise when she was 5 years old. She’s lived most of her life in the Treasure Valley and has experienced the brunt of the changing housing market.
The first place she rented on her own 10 years ago was near the intersection of Cole Road and Fairview Avenue and close to Boise Towne Square mall. It had three bedrooms, two bathrooms and cost $550 per month.
“I don’t feel like you can live here if you’re single,” Mengel said. “If you’re not having multiple incomes, I think it is impossible to live here.”
Housing changes lead to turbulence
Mengel then spent a few years living in Florida but returned in 2017 with Kaydyn to be closer to family and friends. They lived off West State Street near Veterans Memorial Parkway. Kaydyn attended Taft Elementary School for first through fourth grade.
Then Mengel’s rent went up, so in 2020 they moved to northwestern Garden City. That meant switching from the Boise School District to the West Ada district. Because of the pandemic, Kaydyn took online classes, “which was just terrible,” Mengel said. Her son didn’t learn much in fifth grade.
Their landlord then raised the rent to $1,100 per month for their two-bedroom apartment. Mengel called it a “dump.” She said drug addicts frequented the area.
“I didn’t want to put my kids in that environment or situation anymore,” Mengel said.
No financial help from the children’s fathers is available, she said. Kaydyn’s father is in prison, and Lorelei’s father is accused of a crime, she said.
Mengel was desperate for housing when she decided she had to leave the apartment in Garden City. She didn’t know Leap’s program existed until a friend sent her a link.
That’s how the family landed in Nampa in May 2021. The duplex is in a calm residential neighborhood. It’s been a good fit so far and has helped stabilize life.
But the new location meant yet another school district for Kaydyn, who is struggling to keep up with his sixth grade classes at Sage Valley Middle School, part of the Vallivue district. He has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and some anger issues that impair his learning, Mengel said. He has a hard time sitting down and focusing and needs reduced work.
Mengel is trying to help Kaydyn get on track and make sure the work is at a level he can comprehend. That’s been difficult, since each school district change came with additional meetings and evaluations for Kaydyn’s individualized education program.
“My son sees the struggle and he gets upset. I have to tell him, ‘Sorry bud, we’re moving again,’ ” Mengel said. “ ‘I’m going to have to put you in another school district. Say bye to all your friends you’ve made this year, because you’re probably never going to see them again.’ ”
Each weekday morning, Mengel leaves for work, and Kaydyn gets on the bus on his own about an hour and a half later. Lorelei attends day care for $65 a month, because of a subsidy provided through the Idaho Child Care Program. Without that, it would cost 10 times as much.
Because she’s parenting alone, Mengel can work only during day care hours, Monday to Friday, 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. Until November, she worked in customer service at a call center in Boise earning $14.50 an hour. Her new job is closer to home, less mentally taxing and pays 50 cents an hour more.
“I don’t have free time outside of work and parenting,” Mengel said. “If I don’t work as much as possible, I may not be able to afford to stay here.”
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Wages lag behind housing cost increases
With money tight, Mengel dug in to find a place she could afford. Because of the government subsidies, an extensive application review is required for the Leap home. It took several months and lots of paperwork. Mengel called the process “terrible,” but the outcome was the opposite.
“I’m extremely grateful,” Mengel said. “I don’t know where we’d be without Leap Housing.”
Leap’s primary focus is on creating housing opportunities. The nonprofit organization owns homes it rents out and operates a housing land trust to keep homes affordable in perpetuity.
About one-third of households earn less than 80% of the area median income, Leap founder and CEO Bart Cochran said. In Boise, that 80% is $54,250 for a family of three, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Leap’s housing options are targeted at that group, Cochran said.
Those households can become financially unstable, and a catastrophic event could lead to homelessness.
“We want to get people away from that downward spiral,” Cochran said by phone. “Our housing is priced at a point in which households aren’t going to be housing-cost burdened. Our rents are set to be affordable to a household making a certain amount of income or less.”
Mengel’s rate of $15 per hour, working 40 hours per week, translates roughly to $2,580 per month before taxes. She estimated she pays around $800 per month in other expenses, including car payments, gas, food and utilities. Even with rent at $1,085, about 90% of her earnings go straight to these costs. She’s frequently had to dip into her savings. She says they’re almost all gone.
In 2017, the median household income in Ada County was $57,399. That figure has risen to $77,272 (a 34.6% increase), adjusted from 2019 using the Employment Cost Index as of late 2021. In Canyon County, the median household income went from $42,786 to $63,199 — a 47.7% increase. But housing costs have risen faster.
The government deems anyone spending more than 30% of their income on housing as “housing burdened.” Thirty percent of Mengel’s monthly income is roughly $774.
“There’s an undersupply of affordable housing,” Cochran said. “As more people get added into this group needing access to affordable housing, it just puts pressure on an already limited supply, which makes it more and more difficult to be able to access it.”
Struggle for rent causes sacrifices
For 16 years, since she was 15, Mengel lived with her dog Thizz, a timberwolf malamute chow mix. One day last month, Thizz sneezed, rupturing what turned out to be a tumor, and started bleeding profusely.
Mengel rushed to an emergency vet. Cost: $300. Proposed treatments to extend Thizz’s life would have cost more than $2,200. Mengel couldn’t afford them.
The next day, Mengel took Thizz to another vet to get him checked. Cost: $700. On Feb. 8, Thizz was put down.
His ashes are in Mengel’s living room.
“I can’t talk about him, it makes me sad,” Mengel said as her eyes reddened and her hands wiped her face.
Mengel wishes she could provide more for her children. When she’s shopping at a store with Kaydyn, and he points out a toy or game he wants, she wishes she could buy it for him without thinking if it fits the budget. If it costs $40 or $50, she probably knows the answer.
“You’re like, ‘Sorry, dude, I can’t do that. It’s just too expensive,’ ” Mengel said. “It kind of makes me feel like a failure as a parent.”
Growing up, Mengel went to summer camp. She thinks camp would be healthy for Kaydyn to experience. But she knows that’s not an option.
She also doesn’t have money to take Kaydyn to places like a trampoline park or an indoor amusement center. And she can’t afford to take a week off work to go camping in the summer.
“My son, he’s going to remember this,” Mengel said. “He’s going to remember the fact that mom couldn’t do this or mom couldn’t do that.”
Housing costs push people out
Mengel’s lease is up in May. She’s been thinking about what she might do next.
The duplex she’s in now isn’t ideal. Even though there’s a fourth bedroom, Mengel uses it for storage, and it’s still a tight squeeze.
She’s also worried she’ll cross the 50% area median-income threshold and no longer qualify to live there. If she could stay, she said she probably would. But if she can’t, she’s considering moving to Oregon’s Malheur County or the Midwest, where housing could be cheaper.
Cochran said she needn’t worry. He said tenants are required to certify their income only when they move in, not each time they renew the lease. This encourages people to pursue more income rather than encouraging them to maintain low incomes to avoid disqualifying themselves, he said.
“We just don’t want to stand in the way of people being able to better their income situation,” Cochran said. “Income doesn’t just pay for housing. It pays for schooling, it pays for health care. There’s so many impacts on a household being able to raise their overall income level. If we can be helpful and be a catalyst in that, that’s great.”
Mengel’s ultimate goal is to buy a house. Leap’s system is intended to put her on track to be able to do that, Cochran said.
But Mengel’s uncertainty about the rules shows how understanding affordable housing can be difficult.
“I just want my kids to have a good place to be,” Mengel said. “I feel like we’re not going to have that anymore.”
This story was originally published March 6, 2022 at 4:00 AM.
