This Boise-area city has one of nation’s lowest shares of affordable rentals, report says
Meridian recently welcomed its first affordable-housing apartment complex in nearly two decades. But studies show and housing advocates say it isn’t enough.
CashNetUSA, an online loan company, used rental price data from Zillow and U.S. Census data on city salaries to conclude that only 17% of Meridian’s available rentals are affordable to Meridian residents. The company defines affordable as rents that cost 30% or less of the city’s average income.
Meridian ranked 13th lowest in CashNet’s nationwide report on cities’ share of affordable rental properties.
CashNet used data from Payscale, which listed the average salary in Meridian as $65,000. The affordable rent, 30% of monthly income, for a family making $65,000 is $1,625 per month.
Boise-area housing advocates are seeing similar problems in Meridian. Since January, at least 422 people and families in Meridian have needed help to pay their rent, according to Jesse Tree, a Boise nonprofit that provides rental assistance and eviction mediation services to help keep people from falling into homelessness.
Jesse Tree gave those 95 households emergency rental assistance through a $250,000 grant from the city of Meridian.
But Ali Rabe, executive director of Jesse Tree, said the need for rental assistance is increasing in Meridian and across the Treasure Valley, and the organization is struggling to address the needs.
“We don’t have the capacity to sustain the level of need that we are seeing,” Rabe told the Meridian City Council on Tuesday, Oct. 24.
On average the Meridian residents in need were behind around $2,630 in their rent, said Evan Stewart, program manager for Jesse Tree, during the meeting.
Jesse Tree’s goal, 10 months ago, was to help 120 families, but it encountered tenants with larger sums of rent due than Jesse Tree expected, Stewart said.
“Every household was under the 80% area median income, which is roughly $4,754 in monthly income per household of two,” Stewart said. “However the majority of households served were under the 30% area median income, which is $1,783 monthly for a household of two.”
All of the tenants Jesse Tree helped were “in urgent situations and at high risk of eviction and homelessness” and every household was in the middle of the eviction process because they owed rent, Stewart said.
Jesse Tree exhausted all of the funding from the city’s grant, but there is still a lot of need in Meridian, Rabe said.
She said the nonprofit sees 70 applications per month for eviction assistance from residents in Meridian. In January, Jesse Tree was seeing 20 to 40 applications per month.
The reason those eviction assistance requests are up? The end of emergency rental assistance funds from the Boise City/Ada County Housing Authorities and an increase in rents in the city, Rabe said.
Rabe mentioned that the funding from the city made an impact on those 95 families, especially allowing them to avoid homelessness and stay in their homes. Many of the families had children, she said.
Jesse Tree recieves private donations to keep funding eviction mediation and rental assistance and is currently the only agency providing emergency rental assistance in Ada County. Rabe worries about the increased need for housing help.
“We do see increased need here in Meridian and across Ada County,” she said.
CashNet also said that in Nampa and Boise, about 48% of rentals were affordable to residents.
This story was originally published October 31, 2023 at 4:00 AM.
