The business of groundbreaking: Wenatchee’s first true affordable housing community takes shape

WENATCHEE — Just behind Sangster Motors at 9th and Miller, there’s a plot of land that’s been sitting empty for a while now. As soon as you cross Miller and continue up 9th Street, it becomes a residential neighborhood, but the first available residential lot on the north side of the street was unused until now.

Enter Common Ground, a community housing trust based in Wenatchee that’s a relatively new non-profit to the area. The Wenatchee Valley is experiencing a housing crisis, characterized by low housing inventory and rapid community growth. This has led to an increase in both rental and home sale prices, significantly limiting options for much of the local workforce.

Common Ground uses a “community land trust” model. It focuses on home ownership, perpetual affordability and stewardship. With housing costs outpacing wage growth by a large margin, it actually drives people out of the community who would otherwise be contributing to not just the economy here, but our quality of life. A single mom of two kids who works as a nurse makes enough that she doesn’t qualify for state or federal assistance, but not enough to afford the rent in Wenatchee, and our city loses a nurse.

On July 16, as the organization’s administrative consultant Stephanie Bradshaw prepped bottles of champagne and sparkling cider, Common Ground broke ground “officially” on that plot of land on 9th Street with the Crail Cottages project, and unveiled what will, in a year’s time, be a group of eight cottages that check all of the boxes for their mission statement, not just in terms of affordability, but how the project came to be in the first place. It’s the “official” groundbreaking because the concrete foundations are already laid.

Much like another local nonprofit, Serve Wenatchee Valley, Common Ground relies on a network of partnerships that focus on solving the housing crisis in unique ways. And while the scale is different — Serve Wenatchee provides low-income people with essentials so that they can pay their rent and avoid eviction, while Common Ground is actually providing homes — in essence, they’re the same in that their business is investment in people.

“We believe, as I think everyone standing on this ground right now does, that everyone in our community should be able to live where they work and play,” said Thom Nees, the Executive Manager of Common Ground as he prepared to set the golden shovels to the ground at Crail Cottages. And that’s where that network of partnerships is essential.

Fee reductions, lower-than-market service prices, grants, donations, all of them come from the community, and the board of directors for Common Ground makes all of those connections across the valley and even the state. The first conversation that Nees had about a housing trust was with Steve Maher of Our Valley Our Future, another local nonprofit that invests not just in people, but in community. Before Common Ground was even born, it suddenly had double the minds working on it.

One by one, more partners came on board. Patty Etzkorn, the daughter of John and Loretta Crail, who owned the land that the Crail Cottages would eventually be built on. She reached out to Nees, and although the appraised value of the property was more than Common Ground had on hand, Patty and the Crail estate were willing to sell it to them at a reduced price. Her vision of community matched that of Common Ground, and now, as Nees said at the groundbreaking, “Crail Cottages will live as a legacy to John and Loretta Crail.”

But where did the money that Nees and his organization did have come from? Chelan County still had ARPA (American Rescue Plan Act) funds from the federal government, and Nees applied for and got them. Now the Chelan County Board of Commissioners are on the team. Specifically, commissioner Kevin Overbay was a founding board member of Common Ground.

Overbay spoke at the groundbreaking: “Serve Wenatchee Valley [was] the fiscal sponsor at the beginning of this until a 501(c)(3) was able to be put in place,” he said, invoking the name you’ve already read here. “This is the first of what we hope will be many, many projects that will occur in our community,” Overbay said. He talked about their many meetings over coffee, and concluded that Common Ground had gone “from a napkin vision to reality.”

From Nees and Maher in the beginning, the organization had already collected help from two other nonprofits, the county, the federal government and even a private citizen, all because this business is investing in people.

More partners would join, of course. The City of Wenatchee’s planning department had already issued permits for cottage development, and oversaw Common Ground becoming the first group to avail themselves of that zoning by underwriting and reducing the fees for the permitting process, saving them nearly $60,000 in impact fees. That brings the eventual cost of these homes even lower. So now the City is a partner.

Mayor Mike Poirier spoke next, and he made the obvious connection for everyone: “This doesn’t get done by just one individual, it gets done by the community. That’s the reason our community is the way it is, because we have everybody that contributes,” he said. “And we’ll come back a year from now [when construction is complete] and it’s going to look beautiful. It’s going to be somebody that contributes back to our community, somebody that comes in that… the wages aren’t quite there, a young family maybe, and they get to have it.”

CPH Consulting, the engineering firm that worked on the project, comped the due diligence fees on the initial design work. The architectural firm behind the design, modFORM LLC, are based in Cashmere, adding local involvement to the effort. The Chelan County PUD rewrote their code to waive connection fees for affordable housing — homes that cost 80% or less of area median income. More teamwork.

And in just the last two months, Common Ground has had a push for “impact investors” to come together and bring capital to the table to close on the construction loan. They needed a little over $600,000 to get the job done. Straight to the people they went, and a group of ten individuals and families plus the Community Foundation of North Central Washington dug deep in their pockets and combined for $935,000 in investment loan funds.

In fact, the Community Foundation’s portion of that was $350,000, and to it they attached just a one percent origination fee and zero percent interest for the first year of the loan. “That’s just amazing,” Nees said, “for a project like this, where we’re looking for short term loan money, to be able to do the construction, sell the homes, and return the money to the Community Foundation so quickly, is amazing.”

Michael Machado from People’s Bank was on hand at the groundbreaking. People’s did the $1.4 million construction loan, almost entirely on faith in the community. Common Ground had never built anything, had no track record of multiple projects to bring to the table, so let’s call that yet another partner in this endeavor.

But Thom Nees is nowhere near done thanking people yet, and there are some heavy hitters yet to be listed. State Senator Keith Goehner is present, since he joined with his counterpart in the State House Mike Steele to get a direct allocation of a quarter million dollars in affordability subsidy. That money comes in at the end of the project, to buy down the cost of the homes to that number below the 80% of area median income that triggers the PUD’s commitment to free connection fees. Now the State of Washington and specifically the 12th District are fully invested as partners as well.

The board of Common Ground itself is a wealth of experience and knowledge. There’s Thom Nees, of course, but as he says, “What we do is pull the right people together to do the right thing.” Nees introduces Rob Jammerman, the board president, who used to be the public works director for the City of Wenatchee. Jammerman calls this “the first affordable housing project in the valley,” and then clarifies: “I say the first, because we don’t want it to be the last.”

Jammerman lists the board members: Lyle Markhart, the vice president; Adam Haynie, the secretary; Bobby Black, the treasurer; Kristi McPherson, who specializes in real estate and lending; Yaneth Presiado, also in real estate; Jordan Jessup Bullock, who also has been supporting her father Alan, the designer of the Crail Cottages project; Randy Zielinski, a local builder who specializes in construction management; and Cam Clennon, who is a Valley “lifer” with a lifetime of real estate experience as well.

This intricate network of partnerships, both broad and strengthening every day, has come together to create an organization that only pretends to be in the business of building affordable housing. The business they’re actually in, however, is building community.

To find out more about Common Ground and how you can be a part of this expansive alliance of believers in the worth of community, go to commongroundwenatchee.com or call Thom Nees at 509-630-4438.

Andrew Simpson: 509-433-7626 or andrew@ward.media