One of the biggest challenges with building housing that people can afford is the high cost of land. The Spokane Regional Land Bank buys parcels and holds them to sell to developers who are building affordable housing projects. We’ll talk with Ami Manning from the land bank.
"We really feel like there's land that government folks are holding and for-profit folks are holding, speculatively, that could go into the land bank to help us address the [affordable housing] crisis."
Emma Epperly from Idaho Ed News has written about how schools and politics have become intertwined in Kootenai County. Her case study is the Lakeland School Board in Rathdrum.
"The story really is about who is selecting these candidates for school board. We've got this kind of political machine on one side and then we've got this former homeschooling mom on the other side who's doing community outreach."
A Spokane County guardianship monitoring program is celebrating 25 years of protecting vulnerable people and their financial affairs. We’ll talk with Superior Court Judge Rachelle Anderson about the history and mission of the program.
"We have about 2,200 people who are subject to either guardianship or conservatorship or both. That means that 2,200 people in Spokane have been determined to not be able to make decisions for themselves, whether it be decisions about where they're living or their medical decisions or financial decisions. So they are subject to court orders that have assigned a person to make the decisions for them. The GMP is the program that we've come up with to help the judges keep oversight on those 2,200 cases."
