This week on Inland Journal from SPR News:
Spokane’s chapter of Habitat for Humanity had good luck with the Washington legislature this year. It collected about $6.5 million from Olympia to help fund a variety of projects. Habitat Spokane CEO Michelle Girardot talks about them and about the challenges the non-profit is facing.
"How can we build more densely and work with municipalities and the legislature to ensure that certain housing typologies can be created specifically for homeownership that allows for more density? We see that the average size of a family in the United States is getting smaller and so the need for these McMansion type homes is really not appealing."
The state health exchanges in Washington and Idaho each lost thousands of customers this year when federal tax credits for health insurance expired. People decided they could no longer afford to buy policies. We’ll learn about how the Washington exchange tried to maximize opportunities for people who wanted to keep their insurance, but felt financially squeezed.
"In addition to having that very rich benefit gold plan, we also designed essentially a lower premium gold plan that had still really good, low deductible, low out-of-pocket costs, a lot of services before the deductible...very much a replacement for folks who could take those tax credits if they still have them and apply them to those lower premium plans."
Kyrsten Weber talks with author Adriana Janovich about “Secret Spokane,” a new book that explores some of the city’s weird and obscure features.
"A few of the haunted sites include the Bad Seed, which is the restaurant and bar in the old Hillyard Library. It's supposedly haunted by a ghost named Veronica, and there's a cocktail named after her. Another haunted site in the book is the music building on the Gonzaga University campus. It's an old mansion, and apparently ghostly things have been happening there since the 1970s or so."
