Control: severity -1 important I am raising this bug's severity to 'important', following advice from #887595.
Also, the lack of multi-arch awareness in this package blocks multi-arch support in libpango1.0-dev and libfontforge-dev. These packages, in turn, block multi-arch support in Wine (i.e. wine-development). Marking libxft-dev as Multi-Arch: same will benefit many package, including packages depending on libpango1.0-dev and libfontforge-dev. So fixing this bug is important.