Affordable Housing

Affordable housing–and affordable retail spaces for small business–is one of the key challenges facing Washington and the Puget Sound region in particular. It plays into everything from the high rate of homelessness to the high cost of living to our difficulties in attracting and retaining a qualified workforce.

The solutions aren’t simple but they do exist.

Affordable housing tax credits.

These programs already exist and should be maintained. For housing priced at least at the 80% Area Median Income (a number calculated on a regional basis), some credits should be extended to keep the cost down. For projects at the 50% AMI level and below, no tax should be paid as long as the project remains at that level of affordability.

Expedited permitting for all projects.

The cost of permits–and the delays associated with them–drive the cost of housing up tremendously. Many jurisdictions are far, far behind state-suggested targets. We need to work to improve permitting processes to make them easy-t0-access, quick, and predictable, including state mandates for jurisdictions that aren’t doing it on their own.

Government support for permanent supportive housing and very low income housing.

Permanent Supportive Housing (PSH) is housing that has services built in. It’s designed for those folks who have medical or other challenges such that they really can’t live completely on their own but don’t need full support facilities like hospitals. It doesn’t, and never will, pay for itself. Medicaid and other dollars can be leveraged, but we’re going to have to find a way to house these very needy individuals or homelessness will continue to increase.

Mandatory affordable housing for all new construction.

Shoreline does it successfully and the whole state should, too. Every new market-rate construction project should have a required percentage–or a fee in lieu for smaller projects–of affordable units at both the 80% and 50% AMI threshholds.

Flexible ownership options like land trusts.

Affordable purchase options are few and far between. Programs like land trusts, which enable a trust to own the actual land but individual homeowners to own the homes on it, reduce the cost of purchasing a home dramatically.