Our hope for the 2022 legislative session? Action that will get more people housed

The legislative session that begins this week has a very full agenda.

But here in the state capital, what’s needed most is action on housing: housing for people who can’t afford to buy houses, housing for those who can barely pay rent, and housing for people who are homeless.

There is clear data showing that lack of affordable housing has been the chief cause of the increase in homelessness since 2012 — not addiction, and not untreated mental illness. Those are urgent problems, but even if they didn’t exist, we would still have a housing shortage.

There is also clear data showing that access to affordable housing — and especially home ownership — is essential to redressing the heritage of racist housing and lending laws. In Washington, 67 percent of white households are homeowners; only 31 percent of Black households are. The disparity in homeownership is the driver of the disparity of family wealth and all that goes with it, from higher educational attainment to a secure and comfortable retirement.

For years, our state has not built enough housing to accommodate our growing population, and the housing that does get built is unaffordable to an ever-growing percentage of Washington people. And as we all know, housing costs are rising far faster than wages. We are digging this hole deeper with every passing year.

Right now, increased tax revenue and federal COVID relief money provide a golden opportunity to invest more in housing.

Last year’s budget-writing session did make big investments: $175 million to the Housing Trust Fund to build low-income housing, and another $120 million to buy buildings that can be converted to those purposes.

But that money won’t go far enough. The per-unit cost of housing funded in part by the Housing Trust Fund ranges from $277,142 to $459,159, according to the state Department of Commerce.

Gov. Jay Inslee has proposed investing $815 million in housing this year. Two-thirds of that will come from federal COVID relief funding.

But not all of these millions will actually build housing. To keep people housed, $100 million will help pay utility bills for people at risk of eviction. Another $48.6 million will expand behavioral health care to prevent people from being discharged into homelessness, or returning to homelessness once they’ve been housed. Fifty million will aim to get people currently camped on public rights of way into housing. One hundred million will sustain funding for shelters. And an additional $6 million will expand efforts to keep young people leaving foster care, juvenile rehabilitation or inpatient behavioral health care from becoming homeless.

We hope legislators will be at least as ambitious as the governor in funding housing-related priorities.

But we need more than money. We need policy changes that will nudge private sector developers toward building housing that is affordable, and require local governments to reduce obstacles to achieving that goal.

Our own 22nd District Rep. Jessica Bateman and Sen. Mona Das, D-Kent, are pushing one idea: eliminating single-family house zoning near transit stops. Doing so would open up city land to make room for duplexes, triplexes and other types of “missing middle” housing that costs less. Gov. Inslee supports this proposal.

We hope other legislators also will have creative ideas about how to reduce the cost of private-sector housing construction. Can the state provide grants to replace local impact fees cities levy for parks, schools and other infrastructure? Can the state get local governments to streamline permitting processes? Can they encourage use of new materials and technologies that make home construction less expensive and housing more energy efficient?

Even with the plus-size investments the Governor has proposed, it’s the private sector, not government, that produces most of the housing we live in. We need creative, well-crafted state policies that can steer private investment towards truly affordable housing — lots of it, the sooner the better.

This story was originally published January 9, 2022 at 5:00 AM.