I am a practicing architect who has designed and permitted houses in Western Washington for nearly 40 years. I have designed hundreds of structures that meet stringent life-safety and engineering standards. I am proud of the work I do.
In that time, I have watched Washington’s permitting process, especially the energy code governing each structure I design, evolve from a reasonable benchmark into an increasingly costly and time-consuming barrier to housing affordability.
Fifteen years ago, I could take a single-family house from first sketch to building permit in about three months. Today, layers of code analysis, regulations, review comments and corrections routinely stretch that timeline by months and, in some jurisdictions, well beyond a year. Despite government assertions that this is for the greater good, this burdensome process contributes directly to higher construction costs, higher sales prices and slower housing production.
As I write this, two houses sit on my desk. Each has consumed 18 months of my effort and nearly $75,000 in design, engineering and permitting fees before construction has even begun.
These are houses, not commercial buildings.
Houses did not become 10 times more complicated; the approval process did.
A new house today requires architecture, structural engineering, civil engineering, septic design, fire sprinklers, stormwater modeling, energy calculations, a ventilation strategy and a solar-ready roof zone, each with its own drawings, consultants and review process.
Every requirement sounds reasonable on its own. But these requirements were adopted one at a time, by different agencies, across different code cycles, with little apparent consideration of what they would cost when imposed together.
The cumulative cost is enormous.
Cost is not the only problem the energy code overlooks. A building is not constructed in a laboratory. It is assembled on-site by dozens of people over many months. Materials shift. Weather changes. People make mistakes. Yet each new code cycle demands increasing precision from this inherently imperfect process, then assumes the family who moves in will operate and maintain every system exactly as the designers intended.
At some point, this stops being simply about energy efficiency and starts becoming a science experiment.
I am not opposed to efficient buildings. I believe deeply in energy efficiency, and I have spent my career designing high-performance buildings. My own 1914 Craftsman in Ballard has a 29-panel solar array that supplies most of my annual electricity. I have insulated the walls and roof, replaced the water heater, installed high-performance storm windows and am preparing to replace the gas furnace with an electric heat pump.
What I question is whether this drive for perfection is the right strategy.
Washington does offer incentives to improve existing homes, but they are scattered across state and local programs, utilities, federal tax incentives and third-party administrators. The result is a patchwork that few homeowners fully understand and that bears little resemblance to the coordinated regulatory strategy applied to new construction.
This is a math problem. If the vast majority of our housing stock 20 years from now will consist of homes that exist today, why are we concentrating our toughest and most coordinated energy requirements on new construction?
The asymmetry of this strategy does not work. What makes sense is this: Before the state adopts another round of mandates, it should add up the cumulative cost of the rules already on the books, not just the price of the newest one.
Every new requirement should be tested against a simple question: How much additional energy does this actually save, what does it add to the cost of a home and how many homes does that cost prevent from being built?
Then we should ask whether some of that money and attention is better directed toward existing homes, where large and relatively inexpensive energy savings still exist.
For years, we have asked how much more efficiency we can extract from each new building. We have spent far less time asking what that pursuit costs: the higher design fees, the added construction costs, the months of delay, the projects abandoned along the way. The families priced out before construction begins.
What Washington desperately needs is more housing. Yet we continue to add cost and complexity to the small portion of the housing supply we are trying to create.
We should not have to choose between energy-efficient homes and homes people can afford. But for a long time now, those goals have been pulling in opposite directions.
Unfortunately, perfection is winning. And families are losing.
