Housing stability allows families to put down roots, children to stay in the same schools, seniors to age in place, and the next generation to build a future in the communities they call home. That stability depends on having enough homes to meet demand. If we want our children, grandchildren and workforce to have the opportunity to live here, we need to be serious about removing the barriers that prevent more homes from being built.
We see how quickly government can act when disaster strikes, like the recent wildfires in Spokane that led to actions aimed at speeding up the rebuilding process. It shouldn’t take a disaster to bring that same urgency to our housing crisis.
Seattle recently had the opportunity to reduce a significant cost barrier to building popular housing options like townhomes. A wealth of data showed how local fees intended to fund affordable housing were no longer a significant revenue source and are also blocking new housing from starting. Unfortunately, after much community engagement with housing stakeholders, city leaders chose more process over more housing. A new stakeholder process was recently announced that reviewed the same data yet again. That decision illustrates the broader problem: When practical solutions are delayed, fewer homes get built.
Washington needs approximately 50,000 new homes every year just to keep pace with population growth. If we truly believe everyone deserves a place to call home, we must recognize a simple reality: If it costs more to build, it costs more to buy. Building more homes requires strong political leadership and community partnership to tackle this crisis, and a willingness to turn our region’s housing goals into actual homes.
Homebuilders are not immune to the economic squeeze we’re all experiencing. Every new home must absorb the cost of land, labor, materials, financing, local regulations and permitting before construction can begin. Some of those costs are beyond the control of local and state leaders, such as the rising cost of materials and borrowing rates.
Others, including permitting delays, unnecessary complexity, local fees and inefficient land use policies are the result of policy choices. Decisions that lead to excessive fees or utility connection costs, overly large buffers, or unnecessary delays and inefficient steps in the permit process, for example, impact the cost of housing just like the price of lumber or concrete.
I lead a local organization that represents homebuilders. One thing that all homebuilders have in common is that they must be practical. Whether they’re building a single-family home, town home, triplex or backyard cottage, you need to have a clear-eyed understanding of the costs and what it takes to make a project financially feasible. Every project carries risk, but as costs, delays and uncertainty build, projects quickly move from risky to infeasible. Too many well-intended local decisions ignore these practical realities.
Beyond our state, there have been some efforts to address problems that we can’t fix on our own here at home. For the first time in decades, housing is being addressed at the federal level with the bipartisan 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act. Encouragingly, it incentivizes local governments to demonstrate measurable increases in housing supply with federal grant dollars.
While these federal reforms are promising, the most important levers are local. The decisions made at city halls determine whether residents have more opportunities to find a home or continue facing rising costs due to limited choices.
A recent report by the state’s Department of Commerce intended to benchmark local permitting timelines reveals unclear and incomplete data. This reinforces the need for better performance measurement and underscores a reality that builders know too well: Permitting delays remain a bottleneck to delivering new housing. Performance measurement is important, but since we already know permitting delays remain one of the biggest barriers to delivering new housing, we don’t need to wait for a perfect report before making practical reforms.
We already know what works and should act with urgency. We can streamline permit processes, simplify regulations so they’re clear and objective, reduce unnecessary fees, invest in infrastructure and make land designated for housing more viable for housing. We cannot continue to favor process and delay over progress.
Those in need of homes don’t need more meetings, delays or process. They need action on practical solutions grounded in logic — not fear or misinformation — that will result in more homes getting built.
The question is not if we need more homes, it’s whether we’re willing to remove the barriers that prevent housing from being built. If we remain practical and focused on solutions, we can create more room for what matters.
