Dear friends and neighbors,
During the legislative session, my job as a senator is to be in the capitol building, developing policies and voting on bills. But when we are not in session, I spend as much time as I can out in the community, learning from the public about what is working well, what is working not so well, what problems we can solve, and what are the biggest priorities for us to take up in the next legislative session. This week, I took a bipartisan group of my colleagues from the Senate Housing Committee on a tour to learn about some of the opportunities and challenges we have in housing before us – here is what we heard.
Our first stop was a Metropolitan Development Council permanent supportive housing facility in Tacoma. These places are an important stop for helping people end homelessness, get off the street, and get their lives stable so that they can get a job and place to live of their own. Imagine trying to interview for a job without a home address, a place to wash your clothes, or reliable access to any of the million things like charging a phone and taking a shower that all the rest of us take for granted. MDC does not just provide housing – they also connect folks with educational opportunities, assistance with sobriety, and coaching to help people manage their lives better. This is important work, but it is under threat from federal government cuts. We passed legislation this year to provide more flexibility with state and local funding to help these supportive housing facilities use the money they have as best as possible, and we are going to continue that work. These are essential partners in our fight against homelessness.
Then we visited a factory that builds homes off-site, a model that we hope can be a cheaper and faster option to traditional home construction. The walls, frames, everything is prepared at a factory, then it is assembled in just a couple days at the site of the home, rather than doing traditional ground-up construction that takes a lot longer. It is an interesting new method that I hope catches on – I am sure we will not build every home this way, but if it works for some, that sounds good to me. Some of the barriers are in the private market, developers working to convince banks on financing projects built this way, and some of the barriers are in government that legislators can help to solve, like helping get permitting done well ahead of time so that the construction can move as quickly as possible. I think there is a lot of potential here, and we certainly need it if we are going to meet our goal of building a million new homes across the state in the next 20 years.
We ended our day at a Habitat for Humanity South Puget Sound site, where they are building 16 affordable new homes for folks. It was great to see the construction at work and I was so excited to see they were all middle housing duplexes! These are going to be available well below market prices and provide an essential stepping stone for smaller and growing families. Habitat is also starting to work with the off-site construction factory we visited earlier in the day – it is great to see the synergy at work.
Affordable housing is such a big challenge, and there is no silver bullet. We have passed bill after bill on the issue, and will continue to, but none of them will solve it alone. The way we solve housing affordability is “all of the above” – having supportive housing that helps get people off the streets and back on track, affordable housing developers who can build projects that families at modest incomes can still afford to buy, and builders who can build more projects, more quickly, and more cheaply while still upholding a great standard of quality so we can fill the market with the supply of homes we need for everyone to have a place to live. That is what we saw on our tour and seeing the progress firsthand is what inspires me to continue.
Are you seeing new housing in your neighborhood? I hope so! Let me know what is happening in your community and what you think we need to do next. You can reach me any time at Jessica.Bateman@leg.wa.gov, on housing or any other issue that is on your mind. Thank you for reading and have a great day!
-Jess
