OUR HOUSING CRISIS has complex roots going back decades.
As economist Jenny Schuetz says in her book, “Fixer-Upper: How to Repair America’s Broken Housing Systems,” housing is at the intersection of several complex systems.
To solve the housing crisis, we need supply, stability and subsidy.
Many of our state legislators have been thinking of housing policy as fitting into three categories: increasing supply, creating housing stability and security, and helping people who cannot afford market-rate housing. “Supply” gets the most attention in a lot of housing conversations, so let’s break it down first.
Supply isn’t just about building new, but also about maintaining what we have, especially for low-income households.
Housing supply isn’t just new homes. Our housing supply (or housing stock) equals our existing homes, plus new homes, minus homes no longer used as residential housing. Building new homes is far more expensive than maintaining existing homes, so good supply policy focuses on maintaining what we have so that we don’t lose housing stock. Programs like weatherization need to be scaled up to assist more working families and elders.
We also lose housing supply when buyers take housing out of the residential housing stock through converting residential housing into second homes or Airbnb. In Port Angeles, we found that much of the new supply we had enabled through policy changes like backyard cottages had just gone to Airbnbs, not residential housing, which is why we put a limit on the number of Airbnbs in Port Angeles.
When we think of our total housing supply, we should also segment it into supply for different household incomes.
Million-dollar homes are not attainable for working families. If we want everyone who works in Port Angeles to be able to live in Port Angeles, we need to build a greater variety of housing types, and specifically a lot more smaller inexpensive housing.
The supply conversation is often focused only on the cost to build new housing, not the cost to maintain it.
A key aspect of the maintenance cost that many people overlook is the infrastructure that supplies the home with utilities and transportation: streets and sidewalks (or roads), water, sewer, electricity, solid waste, emergency response.
When houses are spread out and thus more infrastructure is needed per house, the cost to maintain the public infrastructure per home goes up.
At suburban densities, the economic benefits of those new homes usually do not outweigh the cost to the public of maintaining the infrastructure for those homes, and either the infrastructure never gets maintained or the cost skyrockets.
There is no affordable housing without affordable infrastructure, so building more suburban sprawl isn’t actually helping us create financially sustainable communities.
An easy way to figure out whether a new housing development is going in the right place from a public infrastructure perspective is whether someone who lives there would be able to walk to do their errands.
The high economic cost of suburban development is part of the reason that the City of Port Angeles has waived our permit fees on infill housing, multi-unit housing and affordable housing, but not on single-unit sprawl.
Government subsidy should go to housing development that is financially sustainable for the whole community.
In short, good supply-side housing policy creates many more small, inexpensive housing units in walkable neighborhoods.
________
Lindsey Schromen-Wawrin is a Port Angeles City Council member.
