City gets lesson on affordable housing from others’ trials

Laws must require developers to include affordable housing in their projects, not give them the option, Gjovik said. But government also must throw developers enough carrots for it to financially work.

“This is not an attempt to lay the whole problem of affordable housing at the feet of the developers,” she said.

An inclusive housing ordinance, as such a law is called, is one of many tools under consideration by the Countywide Housing Affordability Taskforce, a joint project of Whatcom County and Bellingham governments. The task force is discussing strategies to create 11,000 units of affordable housing by 2022.

In Bainbridge Island, a recent study found that every 100 houses built and priced at $680,000 created the need for 29 low-income units, Butler said. Every 100 condos sold for $446,000 created the need for 22 affordable units.

To come to that conclusion, the study calculated how much disposable income residents of those 100 houses would have. Then it projected how many and which jobs they would stimulate in the local economy by spending that disposable income. Lastly, it calculated the probable wages for those jobs and determined how many of those employees would need affordable housing, Butler said.

In Bainbridge Island, the median new home price is $821,000, Butler said. In Bellingham, the median was $340,000 last year.

In Bainbridge Island’s proposed inclusive housing ordinance, developers must sell 15 percent of the units in their development at a price that households making 80 percent or less of the Kitsap County median income can afford. For each cheaper unit built, developers would get permission to build an additional unit to sell at full price. The city would provide other carrots, such as expedited permit processing, relaxed site rules and a delay in charging permit and utility fees.

The cheaper units would remain “perpetually affordable” because each time somebody wanted to sell the house, a community land trust would calculate the 80-percent-ofmedian- income level and set the sale price so someone making that amount could afford it.

The proposed laws would replace a voluntary program the city eliminated in 2005 because it was difficult to administer and the houses returned to market rates upon resale, Gjovik said. It was also prone to legal challenges, according to the Bainbridge Island Review newspaper.

Friday’s talk was sponsored by the Bellingham-based nonprofit Kulshan Community Land Trust.