Inslee’s $4 billion housing plan is doomed. Here’s why — and 5 things that would help | Opinion

Washington needs more low and middle-income housing.

Unfortunately, Governor Jay Inslee’s plan to borrow $4 billion for the state to build housing is misguided, doomed to fail and irresponsible.

The governor’s proposal is misguided because it doesn’t address why people live along freeways and in parks, or why more low and middle-income housing is not being built now.

In his recent State of the State speech, Inslee proclaimed, “Though some people face behavioral health challenges or chemical addiction issues, the fundamental, underlying challenge is that we don’t have enough housing.” If he wants to lift people off the streets, he needs to flip that sentence around.

For those living in tents and boxes, the fundamental, underlying challenge is that they face behavioral health and chemical addiction issues. Until you solve those problems, they will remain on the streets. In over a decade as a volunteer overnight manager at a local homeless shelter, I talked with many men who if we gave them an apartment and a job, would lose both in weeks. Their problem wasn’t that they lacked an apartment. Their problem was that they had lost control of their lives. Borrowing $4 billion won’t fix that.

Unfortunately, the governor’s plan also won’t help those who can’t afford rent and are living with family or friends — because it doesn’t address the causes of our housing shortage.

Low and middle-income housing is not being built because land is expensive, permitting is expensive, getting local community approval is time-consuming (and expensive), building codes drive up costs, and it is increasingly difficult to evict people who do not pay their rent. Add that up, and too often it just doesn’t pencil out to build low and middle-income units.

Want more low and middle-income housing? Here are five immediate steps Washington should take:

• Make certain state lands available to developers at below-market costs in exchange for regulating rents on the property like a public utility.
• Eliminate permitting fees and cut property taxes for anyone who builds a small house rental in their backyard.
• Review every environmental, energy-efficiency, health and access regulation to determine if any can be revised in a manner that reduces construction costs.
• Provide a time-guaranteed permit review period for low and middle-income housing projects.
• Make it easier to evict a tenant who does not pay rent, breaks the law or damages property.

Because the governor’s plan doesn’t address root causes, it is doomed to fail. Inslee’s proposal looks like it’s been copied from what is being tried in Los Angeles, and is failing.

Los Angeles voters approved over a billion dollar bond issue to subsidize building low and middle-income housing to get people off the streets. But as Ezra Klein recently explained in The New York Times, despite spending hundreds of millions of dollars, homelessness there is worse. The city promised to build 10,000 apartments at a cost of about $120,000 per unit. Los Angeles hasn’t built anywhere near 10,000 units, and the average unit cost is about $600,000. Why? Land is expensive. Permitting takes forever. Building codes drive up costs.

This is not true across the country. New York, California, Washington, Oregon and Hawaii have the largest homeless populations in the United States per capita. These are states where land is expensive, and where the cumulative effect of years of Democrat-authored regulations have driven up building costs. We can spend $4 billion, but until we deal with that donkey in the room, all we will have to show for our spending is debt.

Taking on debt is why the governor’s proposal is irresponsible.

While Inslee loves to emulate California, that does not mean we have to follow the state into a pit of debt. But under Inslee’s leadership that appears to be where we’re headed. Washington’s per capita public debt is already just about as high as California’s. Washington state’s interest payments on our existing debt are already the fifth highest in the nation, as a percentage of general fund revenues.

That doesn’t mean Washington shouldn’t make housing investments. It means we shouldn’t borrow to do it, and we don’t need to.

When I ran for governor only six years ago, state revenues were about $40 billion. Today they’re about $70 billion. If the governor were truly committed to investing in housing, he’d find a few billion among the $30 billion in new revenue to spend on this. There is no need to borrow. There is a need to set priorities.

The governor has identified the right problem.

His problem — and that makes it our problem — is that he’s trying to solve with borrowed money and vapid rhetoric like, “It’s time to step up to the plate and do big things.”

Instead, Inslee needs to confront why this problem exists.

Bill Bryant, who served on the Seattle Port Commission from 2008-16, ran against Jay Inslee as the Republican nominee in Washington’s 2016 governor’s race.

This story was originally published February 13, 2023 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Inslee’s $4 billion housing plan is doomed. Here’s why — and 5 things that would help | Opinion."