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This legislative session, I’m excited to support critical housing bills to fix one of the major root causes of housing affordability crisis in our state: the ongoing and growing shortage of homes. Washington State companion bills HB 1782 and SB 5670 (details here), sponsored by Senator Mona Das and Representative Jessica Bateman and championed by Governor Inslee, would legalize missing middle housing options up to sixplexes within a half-mile of transit and fourplexes everywhere else in cities with population of 20,000 or more, and duplexes everywhere in cities with population of 10,000 or more.
Over the last decade, Washington added jobs twice as fast as it added housing, forcing Washingtonians to bid against each other for existing homes. A primary cause of the shortage is exclusionary zoning laws that ban middle housing from around three-quarters of the state’s residential land. And this holds true in Seattle, where nearly 75% of our residential land is zoned to ban new multifamily housing and apartments.
For all our work here in Seattle and in other Washington cities to address housing affordability, we need state leadership and statewide solutions to address the scale of this issue—and we need all hands on deck, with cities across the state acting on zoning reform together. We’ve seen recent examples of state leadership on this issue from California and Oregon, with statewide legislation finally moving the needle of the issue of zoning reform—and we need similar action in Washington State.
The argument of “local control” is often used against state leadership on land use and zoning. However, as the National League of Cities notes, in these cases the state is not standing in the way of cities taking local action—they're setting a baseline and floor for cities in the state on progressive action on zoning reform. Other examples of state leadership on creating similar “floor preemptions” are Paid Family Medical Leave, fair housing laws to protect individuals and families from housing discrimination, police accountability, and vaccine mandates.
The approached outlined in HB 1782 and SB 5670 will allow cities across the state to do their part to address the state’s housing shortage, while tailoring requirements to the size of cities and availability of transit options. These bills will provide needed leadership on a statewide issue so that we can address the scale of our housing shortage--and doing it now rather than waiting years, even decades, for local action while our cities grow increasingly less affordable.
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