Republican and Democrat legislators both use the word “crisis” to describe the state’s affordable-housing situation. A look at the housing-related bills passed during this year’s legislative session calls into question just how serious Democrats really are about solving it.
To put it in context, let’s go back to a few days before the session began in mid-January. Speaking to news reporters, the leader of the state Senate’s majority Democrats basically promised his members would pass a suite of legislation to encourage more housing construction.
They understood, he added, that the affordability crisis in Washington won’t be solved unless the private sector builds more homes.
Recently, my Democrat counterpart publicized what he views as the significant new laws related to affordable housing. There are eight, but only if you include the majority’s rent-control law and another expanding the list of things that can’t be included in rental agreements.
Of the six bills left on his list, only two — both introduced by Republicans — really get at how land is developed, and they aren’t likely to make a major difference in the near term.
There’s nothing wrong with the other new laws, which include fiddling with minimum parking requirements and requiring denser housing near major transit stops. But this was no “suite” of policy changes that will promote construction.
Republicans, in contrast, offered an 18-bill package of housing solutions. Two-thirds of those go directly at the factors that add time and cost to housing construction, which carry through to the sales price or rent cost. We’re talking about the basic things that hinder development, like zoning laws, fees, taxes and permitting.
We offered four other bills aimed at housing providers and tenant protections, and another pair of proposals taking a modern approach to a housing solution from the past: the kit home.
Out of all those Republican bills, the majority supported just two. Under the new law created by Senate Bill 5471, up to four units of “middle housing” may be built per lot in certain areas. Middle housing falls between single-family homes and apartment buildings, and includes duplexes, fourplexes, townhouses and courtyard apartments.
The law created by our Senate Bill 5529 will promote construction of accessory dwelling units by allowing more counties to offer a tax exemption for ADUs.
What wouldn’t Democrats support? Perhaps the best example is our bill to let more counties offer a tax exemption for projects to build, convert and rehab multi-family housing units. Some counties already can do that to encourage such projects in urban and suburban areas.
Republicans believe there’s a demand for affordable, multi-family housing units in rural areas as well. But one of the powerful environmental groups that has the Democrats’ ear opposed Senate Bill 5769, and that was all it took to kill the bill.
I don’t know what the Democrats have against kit homes, but another example is the House majority’s killing of our bill to get building codes in place for kit homes, even though Senate Bill 5552 had strong bipartisan sponsorship and was passed unanimously in the Senate.
In his pre-session prediction, the Senate majority leader did more than talk about passing a suite of pro-construction bills. He described housing affordability as a very close second to K-12 on the Senate Democrats’ priority list.
That certainly sounds serious, but now that the session is past, it seems more apparent than ever that the Democrats have a different definition of “housing crisis” than Republicans.
They clearly saw Washington’s lack of rent control as a crisis, putting words in their rent-control law to make it take effect immediately — the same emergency declaration that just happens to prevent voters from challenging laws through a referendum. But that’s as far as the “crisis” went; any interest they might have had in promoting home construction took a back seat.
It’s as though the majority is blind to the idea that rent control will shrink the supply of rental housing already on the market and either doesn’t realize or doesn’t care how it will cause investment capital to leave our state. If anything, Democrats should be working with us to bring more rental housing online by recognizing that what’s good for building homes to sell is also good for building homes to rent.
A case could be made that the Democrats’ approach to the affordable-housing issue resembles what some say about the homelessness issue — that there’s more incentive to avoid solving the problem while giving the appearance of passionately wanting to solve the problem.
Republicans would set a very different course if we were in charge. We would definitely look at making permitting easier and reforming the state energy code to restore the stability and affordability lost during Jay Inslee’s climate crusade.
But above those, we would finally focus the Legislature on making more land available for housing. Density requirements have their place, but there’s a reason that between 1984 and this past year, no state saw a higher home-price increase than Washington — a mind-boggling 828% rise. I would point immediately to the Growth Management Act, adopted in 1990.
The Democrats are willing to open up the GMA to add things like a “climate change and resiliency” goal, as they did in 2023, but when it comes to updating and reforming the law to make more land available for housing, they act like it’s written on stone tablets and can’t be touched.
It isn’t just the Senate majority leader whose words don’t fit the actions; the Olympia senator who chairs the Senate Housing Committee declared, with just a few days left in the session, that the housing crisis in Washington is out of control but Democrats had made “tremendous progress” on expanding the housing supply.
That’s simply not credible. The Department of Commerce claims our state will need a million new homes by 2044, which means building more than 52,000 homes annually. We are not on track for that, and more laws like those created this year — such as the one about warranties related to condominium construction — won’t get us there. The solution is to reduce regulation, empower the private sector, then get out of the way and let it work.
Although Democrats seem to recognize that the private sector holds the key to meeting our housing-construction need, they’ve overpromised and underdelivered. We must do better.
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Sen. John Braun of Centralia serves the 20th Legislative District, which spans parts of four counties from Yelm to Vancouver. He became Senate Republican leader in 2020.
