The A’s of Housing

 

It is fair to say that our housing policy in this community has failed. Housing prices have increased almost 20% nationwide since the pandemic started, and many of the negative issues identified in our own community are related to housing — or to the lack thereof. Bellingham residents have repeatedly indicated housing, homelessness and jobs as their top issues and concerns in the yearly City of Bellingham Community Survey. Housing is too scarce and too expensive, and we have too many neighbors who are unhoused. What’s more, due to housing shortages in our community, we have had difficulty recruiting additional employers to our community who pay family wages.

In our responsibility to give Whatcom County residents the best possible chance to succeed, we have failed.

Often in our society, we attempt to make things easier to understand by framing it with “The ABCs of …” whatever topic. It is my feeling that we have failed on the housing front to such a degree that we need to start at the beginning of the beginning — with just “The A’s.”

Affordable

Is Kleenex a brand or product category? Who knows. And unless you are a shareholder in Kimberly-Clark (NYSE: KMB) or a member of its marketing department, you may not care.

“Affordable” is the “Kleenex” of socioeconomic policy terms — it means many different things to many different people. Some think affordable housing is only related to those in emergency or subsidized housing. Others would argue it is tied to area median income (often referred to as AMI), which is the average household income for a statistical area (meaning that half of the area’s households earn less than the AMI and half more). For many who are less able to afford their mortgage or rent, “affordable” often simply refers to their financial ability and comfort.

Most economists have jettisoned the word “affordable,” as it no longer has real meaning from a statistical perspective — and since we want to solve housing, we need hard data and information.

Available

As of a few years ago, this was my favorite term in housing policy. It may be the most underutilized and valuable term we have. Why? Because we can measure it multiple ways. In fact, we already do measure availability via rental vacancy rates, months on the multiple listing service, and permits pulled at City Hall.

As I mentioned in the intro, everywhere has an affordability issue right now, caused in part by drastic increases in housing costs. In our corner of the world, we have been struggling with affordability for a decade or more.

But we also face an availability crisis. Opponents of increased housing would argue that “we can’t build our way out of it.” I agree — at least, we can’t build our way out of it in the short term and without smart policy decisions from our elected leaders and compassion from those who are current homeowners. However, building more may ease at least some of the pain. And, what’s more, building additional housing shouldn’t exponentially increase costs — but doing nothing will.

Since we currently measure availability, we should benchmark goals against those metrics.

Now, for my new favorite housing word.

Abundant

We need abundant housing. Period. And who doesn’t like an abundance of good things? Just recently, I learned of this housing term from “Slow Boring,” the Matthew Yglesias blog. “Abundant” is not a mandate for more four-bedroom, nondetached homes; we need a diverse supply of housing options.

If we care about solving homelessness, we need housing.

If we want to be inclusive and accepting of diversity, we need a variety of housing options.

If we want to keep and recruit well-paying jobs (and if we want to keep families, youth and graduates here), we need housing. Local — and potentially local — employers have been saying the same thing: We need housing, and we need it abundantly.

So. What do we do next? How do we improve the supply of housing in Whatcom County, and how do we do so while making sure that more people can afford a home?

There are no simple answers, of course. But here’s what we as a chamber are working on right now:

• Advocating for increased workforce housing near employment areas.
• Collaborating with Sustainable Connections Whatcom Housing Alliance on affordability and availability options and convening workforce housing stakeholders and advocates.
• Providing adequate support for the homeless.
• Decreasing policies that increase costs to housing and households.

We would love to have your help in this. A community that fulfills the three A’s of housing needs support from individuals, businesses and policymakers. Please reach out to the chamber to discuss how we can actually make progress on the issue of housing in Whatcom County.

-Guy Occhiogrosso, President/CEO
Bellingham Regional Chamber of Commerce

Photo by Breno Assis on Unsplash