Published March 2001

Now’s the time to generate housing solutions

Snohomish County is the fastest-growing county in the state of Washington. It is among the top 25 fastest-growing counties in the United States.

So, why the energized campaign to bring even more development, more jobs and more people when growth seems difficult enough as it is?

It’s all about how we will grow. Few of us are willing to accept the arrival of whatever business enterprise wants to move here without regard to the impact on our communities, transportation network and environment. Allowing such unbridled growth would create an unplanned, little-regulated and conflicted business environment that would erode, not promote, our quality of life.

Instead, our focus is on attracting companies and organizations that will create minimal environmental disruptions while bringing long-term, family-wage jobs that rely on the existence of a highly educated and skilled work force.

To fully appreciate this planned future business development, to enjoy benefits that such job creation will bring, we must work to provide an important support element: decent, comfortable and fairly priced housing for people of all income levels.

To achieve this goal, we must begin to slow the trend toward housing prices rising at a far higher rate than inflation. We need to encourage the building of a wide variety of quality housing, including planned-condominium and zero-lot-line housing communities especially attractive to young professionals as well as people whose housing no longer requires a conventional single-family detached house on a half-acre lot.

I envision the formation of a group similar to The Housing Partnership, a nonprofit agency formed 11 years ago to confront the dwindling availability of housing for moderate- and middle-income households in King County.

Such an organization is composed of leaders in the building trade, government, business and the community interested in fostering a wide range of housing development while emphasizing affordability and maintaining neighborhood character.

In King County, The Housing Partnership’s Year 2000 work program emphasizes the development and refinement of public policy options that can be adopted by local governments.

Specific policies being encouraged include improving the development climate for mixed-use housing in urban centers, allowing cottage housing in single-family areas, permitting detached accessory housing, and the building of townhouses and small multi-family buildings in broader areas.

The discussion has paid off. In Shoreline, the city’s new development code allows construction of cottage clusters in all residential areas; other cottage developments are emerging in Seattle’s Capitol Hill, Greenlake and Greenwood neighborhoods.

Even so, Housing Partnership Chair Norm Rice concedes that achieving major breakthroughs that encourage wider and affordable housing is slow and frustrating. That’s why I believe, before our housing availability and cost problem becomes a crisis in Snohomish County, the time is now for leaders to unite to look for reasonable and effective solutions.

Deborah Knutson is President of the Snohomish County Economic Development Council. She can be reached at 425-743-4567 or send e-mail to dknutson@snoedc.org.

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