Affordable Housing & Homelessness

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Issues

Washington state has a housing crisis. This is a shared problem that affects all communities across Washington. On any given day, we have over 21,000 people experiencing homelessness and countless people struggling to pay their rent or mortgage. A recent report found Washington’s housing supply was short by about 225,000 homes. Child homelessness has doubled in the last decade.

There are dozens of variables that cause a person or family to experience homelessness. Because of this, there is no single solution that lawmakers can enact to solve the problem. Conditions within each community struggling with homelessness challenges are unique and will require solutions from many different approaches.

Homelessness is not a Democratic or Republican problem. It’s not a Western Washington or Eastern Washington problem. It’s not an us vs. them problem.

It’s a shared problem that affects all communities across Washington.

And the only way to solve the problem is by working towards solutions in a collaborative way as lawmakers, community leaders, local officials, advocates, tenants, and property owners.

We’re all in this together, and together we can find mutually beneficial solutions.

With homelessness on the rise in Washington state, the Senate created a dedicated committee to address this growing problem. I was honored to be selected by my colleagues to chair the Senate Housing Stability & Affordability committee.

In the last two years, we’ve enacted new policies and investments that put people first – bipartisan legislation that will have a direct impact on people’s lives for the better:

  • Enacted incentives to encourage the building of more affordable housing.
  • Extended notice periods for rent increases, change of use, and mobile home owners.
  • Increased the pay or vacate timeline to align with the standard practice in other states, giving people more flexibility to pay their rent helping keep that family in their home.
  • Gave local governments additional flexibility with locally collected property taxes by expanding the use of those funds for affordable homeownership, owner-occupied home repair, and foreclosure prevention programs for low-income households.
  • Through the budget process lawmakers added $175 million to the Housing Trust Fund for various housing programs and services in 2019.
  • And in the 2020 supplemental operating and capital budgets, lawmakers allocated an additional $174 million to address affordable housing and homelessness with new investments in services such as reducing youth homelessness, supporting a grant program for pregnant women and single mothers, and helping struggling families afford child care.

These were excellent steps in the right direction, but there’s still much more we can and should do.

TVW Video: Watch my 2020 session opening remarks during the Senate Housing Stability & Affordability Committee.