They wanted to build houses in Tacoma people could afford. Rising costs killed the dream
What started as a promising new venture to bring affordable housing to Tacoma came to an end this week with a social media post announcing its demise.
Green Harbor Communities, in a Wednesday afternoon announcement posted on its Facebook page, said it was abandoning its workforce housing project called The Preserve.
The planned community of more than 70 homes, adjacent to Charlotte’s Blueberry Park on land purchased from Tacoma Public Schools in 2018, was envisioned as a way to offer homes priced below $300,000 to those making $75,000 or less annually, via a leasehold program unique to the development.
The project also included 22 acres for wetland preservation and touted tree-canopy protection.
Those home prices now seem remarkable, given Pierce County’s median closed sale price for March hit $480,000.
In its Facebook post, Green Harbor’s developers blamed the project’s demise on economic headwinds amid the COVID-19 pandemic:
“Multiple factors played a role in this decision,” GHC said in the post. “In 2020, we all faced a global pandemic which caused every possible industry delay, companies hoping to take advantage, limited resources on materials, labor and funding. The most impactful issue has been the historic rise in lumber prices. For clarity’s sake, the same lumber package last year cost $19,000 while the current price is approximately $53,000.
“The most unfortunate and devastating part of the price increases is that we would not have been able to help our target buyers if we raised our prices to correlate with the market. We did not start this adventure to be another traditional developer. We started this to drive change and support our community’s essential individuals and families such as nurses, teachers, city employees, etc.“
In a telephone interview with The News Tribune on Thursday, Michael Pressnall, one of the developers, said the unaffordability aspect was devastating at a time when first responders to the pandemic were among those they envisioned as Preserve homeowners long before the pandemic.
The homes, essentially, became too expensive to build to keep at the price level they wanted to offer, with no one ultimately qualifying.
“When 100% of our buyer audience of nurses, teachers, city employees, the people who take care of us day in and day out — not a one of them would qualify for one of our houses, we lost all of our desire. Literally, nobody would qualify for our homes,” he said. “It didn’t pencil out because of those increases to material ... that was probably the thing that really kind of broke and was the final straw.”
Finding qualifying buyers also had been a challenge pre-pandemic as the developers told The News Tribune in 2019. That year, GHC moved to modify who could qualify, expanding to those working beyond a set-mile radius from the development, and would consider those making above $75,000 on a case-by-case basis, such as if the individuals made more but were also facing other hurdles such as paying down medical debt.
“Thankfully, all of our buyers have been notified, all money returned,” he told The News Tribune. “We were very upfront ... there were hurdles that we’re working through, this as a social experiment...
“It’s years of work; weekends, nights, holidays you know, personal investments. All of those things. Sadly, we ended here, and it is an incredibly hard place to be.”
He said the decision to shutter the project was made fairly recently, and what’s next is still up in the air for them.
The developers had grown close to neighbors in the area, who helped watch over the property. Sandra Ford, a nearby resident, told The News Tribune when reached via Facebook Messenger that she was “heartbroken” by the news.
“I was hopeful when they presented this idea to our neighborhood. But I can understand the hardships they faced. The high cost of lumber and other materials, property theft, homeless camps and COVID,” she wrote.
Pressnall said thefts in the area didn’t really affect the project’s outcome, but more to the point, it was perhaps an idea too far ahead of its time, noting it had attracted attention early from national media as part of the vanguard of “missing middle” housing creation, defined as options somewhere between more expensive new single-family home construction and market-rate apartments that don’t quite fit families starting out.
The ending, unfortunately, comes at the same time that the city is doing its own intensive review of rezoning and seeking ways to bring more affordable housing to the city.
GHC’s Facebook announcement came an hour before the Tacoma’s Planning Commission began their meeting to consider revisions to the Home in Tacoma project, a project whose goal is to pave the way for more “missing middle” housing much like The Preserve intended.
Affordability was a key topic at that night’s meeting, along with the risk of many people being priced out of the city if some kind of change didn’t occur.
“We were early to the game,” Pressnall told The News Tribune. “The goal wasn’t just to do a single development. The goal was to take it across the United States and change how people support our everyday workers who take care of us, our families, and to really give thought into the long-term plan for housing for a city. And so I still think that’s the goal, where we can come out.”
This story was originally published April 23, 2021 at 12:07 PM.
