Home in Tacoma has big pluses: affordable housing, preservation of neighborhood character

As housing prices skyrocket in Tacoma, it is imperative for the city to redouble efforts to increase affordability. Tacoma’s current housing crisis is largely self-imposed due to decades of well-intentioned but increasingly restrictive and exclusive zoning laws and building codes.

When placed up against other policy concerns over the last 70 years, the city has almost always responded by making housing more difficult and expensive to build. On numerous occasions officials even outright banned housing in huge swaths of Tacoma.

It was only a decade ago the city banned hundreds of new housing units in Northeast Tacoma to save a golf course of all things. Around the same time, the city completely banned any housing on the east side of the Foss Waterway.

Dozens of similar actions over many decades have cumulatively contributed to making housing unnecessarily rare and expensive in Tacoma and caused an increase in the displacement of residents.

The best, most cost-effective approach Tacoma can take now is to join other cities around the country in allowing more flexibility in home building. The City Council can do this by approving a meaningful Home in Tacoma measure.

Virtually every known study on housing has concluded that cities that allow more housing construction have lower future price increases and a lower rate of displacement.

Home in Tacoma would allow more flexible housing types and help thousands of people find housing while not costing taxpayers a penny.

Some of the most sought-after and expensive places to live in Tacoma already contain a mixed of single-family homes, duplexes and triplexes forming neighborhoods with great character.

This legislation won’t prevent future construction of single-family homes.; rather, it will let the city continue its growth in an intentional way for additional density.

Tacoma is in an underdeveloped city of a fairly large geographic size, and it functions in many ways like a suburb. Tacoma leaders can, and should, increase incentives to build housing inside the city rather than out in the Pierce County suburbs.

The city should cease any actions which would dilute or remove the multi-family housing incentive program, which over 20 Washington cities use as a tool to reduce sprawl, the loss of farm and forest land, and the cities’ carbon footprint.

Tacoma should reject any consideration of an impact fee on new housing. Adding a tax on an economic activity is the surest way to make it more expensive. The state and federal government, for instance, impose high taxes on liquor and cigarettes to reduce use of these products.

Likewise, imposing new taxes on new housing would reduce development of these projects, thus exacerbating Tacoma’s housing crisis.

The city should also reject any effort to impose a design review process for new housing, as it would add a great deal of cost and delay to any project and make affordability worse, not better.

It is important that Tacoma have well designed, safe and well-functioning buildings. These standards can continue to be placed into the building and land-use code for new construction.

Having city officials make subjective decisions on individual buildings is a surefire way to slow or stop projects and would likely result in worse-designed structures.

With Home in Tacoma, we can continue to have attractive, beloved neighborhoods with great character while allowing more housing for residents to create a more inclusive city.

Erik Bjornson is a downtown Tacoma attorney who periodically writes for the TNT on urban issues. Joshua Jorgensen is a project manager at Tacoma Housing Authority.

This story was originally published July 30, 2021 at 12:00 PM.