Keeping houses in reach

Published 7:48 pm Thursday, November 29, 2007

SMOKEY POINT — Developers and communities in Snohomish County need to work together to give a shifting population base more affordable and useful houses.

That was the message Thursday from a North Snohomish County Housing Forum aimed at finding solutions to rising prices and to requirements for denser development in urban areas.

North Snohomish County had been doing well in creating affordable homes, said Will Hall, long-range planning manager for Snohomish County’s planning and development services.

He noted that in 2002, 94 percent of the houses were affordable for people whose incomes were about 20 percent above the median, which is the level where half earn more and half earn less. Last year, only about 50 percent of the housing was affordable to someone at that level.

“It’s more of a challenge for all of us,” he said.

Hall also noted that from 2002 to 2006, prices for new houses went up 80 percent and that the size of houses increased by 35 percent during that four-year period.

“We’re building larger houses at a time when our family size is going down,” he said.

Households are shrinking as more singles and more retirees enter the market, Hall said, noting that demand in those groups is for a smaller, less expensive place.

Michael Luis, a housing consultant who was the conference’s keynote speaker, also highlighted the shifting demographics, talking about how people and politics are shaping our housing market.

Luis said most people still want a single-family house but are willing to give up large lots.

“They say they want large lots, but they aren’t willing to pay for them,” Luis said.

Driving affordability, he noted, are issues including proximity to jobs and communities, size of the house and new construction.

What’s needed, he added, is innovation in the types of houses that are built. Luis showed slides of a number of smaller, cottage-style houses built closely together on small lots with some community open space.

That type of construction would be perfect to add density in urban areas, but is often not allowed by city or county planning laws, which have stricter rules on lot sizes, street widths and other aspects of development.

Luis said governments need to work with builders to allow them to build housing they can make money on and will be affordable and attractive to buyers.

He said developers now must either choose from multi-family structures to the typical single-family house “with very little choice in between.

“What we’re after is more choice,” he said. “Builders know how to do this stuff. The solution to these problems is in working together.”

“Transforming housing markets to meet lifestyle, affordability and growth management goals is not a technical problem,” he said. “It’s political one.”

Donna Wright, a real estate agent and long-time Marysville City Council member, acknowledged that accommodating newcomers “is one of the challenges we have.”

Brian Holtzclaw, lawyer for the McNaughton Group, a developer mostly in south county, said there’s “a big disconnect between what the public perceives and the law requires.” He noted that people seem to hate both density and sprawl and have not been participating in the process of deciding those areas that will have more dense development as dictated by the state Growth Management Act.

“The perception is that we’re the bad guy,” he said. “But we don’t make money building bad product. We make money building what people want to buy.”

Mike Benbow: 425-339-3459; or benbow@heraldnet.com