A sustained housing shortage hovers at a crisis level in the Inland Northwest.

It has for years, but now, high interest rates have exacerbated the problem, making it harder for developers to make projects pencil out and putting homeownership out of reach for more families. Fewer projects make fiscal sense in the current reality, and financing is more elusive for more people than it was at one time. 

In such an environment, elected leaders should be doing what they can to ease pressure and encourage development of workforce and market-rate housing. At a minimum, they should try to avoid taking steps to make development of housing more difficult. 

An oft-cited 2021 report from the Spokane Association of Realtors revealed that Spokane County was underbuilt by about 32,000 housing units during the 2010s. A decade worth of “‘lost opportunity,” as the Realtors group puts it, pressured housing prices upward to where the median price crested $300,000 and put rental occupancy rates below 2%. 

Three years later, the average working-class family looking to get into their first home likely would look at the $300,000 median home price enviously, as prices have soared in a relatively short period of time to a median of more than $400,000. 

Rental vacancy rates have increased some, but still remain below 5%, far from a renter’s market.

Despite those market realities, new laws and ordinances seem to make developing and owning property more difficult or more expensive. 

Now, the City Council has passed an emergency ordinance that places a yearlong building moratorium in the Latah Valley once again, after halting development there for six months while working on a new plan for citywide impact fees last year. The Journal's stance is the same now as it has been for quite some time. The state's Growth Management Act compels municipalities to draw urban growth boundaries and permits development only within those boundaries. It isn't fair for a city to draw a boundary around itself and restrict development to that area, then take the additional step of stopping development within that boundary. That would be true if we weren't in a housing crisis, but the moratorium is even more tone-deaf to the reality of a housing shortage. 

The city also has passed an ordinance that expands to 180 days the minimum notice that landlords must give tenants before raising rents. While the intentions are good, some developers say they will raise rents proactively as a hedge against inflation and other unforeseeable cost increases that might arise in the future, affecting affordability and potentially compelling some to look elsewhere to build. 

Factor in the state's Clean Buildings Act, which is requiring many owners of large buildings to invest thousand of dollars into analyzing their structures for energy efficiency and tens of thousands of dollars into otherwise unnecessary improvements, and public safety issues in many neighborhoods, and there clearly is a chilling effect on development. 

The housing crisis requires long-term vision, and as we seek answers to the problem together, elected leaders should be mindful not to make the situation worse. Thus far, it doesn't seem as though they have taken that into consideration, at least not at City Hall.