The Washington State Department of Commerce (DOC) announced this week that it has awarded growth management grants of $25,000 each to Othello, Stevenson and Cowlitz County to help the communities address housing affordability.
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According to DOC, the grant funds will be used by the counties to develop housing action plans and adopt municipal code changes to make affordable housing more accessible to rural residents.
These grants support and strengthen communities in their efforts to address the statewide affordable housing shortage,” DOC Director Lisa Brown said. “Washington’s rural communities are not immune from the high cost of housing and low vacancy rates that challenge metropolitan areas, yet they have far fewer resources and staff to respond to the housing crisis.”
The urgency behind making affordable housing more accessible in rural Washington stems from data which shows that many rural communities now have rental vacancy rates well below the 7-8% considered healthy for the economy.
In a 2019 report published by the University of Washington’s Center for Real Estate Research, the statewide apartment vacancy rate was found to have declined slightly from 4.7% to 4.3% in Spring 2019.
While there was variability among the individual county rates, all of the counties outside of the Puget Sound region included in the report’s survey had vacancy rates below 5%, which – according to the researchers – is usually considered the threshold for a tight rental market.
An acute shortage of rental units is typically characterized as a vacancy rate below 3%. This was the case in every county outside of the Puget Sound region. While vacancy rates are rising in the Puget Sound region as well as Spokane and Clark Counties, most other counties are experiencing a tightening of the rental market as new rental supply has been slow to materialize,” read the report.
The report surveyed 327 one-bedroom units and found only three vacancies – a 0.9% vacancy rate.
In a statement announcing the grants, DOC also noted that middle and low-wage workers are being driven away from urban centers due to ballooning rents, effectively creating new bedroom communities in neighboring small towns and exacerbating the affordable housing shortage in those areas.
The housing policy plans and municipal code changes funded by the grant will address the following issues, as outlined by DOC:
In Othello, rental vacancy rates are less than 1%, and residential land is selling for more than industrial land.
In Stevenson, rapid increases in average home prices (26% in Skamania County between 2018 and 2019) and a high percentage of part-time seasonal residents (1 in 5 dwellings) have put intense cost pressure on the housing stock.
Cowlitz County is serving as an affordable bedroom community for pricier centers such as Olympia and Portland, and even with living wage jobs in the county, competition for available housing is high.”
This boon to funding for affordable housing comes after the Washington State Legislature passed a larger program last year which rural communities like Othello, Stevenson, and Cowlitz counties were not eligible for.
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