Washington doesn’t have enough housing, so say some of the state’s most influential people, including Lieutenant Governor Denny Heck.
"The housing shortage obviously causes, by definition, cutthroat competition, and price increases, rapid price increases, follow as surely as night follows day," he said at a recent forum on housing sponsored by Greater Spokane.
"We can't grow our economy because we don't have enough houses. Simple fact of the matter. Businesses cannot expand. Businesses cannot locate here if they cannot find shelter for their employees. The housing shortage actually causes a bunch of problems that aren't intuitively obvious at all and that don't always leap off the page at you, but they are problems caused by the shortage nonetheless."
People who can't afford to buy housing often can't begin to build the wealth they'll need to live on in their retirements. Heck also argues the housing shortage exacerbates the racial wealth gap.
"The average black family has 10 percent of the net worth of the average white family because half as many black families own their homes as white families. They're directly related."
Heck was the opening speaker at the GSI summit. He was joined for a panel discussion by downtown Spokane developer Chris Batten from RenCorp Realty; Deborah Flagan from Hayden Homes; Ben Stuckart, the executive director of the Spokane Low Income Housing Consortium; and Greg Lane from the Building Industry Association of Washington. Jim Frank from Greenstone Homes was the moderator.
Frank says decades-old barriers erected by local, state and federal governments are partially responsible for the nation's housing shortage.
Jim Frank: Those barriers now make housing very difficult and expensive to construct. The building permit, for example, when I started business and we were building in Garden Springs and Manito Place in Spokane, you could get a building permit for a house in one or two days. We're doing work for a low-income housing developer in Spokane, trying to build a fourplex in the East Central neighborhood. We applied for a building permit in November of 2025. Nine months, and we still don't have the permit. That's an example of how the world has changed.
Chris Batten: The only way we're ever going to get to home ownership downtown is going to be if the state goes back and revamps it. If the state revisits the 2009 Condominium Act and bring some liability reform to that act because unless until we do that, we will not have any home ownership opportunities downtown for most people...With 83% of all housing units downtown being rental units, the only way we're ever going to get to home ownership is going to be by going vertical and building condos.
Deborah Flagan: We would love to build more homes in Spokane and Spokane County and the reality is that there is not the land available and there is plenty of land over in the Kootenai County area. The choice is, and the buyers that are coming through the door, we see it every day, they want a certain type of house. When cities determine that this is the type of homes that they're going to allow to be built, attached, only apartments are going to be built, and they dictate what's going to be there, they will go across the border and decide that they're going to live in Idaho. And that's what's happening here.
Ben Stuckart: If we look at the growth rates for the last five years on population growth and how many people are moving into towns, I think Spokane's at about 1 1⁄2% and the Rathdrum Prairie and Post Falls are at over 5%. And if we're losing all of the population across the border and then it all has to travel to work on I-90. But it's like the problem of compound interest if you look at that over a 15-year period and we consider those growth rates. Downtown Spokane, which is the urban center of our area, is going to be a shell of itself because it's not gonna have the population to support all of the new wealth in the region moving to Idaho.
Greg Lane: Only one in five families can afford to purchase a median price home in Spokane County. And that figure is also across the state. A healthy housing market, there should be 60% to 65% of families that can afford a median price home. And through policies at the state and local level over the last 30 years, we have driven people out of being able to access homeownership in the state. And it's a huge problem.
