An housing expert based in Atlanta, Ga. arrived in Spokane this week for an informal cross-country partnership.
Colin Delargy is the assistant director of Atlanta’s Housing Innovation Lab, a program in Mayor Andre Dickens’ office that helps coordinate and enact housing policy.
The Dickens administration has set a goal of building 20,000 units of affordable housing before the end of the decade. Thanks in part to a groundbreaking network of public and private partnerships, the city has built a little more than 14,000 units to date and is widely seen as a success story in the affordable housing policy space.
On Monday, September 28, Delargy spoke at “Housing for the Public Good,” a public forum hosted by the Spokane Alliance and the Spokane Low Income Housing Consortium.
SPR’s Audrey Nelson sat down with Delargy to ask him what Spokane can learn from Atlanta when it comes to housing.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
COLIN DELARGY: So the Housing Innovation Lab — it’s our responsibility to turn over every rock and figure out how we solve the affordable housing issues that have challenged Atlanta for the last…while.
AUDREY NELSON: And tell me about those issues. How would you characterize them?
CD: Well, first and foremost, it’s just the number of available affordable units to folks at a range of affordability levels. So that’s the first issue, always, is just: How do we get more built?
AN: I know that collaboration between agencies and organizations has been particularly important for teams in Atlanta that are addressing housing issues. Can you speak to how that collaboration has been accomplished?
CD: There are things that the city can do that our housing authority can't do. There are things our housing authority can do that our land bank can't do. There are things our land bank authority can do that our transit authority can't do. And we realized we probably need everyone to be in the same room, talking about what we want to do and how we can help each other do it.
That all started, really, from a mandate from [Mayor Andre Dickens]. He said to us, “I don't want to hear about why you can't do it. I want us to get together and figure out how we're going to do it.” And “it” being creating 20,000 units of affordable housing. Right now we are at 14,060-some odd units that have either been delivered or are under construction. And we are on the path to 20,000, which is where we need to get by the end of the decade.
In 2024, the mayor said, “In the next two years, I want 500 new units of permanent supportive housing built in two years.” Housing doesn't get built, from idea to people living in it, in two years. That just doesn't happen. And we did it. And we did it by taking containers that had been used as COVID hospital rooms and retrofitting them into housing. We did it by taking a piece of public land next to our water treatment plant and building modular housing on it. We did it by buying Airbnb complexes in really nice parts of town.
We used every tool that we had, and we did it. And earlier this year, we ribbon cut at our 500th unit. And that's — you know, kind of out of nowhere, 500 new homes for folks who are experiencing homelessness.
AN: I do want to understand why you’re here in Spokane. First, how did you get connected with Spokane Alliance and the Spokane Low Income Housing Consortium?
CD: Sure. So Spokane Alliance reached out to me earlier this year, just doing research about who's doing interesting things in the space of housing. And we realized that there was some shared challenges that we had and still do experience that were experienced here in Spokane. Also some differences. And thought it could be a good opportunity to roll up our sleeves and figure out what's what.
AN: So — get into some of those similarities for me, to start with.
CD: Sure. On the one hand, obviously everywhere in the country is just an affordability issue in general. I think that there's a lot of similarities as well in terms of — kind of a landscape of different public authorities and private partners and philanthropic partners who all want the same thing, but maybe are still learning how to work together.
AN: Yeah. Tell me about the kinds of conversations you've had with regards to what lessons could Atlanta offer Spokane — or, what good could your presence do here while you're having these conversations?
CD: Totally. A lot of the conversation that I've noticed is: How do we take a more proactive public stance to guide development and to guide the type of development that we want to see? In demonstrating that that can happen and that it is happening — but it takes public leadership — is one of the things that I've been excited about in the conversation so far.
We ended up creating a new entity because we realized that none of the entities that we had could do the trick. At the end of the day, we said, “Okay, we've got a couple of projects we're really excited about, but the difference between them happening and not happening is whether someone's going to do it. We don't know who's going to do it, so we've got to make who's going to do it.”
I feel like that's some of the conversation that I've heard here, is: “We see some potential. We know that there's land that we have or there's development opportunities, but what's going to be the thing that actually does that for us and how do we make sure that that thing does something that's good for Spokane?”
AN: The recent Spokane Complex Wildfires here have meant that many Spokane residents are facing increased housing challenges. Can you think of solutions or innovations that might be best for addressing this shortage?
CD: A moment like that can help galvanize things. Crises require crisis-type intervention and crisis-type focus. I think that there may be some opportunities to think no-nonsense and really decisively.
If this is what we need to do, this is what we're going to do. We have examples of getting 100-unit complexes of homes built in six months. That can be done. Physically, the engineering is there. It's just a question of: Are we going to do it?
