Welcome Home Legislation will provide opportunities
for more housing - and a better quality of life.
What is “Welcome Home”?
Welcome Home is a comprehensive plan to provide additional types of housing and ramp up incentives for local jurisdictions to provide more and diverse housing types such as duplexes, triplexes, and cottage housing. Under Welcome Home, a series of legislative initiatives designed to allow more housing for our communities.
Why Welcome Home?
Washington underproduced housing with just 225,600 units between 2000 and 2015. The lack of housing affordability, with the rising cost of living, has led to more homelessness – and a lower quality of life for everyone. Washington now has the lowest number of housing units per household of any state in the nation.
- Washington’s homeownership rate was 43rd in the country by the end of 2020.
- Homeownership for black Washingtonians declined by 16 percent over the past 20 years – it is now 11 percent lower than homeownership rates nationally for Black Americans.
- Over the past year, Zillow’s typical home price estimate for Washington rose from $434,000 to $530,000 – an increase of 22 percent.
The Washington Legislature needs to do more to increase housing inventory and keep housing development costs down. The Welcome Home plan is a step in the right direction.
Welcome Home proposals include:
- The Welcome Home Toolkit and Local Officials Guide to help local governments develop an overall affordable housing strategy and engage stakeholders in the community.
- Welcome Home awards funding to local governments for assistance in adopting land use strategies, which would enable the local government to be competitive in applying for a housing development incentives grant.
- A Welcome Home Grant supports local governments in adopting effective tools to spur housing creation with a menu of strategy options broad enough that any community can be successful in finding the right mix of strategies that fit its community.
To learn more about Welcome Home:
Home ownership Opportunities for Washington Families.
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