Clark County has big housing problems. Housing has become too expensive and ill-suited for an aging population, and the industry faces barriers to building the housing that’s most needed.
Those are some of the takeaways from the Future of Housing Summit, a half-day event held Thursday at the old Red Cross building on the Fort Vancouver National Historic Site that drew about 100 people from the housing industry as well as a smattering of elected officials to hear about the county’s daunting challenges and potential solutions.
“I’m just going to give you all the bad news; I apologize,” Elliot Eisenberg, a former senior economist with the National Association of Home Builders and current chief economist of economic consulting group GraphsandLaughs, said during his keynote speech, which was peppered with dour statistics.
Eisenberg said that everything “seemed to be moving in the wrong direction” for the housing situation nationally and in Clark County. He said that in the wake of the Great Recession of 2008, the supply of cheap foreclosed houses is now gone, credit has tightened, millennials are too burdened by student debt to afford a mortgage, and a generation of workers have left the building trades, leaving a shortage of labor for the industry.
“The supply of homes is quite limited” as a result, he said. “It’s aiding and abetting increasing housing prices. … There is no inventory anywhere.”
Eisenberg said the solution is to build more varieties of housing. But he said that’s not happening because builders are faced with increasing regulations and fees. He said builders aren’t building much affordable housing or “starter homes” because they are unprofitable.
Instead, he said, they’re turning to expensive housing. According to Eisenberg, 52 percent of homes built in 2015 were larger than 2,400 square feet.
“The builders are building the wrong type of houses,” he said. “It’s not that they want to build the wrong type of house; they are building homes given the decks of cards they’ve been dealt.”
In Clark County
Eisenberg presented graphs showing Clark County’s burgeoning population and shrinking unemployment rate. But he said the housing supply isn’t keeping up. He said that the creation of single-family housing was “exceptionally weak” at 1990s levels, with multifamily housing left to pick up more of the slack.
During a panel discussion, Aaron Marvin, president of the Building Industry Association of Clark County, said that the limited developable land in the county coupled with regulations had created “a bubble.” He also described the housing market for Southwest Washington as “OK” and said it was meeting the needs of middle- to high-income buyers.
“Our new construction is leaving low-income and first-time buyers out in the cold,” he said. “Sometimes literally.”
Solutions
Eisenberg said a simple solution is to increase the supply of all types of housing, including modular or manufactured homes, single-room occupancies, small houses, accessory dwelling units or even a corrugated box with water and sewer service.
“You may look down on that type of housing (and say), ‘it’s for those people,’ ” he said. “But we’re all those people at some point in our life.”
He said “density is our friend,” even in suburban settings, although he later acknowledged such proposals generate blowback. He also called for an end to both inclusionary zoning (a requirement that developers include affordable units in a project) and exclusionary zoning, which requires developers to build high-end housing. He also cautioned local governments to be thoughtful in adopting regulations that could drive up housing costs, and advised against subsidies, saying they can become expensive.
If action isn’t taken, he said, the area risked becoming a “rich, beautiful, quiet not-growing-much community” similar to parts of California.
Gerontopia?
Wrapping up the event was Patrick Roden, founder of AginginPlace.com, who said that Clark County’s demographics were aging and were on pace to resemble parts of Florida’s retiree-heavy population.
“Folks, we are standing right now at a crossroads,” Roden said, with Clark County having the potential to become a “gerontopia” for its aging populace.
He said that while discussions on seniors often focused on their ability to age in their homes rather than in institutions, he instead called for a broader discussion of how seniors fit into social environments. Roden noted that aging baby boomers living in suburban settings, with a lack of transit, would face particular challenges.
Among the solutions he suggested included encouraging arrangements where seniors could rent out rooms, gaining additional income while helping perhaps a college student find housing. Additionally, he suggested “Golden Girls” situations where seniors live together as an option.
Roden also noted that many homes are aging and in disrepair and mentioned a program where medical insurance would help pay for upgrades to keep seniors’ homes safe.
