Over the next 20 years, King County will need to add hundreds of thousands of housing units.

Last edited Tue Oct 8, 2024, 01:58 PM - Edit history (1)

The Puget Sound region’s housing problem comes down to math. There is too much demand, not enough supply and building more affordable housing is often too expensive for a private developer to tackle alone.

But officials in King County’s two largest cities — Seattle and Bellevue — are cautiously optimistic that they will meet lofty 25-year production goals.

A report released by King County’s Growth Management Planning Council in January 2023 defined the shortage in sharp detail. To meet the housing demands from the estimated population growth, it found the county as a whole needed 308,677 new housing units — both affordable and market-rate — in the 25-year period that retroactively began in 2019 and ends in 2044. Of that total, 147,000 new housing units are needed in Seattle and Bellevue alone.

“This number is daunting, but we have known for some time that our county is increasingly unaffordable for people at all levels of income, with the heaviest impact falling on low-income individuals and families, seniors, young people and people of color,” Claudia Balducci, King County Councilmember and affordable housing committee chair, wrote in the report’s introduction.

https://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/news/2024/10/07/affordable-housing-developments-shortage.html