February 16, 2023
MEDIA CONTACT: Dan Bertolet, Director, Housing and Urbanism Program, Sightline Institute, dan@sightline.org
FULL ARTICLE: 50 housing bills to watch in Olympia right now
OLYMPIA, WA – An absolute deluge of bills to support more housing options across Washington state is pouring through the legislature this session. Sightline Institute counts fully 50 unique measures addressing the supply, stability, or subsidy pillars of policy. Together these could unlock more of the one million homes the Department of Commerce estimates Washington needs to make up for decades of underbuilding and over-restrictive local zoning.
“The shift in support for housing solutions, from last year to this one, just can’t be understated,” says Dan Bertolet, author of a new summary of the bills and director of Sightline Institute’s Housing and Urbanism program. “State leaders get it. The public gets it. Now we just need more local leaders to get on board with the idea—a really basic idea, I think—that Washingtonians should be freer to build more kinds of homes in more places across our state.”
Read the full article: 50 housing bills to watch in Olympia right now
Related: Poll: Washington voters out ahead of local leaders on zoning reforms
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Dan Bertolet, Director of Sightline Institute’s Housing and Urbanism program, researches, writes about, and speaks about housing and urbanism. He has a background in urban planning and electrical engineering, and his passion is to help create cities that will thrive amidst the challenges of the 21st century. View his latest research, and follow him at @DanBertolet. (Last name pronounced BER-də-lay.)
Sightline Institute is an independent, nonprofit think tank providing leading original analysis of housing, democracy, forests, and energy policy in the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, British Columbia, and beyond.