Pierce County one of a few selected for national housing program. What will it do?
'Pierce County is excited to be just one of six counties selected to participate in this national program,' said County Executive Ryan Mello. 'The scale of our housing shortage requires us to do things differently. We're bringing folks together from multiple departments to tackle housing affordability and speed the pace of development, particularly among our high-density transit corridors.'
The program is the second national cohort of Counties for Housing Solutions (C4HS), from the National Association of Counties (NACo), designed to increase housing supply in urban counties.
Moore said the county will not receive any funding through the program, but would receive consulting services through a third party. The initiative is funded through a grant from the Gates Foundation.
NACo launched C4HS to help counties implement recommendations from NACo's 2023 Housing Task Force, convened with the goal of addressing America's housing crisis.
According to the county, the goal is implementing strategies to increase housing supply, bring down rents and create a pathway to upward economic mobility for American families.
Over a 12-week period, representatives from the Pierce County Council, Human Services and Facilities Management departments will work to develop underutilized, county-owned land for affordable housing. The plan begins with identifying available land and evaluating sites. Next comes community engagement and partnering with potential developers. The process will also include identifying financing to support the planned housing development.
Human Services Spokesperson Kari Moore told The News Tribune the program will use a cohort of seven teams selected to work together to increase affordable housing supply and build capacity to assess affordable housing opportunities on publicly owned land. The teams will meet weekly.
'It comes with access to partners at Smart Growth America and offers a technical assistance sprint with a suite of implementation-ready plans to address site selection, zoning, financing, affordability requirements, community engagement and developer procurement,' she said.
Smart Growth America is a non-profit coalition of housing advocates.
Moore said the program will help facilitate collaborative development of plans the county can use to increase its housing stock, and will provide the best practices and solutions that have proven successful for other counties.
'This will help us build skills to bring more tools to our marketplace on housing solutions that benefit everyone,' she told The News Tribune.
Pierce County's Housing Action Strategy estimates the region will need 110,000 new units in Pierce County by 2044 to meet the housing needs of residents.
'To fully meet the housing needs of current and future residents, the county needs to produce, on average, over 2,300 units per year of housing affordable at or below 50% of area median income through the year 2044,' the county's Housing Action Strategy published in 2022 found. 'Over half of these units are needed for households at 30% of AMI or below.'
According to Pierce County, the region's area median income is around $98,200 per household.
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