Letter to the Editor: Do we really?

We all say we want affordable housing.

Do we really?

I don't mean that cynically. I think most of us genuinely want teachers, restaurant workers, young families, seniors and the people who keep this community running to be able to live here. But wanting affordable housing in principle is different from accepting what it may take to actually create it.

Start with a fairly ordinary three-bedroom house. Nobody sat down one morning and decided it should cost $500,000. It got there one decision at a time.

There's the land, lumber, concrete, labor and financing. But there's also engineering, permitting, utility connections, stormwater requirements, energy standards, environmental review and insurance. If approvals take longer, somebody pays interest while they wait. If there's an appeal or lawsuit, add attorneys, consultants and more time. More uncertainty creates more risk, and risk costs money.

Most of those requirements didn't come out of nowhere. Building codes exist because buildings failed or people got hurt. Environmental regulations came from lessons we learned, sometimes the hard way. Energy codes have real benefits. Public process exists because people deserve a voice in what happens in their community. There are good reasons for most of it, but good reasons aren't free.

We tend to debate each requirement individually. Is this regulation reasonable? Is this environmental protection important? Should the public have another opportunity to comment? Fair questions. But the person buying the house doesn't pay for these decisions individually. They buy the whole pile.

That's not an argument against regulation. It's arithmetic. If we're serious about the cost of housing, we have to be willing to follow those costs downstream, even when they come from decisions made with the best of intentions.

Once that ordinary house costs more than many working people can afford, we start looking for ways to bring the cost down. One answer is density. If land is expensive, maybe instead of putting one home on it, we put four. Or eight. Or twenty. Maybe we allow smaller homes, townhouses, apartments and ADUs and spread the cost of land and infrastructure among more households.

So we change zoning, update comprehensive plans and allow more infill. We try to create an environment where more housing, and hopefully less expensive housing, can actually be built. Then it gets personal. We want affordable housing, but maybe not an apartment building there. We want workforce housing, but perhaps that's too much density for our neighborhood. We want young families to be able to stay in Jefferson County, but we're less certain when making room for them means accepting changes to the community we already know and love.

Wanting affordable housing requires tradeoffs.

And that raises another uncomfortable question: How much say should the public have in what someone does with private property?

The answer obviously isn't none. What happens on one property can affect neighbors, traffic, water, the environment and the larger community. We have a legitimate interest in those things. But that interest can't be unlimited either.

At what point does the community's right to influence private property become the community's ability to prevent someone from making reasonable use of it?

I don't know exactly where that line is, and I doubt there's one answer that works in every situation. But we should at least acknowledge that the line exists.

Opposition has a place. Challenge has a place. Good ideas should have to survive hard questions, and public participation matters. But having a voice and having a veto are not the same thing. When opposition moves into appeals and litigation, a plan gets delayed, a project sits, financing costs continue and attorneys and consultants get involved. Sometimes a developer simply decides it isn't worth the time, expense or uncertainty, and nothing gets built.

That's a consequence too.

We often talk about our responsibility to “do no harm.” I agree with the principle. The trouble starts when we ask what harm actually means, and to whom.

Is it harm to the neighbor who doesn't want an apartment building next door? The property owner who wants to build it? The family who needs somewhere affordable to live? The environment? The community twenty years from now?

All of those interests matter. They just don't always point us in the same direction. Preventing density might protect a neighborhood from change while contributing to housing scarcity. A stricter energy standard may provide environmental benefits while adding to the upfront cost of a home. Stopping a development may prevent one perceived harm while creating another for the people who would have lived there.

“Do no harm” isn't a finish line. It's a balancing act. And sometimes good enough has to be just that: good enough.

That's not an argument for lowering our standards or accepting bad decisions. It's an acknowledgment that we can't anticipate every consequence before we act. At some point, governing means weighing competing interests, making a decision and moving forward, not waiting until we've found an answer that makes everybody happy and harms no one. That answer probably doesn't exist.

We are very good at adding things to our systems. Something goes wrong and, understandably, we respond. We legislate. We regulate. We add another safeguard or another step to the process. Usually there's a perfectly reasonable story behind why it was added.

What we're not nearly as good at is coming back five or ten years later and asking: Did it work? What did it cost? What else did it cause? And now that we know more, should we change it?

Every decision has consequences, including good decisions. Sometimes the most important ones don't show up for years.

That's why I keep coming back to progress, not perfection. Progress doesn't mean abandoning building codes, environmental protections or public participation. It means accepting that we won't get everything right the first time. We make the best decision we can with the information we have, watch what happens, learn and adapt.

Maybe we've gotten so good at protecting ourselves from what might go wrong that we've made it too difficult to get anything done.

I don't pretend to have the answer. But when it comes to housing, we can't demand affordability while insisting that neighborhoods never change, density never increase, nobody take a risk and every decision be perfected before we move forward. Those things don't add up.

If we really want affordable housing, there will be tradeoffs. There will be change. There will even be decisions we discover later weren't quite right.

Then we adjust.

That's progress, not perfection.

After all the plans, regulations, hearings, good intentions and arguments about affordable housing, someone still has to build the housing.

We all say we want affordable housing.

Do we really?

Scott Rogers
Port Townsend