Local leaders and researchers pondered solutions to one of Vashon’s most vexing issues on Oct. 3 at the Vashon Center for The Arts: Housing, and how to afford it.

Vashon Household board member Gedney Barclay introduced the event with a few sobering figures.

The median rent on Vashon is currently $3,000, Barclay said, higher than Seattle or Tacoma. The median home price is $825,000, she said, meaning a household applying for an average-priced home would need to earn more than $110,000 to afford rent or a mortgage without being home-burdened.

“We are trying to … galvanize the community around solutions,” Barclay said. “Tonight is about thinking about what can be done.”

The panel, facilitated by local resident and musician Chris Ballew, included Seattle Times reporter Heidi Groover, who recently wrote about Vashon’s housing woes; Jason Johnson, executive director of Vashon Household; Christopher Bric, executive director of Shelter America Group, based on Vashon; and Joe Nguyen and Emily Alvarado, state legislators for Vashon, West Seattle, White Center and parts of downtown Seattle.

The conversations took place under the looming shadow of the upcoming, once-in-a-decade update to King County’s Comprehensive Plan, a document that guides the county’s philosophy and priorities around growth and housing in the region. The public can comment on the plan, which is set to be adopted by the council around December 2024, by visiting online here.

Solutions floated at the forum included crafting new local funding sources for housing projects, efforts to incentivize or demystify accessory dwelling units (ADUs) and legislative action to make it easier or cheaper to build.

But one of the biggest rounds of applause came near the end, when one audience member spoke to a broader point about where the U.S. places its priorities and how the state chooses to levy taxes.

“One of the things we haven’t talked about … is the whole issue of housing being a right,” the speaker said. “I just want to remind us that all of these issues are really stopgaps to what we really need — that everyone has housing, and we don’t have to do it piecemeal, because we have social housing … which is the case in lots of other industrialized countries.”

Perspectives and projects on affordability

Groover came to write about the island this year, she said, after hearing from a friend about the county’s proposed land use and zoning changes. Those proposals would have encouraged duplexes and triplexes, expediting permitting for such projects, and boosting density close to the town core.

What she found was “a larger story about (the) shortage of housing … and how that’s affecting individual people who are trying to scrape together a living.”

On average, home values are up 36% and rents are up 33% from before the pandemic, Groover said, and of course there is the controversy around short-term rental services such as Vrbo and Airbnb. A scan of the number of those short-term rentals on the island gave a rough estimate of about 186, Groover said.

Vashon Household operates 88 rental units and 38 affordable single-family homes through a community land trust model, Jason Johnson said. This year, it launched its Homeshare program, which connects renters with homeowners who offer cheaper rents in exchange for those renters cooking, grocery shopping or completing other mundane household work or other services.

“We are sort of the matchmaker,” Johnson said. “… And that was really exciting because we didn’t have to build a thing. We’re making use of existing housing.”

The waitlist for Vashon Household, which had been closed for years, won’t be closed for much longer, Johnson said: “We are going to be opening our waitlist very soon. There’s going to be a lot of information … about exactly what that looks like. … (though) we may not be able to house individuals immediately.”

There’s no waitlist on the Homeshare program, he said: “We are actively pursuing both people who have extra space in their homes … (and) people who are looking for a place to live.”

Also speaking was Vashon’s Shelter America president Chris Bric, who gave an update on the organization’s 40-unit affordable apartment community project.

Shelter America, with funding help from King County, the Department of Commerce and others, is working on Creekside Village, which promises affordable rents for workforce tenants and seniors. The project started in 2015 and secured the funding it needed to go forward this year.

“We’re fighting like hell to hang on to our budget,” Bric said. “These are crazy times to be developing anything with interest rates, and distribution issues with materials. And of course, we pay a premium here for everything on the island. [But] the budget reflects all of that. … We’ll get it done.”

Now dealing with the permitting process, Bric said the project may be completed within two years.

“We’re looking at a nine to 12-month permitting process, which would enable us to begin construction probably in June 2024,” Bric said. “We have a 14-month construction schedule. So call it mid-to-late summer 2025 when we open the doors.”

Responding to a question about the idea of creating a special purpose district for subsidizing housing on Vashon, Sen. Joe Nguyen pointed out that the area would statutorily be capped out on property taxes — so such an effort would need to find a “creative” source of funding.

Still, a special fund of some kind could pool money for projects and protect against economic headwinds and roller-coaster supply cost fluctuations, audience members said.

Nguyen described his and his colleague’s efforts to restore funding to the state’s housing trust fund, which he described as having been “effectively gutted” during the 2008 recession. That fund supplies resources to housing projects across the state, and lawmakers boosted it by $400 million this year.

But that’s still “not nearly enough,” Rep. Emily Alvarado said, as affordable housing development is already outstripping that figure and needs more funding.

Part of the challenge, Alvarado said, is that low-density affordable housing — the kind that generally fits Vashon’s rural vibe — is “really hard to finance.”

She pointed to housing supply, subsidies and cost-of-living stabilizations as three pillars to making housing more affordable.

Supply is aided by streamlining permitting and rezoning areas to allow for more homes; subsidy means helping people, especially the very-low-income earners, afford even affordable housing; and stabilization includes safeguarding renters from massive yearly spikes in rent prices, much as homeowners are protected from price fluctuations by fixed-rate mortgages.

“I’d love to see us using those resources to acquire land here on Vashon and create new, permanently affordable homes, for first-time homebuyers, to be able to get a chance to live in this community,” Alvarado said. “That’s something we can do more of. It’s something we can scale here in this community.”

More aggressive ideas from the audience included possible legislation to curb people from using the island for their second or third home. or to regulate short-term rental services. Alvarado pointed out that those who use a second home as a rental are still adding housing to the community, “as long as those rentals are .. reasonable and following the law.”

Some communities use tools like a vacancy law to push property owners to either rent out or sell their vacant units. Alvarado said it’s worth looking into whether such a proposal “makes sense in Washington.”