Cinco de Mayo

Local nonprofit providers already have a lot of proposals for the current homeless population.

“Nonprofit providers have come up with a pretty extensive set of proposals for affordable housing,” Brown says. “And maybe it’s not enough for the whole system, but I think it would be a big dent in the number of units that they’ve got based on our current homeless population.”

Brown looks to some of the innovations from other cities like Olympia, which has an “off-the-shelf” blueprint for accessory dwelling units — secondary housing units on a city lot.

“Use the plan, and you automatically get permitted,” Brown says.

She criticizes Woodward’s administration for missing out on a lot of the housing dollars that could be used to build even more affordable housing.

“If I’m mayor,” Brown says, “I will hit the ground applying for every single dollar of state and federal funding that we could get.”

Since Inslee has taken office, state spending on housing has gone from $176 million to $2.6 billion — a 1,400 percent increase. But Inslee believes the state needs to do even more, building even more housing to get people off the street.

“It is a winning strategy,” Inslee says. “We simply need to do it at scale. We need to scale up efforts. We need to do it big time.” n