Housing
Solution Diversity
Examples of diverse housing providers in Washington State.
% of New Units Produced by Nonprofit or Public Entities
(Work in Progress)
Key Points
• Solution Diversity means a genuine mix of providers: nonprofit, land trust, public authority, cooperative, and private, rather than reliance on any single model.
• Nonprofit and public providers can serve populations that the private market has little incentive to reach.
• Goal: a majority of new units produced by entities where housing is the goal, not profit.
What is it?
Solution Diversity means housing produced and owned by a genuine mix of provider types: nonprofit developers, community land trusts, public housing authorities, public development authorities, cooperatives, and private market developers, rather than relying on any single model to meet the entire need. No single sector, public or private, has ever solved a housing crisis alone.
Why Solution Diversity Matters
A housing system that depends almost entirely on private market developers is structurally limited in what it can deliver, since market rate development follows profit incentives that do not naturally produce deeply affordable or permanently affordable housing at the scale needed. Nonprofit developers, land trusts, and public entities can take on projects and serve populations the private market has little incentive to reach, and they can build housing that stays affordable permanently rather than for a fixed compliance period. A diverse provider ecosystem also builds resilience into the housing system as a whole, since no single sector’s funding cycles, capacity constraints, or political headwinds can stall the entire pipeline at once.
Where We Want to Be
The goal is meaningful growth in the share of WA’s housing stock held by nonprofit, public, and cooperative providers, moving away from near total reliance on the private market. That means a growing and increasingly capable network of active CLTs, nonprofit developers, housing authorities, and PDAs across the state, and a rising share of new units produced by nonprofit or public entities each year. The vision is a housing ecosystem with real structural diversity, one where permanently affordable, community controlled, and publicly owned housing are not niche categories but substantial and durable parts of how Washington State houses its residents.