Housing Pillar
Most of what gets built in the United States is housing. The most important building in your life is housing.
Across the US, roughly 90% of all buildings are single-family homes, and 60% of total built square footage is for single family homes, with another 10% for multifamily homes, meaning 70% of the total built square footage of buildngs in the US is residential, more than commercial, industrial, and everything else combined. That share is also growing: residential square footage is increasing faster than any other building type, meaning housing’s share of the built environment will keep getting larger over time.
If you want to change how a place actually works for the people living in it, you’re working on housing, whether you name it that way or not. It’s not one priority among several; it’s the dominant physical fact of how American cities and towns are built. Land use and transit are the levers we pull to get there, but housing is the goal.
Stability: Housing has to hold up when circumstances change, not just on move-in day.
A resident’s income can drop. A building’s conditions can change, such as ownership shifts, maintenance lapses, and rising costs. Good housing policy doesn’t just get someone into a unit; it gives them real protection and a real say when those things happen, so that a lost job or a neglected roof doesn’t mean losing your home, and that the people living there have actual standing in decisions about the place they live, not just a lease they hope gets renewed.
Dignity: Housing that's good enough to be proud of, not just affordable enough to accept.
Design quality isn’t an upgrade layered onto “real” affordable housing, it’s part of what we mean by the word. A building that’s cheap to live in but grim to live in hasn’t solved the problem, it’s just changed which problem you have. The people living in affordable housing deserve buildings designed with the same care and craft as anything else in the city, not the visibly cheapest version of shelter that meets code.
Location: Build where the demand and the services already are.
Decommodified, affordable housing belongs in the neighborhoods people actually want to live in, near transit, jobs, schools, parks, not wherever land happens to be cheapest. This underscores what is required for a vibrant, healthy city — people living and working where cities have already built infrastructure and provided services, and not developing in areas that stretches our cities thin and pushes people farther from jobs and homes.
Sustainability: Our homes should be mindful of their impact on the environment.
Housing is most of what gets built in this country, which makes how we build it a climate decision. That means being considerate of the carbon spent building our homes: materials, manufacturing, transport. It also means carbon spent running our homes for the next fifty or hundred years. Durable materials matter too, since a building that needs replacing in twenty years burns that carbon twice. And it has to hold up under the climate it’ll actually face, like heat domes, smoke days, and grid failures. The future demands more using less.
Construction Innovation: Housing should get cheaper and faster to build, and we should keep pushing for better ways to do it.
Construction is one of the only major industries that hasn’t industrialized the way manufacturing has — most of a home is still built piece by piece, on-site, exposed to weather, labor shortages, and permitting delays stacked on top of each other. Factory-built and modular construction are the clearest example right now, moving fabrication into a controlled environment where standardization and parallel production can bring down costs the way they have for cars and appliances.
That shift also changes where the jobs are. Site-built construction work is scattered, project-by-project, and often goes to whoever’s available when the job starts. Factory construction moves that work into a fixed facility — the kind of stable, local manufacturing job Washington can actually plan around, recruit for, and keep in-state, instead of work that follows the next project wherever it happens to be. Building more housing and building more Washington jobs aren’t two different goals here; factory construction is one policy that does both.
Solution Diversity: No single solution exists; diversity is a strength.
Co-ops, tenant unions, public housing, social housing, private housing, mission-driven private developers, non-profit housing providers — we think all of these are legitimate paths, and the city is better off with all of them working simultaneously than with any one of them treated as the only answer. The provider landscape should be as varied as the people who need housing in the first place.
Decommodified: At least a third of housing should exist permanently outside the market.
We demand that at least one third of the housing offered in the state of Washington be permanently decommodified – not income-restricted for ten years, not subsidized until the next budget fight, but genuinely decommodified, so its existence and its affordability don’t depend on what the market is doing or how a politician is feeling. We think this needs to be a structural share of how a city’s housing works, not a safety-valve category sitting at the margins.