THE HOUSE THAT JAY BUILT

Gov. Jay Inslee presided over a booming economy and the nation’s worst housing shortage — will it help or hurt his former commerce director in her run for Spokane mayor?

The conservative critics were wrong about Jay Inslee.

They warned that the governor’s left-wing, environmental policies — coupled with Washington state’s ever-rising minimum wage — could strangle the state’s business climate.

That didn’t happen.

Instead, Washington’s economy has continued to boom, and the total per capita value of all the state’s industry is the third-highest in the nation.

And so, with that lens, having served under Inslee — as the director of the Commerce Department — looks like an unbeatable resume for someone who wants to be mayor of Spokane.

Inslee agrees: Lisa Brown helped make Washington state the business hub it is today.

“We have been listed repeatedly as one of the top three or five places to do business in the United States, and her leadership has been a significant part of that,” Inslee says of Brown. “She’s helped grow the economy of the state of Washington.”

But there’s a problem: A study commissioned by the state’s Democratic lieutenant governor last year found that Washington, by one metric, had the least amount of housing available for its population than any other state

BY DANIEL WALTERS AND NATE SANFORD

in the nation. And when there’s not enough housing, people start to slip through the cracks.

In other words, across Washington’s cities, business is booming while people live and die in the streets.

Brown acknowledged the problem in her campaign launch speech, tying a dramatic decrease in rental vacancy rates, and rising rent and home prices, to Spokane’s increased homelessness.

All you have to do is to look to the East Central neighborhood, where Camp Hope stands as a visible reminder of Spokane and Washington state’s failure to stem the surge in homelessness. At its peak this summer, the encampment was the largest in the state, and arguably the nation — more than 600 people packed into rows of tents and RVs on a single block of land owned by one of America’s most prosperous states.

If the camp, and homelessness in general, is a political weakness for Brown, the same goes for the person she’s seeking to defeat, Mayor Nadine Woodward. Woodward can be blamed for not providing enough shelter space soon enough to prevent Camp Hope’s population from exploding last summer. And Brown can be blamed for spending millions of state commerce dollars on a plan that prolonged the camp’s existence and failed to house a majority of its residents.

But in their efforts to solve the problem, both start severely handicapped by the decades of leaders who got Washington state in a housing crisis to begin with.

SPRAWL, Y’ALL

Inslee knows Washington is seriously struggling with housing, but he blames the market.

“The private sector is not building housing for teachers who can’t afford to rent,” Inslee said last week during a visit to Spokane. “It’s not building housing for people who work in early childhood education centers that can’t afford rent. We need that public investment.”

He says he’s asking the Legislature to spend $4 billion to build housing and help address homelessness.

And yet, Inslee has been governor for a decade — though until 2018 Republicans controlled the Senate. During his tenure a lot of people warned about the looming housing crisis.

“I can say that over the last 10 to 14 years, there have been some very loud voices, mine included, saying, ‘Wake up, there’s an issue here, we need to change course,’” says Spokane City Council member Michael Cathcart, who was elected in 2019.

Brown heard it, too. But she says that for years, there the most accurate way to describe what happened there,” Brown says.

SPOKANE SOLUTIONS?

When it comes to loosening zoning restrictions to make way for housing, however, Woodward has bragging rights for pushing a suite of housing reforms that came out of the city’s planning department.

Last year, the Spokane City Council, with Woodward’s enthusiastic support, passed a one-year pilot to legalize fourplexes, duplexes and several other types of housing in every residential zone in the city.

And despite complaints of neighbors in the GrandviewThorpe area, Woodward has pushed against both a moratorium on development there and a steep increase in fees to pay for more infrastructure in that sprawling edge of town.

Still, she’s allied herself more closely with the Not In My Backyard types. After the Commerce-funded Catalyst Project drew the ire of West Hills neighbors last fall, Woodward blamed the state department for a “sloppy, messy process” and rushed timeline.

“The city didn’t get to decide this, this is a Commerce decision,” Woodward said.

Yet as Camp Hope has dragged on, it’s pitted Inslee and his state agencies — including Brown’s Commerce Department — against the frustrated East Central neighborhood and, at times, against city leaders.

It happened in the westside city of Everett last fall, when Everett’s mayor accused WSDOT of placing unhoused people in the city’s motels without her knowledge. Brown and the directors of WSDOT and Washington State Patrol fired back with a letter accusing the mayor of putting out “patently false and offensive” information in an attempt to “shame our state agencies.”

In Spokane, local jurisdictions have also expressed concern about being left out of the decision-making process and have repeatedly clashed with the state. There have been accusations of bad faith, legal threats, three actual lawsuits and lots of finger-pointing.

For her part, Brown finds plenty to take issue with Woodward’s approach to housing and homelessness.

“There’s not a long-term plan,” Brown says. “I think that’s unfortunate. For city taxpayers and people who are unsheltered.”

Brown says the city needs to use every tool in the toolbox — reworking fees, streamlining permits, experimenting with financing models, land trusts and tax exemptions — to incentivize housing construction.

Letters

Send comments to editor@inlander.com.