This Tuesday, Tacoma City Staff presented their Affordable Housing Action Strategy plan to City Council.
Among the ideas in the Strategy is the creation mandatory inclusionary zones in selective areas around Tacoma. Staff is proposing that the Council require 10% of units in these zones to be affordable to 50% AMI residents, offer minimal incentives (10 foot height increases, 10% floor-area-ratio increases, and 25% reduction in current parking requirements), and raise in-lieu fees from $30,000 per unit to upwards of $200,000 per unit.
Master Builders Association of Pierce County has been meeting with Council Members and will continue to do so campaigning against this aspect of the proposal. If you have builder incentive ideas we can share with council or would like to be present at one of these meetings to run through how projects would be hard to pencil with this model, please contact Jessie Gamble at jgamble@masterbuilderspierce.com. We want to show Tacoma that this approach won’t create the units they think it will before they adopt legislation that has been a failure everywhere else it has been tried.