https://ckarnes.com/categories/housing/ Recent content in Housing on Chris Karnes | Tacoma, WA Hugo en-us Tue, 06 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://ckarnes.com/post/moving-beyond-parking-minimums/ Tue, 06 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://ckarnes.com/post/moving-beyond-parking-minimums/ Senate Bill 5184 (The Parking Reform and Modernization Act), originally proposed by Jessica Bateman (D-Olympia), is due to be signed into law later tomorrow by Washington’s Governor Bob Ferguson. The bill, seeks to reform the practice of requiring excessive vehicle parking at businesses and homes throughout the state, which the Legislature finds “needlessly drive up development costs, especially for housing”, as well as has negative impacts like furthering automobile dependence, harming public health, and contributing to climate change. https://ckarnes.com/post/housing-for-the-working-class/ Thu, 30 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://ckarnes.com/post/housing-for-the-working-class/ *Home in Tacoma (HiT) *was a landmark achievement, the result of five years of meticulous planning, policy reform, and community engagement. By rezoning two-thirds of the city and overhauling single-family zoning, HiT has cleared the path for much-needed housing development. However, as the Planning Commission warned in their final recommendation, this effort alone cannot guarantee housing affordability across all income levels. While HiT sets the stage for building homes for higher-income households and those at the lower end of the economic spectrum, it leaves one part of our community out in the cold: the working class. https://ckarnes.com/post/home-in-tacoma-final-passage/ Tue, 19 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://ckarnes.com/post/home-in-tacoma-final-passage/ Today is the day. This evening the Tacoma City Council is poised to vote on the final Home in Tacoma code package. With that event, I thought I would get some reflection down for better or for worse. It’s taken five years to get this far, longer than a presidential term, longer than most people’s journeys through high school, and even longer than the COVID-19 Pandemic. The substance of the package is enormous relative to most items that the Planning Commission and Tacoma’s planning department have taken on over the years: 246 pages of changes to the Land Use Regulatory Code. https://ckarnes.com/post/the-generational-disconnect-about-housing/ Sat, 24 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://ckarnes.com/post/the-generational-disconnect-about-housing/ Based on written and oral testimony about the Home in Tacoma project, I conclude that there is an overall generational disconnect between people who bought a home in the housing market 25 or 30 years ago and those who are trying to find a place to live today in the 2020’s. The Housing Market in 1996 People who bought earlier in areas zoned single family made the assumption that nothing would ever change.