Working families, young people, and longtime residents are being priced out of the communities they grew up in. Much of this crisis is the direct result of one Olympia mandate: the Growth Management Act of 1990.
Since 1990, the GMA has imposed strict Urban Growth Boundaries and centralized mandates from Olympia. The region's population has grown by over 60%, but housing supply has increased by only 33%.
In King County, only about 26% of land is available for urban development. When you trap demand inside a fixed boundary, land and home prices climb dramatically. This is not a market failure. It is a policy choice.
The GMA turns limited land into a speculative asset for well-connected investors. The pattern is consistent, and it drives up costs for everyone else.
Investors buy land at lower commercial or low-density values.
They lobby city and county councils to rezone it to high-density residential or mixed-use.
Once rezoning is approved, land values explode, and builders pass those costs on to homebuyers.
In 2008, an investor group purchased the former Molbak's Garden + Home site in downtown Woodinville for $16.5 million. For years the owner held the land, lobbied the City Council for favorable rezoning, and walked away from development agreements to increase leverage.
The site sat largely vacant, the beloved garden center closed, and the community lost a landmark, while the land's paper value multiplied through entitlement games, driven by upzoning, not by any new construction or productivity.
Upzoning without guardrails doesn't automatically build housing. It often just transfers massive windfalls to landowners who successfully play the entitlement game.
The GMA promised more affordable housing. The results have been weak. In many new developments, units labeled "affordable" rent for only slightly less than the market-rate units in the same building.
Most "affordable" units target households earning $110,000 to $170,000+ for a family of four, doing little to help the truly working-class families who need it most.
We must reform the GMA so cities and counties, not Olympia, have the primary power to decide what kind of housing and development best fits their community.
Communities, not distant mandates, decide what fits their neighborhoods.
Cut delays while protecting critical environmental areas. We increase supply by allowing development on land where it poses no environmental risk or habitat destruction, subject to each city or county's own rules.
End the variances and rezonings that let well-connected buyers cut deals for themselves that were never available to the prior land owners.
Clear, predictable rules applied equally to big and small builders alike.
When rules are applied fairly, land stops being a lobbying jackpot.
More housing built where it makes sense means genuine affordability.
Communities shaped by the people who live there, not distant investors.
It's time to end the failed top-down experiment of the GMA and trust Washington communities to shape their own future.
Reform the GMA. Restore local zoning authority. End the speculation cycle. Build real housing where it makes sense, for the families who actually live here.
