Housing shortage needs new approach here

Two stories in The Star this week revolve around a problem central to not only the Grand Coulee Dam area, but to the nation as a whole: housing shortages.

More than any other problem, a lack of good housing is the biggest impediment the local area faces to economic development.

Two proposals — Coulee Medical Center’s tiny homes project and the Center Senior Living initiative — would address different aspects of this similar problem.

All the largest employers in the area deal with a lack of housing when recruiting workers to come here. The Bureau of Reclamation stated that after conducting its own survey several years ago to help in understanding why it’s hard to get talent to move here.

The hospital is pushing a novel use of tiny homes: for their own workers who travel here to work in shifts or on call for days at a time. Some have been doing it for years and stay in the hospital’s 1930s dormitory in Coulee Dam or in rental housing the hospital keeps just for that purpose, adding to the rental housing shortage. They hope the tiny home project might be an answer that could transfer to many areas around the country having similar problems in rural health care.

The Colville Tribes, recognizing its own conundrum in attracting mid-level professionals to the area, has built some of the many houses it plans to in Elmer City.

Some of the nation’s housing shortage comes under the category of “It seemed like a good idea at the time.” But many cities have in recent years been sacking decades-old planning wisdom that sought to segment our spaces into neat boxes to make it easier to build the right kind of infrastructure to support residential, commercial, industrial, retail, or agricultural sections of town or county.

Mixing it up is now more accepted. Look at any city apartment complex being planned and you may find retail on the ground floor, maybe some professional services higher up, all mixed in with the residences. Not allowing that mixed use, insisting on separate use areas, has effectively limited where housing can be placed, artificially driving up the scarcity — and therefore the price — of housing.

But that idea isn’t so easy to swallow for anyone who has accepted the prior paradigm.

Local cities and their planning commissions may find they need to broaden their view of the causes of the problem in order to start making progress on it instead of continuing to add to it.

Scott Hunter

editor and publisher