Massive Change in the Spokane Housing Market!

The landscape of Spokane housing could change forever. After a couple intense years in the housing market here in Spokane, major changes have begun to take effect in order to combat the continuously challenging housing market, both in the rental and resale space. We’ve seen headline after headline concerning rising home prices, rising rental rates and now in the last couple months, rising interest rates have started to compound as well. 

As of the beginning of the pandemic, home prices have increased 57% and rental rates have increased nearly 50% as well. The Spokane Association of realtors recently stated that they believe Spokane is short about 25,000 housing units in order to get us to a more stable market where rental vacancy would sit between 5-10% instead of 1-2% and the inventory of homes would be around 2-3 months instead of 15 days. 

Spokane Mayor, Nadine Woodward, declared a Housing Emergency back in July of 2021 in order to begin to take steps towards combating the major lack of supply we were and still are experiencing. We started to see progress in November of 2021 when the city approved two zoning changes for a couple of private landowners in the city off of East Cleveland and a few lots near W Sinto and W Maxwell that allowed these owners to build larger multi family complexes on the properties. 

Fast forward to July of 2022 and the Spokane city council has unanimously approved a 1 year zoning change that will allow for small multi family properties to be built on any single family lot. 

So, let’s go through a few concerns and then the opportunities that this allows for. 

First off, many people are worried that an apartment building is just going to show up next door to their home. That’s not completely the case. This initiative focuses on “middle housing” which is two to four unit buildings and townhomes. Now, at this time there is no restrictions on the number of allowable attached townhomes on one parcel, but based on the building requirements for townhomes the is a limit for the majority of parcels in the city. 

Townhomes will be required to be at least 16 feet across for units that have parking in the rear and need to be 80 feet in depth. Well the majority of parcels in the city are roughly 50 feet across and any where from 100 to 140 feet deep. 

I know when I first read this that I imagined on a standard parcel you would just line the townhomes up sideways or in other words, if all the homes on the street are facing this direction, the townhomes might face that direction, but that’s actually not the case because if they’re all lined up sideways they wouldn’t be able to get to that 80 foot depth requirement because the 50 foot parcel would not allow for that. This means that the only option for townhomes is to have them face the same direction as the rest of the houses on the street and with the minimum requirement of 16 feet, this only allows for 3 townhomes per 50 foot wide parcel. This doesn’t include the need for any setbacks from other properties that may or may not be required once the city finalizes the regulations for this. 

So with all that said, yes, there might be anywhere from 2-4 units being built next to you, but it won’t be a massive complex. 

Another concern that has been voiced so far is that even with it being limited to a maximum of four units per parcel, people are concerned over parking and noise from more people entering their neighborhood. 

I think this feeds into a limiting belief that all multi family units are bad and create issues for a neighborhood. It’s a mindset that we’ve grown accustomed to here in Spokane where we must separate multi family housing from single family housing even though this city was built on combining the two. 

Spencer Gardner, Spokane’s new planning director recently spoke on this topic at a recent community assembly. He showed a similar time in history when Spokane had a massive spike in population growth between 1900 and 1910. 

70,000 people came to Spokane during that time which tripled the overall population. In the last ten years in Spokane between 2011 and 2021, we’ve seen a population growth of about 55,000 people with a population around 400,000 just to put that into some perspective on how massive of a growth that was for the time period. 

During that time period, Spokane created neighborhoods like Browne’s Addition, Cliff/cannon, perry district, and the logan neighborhood. All of those neighborhoods are examples of common places where you see a variety of housing types and that was done on purpose. Back then, we believed that people of all income levels should be able to pick which neighborhood they would like to be and grow into that neighborhood. It was a natural path to wealth to start in Browns addition renting a small studio apartment, to then purchase a duplex in the same neighborhood and rent out one side to help pay for your mortgage (so house hacking was even cool a hundred years ago) and then you could buy a single family home and build your way up to one of the big beautiful homes as your finances improved and you built wealth over time.

During that time period, Spokane created neighborhoods like Browne’s Addition, Cliff/cannon, perry district, and the logan neighborhood. All of those neighborhoods are examples of common places where you see a variety of housing types and that was done on purpose. Back then, we believed that people of all income levels should be able to pick which neighborhood they would like to be and grow into that neighborhood. It was a natural path to wealth to start in Browns addition renting a small studio apartment, to then purchase a duplex in the same neighborhood and rent out one side to help pay for your mortgage (so house hacking was even cool a hundred years ago) and then you could buy a single family home and build your way up to one of the big beautiful homes as your finances improved and you built wealth over time.