The Salem City Council on Tuesday unanimously approved a six-year roadmap outlining ways to make housing more affordable and to build more of it.

It’s the city’s first housing production strategy, which outlines 17 approaches the city could take to encourage housing development, preserve existing housing and promote fair and equitable access to housing.

They include expanding city tax cuts for developers, making the permit process simpler and faster, and pursuing more creative ways to turn available space into apartments.

The changes aim to curb trends that are pushing more residents into homelessness. Fewer than half of Salem’s households can afford the city’s median rent and utilities of $1,700, and only 16% of households can afford to buy the average home at $435,000, said city planner Eunice Kim in a presentation during the meeting.

Salem needs more places to live, and a wider variety of them to accommodate all types of families, Kim said.

A 2019 state law required cities with populations of over 10,000 to study housing needs and build a strategy to address them. The state required that Salem adopt a housing production strategy by the end of 2025. 

A state grant funded the hiring of consultants at ECONorthwest to help create the strategy. Progress will be tracked each year, and the city will need to submit a comprehensive midpoint report to the state in 2029. 

Passing the plan didn’t implement any of the 17 proposed actions, which would need to individually go through the city’s processes and council approval before taking effect.

The ideas include offering homeowners help with their down payments using federal grants, expanding tax breaks for people building apartments and creating areas where a nonprofit owns the land people buy homes on, called a community land trust.

If the council decides not to pursue one of the actions, the city will have to prove to the state that it has alternatives that will rise to the occasion.

Developing the plan over the past year, the city held focus groups in neighborhoods and among populations vulnerable to homelessness, and consulted local home builders and other stakeholders.

The city’s 2015 housing needs analysis found that Salem needs to build around 1,170 units per year through 2035 to keep up with need. After a slower start, the city has nearly met that goal with an average of around 1,100 units per year over the last five years, Kim said. The city is further behind on production goals for affordable housing and housing accessible for people with disabilities, she said. 

City officials have made moves to improve development since that analysis, including acquiring land for affordable housing and streamlining the permit approval process.

Some of the 17 proposed actions build on existing efforts, like expanding permission for homeowners to build additional living spaces for renters on their property, finding new ways to incentivise development with tax breaks, and adding hundreds of new apartments with reduced rent. 

But housing development goalposts will only move further, Kim said.

“We know we need more housing overall. We need to produce more housing, whether it’s single-family, multifamily, middle housing. We know we have not produced enough in the past. And we know in the future we’re going to be given a target from the state that is much higher,” Kim said. 

The proposals weren’t ranked by priority, and will all be explored by the city in the coming years. No one solution will sufficiently address the scope of the problem, said Beth Goodman, a consultant at ECONorthwest, during the meeting. 

“This is more like a housing ecosystem, all taken together,” Goodman said.

Before the vote, councilors heard public testimony from neighborhood associations and developers, who wanted more analysis on the costs and benefits of each item. Several pointed to the planning commission’s rejection of the plan, which deemed it insufficient. 

Kim said that the commission wanted to see more analysis of the impact and magnitude of the proposals. She said those are hard to pin down this early in the process. They’d need to start sketching the boundaries of an Urban Renewal Area, for instance, before it would yield more specific predictions on how many apartments it could fund.

She said her department has committed to starting improving city codes right away, but some wanted to see it prioritized on the list. Her team opted to categorize each entry by how quickly it could be implemented under current staffing and projects already in development.

Following testimony, Councilor Shane Matthews introduced an amendment asking staff to officially prioritize revising the zoning code to make it easier for developers to get approval to rebuild and improve existing housing.

Matthews said he’d spoken with around 20 local developers ahead of the meeting to get their thoughts on the city’s permit process.

“The perception is that we are slow at this,” he said. He said the amendment would show that they’re listening, and give the city more information faster on how to address the problems.

His amendment also asked for the city to report back with feedback about a strategy asking for greater protections for residents at mobile home parks.

After discussion and further changes, the amendment passed 6-2, with councilors Paul Tigan and Linda Nishioka voting against it. Councilor Micki Varney said she would have opposed it but misunderstood what aspect they were voting on.

On the overall plan, which all councilors supported, several said that they didn’t think sending the entire strategy back to the planning commission would bring the specifics that the community testimony asked for.

Tigan said he didn’t want to get stuck in a loop of planning a plan, especially when it’s intended to be a high-level guide.

“I think the kinds of comments that we heard from the public are the sorts of things that we would be considering very directly as we move forward through each one of these 17 strategies,” he said.

At the end of the lengthy discussion, Mayor Julie Hoy thanked staff and the consultants for their work.

“There’s more work to do. It’s an open, living, breathing document. So see you in 17 items,” she said.

Contact reporter Abbey McDonald: [email protected] or 503-575-1251.

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