Apartments at 13th and Massachusetts Avenue NW by BeyondDC licensed under Creative Commons.

The Washington region has formally adopted three targets for housing production. This clarifies the amount of housing the region needs to build as a whole and how accessible and affordable it should be.

On Sept. 11, the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments voted in favor of a resolution to adopt regionwide housing production goals. The vote follows the release of a report from the Urban Institute, which deemed the adoption of regionwide housing production goals necessary to enact additional further housing-related policies.

The three targets are:

  1. Amount: At least 320,000 housing units should be added in the region between 2020 and 2030. This is an additional 75,000 units beyond the units already forecast for this period.
  2. Accessibility: At least 75% of all new housing should be in Activity Centers or near high-capacity transit.
  3. Affordability: At least 75% of new housing should be affordable to low- and middle-income households.

Per a COG press release:

A year ago, COG released an analysis that helped the region better understand its unmet housing needs. Between 2020 and 2030, the region needs to produce at least 75,000 additional households beyond the 245,000 households already anticipated, totaling 320,000 net new households. If the time frame is stretched from 2020 to 2045, more than 100,000 additional households will be needed beyond the new households anticipated.

The COG Board of Directors called on the region’s planning and housing directors to help determine whether there was capacity in local plans to accommodate additional housing, and if so, where new housing should be located and how it should be priced to make the biggest impact.

Officials on the COG Board of Directors used these analyses to develop and build consensus around the three regional housing goals adopted today.

The resolution also calls on officials “to work within their communities to adopt local-level targets on production, accessibility, and affordability.” The COG board is comprised of elected officials in the region. Its chair is DC At-Large Councilmember Robert C. White, Jr., whose statement on the vote, in the release, is:

“Today’s vote signals the beginning of a new chapter in our housing crisis where we are partnering across the region with governments, nonprofits, and the private sector to meet our housing needs,” White said. “Now that we have worked together to set our housing goals, we can continue working together to ramp up housing production in ways that ensure all our communities benefit.”

It’s significant that COG passed this resolution, in part because its board is made up of elected officials. This kind of collective pressure, hopefully, will imbue each jurisdiction in the region—besides DC, which has already committed to building 36,000 units by 2025—with the urgency to follow suit.

All that said: As we wrote last week, targets aren’t teeth, and actually building 374,000 homes will require a lot of politically unpopular actions, well beyond a stated commitment from a regionwide organization.

Passing the resolution is an important benchmark. It would be impossible to hold any given jurisdiction accountable without hard numbers, and the region’s planning organization voting in favor of this appropriately reflects that the shortage of homes here is both a shared crisis and shared responsibility.

We’re pleased with COG’s vote and think it sets the correct tone for how the region should talk about housing, especially given that it prioritizes infill development and housing for low- and middle-income households. But actually satisfying the resolution’s mandate will be a much more challenging endeavor.

Alex Baca is the DC Policy Director at GGWash. Previously the engagement director of the Coalition for Smarter Growth and the general manager of Cuyahoga County's bikesharing system, she has also worked in journalism, bike advocacy, architecture, construction, and transportation in DC, San Francisco, and Cleveland. She has written about all of the above for CityLab, Slate, Vox, Washington City Paper, and other publications.