WSHFC Director Steve Walker, testifying before Congress about LIHTC, in March 2023.
On June 23, the Washington State Housing Finance Commission (WSHFC) voted to suspend a component of its federal Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) program that facilitates tenant home ownership.
A WSHFC administrator explained: “we need to get our house in order.” That is because it appears WSHFC has failed to administer the program for the last two decades. As a result, the eventual home ownership regime that Congress encouraged in 2001 has fallen short in Washington state, if not failed entirely.
Excerpt of WSHFC June 23, 2023 meeting information.
For example, WSHFC reports that there are at least 12 LIHTC eventual home ownership projects in Washington tribal communities. Those projects involve 369 units whereby Indigenous tenants engage in home buyership (commonly called “rent to own”) over a 15-year period.
At year 15, they are entitled to have the homes conveyed to them, as Congress intends. But according to WSHFC, it appears that not a single one of those 369 units has yet to be conveyed an Indigenous homebuyer. That is because WSHFC failed to regulate the home buyership component of those projects since at least 2010. The agency overlooked it all, for the last thirteen consecutive years.
WSHFC’s highly publicized failure to facilitate the conveyance of seven of those 369 units to Indigenous homebuyers at Nooksack, which are now at year 18 in WSHFC’s LIHTC program, has invited the attention of the United Nations; and, according to the Seattle Times Editorial Board, "brings shame on the . . . state." It is against this political backdrop that WSHFC made its decision to forgo further LIHTC eventual home ownership opportunity for the foreseeable future.
But that is the wrong approach. Given the low income housing crisis facing Washington state, WSHFC should be leaning into federally subsidized tenant home ownership opportunity, not recoiling from it.
More generally, taxpayers should be asking: what is happening—or, what else is not happening—at WSHFC?
