Washington State is pushing another round of federal affordable housing dollars into its pipeline, targeting the lowest-income renters who are least likely to find relief anywhere else in the market.
The state Department of Commerce is now accepting applications from developers seeking capital funding for new multifamily rental construction through two federal programs: the HOME Investment Partnerships Program and the National Housing Trust Fund (NHTF). HOME serves households earning up to 80% of area median income; NHTF dollars are reserved specifically for households at or below 30% of AMI, a threshold where the private market effectively stops building.
The stakes are significant. Washington must add roughly 1 million homes over the next 20 years to keep pace with demand, according to the state's own housing needs analysis, with the worst shortfall at the lowest income tiers. The state also carries one of the highest per-capita homelessness rates in the country, concentrated in King, Pierce, and Snohomish counties but increasingly visible across rural Eastern Washington as well.
HOME has been the federal government's main flexible housing block grant since 1990. NHTF came later, authorized after the 2008 financial crisis but not funded until 2016, when Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac resumed assessments that feed the program. Neither program alone is enough to make a project viable in today's market, where post-pandemic construction costs and high interest rates have made even subsidized deals difficult to finance. Developers typically layer these federal grants with state Housing Trust Fund dollars and Low-Income Housing Tax Credits to close the gap.
Commerce has historically tried to distribute awards between Western Washington's urban core, where deep affordability and supportive housing needs dominate, and rural Eastern Washington, where smaller workforce housing projects are more common. The nonprofit developer ecosystem that competes for these dollars includes organizations like Mercy Housing Northwest, Bellwether Housing and Plymouth Housing.
The total amount available in this funding round was not disclosed in Commerce's notice, a gap that developers will need to clarify directly with the agency. Applications opened Sept. 21.
