Three innovative bills carry forward the momentum of 2023 and complement its measures to legalize less expensive housing.

Washington lawmakers racked up some solid wins for housing abundance this year, passing bills to legalize co-living homes, increase parking flexibility, and revamp building codes for middle housing.

These wins overcame the challenges of both a "short session" (only two-months long) and the risk of complacency following 2023, which became known as Washington's "year of housing" in recognition of all the bills passed to help reduce the state's housing shortage.

Indeed, 2024 was not without casualties. Three bills to boost housing supply that didn't survive: HB 1245 to legalize house lot splitting, HB 2160 to allow more homes near transit, and HB 2113 to establish local accountability for housing production. And the legislature still has much work to do on the other two pillars of housing policy: stability for tenants and subsidy for below-market rate homes.

Still, in 2024, Washington achieved more on zoning reform bills than in any previous year other than 2023. And the debate and coalition building around the bills that died will create a more solid foundation for progress on them next year.

Here's a cheat sheet for the three key bills that passed, followed by sections digging into the details on each.

HB 1998 establishes a new best-in-the-US standard for statewide zoning reform to allow co-living homes, which are small apartments with shared kitchens. Co-living is a low-cost housing option requiring no public subsidy that most cities have all but regulated out of existence.

SB 6015 creates new statewide standards to give builders more flexibility in complying with local parking mandates. The first stand-alone parking bill ever passed in Washington, its reforms will make homebuilding easier and less expensive - especially for middle housing and accessory dwellings.

HB 2071 sets in motion a process to modify the residential building codes so that it can apply to the construction of middle housing projects up to six units. It's a critical cost-saving follow-up to 2023's HB 1110 that legalized middle housing.

CO-LIVING HOMES: NATURALLY AFFORDABLE, FLEXIBLE, AND COMMUNITY-FORWARD

Co-living homes are a low-cost, multifamily housing option in which each resident has a small, private room and shares with other building residents a common kitchen and other spaces. Policymakers also refer to it as single-room occupancy (SRO), congregate housing, or rooming houses. Rents in newly constructed, market-rate co-living homes in the Puget Sound region can be affordable to people earning as low as 50 percent of area median income, without any public subsidy.

Co-living was once far more common. In the 1950s, it accounted for up to 10 percent of the rental stock in some US cities. Soon after that, however, local governments began adopting restrictive zoning and other rules that increasingly banned co-living, both new and old, and its numbers plummeted.

In a first for any US state, last year Oregon passed legislation to legalize co-living homes on all residential lots in urban areas. A weakness in Oregon's bill, though, is that it doesn't apply a co-living-specific method for counting its units - i.e., counting their "sleeping units" as fractions of standard "dwelling unit" apartments that they are so as to fit well within designated residential zones.

Washington's co-living bill, HB 1998, raises the bar by establishing this better-suited unit-counting method and by establishing other guardrails to prevent cities from indirectly preventing co-living development. Here's what it does:

Requires cities and counties to allow co-living homes everywhere that they allow multifamily housing with six or more units per lot on land inside urban growth areas (the six units aligns with the middle housing bill HB 1110)

Prohibits a sleeping unit from counting as more than one-quarter of a dwelling unit for density limits

Eliminates parking ...