Finding Our North Star: Skagit County’s Call to Action on Housing

By now, nearly all of us in local government have gotten the word—we have a severe shortage of homes throughout the State of Washington, and that shortage is driving up both prices and homelessness.

Just like in other contexts, the solution to a shortage is to provide abundant supply—more home choices and options throughout our communities. Indeed, the data shows that Washington needs to add one million new homes by 2044.

In Skagit County, we combined our required updates to local comprehensive plans with collective action to move the goal forward on encouraging more housing development. This blog will discuss that effort and what we have learned in the process.

A Collective-Action Problem

Cities throughout Washington State share a common interest in the production of more homes, but the statewide need is so substantial that a single city’s efforts would barely be noticeable and a city that shirks its responsibility would leave only a small proportion of housing unbuilt.

A city that altruistically tries to do its part does so in the face of opposition from its own residents who desire no change and who may themselves recognize that the efforts of a single city acting independently are futile.

This is an archetypal collective-action problem where each individual city is incentivized to act in its own self-interest instead of contributing to the collective effort.

Skagit’s Call to Action

In Skagit County, the county’s four cities (Anacortes, Burlington, Mount Vernon, Sedro-Woolley) and the county government joined forces in 2022 as the North Star initiative to solve homelessness, housing instability, and behavioral health issues.

As our local governments worked independently toward required comprehensive plan updates in 2025, we realized that solving the collective-action problem on housing would be critical. As a small county, only one of our cities (Mount Vernon, with its population of 35,000) is subject to HB 1110’s (2023) minimum density requirements and SB 5184’s (2025) parking reform mandates.

Led by planning staff across the county and other representatives on the North Star Housing Taskforce, the group’s leadership team (the four city mayors and three county commissioners) issued a Housing Call to Action, encouraging participating cities to incorporate four basic housing measures into local periodic updates of comprehensive plans and development regulations.

These recommended housing measures are as follows:

• Allow mixed-use development outright in commercially zoned, transit-served corridors, and relax or eliminate density limits in those areas.
• Adopt “by-right permitting” in residential zones by eliminating discretionary review processes for submitted projects that meet zoning code.
• Reduce parking requirements for affordable housing projects and housing located in transit-accessible areas.
• Reduce fees for affordable housing, especially for smaller housing types and centrally located housing with good access to transit, services, and employment.

Of the four measures, the first two have the potential to be most impactful, for the reasons outlined below.

Allowing mixed-use development

The segregation of commercial and residential uses (i.e., traditional zoning) may be one of the planning profession’s greatest errors, increasing sprawl and forcing long commutes while wasting land and reducing the potential for vibrant and walkable mixed-use communities.

Zoning should separate incompatible uses—think industrial or heavy manufacturing uses—while allowing distinct but compatible uses to coexist. Nuanced standards, such as requiring first-floor uses that activate the streetscape, are reasonable measures to harmonize residential and commercial uses in a single area.

Since our Housing Call to Action was issued, SB 6026 (2026) now requires cities with populations over 30,000 to allow residential uses in commercial and mixed-use zones. Within Skagit County, only the City of Mount Vernon, with a large single-purpose commercial area, is subject to that requirement.

Adopting housing by-right

Some cities use a conditional use permit (CUP) process to impose special conditions on housing projects. Indeed, my own city of Anacortes used to require a CUP for duplexes in a zone where single-family homes of the same size and scale were allowed outright.

CUP processes add time, cost, and uncertainty to project development, each of which conspire to reduce the number of projects we see that would face such a requirement. It also results in the potential for disparate treatment of similar projects, which raises questions of fundamental fairness. (See the 1993 Washington State Court of Appeals decision in Anderson v Issaquah, which found that Issaquah's design review regulations were invalid due to vagueness.)

The alternative is clear: include objective standards in local development regulations that applicants can read and apply as they develop their projects. RCW 36.70A.630 now expressly requires such standards as applied to design review, and while it continues to allow for a CUP process, the new statutory limitations beg the question—what benefit does a CUP process convey?

In fact, a CUP likely conveys a false sense to the public that they can influence the outcome of a permit decision through public comment or a public hearing.

Moving Forward

Two of our four cities and Skagit County (to the extent it can in rural areas) have now achieved all four prongs of our Housing Call to Action. Anacortes, for example, includes a suite of fee reduction measures for low-income housing, and Mount Vernon continues to work on its periodic update.

Though Sedro-Woolley has withdrawn from the North Star interlocal agreement, regional collaborations on specific efforts continue.

While development is now depressed by inflation uncertainty and interest rates, we in Skagit County are proud to have laid the groundwork for housing abundance moving forward by working together and holding each other accountable. After all, it is only through collective action that we will successfully tackle our housing crisis.