BY KEELIN EVERLY-LANG 3/27/26 |
The Tacoma-Pierce County Affordable Housing Consortium (TPCAHC) has been bringing together developers, funders, service providers, and more for two decades to create more affordable housing in Tacoma and the broader Pierce County region.
For many years, the organization was led by Connie Brown, who passed away in 2022.
Amanda DeShazo has now been at the helm for the past eight years as executive director and is currently the only full-time paid employee who is not on a contract.
Coming from a background in labor union nonprofit work, she told Weekly Volcano that her work directly with community members dealing with housing insecurity still informs her work today.
Coming up in May, the TPCAHC will host Affordable Housing Week, with a focus this year on the lifecycle of affordable housing.
This will feature content and events educating the community on the steps from starting with the conception of a project, or the idea of what somebody wants to see in the community for affordable housing, all the way to funding it, development, leasing, and long-term care and operations.
“We don’t want to see homelessness. We want people to be housed, and the solution is more housing. But I don’t think people quite understand how complicated it is to get to that point where we are housing people,” DeShazo said.
While she hopes that the Affordable Housing Week topics will help people understand the complexity of the system, even as an expert in the industry she is constantly learning as well.
From funding sources to permitting to operations and maintenance, every step of the process currently has its own red tape and hoops to jump through. There are also many people looking at solving problems who only have awareness of their own part of the larger puzzle. That’s where the consortium comes in.
The consortium is made up of more than 70 partners that include investors, developers, service providers, cultural organizations, and community partners who care about affordable housing.
The consortium “delivers public education on the affordable housing crisis and advocates for policies in support of affordable housing development” and provides opportunities for members to “invest, advocate, and engage through our robust affordable housing network.”
This coordination across many different stakeholders helps all those involved navigate the maze of bureaucracy between the goal of affordable housing and the reality of actual tenants moving in and staying housed.
Looking even just to the start of her tenure, DeShazo said she has seen an increase in awareness of the importance of affordable housing.
“When I came on, it was definitely not as talked about. All of the same problems existed, but there was a shift in the narrative that I found maybe a year or two after I started, that people really started focusing on the need for housing and homelessness was a really big thing,” DeShazo said.
Although their ultimate goals of increasing affordable housing are aligned, DeShazo said sometimes well-meaning initiatives that focus on tenant protections can backfire.
TPCAHC got some pushback this year when they sought an eviction exemption from the Landlord Fairness Code Initiative.
DeShazo said it is important to “shine light on the balance between tenant protections and then what it means to be an affordable housing provider.”
In a recent example, one of the TPCAHC providers had to sell one of its buildings because the cost of missed rent payments grew so high that it was not able to sustain operating costs.
When this happens, it can mean an entire complex of affordable housing disappears.
Even when properties have restrictive deeds that include affordability stipulations, if a building is sold to a market-rate operator, deeds can expire and the new owner could choose to raise everyone’s rent to market rate.
“Nobody wins in that situation,” DeShazo said, adding that it is a “delicate balance” where the question needs to be asked: “How do you maintain affordable units with not a lot of income, without having to sell the entire property and put everybody out?”
Affordable housing developers and operators maintain properties with a low margin and represent a wide variety of setups. Some are fully subsidized, where a separate funding source is paying all of someone’s rent. Others have agreements that change over time about paying some percentage of that person’s income. Others have a mix of a variety of sources of payment.
Many affordable housing options also include additional services, like permanent supportive housing that often includes full wraparound services like case managers, on-site physical and mental health care options, employment support, etc.
Affordable does not typically mean free, however, and although a wide range of payment structures are available across the spectrum of housing, managing affordable housing properties can become unsustainable if those payment agreements are not followed.
When rent stops being paid or other issues cause a tenant to not be a good match to live in a property, the response has changed over time.
Eviction moratoriums during COVID and changing tenant protections have brought safety and security for those who find themselves unable to pay rent.
At the same time, a new problem of unpaid rent debt is now causing people issues when looking for a new place.
In Pierce County alone, more than 11,000 households are behind on rent, and the total rent debt is more than $27 million, according to the National Equity Index.
Battling through an eviction process in court takes time, during which back rent can accumulate quickly until the individual is thousands of dollars in debt.
This debt can end up being the barrier between accessing housing or not, rather than the eviction itself.
DeShazo said she has been hearing from professionals in the field who help prospective tenants connect to housing that “evictions aren’t the problem anymore. People will take you if you have an eviction. They won’t take you if you owe a ton of back rent to a previous landlord.”
Tacoma Pro Bono is one organization that helps people in this type of situation.
One area that has been going well has been the pipeline of development in Pierce County.
“We have projects in line ready to be funded, continually going online. There consecutively is a project that is ready to be developed. There is not one time where we have a bunch of money and nobody to give it to,” DeShazo said.
When it comes to funding, the sources can become frustratingly circular.
As just one example, there is a sales tax in place that funds affordable housing, yet developers have to pay sales tax on their projects at the front end of development, which means “we’re kind of paying ourselves,” DeShazo said.
The consortium advocated for House Bill 1717 to pass for the third time this year, which would have created a sales tax remittance, but it did not pass.
A few other bills did go through this year, one allowing affordable housing providers to not have to build commercial space on the bottom floor.
While the idea of having retail on the ground floor is a nice idea, “what we have experienced is it is really expensive to build out, and we are having a really hard time finding people that are wanting to rent out the commercial space,” DeShazo said. This means they are losing out on income, and the commercial space takes away potential housing units.
Another bill focused on zoning, which can also be a challenge when it comes to finding where to actually place affordable housing.
With all of these challenges, everything functions better when all the stakeholders can work together to find solutions that strike the right balance.
