Spokane mayor unveils HEART Fund renaming and four measures to spur affordable housing

Mayor Lisa Brown announced a set of four proposals at a Liberty Park event to increase housing supply in Spokane, emphasizing a mix of local, state and federal tools that officials say will expand affordable housing and speed construction.

Brown said the Liberty Park project includes 54 new units and "utilizes $4,000,000 from the heart fund," and described the measures as part of the citys broader goal to create more than "22,000 new housing units in the city by 02/1946" as stated at the event. She listed partners on the project including Proclaim Liberty, Habitat for Humanity, Take Up the Cause and the Spokane Low Income Housing Consortium.

The four proposals described by Brown were: updating and aligning the local tenth-of-a-cent sales-and-use tax authorized under House Bill 1590 with the city's housing goals and renaming it the Housing Equity and Attainable Residents Trust (HEART Fund); an affordable housing permit fee deferral program that would allow certain affordable-housing projects to defer up to $150,000 in building and street permit…