The time to act on affordable housing is now.

Or yesterday, depending on who you ask. At the Master Builders Association’s annual Housing Summit in Bellevue, speakers told the crowd that the Puget Sound region risks losing economically if it cannot meet its housing needs.

Matthew Gardner, chief economist with Windermere Real Estate, said that if Seattle (and Bellevue) cannot find a way to bring housing costs down, it could cost in the long run.

“Cost of living is the most important thing to look at for a [chief financial officer],” he said. “If it becomes too expensive to pay employees a wage with which they can buy housing, they will start looking somewhere else.”

Gardner set the tone for the meeting, reminding the builders, legislators, bankers and others in the room that affordable housing was the number one issue for the region if it is to stay competitive. The Master Builder’s Association of King and Snohomish Counties is a trade organization of home builders and remodelers and other related businesses. It was founded in 1909 in Seattle and has a yearly summit addressing housing issues for the year.

“It personally troubles me that too many families can’t find an affordable home in today’s market,” said Shannon Affholter, executive director of the Master Builders Association.

Governor Jay Inslee spoke at the meeting, laying out some bare numbers when it comes to housing.

“This is not just a Seattle issue, this is a statewide issue. Rental costs are going up in Yakima and Spokane as well,” he said. “More than one-third of households in the state are housing cost burdened and 15 percent are paying more than 50 percent of their household income on housing.”

Inslee said that to keep up with housing demand in the area, more than 43,000 new housing units would have to be constructed annually. The Puget Sound region is well short of that number.

But the fact that the housing market is difficult in the area isn’t a new development.

“For the first time home buyer, it has never been affordable to live in King County,” Gardner said.

His data went back to 1995, but he said that the trend is much longer.

Part of the issue, Gardner maintains, is the Growth Management Act, which restricts where developers can build. With Western Washington’s unique terrain, any limiting factors beyond the mountains and water can make it difficult to build.

And that means that some people — like a family featured in a video shown at the conference — can look at more than 100 for-sale homes before finally finding one that is right for them at $50,000 over asking price.

“60 percent of the growth is in single-family housing,” Gardner said. “Millennials might want to live in high-rises today, but tomorrow they might want to live in a single family home.”

Marysville, in Snohomish County, is the fastest growing city in Washington, Gardner said, because it is one of the few places where single-family houses are being constructed. That means longer commutes and more traffic for the region as a whole if something can’t be done with the space available.

Additionally, banks are more wary about who they lend to. The lessons of the last recession were learned the hard way, said John DesCamp, vice president for Washington Trust Bank.

“We have to be much more conservative about what is dependable income,” he said. “And buyers are competing against cash offers, often foreign buyers repatriating money, buyers putting more than 20 percent down, quick-close offers, buyers offering to waive inspections and even heart-felt letters to the sellers.”

DesCamp did some math for the average home buyer in King County. He said that according to his data, the average household income in King County was $73,000 and the average home was $491,000, meaning that to put 20 percent down on a home, buyers would have to have $97,000 cash on hand and would still be paying 35 percent of their monthly income towards a mortgage, putting the average home buyer into the “cost-burdened” category. For people with smaller down payments, mortgage rates go up to unsustainable levels — at least from a lender’s perspective — he said.

And when people struggle with housing, what can they do?

Gordon McHenry Jr., president and chief executive officer of nonprofit housing organization Solid Ground, said that many surf couches, live with friends or family or even start to live on the streets.

“A sixth of all people in Seattle are spending more than 50 percent of their household income on housing,” he said. “People don’t become homeless when they run out of money, people become homeless when they run out of money and have no support system.”

Additionally, ten percent of all rentals in the area are in a state of moderate or severe disrepair, McHenry said, and that what subsidized housing there is has a year-long waitlist just for a lottery chance to get a Section 8 voucher.

So what can the region to to help the 80,000 new residents flocking here mostly from Oregon, California and Texas every year?

Some of the speakers proposed a foreign investment tax, like what British Columbia imposed. Some advised lifting the growth management act’s restrictions and figuring out rezoning in the city. Several expressed the need for reliable, efficient public transportation, stating prices spike near major employers if the employees can’t get to work quickly and predictably.

“If you can’t move people around, it pushed home values up,” Gardner said.

But for Peter Orser, director of the University of Washington’s Runstad Center for Real Estate Studies, there’s one thing planners and the housing industry need to stop doing —using outdated models to guess what home buyers want and need.

“We are making bad decisions on bad data,” he said. “We’ve got to change that.”