OGDEN — In the closing weeks of the 2025 Ogden City Council election campaign, Alicia Washington is looking at some of her biggest priorities.

Among the concerns she’d like to tackle, if elected to the council, is affordable housing and the lack thereof in Ogden.

“We’re starting to price people out of living in neighborhoods that they love,” she said. “One of my main platforms is, ‘Invest in neighbors and neighborhoods, not just place them.’ When it comes to affordable housing, we need to be looking at more than what it is to build the home. We need to be looking at ways that we can make sure we’re investing in our neighbors, which is opportunities for home ownership.”

She said that some massive barriers exist, preventing many people in Ogden from achieving home ownership.

“When we’re in Ogden … the median amount that a person may bring in annually is a little over $47,000, and we have homes that are priced much above that. How are we expected to keep people in town? How are we expected to keep people in their homes? How are we expected to have some type of flow program from being a renter into home ownership and that looks at creative ways of looking at working with developers to offer opportunities to buy into their homes like a lease-to-own.”

She also suggested turning housing opportunities like townhomes and duplexes into condos.

Washington noted she’s also had some experience in the realm of affordable housing on the rental side of things.

“When I was a Section 42 LIHTC (Low-Income Housing Tax Credit) property manager, I saw the benefits of mixed-rate units where we’d have market rate and LIHTC properties, then 100% LIHTC or 100% market rate,” she said.

She said in order to begin solving the issue of affordable housing, the city needs to get some hard numbers first.

“We have had extensive studies done in our city,” she said. “But a study I have yet to see is understanding how many deeply-affordable homes we have to how many higher-priced homes we have in the city and what’s in between. We just know that housing costs are incredibly high, but the extreme data and surveys that we need to be able to start to examine and dissect where we can even start with housing affordability is where we need to start.”

In addition to housing, Washington said that she prioritizes fixing the city’s infrastructure.

“We need to be doing a more efficient job of replacing our water pipes throughout the city,” she said. “We know that they’re incredibly old. Ogden is a beautiful, historic, aged and well-loved city, but when we have community members saying, ‘I have groundwater in my home,’ or ‘I have sediment in my water,’ how are we prioritizing this to address these concerns quickly and then to prioritize these neighborhoods that need to have these pipes fixed quickly and then correctly so they last for these upcoming years?”

She added the city must also be good stewards of the land.

“I know we have the Sustainability Committee and we’re one of the communities that participates in CREP — the Community Renewable Energy Program — but we need to prioritize that because having renewable energy in place by 2030 is right around the corner,” she said. “That’s going to help sustain our neighbors and our neighborhoods and make sure that we’re taking care of our land because we need it. We need to be able to support our community, our parks, our houses, our future builds by making sure we have this infrastructure taken care of.”