During November and December, the City Council passed a set of ordinances designed to reduce the proliferation of derelict properties in neighborhoods like Delridge and Roosevelt. The ordinances created expensive fines for owners who willfully neglected properties and let them degenerate to “nuisance” status, and also set forth some new rules concerning demolition permitting. The big idea was to withhold demolition permits from property owners who didn’t have a rebuilding plan in place and to discourage destruction of affordable rental housing.
But this week a rep from the Master Builders of King and Snohomish Counties told us that the ordinances create a serious impediment to remodeling and rebuilding. Along with some logical new rules about when and how the city can intervene in neglected properties, they also came up with this: Owners of rental properties can’t get permits to tear down that housing without first submitting rebuilding plans—unless their property has sat vacant for 12 months.
Is it enforced vacancy, or enforced rebuilding planning? And, if an owner lets their property sit empty for 12 months while awaiting their demolition permit, won’t they face the likelihood of “nuisance”-related fines, since empty homes invariably attract graffiti, vandalism, drugs, and such?
In the past, the city would not let a homeowner tear down a house without first submitting a plan to build a new one, according to Alan Justad, deputy director at the city’s department of planning and development. Introducing the 12-month waiting period is designed, he says, to “not make it so easy to tear down homes. The rule on vacancy is a disincentive to tearing a property down.”
Garrett Huffman, a manager at the Master Builders Association of King and Snohomish Counties, says he thinks builders aren’t fully aware of the 12-month wait required in some cases for demo permits and that this is just one of a few problems the city is tossing in the way of demolition projects.
“We’re probably losing a lot of projects that could actually improve housing,” Huffman says. “I mean, you have to let it sit empty for a year because we have an affordable housing issue?”
Council member Sally Clark says the 12-month rule on allowing demolition of former rental houses was created to dissuade property owners from either indiscriminately tearing down homes (and sending those homes’ corpses to the landfill) or letting homes deliberately fall into disrepair to speed up permission for demolition (and, as above, hitting the landfill). While it’s hard to believe a property owner getting rental income would let a property go to pot just to secure a full demolition permit, apparently it happens.
Clark says that in debating a vacancy time frame, conversation centered on just how long an owner would wait with property empty. A six-month wait was deemed too short, 18 months too long, with 12 months the “compromise.” City Council member Nick Licata said he’s aware that builders aren’t happy about the issue during a brief phone interview, but didn’t return our call for further comment on his role in recommending vacancy timeframes.
John Fox, coordinator of the Seattle Displacement Coalition, says that the vacancy ruling doesn’t mean that landlords have to empty out their single-family rentals in order to rebuild them. Instead, he says, owners must have a new home plan in the pipeline before they can get their demolition permit; the only way a property owner can let the Caterpillars rip without a new home plan in the permit pipeline is if the home’s sat empty for 12 months, meaning it’s unrentable, undesirable, or in the gray area between “nuisance” and habitable.
Fox says that single-family homes account for 25 percent of Seattle’s rental housing and that demolition erases lots of affordable housing around town. During the real estate boom’s height, he says, up to 1000 single-family homes fell under the wrecking ball annually; more recently, he says, the number has fallen to about 600 homes per year.
Still, if you see an empty rental home sitting in your neighborhood, you might wonder what’s in store: A new neighbor, a nuisance property, or a bulldozer.
“Welcome to my world,” Huffman says.
