The new attitude of the city council’s public safety committee, headed by former Queen Anne Community council public safety chair Bob Kettle, was evident from the first slide of Councilmember Kettle’s presentation on the scope of the committee, titled “Public Safety Vision.” It read: “We envision a future where families feel safe sending their children on the bus to school, businesses can operate without paying for private security, and the city can respond in a timely and appropriate manner to people experiencing acute crises.”
The implication—that Seattle is so dangerous that businesses need security to operate, buses are so unsafe that kids can’t take them to school, and police are so understaffed they can no longer respond swiftly to crises—went unquestioned throughout the two-and-a-half hour meeting. Instead, council members lavished praise on the police department, asked what they could do personally to “improve officer morale,” and assured Police Chief Adrian Diaz, who talked at length about the “trauma” police have experienced “after George Floyd,” that they would—as Councilmember Cathy Moore put it—”allow police to police.”
“Doesn’t this feel different?” Council President Sara Nelson asked Diaz, smiling broadly, before diving into questions about how the council could support the police department.
“I think we’ve had a lot of micromanaging in the prior councils,” Moore said. “I think there was a sense among rank and file that we are constantly micromanaging and that we’ve taken their power away to police.” Additionally, Moore said, she wanted to “have [a] hard conversation about the jail space” that the city is paying for, but not using, “because we do need to be able to send a message that people are going to be held accountable. That doesn’t mean that we’re going to run them through the system and create long records for them, but you need a place to go police need to feel like the work that they’re doing matters.”
Other council members emphasized how much friendlier the committee would be toward police. “Doesn’t this feel different?” Council President Sara Nelson asked Diaz, smiling broadly, before diving into questions about how the council could support the police department.
During her two years on the council, Nelson has advocated to keep vacant police positions open and funded, and to provide bonuses of up to $25,000 for new police hires. The previous chair of the public safety committee, 27-year City Hall veteran Lisa Herbold, also supported police hiring, but she also focused on accountability, frequently requiring the police department to report back to her committee on the results of initiatives the council agreed to fund.
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Without regular reports on things like SPD’s use of overtime, the efficacy of the overdose response program Health 99, and the cost to staff up the new CARE Department to take over some police calls (to name just three reports that will be required this year thanks to Herbold’s budget “meddling”), the council would have significantly less information to help it judge the job police are doing. Which, perhaps, is precisely the point.
As public safety chair, Kettle has transferred his key campaign message—that Seattle has a “culture of permissiveness” that has allowed crime to flourish—directly into the mission of his committee, whose official mission statement previously highlighted police accountability, alternatives to arrest and jail, and “programs to reduce the public’s involvement with law enforcement and decrease involvement with the Criminal Legal System.” Now, the mission can be summarized in a single slide, which defines a “permissive environment” as “the underlying factors behind crime tied to the lack of deterring structures that allow people to endanger themselves and our city.
The slide includes six “pillars of public safety.” “Public health” appears fifth, after “graffiti remediation.” Police reform, alternatives to arrest and prosecution, and human services appear nowhere on the list.
On the local campaign trail this year, you can’t go to a debate without hearing multiple candidates profess their support for “Comp Plan Alternative 5″—the densest potential option currently on the table for the city’s comprehensive plan update, which will serve as a framework for Seattle’s future growth and development for the next 15 years.
It’s a kind of proxy for an urbanist (or urbanist-lite) position on development that fits neatly into a 30-second debate response: Supporting Alternative 5 signals that you support housing as dense as fourplexes (or even sixplexes!) in areas that were previously zoned exclusively for detached single-family houses—a marked departure from the bad old days when even backyard or basement apartments were a third rail for the homeowner activists who dominated the public debate over density.
We’ve expressed optimism in the past about the way the Overton Window has shifted on density and housing. This, at least, is undeniable: Polls show that Seattle residents are increasingly receptive to the idea of “more housing in my neighborhood,” and politicians have come along, including many on the left who have come to support density coupled with anti-gentrification measures, like targeted investments in affordable housing, homeownership, and preservation.
But lately, I’ve started to think that my optimism may have been misplaced. This is because while the concept of “more housing” is generally popular, the kind of housing people say they support is actually a very specific type: Modest density that looks like the rest of an existing neighborhood—the kind of inoffensive density you don’t even notice if you aren’t looking for it. Ask a moderate candidate what they mean when they talk about density in residential neighborhoods, and they’ll often describe a fourplex built about 80 years ago— the type that blends in to a single-family neighborhood because it looks an awful lot like the the single-family houses that surround it.
When pressed, candidates are often explicit about this preference. Take Maritza Rivera, running in District 4. When David Hyde, moderating a debate at Roosevelt High School, asked the candidates what they thought of a new state law that allows fourplexes in formerly exclusive single-family areas, Rivera said she supported increasing density “gradually” in a way that preserves “the character of the neighborhood… for instance, on north Capitol Hill, you can see there are some places that look like mansions, but they’re actually fourplexes.” Or Maren Costa, in District 1, who talked about creating a set of pre-approved architectural plans that homeowners could use to convert their property into a fourplex while adhering to the current neighborhood vibe.
Just look at Minneapolis, which, in 2019, made nationwide headlines as the first city to “eliminate single-family zoning” outright by allowing triplexes everywhere. Fast forward to 2023, and just 17 triplexes have been built in areas previously zoned for single-family use in Minneapolis, a blow to the idea that cities can encourage “gentle” density by gingerly increasing what’s allowed in formerly redlined neighborhoods.
It’s thoroughly unrealistic (and, I would argue, a form of creeping architectural fascism) for a big city to dictate what housing in a neighborhood must look like. But the problem goes deeper than aesthetics, and gets to the question that has been nagging me for months: Are fourplexes real? That is: If we zone the whole city to allow fourplexes everywhere, will they get built? To drill down even further: Will developers find it possible–in other words, profitable— to build four-unit rental housing developments on single-family lots?
My belief, increasingly, is that fourplexes are not a viable option for replacing single-family houses in Seattle—but apartments are. Which is why it’s time for urbanists to stop conceding this point. We have to stop settling for “plexes”—and start advocating for apartments everywhere.
This doesn’t mean allowing high-rises in Laurelhurst, or eliminating tree protections (which, by the way, are easier to follow when housing can go up instead of sprawling out). But it does mean allowing regular old apartment buildings (not “sixplexes”; not “stacked flats”) in a lot more places, and allowing taller, denser apartment buildings everywhere short, stumpy apartment buildings are currently allowed.
I’m not a developer, and I don’t pretend to have the precise zoning formula for what will pencil out for builders and actually create housing in the city, rather than just on paper. (I mean: No zoning at all works pretty well in Houston, but I’m not a lunatic. I know where I live.) What I do know is that when other cities have tried to go for modest, tentative density, it hasn’t worked out the way they hoped.
Just look at Minneapolis, which, in 2019, made nationwide headlines as the first city to “eliminate single-family zoning” outright by allowing triplexes everywhere. The city was seen as a model for the kind of modest, infill density known as “missing middle” housing, including by hopeful urbanists in Seattle. The housing advocates at the Sightline Institute, for instance, argued that by allowing triplexes, cities could start to undo the “ugly legacy of economic and racial exclusion” and break “the entrenched stranglehold of exclusionary zoning.”
Fast forward to 2023, and just 17 triplexes have been built in areas previously zoned for single-family use in Minneapolis, a blow to the idea that cities can encourage “gentle” density by gingerly increasing what’s allowed in formerly redlined neighborhoods.
One reason triplexes didn’t catch on in Minneapolis is that formerly single-family areas retained their old envelope (height and lot coverage) limitations, which means that the new three-unit buildings can’t take up much more physical space than the houses they replace. If you allow developers to build more units but don’t let them build up or out, it turns out they decide to build housing that’s more profitable—like $950,000 townhouses, or 100-unit apartment buildings in the narrow slivers of the city, generally along multi-lane arterials, where renters are mostly allowed to live. You can argue that this is developer greed or unwillingness to get creative or rapacious gentrification all you want; what matters is that this kind of housing, though now legal in Minneapolis, isn’t getting built.
Seattle is facing a similar path. Although the city hasn’t released all the details of the five comprehensive plan options yet—an environmental impact statement that will include this information has been delayed from April to November of this year—a high-level “scoping” document says that new, market-rate “plexes” will have to fit within current height and zoning limits for single-family areas, which means Seattle will likely run into the same problem as Minneapolis.
Paradoxically, if we do increase Seattle’s theoretical zoning capacity without actually increasing the amount of housing, urbanists could end up playing directly into NIMBY hands.
The city’s Mandatory Housing Affordability Program, which allows developers to build more density in small portions of formerly exclusively detached, single family homes, in exchange for building affordable housing (or paying for it elsewhere) provides a local example of what happens when the city plans for a type of development without considering whether it’s practical for developers to build.
Townhouses, which were the city’s dominant low-density development type before MHA passed in 2019, have all but dried up, shrinking from more than 1,800 permits filed in 2018 to just 165 in the first nine months of 2023. This isn’t because people weren’t buying townhouses; it’s because developers can’t make them pencil out now that they have to either build one or two affordable townhouses per four- or six-house development or pay tens of thousands of dollars in MHA fees.
Paradoxically, if we do increase Seattle’s theoretical zoning capacity without actually increasing the amount of housing, urbanists could end up playing directly into NIMBY hands. For decades, traditional neighborhood activists have argued against upzoning by pointing out that there is already “plenty of zoning capacity” in Seattle to accommodate future growth; in other words, if every parcel of land in Seattle was built out to its maximum allowable density, there would be enough housing for everyone.
Let’s stop equivocating, or using euphemisms, to describe the changes we must make in order to have any hope of being the kind of city where working people can afford to live. We need apartments where people can live—not imaginary plexes that “fit in” to our existing suburban-style neighborhoods.
The problem with this faux density argument is that capacity isn’t housing until someone builds it. Until then, it’s existing housing that people already live in—from the affordable dingbat apartment building that’s been hanging around since the 1960s to the Craftsman bungalow that could be, but hasn’t been, replaced by a triplex. This “capacity” argument has lost currency in the face of Seattle’s growing affordability crisis, as Seattle residents have generally come to accept that we probably could stand to add a bit more density. Adding more theoretical capacity—even, perhaps especially, in the absence of actual housing—will only give NIMBYs another reason to argue that Seattle has plenty of room to grow.
I’m not completely giving up hope on the possibility that Seattle may yet build more rental housing, and even affordable housing, in its traditionally single-family areas. But I am going to start looking beyond “fourplexes” and “sixplexes” as that housing solution, because I don’t believe it’s going to happen—at least, not in a way that meaningfully makes a dent in the 112,000-unit shortfall we’re expected to face over the next 21 years. Instead of “plexes,” we need apartments—and that means building densely, not tentatively, everywhere in the city.
We could start by re-legalizing small, aPodment-style apartments and bringing back single-room occupancy units—housing types that may shock the sensibilities of people who think everyone needs two sinks in their 180-square-foot microunit but that will be popular among people who don’t have a lot of stuff, or those who would otherwise be unsheltered.
So let’s stop equivocating, or using euphemisms, to describe the changes we must make in order to have any hope of being the kind of city where working people can afford to live. We need apartments where people can live—not imaginary plexes that “fit in” to our existing suburban-style neighborhoods.
Advocates for preserving Seattle’s existing trees could soon achieve some of their longstanding goals when the city updates its city’s tree ordinance, which restricts which trees private property owners can remove and how much they must pay the city to do so. The proposed new rules would impose new restrictions on about 48,000 trees citywide, more than tripling the number of privately owned trees under the city’s regulatory purview.
The aim of the tree ordinance, at least according to the tree ordinance, is to “preserve and enhance the City’s physical and aesthetic character by preventing untimely and indiscriminate removal or destruction of trees” while “balancing other citywide priorities such as housing production.” A secondary goal is to reduce historical inequities in Seattle’s tree coverage—wealthy, white neighborhoods in north Seattle neighborhoods benefit from a lush tree canopy while much of of Southeast Seattle is comparatively barren, and losing ground—by planting trees, using payments from developers to right historical wrongs.
The proposal, which the city council’s land use committee plans to pass later this month, creates complex new regulatory maze for developers, and ordinary homeowners who want to remove trees on their own property, to navigate. The new rules will make it harder, or more expensive, for housing developers and homeowners to remove trees on their property, and ban the removal of large “heritage” trees for virtually any reason.
The rules impose new restrictions on trees between 12 and 36 inches in diameter, requiring land owners to replace the tree with one that will grow to the same size or pay a “payment in lieu” of replacement that ranges from $2,833 (for trees between 12 and 24 inches in diameter) to tens of thousands of dollars, depending on the size of the tree.
Under the new rules, all trees larger than 6 inches in diameter would fall into one of four “tiers” that would correspond with new restrictions on their removal. At the small end, the proposed new rules will allow homeowners and residential developers to remove up to two “tier 4” trees—those with diameters between 6 and 12 inches—every three years—a significant reduction from the current rule, which allows the removal of up to three such trees per year. On high end, the rules will ban the removal of “tier 1,” or “heritage,” trees, under any circumstances other than a documented hazard or emergency. Certain trees, including madronas and spruce trees, will become “heritage” trees as soon as they reach six inches in diameter.
The rules impose new restrictions on trees between 12 and 36 inches in diameter, requiring land owners to replace the tree with one that will grow to the same size or pay a “payment in lieu” of replacement that ranges from $2,833 (for trees between 12 and 24 inches in diameter) to tens of thousands of dollars, depending on the size of the tree. The proposal decreases the threshold for an “exceptional” tree from 30 to 24 inches; under the formula the city uses, the fee to remove a 25-inch tree, which is just above the new threshold, would be $8,767.
To monitor and enforce all these new regulations, and many more besides, the city’s Department of Construction and Inspections says it will need to hire three new full-time staffers at an initial cost of $273,000 a year. That more than offsets the revenues the city expects to receive from payments in lieu of tree plantings, which will be used to plant new trees on city-owned property—an estimated $191,000 in the first year.
Analysis of the tree legislation didn’t include the exact cost of replacing trees removed for development. But using the city’s own average “nursery purchase price” of $2,833 per tree, that $191,000 would plant about 67 trees citywide—hardly enough to address geographical inequities in the city’s tree canopy, which has resulted in heat islands across Southeast Seattle and other historically disadvantaged neighborhoods.
Imposing new restrictions on tree removal will probably result in less housing development, especially from affordable-housing developers who can’t just add the cost of new regulations onto their residents’ monthly rent. Tree-preservation advocates, who often rail against development, may well see this as a win. What it almost certainly won’t do is keep Seattle’s tree canopy from shrinking or make the city’s “urban forest” sustainable.
The obvious way to address a declining tree canopy and add trees in the parts of the city that lack them is for the city, not private property owners, to plant (and make room for) more trees. Yet the tree ordinance barely mentions trees in public spaces, which make up 36 percent of the “Urban Forestry Management Units” in the city—mentioning street trees only in the context of property owners’ obligations to maintain and replace them.
At a meeting of the land use committee last week, Councilmember Tammy Morales, who represents Southeast Seattle, was the only committee member who mentioned this obvious point. “I’m interested in how we actually plant more trees… in areas where we don’t have enough,” Morales said, “particularly in some parts of the city [where there are] potential impacts on the cost of housing production, which we also know we need desperately.” With just three meetings left before the committee passes the legislation, time is running out for her colleagues to listen.
When City Attorney Ann Davison announced her “high utilizers initiative” last year, she said it would go beyond previous attempts to punish people who commit misdemeanors by connecting them to case management, treatment, and other services. In reality, according to a report from Davison’s office, the initiative has only managed to temporarily incapacitate some people by locking them in the understaffed downtown jail, a “solution” to crimes like shoplifting and trespassing that does nothing to address the root causes that lead people to use drugs, steal from stores, and act out in public.
The report appears to feature a lot of hard numbers, but a closer look reveals that many are based on assumptions about how individual people would behave—assumptions that would undoubtedly be altered by effective interventions like housing, mental health care, and addiction treatment focused on harm reduction rather than coercion.
According to the report, the high utilizers list included 168 people over the last year—all individuals who have had at least 12 misdemeanor referrals to the city attorney’s office over the prior year, and at least one in the most recent eight months. Of those, 142 were booked into the downtown jail for misdemeanors or warrants, under a special exception to jail rules that have eliminating booking for most misdemeanors. On average, each “high utilizer” served 117 days in jail in jail last year—nearly four months per person.
In January and February 2022, before the high utilizer initiative went into effect, the average daily population at the downtown jail was 910; for the same period this year, it was 1,220. The increase is the result of a complex mix of factors, but jailing 142 people for low-level misdemeanors is undoubtedly among them.
Because most of the people on the high utilizers list ended up incarcerated, the report notes, they ended up fewer crimes than they had in previous years, averaging 2.7 misdemeanor referrals per year compared to a pre-initiative average of 6.3. This, the report says, is proof the initiative is working: “The principal reason for the significant drop in high utilizer criminal activity was that they were quickly held accountable and booked into jail for their criminal activity,” the report says. “Holding high utilizers accountable for repeat criminal conduct is the game-changer that reduced their impact on the City.”
Already, these numbers are speculative—who can say, for example, whether a “high utilizer” who received housing and case management, rather than blunt-force punishment, would have gone on to commit their own “average” number of misdemeanors? The report veers further into extrapolation and guesswork with an “estimate” that locking people on the list up for misdemeanors has prevented “over 750 criminal police referrals reflecting many thousands of criminal acts.” If this is true (and if “high utilizers” are really superpredators who deserve harsher treatment, including exclusion from community court), the city’s overall misdemeanor rate should have declined appreciably. Yet according to the Seattle Police Department’s 2022 crime report, misdemeanor theft (which includes shoplifting and theft from buildings) went up 5 percent last year.
The report includes “examples of reduced public safety impact” identifying some of the high utilizers by first name and last initial, making them easily identifiable—something PubliCola has not done when writing about the initiative in an effort to avoid re-traumatizing people who may have been targets of negative media attention. It also lists people, by name, who “absconded” from mandatory treatment for their addictions or died during the period covered by the report.
Not surprisingly, the report also concludes that people “failed” to follow through with coercive residential treatment, which has an extremely low success rate, particularly for people with co-occurring mental illness and those experiencing homelessness. Even people who voluntarily enter residential treatment for opiate use disorder are likely to leave against medical advice, and the vast majority of people who enter traditional residential treatment relapse—facts that ought to argue in favor of different solutions, rather than more of the same.
According to Davison’s report, though, the problem is that the people on her list just aren’t “ready” to accept the treatment they’re offered.
Image from original high utilizers initiative announcement
“While there were a small handful of success stories, the great majority of times in which out-of-custody addiction treatment services were offered and accepted, the defendant fled within the first 24 hours,” the report says. “At least five high utilizers absconded on more than one occasion when they were given a chance to address their substance use disorders with treatment. … That leads us to the conclusion that most high utilizers are not ready to go direct to out-of-custody, voluntary addiction treatment programs.”
“If individuals stabilize during in-custody time, there is an opportunity to successfully graduate the individual to out-of-custody residential treatment after they had demonstrated active participation,” the report concludes.
King County does offer medication for opiate dependency behind bars—an evidence-based solution that, unfortunately, doesn’t work long-term if a person doesn’t have immediate access to equivalent treatment when they’re released. As we’ve reported, the county’s jail-based treatment programs suffer from the same lack of staffing that has led the ACLU to sue the county over inmates’ lack of access to basic physical and mental health care; jail-based treatment also has the best chance of succeeding if people can immediately access housing and health care when they’re released, something the jail system is poorly equipped to provide.
Two years ago, Seattle’s corporate set learned that money can’t buy you the Seattle City Council. Now they’re finding out it can’t even buy a measly amendment to the city charter.
I’ve written before about how Charter Amendment 29, promoted by the business-backed group “Compassion Seattle,” was an expensive unfunded mandate with troublingly unclear implications for the city’s approach to unsheltered homelessness. Last month, a King County Superior Court judge struck it from the ballot for wholly different reasons: It’s a misuse of the initiative process, conflicting with state law and usurping the city’s legislative prerogatives. The state Court of Appeals denied Compassion Seattle’s appeal of the ruling on Friday.
To be clear, I wasn’t an impassive observer in this process. The organization I work for, the Transit Riders Union, was a plaintiff in the lawsuit along with the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington and the Seattle/King County Coalition on Homelessness. TRU is also a part of House Our Neighbors!, the grassroots coalition convened by Real Change to oppose Compassion Seattle.
So yeah, I feel like running some victory laps. But going in circles, even metaphorically, is the last thing to be doing right now. There’s a good reason many thousands of Seattleites would have voted for the measure: It sounded great. It promised to do something about the ever-worsening homelessness crisis. With compassion, no less! It was a false promise, but attractive because the crisis is so vast, so heartbreaking and so visible.
So, what now? Here are four ways forward.
1. The city should make it easier, faster and cheaper to site and build shelter and permanent housing. CA 29 promised to do this by expediting project applications and waiving land use code requirements and permitting fees. This is one part of the measure that was actually good policy, but it also illustrates why the whole enterprise was so wrongheaded. Land use and zoning falls under the purview of the city’s legislative process and can’t be decided by initiative.
There’s a good reason many thousands of Seattleites would have voted for the measure: It sounded great. It promised to do something about the ever-worsening homelessness crisis. With compassion, no less! It was a false promise, but attractive because the crisis is so vast, so heartbreaking and so visible.
Siting shelter and housing for homeless people is often controversial. Suppose CA 29 passed and the city began fast-tracking projects; if disgruntled neighbors sued, they’d probably win. The Seattle City Council already took action in early 2021 to make it easier to site and build permanent supportive housing. The Urbanist reported on that effort here. Next year, Seattle’s new mayor and council should work together to make more changes like these the right way, by developing and passing legislation to allow projects to move forward faster.
2. The city should make smart use of new revenue flowing in from the JumpStart tax—a payroll tax paid by Seattle’s largest corporations—as well as the remainder of the city’s federal American Rescue Plan Act allocation, which will be budgeted this fall. JumpStart’s first year was focused on economic relief from the COVID-19 crisis. But that’s about to change. “Starting next year, two-thirds of the JumpStart funds are for housing and homelessness,” Seattle Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda said. “That’s about $135 million annually for emergency housing, long-term housing solutions and everything in between.”
In July, Mosqueda and her council colleagues passed legislation creating a dedicated fund for revenues from the new tax, to help ensure they’re funneled to their intended uses.
This by itself won’t be enough to create 2,000 units of “emergency or permanent housing” in a single year, as CA 29 arbitrarily stipulated, let alone all the permanent supportive housing and deeply affordable housing that’s needed, but it’s a great start.
3. To go further, the city will need to explore new sources of progressive revenue. Last fall, King County enacted the Health Through Housing Initiative, funded by a one percent sales tax, to scale up its efforts on chronic homelessness; that’s not a progressive tax, but it is buying a lot of hotels. Seattle can do its part without further taxing poor people. Should it raise the JumpStart tax? Design a city income tax? Siphon off some unearned wealth? Push for other new options from the state legislature? City leaders should create a task force made up of policy experts and community stakeholders to research what’s possible and report back on the options.
4. One of the most unrealistic pieces of CA 29 was the suggestion that the city should suddenly (and with no new funding) start playing a major role in providing mental health and substance use disorder treatment, services that are currently managed mainly through county and state agencies. The city should acknowledge that behavioral health services are a county and state responsibility and work in partnership with King County and state legislators to fund behavioral health care for people experiencing homelessness.
One promising idea comes from 43rd District Rep. Frank Chopp, who points out that health care is the proper responsibility of state government . He’s developing a proposal called “a prescription for a home,” which he hopes to advance in next year’s legislative session. It begins from the recognition that chronic homelessness is usually related to chronic health conditions, which are nearly impossible to heal or treat successfully without housing. Just as the state now funds health care through Apple Health for qualifying individuals, people experiencing chronic homelessness would have a right to a home and wraparound services.
“The core of the program would be funded right out of the state general fund,” Chopp said. Phased in over time, “it would be part of the state Medicaid budget, like nursing homes, like home care, like prescription drugs.” With the state taking on more responsibility for addressing chronic homelessness, local governments could focus on building housing for the rest of the homeless population and for low-wage workers.
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So much for what I think; with CA 29 off the ballot, what are its backers and opponents up to?
“We need to start treating housing as a human right, not an exploitative venture,” said Tiffani McCoy, advocacy director at Real Change. “For-profit housing will never be the answer to our housing needs. We need to immediately start shifting housing away from the private, for profit sector and into the public sphere. We need social housing now.” The House Our Neighbors! coalition, she says, isn’t going away — it’s planning its next steps.
Compassion Seattle, meanwhile, is urging supporters to pay attention to the city elections.
“We can still make our voices heard in the elections for Mayor, City Council, and City Attorney,” the campaign said in a statement. “In each race, the difference between the candidates is defined by who supports what the Charter Amendment was attempting to accomplish and who does not.”
It’s true, the numbers are impressive. MHA dollars accounted for 45 percent of the city’s affordable housing spending in 2020, or $52.3 million. (MHA actually brought in $68.3 million total last year, and the city will carry over the additional $16 million in MHA money for 2021 affordable housing projects.)
And while the longtime Seattle Housing Levy’s $56.7 million accounted for more of 2020’s affordable housing spending, 48 percent, MHA actually created 110 more rent-restricted units than the venerated levy—698 funded by MHA versus 588 funded by the levy.
In short, this brand-new inclusionary housing mechanism, which came online in 2019 after five years of old-school neighborhood lawsuits and challenges, more than matched the levy, a 40-year-old property tax program that cost homeowners a median of $122 a year in 2016.
MHA is an affordable housing mandate that upzoned a sliver of Seattle’s exclusive single-family areas while requiring developers to either pay a fee, which goes into an affordable housing fund, or build a percentage of affordable units on site. MHA applies to every new multifamily or commercial building in the city. And it costs you nothing. Oh, and the $52.3 million for 698 units doesn’t even include the 104 on-site affordable housing units that MHA created; the city does not track on-site units as affordable housing dollars.
So, with such glowing stats, why “fail?”
I mean it the same way Obama’s $800 billion stimulus package was a failure and Democrats are now applauding Biden for going big on his $4.1 trillion infrastructure plan. In other words, if we’re getting a nearly-$70 million-a-year bang for our buck on affordable housing dollars from the polite MHA upzones the council passed in 2019, it’s time to do a Biden and go bigger.
If a bumper-bowling upzone was able to create a fund comparable to the Housing Levy without raising any taxes, imagine what a grown-up upzone would do for affordable housing.
MHA only upzoned 6 percent of the city’s single-family zones, which make up around 65 percent of the city’s developable land. Under MHA, the city also did some earlier upzones between 2017 and 2019 in parts of six neighborhoods where some density was already allowed, such as downtown, the University District, South Lake Union, and 23rd Avenue in the Central District
“For some, this housing affordability legislation goes too far,” González said from the council dais when the council passed MHA in March 2019, “for others it does not go far enough.” It was clear which side González was on. “So, let’s chat a little bit about that dynamic,” she said. “Contrary to the name of the Select Committee on Citywide MHA, this legislation is not even close to citywide. This legislation impacts a total of only 6 percent of existing areas currently and strictly zoned as single family home zones. That means even with the passage of MHA legislation, approximately 60 percent of the city of Seattle is still under the cloud of exclusionary zoning laws.” She went on to give a history lesson of racist housing covenants in Seattle.
Councilmember Mosqueda sounded the same note. “I’m sad that we’re not actually having a conversation about citywide changes,” she said. “I think that’s the next conversation to have. Larger changes that create a more inclusive Seattle. Again, this is just an effort to look at 6 percent of the single family zoning in our city.”
González is running for mayor this year, and Mosqueda is backing her. Here’s hoping González is actually committed to doing something about “the cloud of exclusionary zoning.” Not only because it will help create a more inclusive city, but according to the numbers, it would be good affordable housing policy.
Think about it. If a bumper-bowling upzone was able to create a fund comparable to the Housing Levy without raising any taxes, imagine what a grown-up upzone would do for affordable housing. While we created 1,300 units last year, we should be building a total of 244,000 net new affordable homes by 2040, according to the King County’s Regional Affordable Housing Task Force, or about 12,000 a year.
Another important stat, one that’s not in the report: $10 million of all MHA proceeds to date have come from developments within the sliver of city land that used to be zoned exclusively single-family.
Upzoning the rest of the city—the part that remains exclusively single-family—would certainly help. Another important stat, one that’s not in the report: $10 million of all MHA proceeds to date have come from developments within the sliver of city land that used to be zoned exclusively single-family.
This is noteworthy. Here’s why. There are three main streams of MHA money: first, payments from developments in selected multifamily hubs that became subject to MHA in 2017, including parts of 23rd Ave. in the Central District, the University District, and Uptown; next, payments from developments in all multifamily zones, from the new MHA legislation that took effect in 2019; and also payments from developments in the upzoned sliver of former single-family zones.
Over the four years between 2016 and 2020, the hub upzones, which went into effect earlier, have generated about 60 percent of the money from MHA, most of that in 2020. But since 2019, when MHA dollars started flowing in from the multifamily areas and the former single-family areas, nearly a third of the additional money from those new revenue sources—$10 million of $36 million remaining total—has been from development in the sliver that used to be single-family.
That outsized stat indicates just how attractive these formerly verboten zones, which sit on the edges of existing urban centers and urban villages, are for new housing. If we actually upzoned all of the city’s exclusive single-family areas, instead of just six percent, we’d have a better chance at generating the money to build the affordable housing stock this city needs.
While the upzoned former single-family zones did generate $10 million for affordable housing, there is another MHA fail. None of the on-site MHA housing was built in those areas. That needs to change. Opening up the entire city to multifamily housing, as opposed to the begrudging 6 percent allotted in MHA, would create more options for on-site multifamily development in these zones themselves. Hopefully, the next conversation about upzones will address how to actually put multifamily housing in amenity-rich SFZs.
The name of this column is Maybe Metropolis. My verdict on MHA? Emphasis remains on “maybe” until we do mandatory housing affordability right and make it actually citywide.
By Erica C. Barnett
By Erica C. Barnett
By Erica C. Barnett
