Affordability, housing, legislature

Elevating the Affordable Housing Issue

By Josh Feit

How can we increase affordable housing production? According to Senate Bill 5156, one button we can press is elevator reform. Sponsored by State Sen. Jesse Salomon (D-32, Shoreline), the legislation would allow the state to change current elevator rules that—practically speaking—force builders to buy from an elevator manufacturing oligopoly. The marquee change: Salomon’s bill would allow elevators about 17 percent smaller than the current standard minimum.

In short: By allowing smaller elevators, the state can make “missing middle” housing more affordable.

In 2024, a 100-page white paper from the Center for Building in North America outlined how a clutch of firms, including Otis and Kone, have signed onto a binding labor agreement  mandating a set of inflexible elevator specifications that define and limit elevator production in the US and Canada. These specifications, including exclusive propriety installation and repair standards, cut out a bevy of reputable and safe elevator makers that serve the rest of the world.

Prompted by the 2024 report, pro-housing advocates nationwide have been making elevators a YIMBY agenda item. As part of this lift, Sen. Salomon’s aspirational bill would allow changes to Washington state building code that could, according the urbanist nonprofit Sightline, increase the production of affordable, smaller-scale multifamily housing: “Apartment buildings with at most six stories and at most 24 units,” specifically, per Salomon’s bill.

The logic goes like this: State-by-state elevator regulations mandate unnecessarily oversized elevators.  As a result, according to the CBNA report,  elevators in North America are more expensive than elevators in the rest of the world. The report found that elevators cost around $50,000 to install in Europe while in the US and Canada, “these installations start at around $150,000.”

As the summary report on Salomon’s bill notes, this means that “currently, buildings either must have large elevators or [developers] are likely not to build them at all.” This second point gets at a cruel irony about opposition to the legislation.

One rationale for the current size standards is to ensure that elevators accommodate disabled tenants who rely on wheelchairs and make it possible for medics to fit stretchers onto elevators in emergencies. And it’s true that the elevator downsize recommended for smaller buildings in Salomon’s bill could mean elevators wouldn’t be able to accommodate a fully extended gurney. Citing emergency response concerns, the Washington Fire Chiefs and the Washington State Council of Firefighters testified against the bill last year, when it ultimately failed.

However, under Salomon’s recommended changes, elevators would still be ADA-compliant (current state law requires elevators to be much larger than ADA requirements). And, as Sightline notes: The new guidelines would still have enough room to spin a wheelchair around, plus another person, as well as a slightly tilted gurney. More importantly, they say, having a slightly smaller elevator is better than having no elevator at all.

“Perversely,” as the proponents of elevator reform at California YIMBY put it, North American rules actually make buildings less safe for people who need to be transported by gurney and less accessible for those who rely on wheelchairs.

“While larger elevator cabins make it easier to transport patients,” a California YIMBY blog post on the former issue argues, “the high costs the requirement imposes also increases the likelihood that buildings will not have any elevators at all, and that emergency responders will have to carry the patient down multiple flights of stairs.”

The CBNA report made a similar point about wheelchairs. “The United States and Canada now require the largest elevator cars in the world … a perverse disincentive that some developers respond to by simply building walk-ups.” In these buildings, people who are unable to navigate the stairs are restricted to living on the first floor.

Stephen Smith, the author of the elevator-reform report, acknowledges that he doesn’t know how many elevators aren’t getting built that otherwise would if the bespoke regulations didn’t govern the US market. But he stands by his report’s conclusion that “walk-up complexes are … being built, at a scale and to heights that are unique in the developed world.”

He explains: “I spent a lot of time poring over new apartment listings in Germany, Italy, France, and Spain and noticed that virtually all new four-story apartment buildings had elevators, and most new three-story buildings did too. In the US, virtually no new three-story apartment buildings have elevators.”

Smith says that when it comes to four-story apartments, his best guess is that it’s about “50/50” split on new apartments having elevators or not. As for the extremes,” Smith adds: “I have found examples in LA of five-story buildings without elevators, and six-story walk-ups in NYC and Seattle.”

Smith’s report does have telling data comparing elevators per capita in European and Asian countries versus in the U.S. and Canada. The difference is dramatic.  Canada and the US come in last with four and three elevator cars per capita, respectively. In comparison, Switzerland, Spain, and South Korea come in at 27, 23, and 15. (Greece tops the list at 41.)

Elevator-free apartments also make housing inhospitable to the broader universe of people who can’t navigate stairs easily or at all and who are looking for affordable housing. Conversely, as I noted, if developers do include the pricey, larger elevators in their projects, it raises building costs. And this too undermines the broader universe of people seeking affordable housing by making the housing too expensive.

Certainly, developers aren’t loopy enough to skimp on elevators in tall buildings. That’s why Salomon’s bill focuses on allowing smaller elevators in smaller buildings only.

Fortunately, small-scale multi-family housing such as stacked-flats, condos, and small apartments are exactly the kind of housing that urbanists believe will have the biggest impact on supply: Four-and six-story developments are known as “missing-middle housing” that would fit seamlessly into traditional low-density single-family zones; these are neighborhoods that largely exclude lower-income families, renters in particular.

As Uytae Lee, a pro-city videographer who worked with Sightline to promote elevator reforms, says in his elevator-reform agitprop video: By making more neighborhoods accessible, elevators are “an essential part of our transportation network … a core part of a city’s infrastructure.”

Uncategorized

UPDATED: Top Advisor to Mayor Wilson Leaves Temporary Job After Ethics Director Reverses Course

And: Where was the police chief during last weekend’s spate of deadly shootings?

This post has been updated to note that Lisa Daugaard left her position voluntarily, rather than being asked to leave.

1. Last Friday, two teenagers were shot and killed in a double homicide near Rainier Beach High School. The following night, four people were shot during a fight in Pioneer Square; one of them, a 27-year-old, was killed. On Monday, Barnes did a presentation on Seattle’s improving crime stats, which SPD billed as the police chief’s “State of the City” address, and was apparently peppered with questions about the weekend’s violence.

PubliCola couldn’t attend Monday’s event because we’re out of town this week. If we had, we’d have asked Barnes a question SPD’s communications office refused to answer: Where was the police chief last weekend when Seattle residents were being shot? Historically, Seattle’s police chief has gone to the scene of deadly shootings, but Barnes was nowhere to be seen.

Barnes’ family lives in Chicago while he rents an apartment in Seattle and goes home periodically. When we asked why he wasn’t on the scene of the shootings and if he was at his family home in Chicago, an SPD spokesperson replied: “The Chief was out of town meeting with law enforcement officials to discuss federal immigration response policies to ensure the safety of Seattle.”

SPD did not respond when we followed up to ask where Barnes was, specifically, and reminded their communications office that this is public information.

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2. Lisa Daugaard, the co-director of Purpose Dignity Action and founder of the LEAD diversion program, has left Mayor Katie Wilson’s office after just 10 days on the job because of a purported conflict of interest between her work at PDA and her work helping the mayor implement her own homelessness and public safety strategy.

The decision is a blow to the new mayor’s homelessness strategy and another example of Seattle Ethics and Elections Director Wayne Barnett’s unusually strict decisions when it comes to Wilson. Previously, Barnett fined Wilson for accepting financial help with childcare from her parents after Wilson—under fire from right-wing commentators—said it was a temporary arrangement while she was campaigning for office and unable to stay home with her daughter.

After approving Daugaard’s six-month posting in Wilson’s office last month, Barnett apparently changed his mind, deciding that it represented a conflict of interest. Barnett told Daugaard she could work on policies unrelated to the issues she has worked on for years at PDA, such as diversion and temporary housing for people who commit “public order” crimes because of poverty and untreated behavioral health disorders.

Barnett told PubliCola that Daugaard reached out to him on Monday, and that he told her “she would need to formally sever ties with the PDA” to officially work with the mayor’s office.

Barnett saw no issue worth addressing with former mayor Bruce Harrell’s many apparent uses of the mayor’s office to campaign for reelection. For example, Harrell’s communications office dramatically ramped up the pace of press releases praising Harrell’s work in the two months before last year’s election. Harrell also stamped his “One Seattle” campaign brand across many city initiatives and aggressively used his official social media accounts to promote himself during the campaign.

LEAD provides services in lieu of arrest and jail to people who commit crimes of poverty. Another PDA program, CoLEAD, provides intensive case management and temporary lodging to people with unmet behavioral health needs.

Last year, the PDA sought funding for an encampment resolution program in Pioneer Square modeled after a similar statewide program the group ran until it lost funding earlier in the year, but faced opposition from some advocates who argued that the city needed to pay for existing programs that stood to lose federal funds under Trump before starting new pilots.

Daugaard, an influential member of Wilson’s transition team, took a leave of absence from the PDA for the six months she planned to be at the mayor’s office advising Wilson on public safety and homelessness. Some social service providers, as well as the same right-wing commentators who criticized Wilson for accepting help from her daughter’s grandparents, questioned the decision, arguing it gave LEAD an unfair advantage.

Courts, Police, public disclosure

Police Department Reverses Course on Public Records After Lawsuit Loss

By Erica C. Barnett

Late last month, a King County Superior Court judge ruled that the Seattle Police Department’s policy of considering no more than one public disclosure request from the same person at a time, leaving subsequent requests in an indefinite “inactive” status, violates the state Public Disclosure Act.

The policy, called “grouping,” has been allowed in Seattle since 2017, when then-mayor Ed Murray and the City Council passed legislation aimed at preventing people from using bots to file dozens or hundreds of requests at a time.

In practice, SPD has been the only city department to deploy grouping on a mass scale, allowing the police to delay or deny disclosure for years by responding to every request by the same requester, in full, before even starting on subsequent requests. The Seattle Times sued to stop the practice, secured an agreement from SPD that they wouldn’t group requests from any requester that were more than eight weeks apart, and sued again when SPD failed to abide by their agreement. (PubliCola filed a declaration in support of the Times’ position).

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This week, SPD finally took action to comply with Superior Court Judge Sandra Widian’s ruling, sending notices with actual dates when the first (or next) installments of records will be available. PubliCola has nine outstanding requests with SPD, including some that SPD had been working on before they stopped responding to all our requests but one in November 2024; on Tuesday, SPD sent us new dates for all of our stalled requests. Each response said that SPD was providing these estimates “pursuant to a court order.”

SPD, of course, can push back these dates individually in the future, delaying disclosure in a way that appears more transparent than its previous practice of providing end-of-year “placeholder” dates for every request that move forward at the end of every year.

And in PubliCola’s case at least, SPD’s responses will still be far from timely: SPD now says they’ll provide new records for our oldest outstanding request, from June 2023, by July 2026, and we won’t see a single document from our most recent request, from December 2024, until June at the earliest. (That request, appropriately enough, is for correspondence between the public disclosure office and other records requesters about “grouping” in 2024). But perhaps it’s a sign of progress that SPD appears to be complying with this court order, so far. We’ll let you know in June.

City Council, housing, Mayor Wilson, zoning

With a Year of Zoning Changes Ahead, Mayor Wilson Can Still Put an Urbanist Stamp on the “One Seattle Plan”

By Erica C. Barnett

The city’s Office of Planning and Community Development rolled out legislation this week that will implement “Phase 2” of the city’s 10-year update to its comprehensive plan, the document that guides density and zoning in Seattle. Former mayor Bruce Harrell officially dubbed the proposal the “One Seattle Plan,” in keeping with his campaign and mayoral catch phrase.

The legislation complements the comp plan updates City Council adopted last year by increasing the density of housing allowed in 30 new Neighborhood Centers—areas within about 800 feet of existing commercial “nodes” or major transit stops—and expanding Urban Centers, where significantly more apartments are allowed.

The new plan will simplify the requirements for developers to build apartments in midrise areas. OPCD staff said apartments rarely get built in the existing midrise zone, because the four-story height restriction is too low to justify building and because Midrise has the most complex requirements of any zone in the city.

“Today, every single project that is built in a midrise zone has to come in and get a departure [from the standards because these are so complicated,” OPCD strategic advisor Brennon Staley said during a briefing on the legislation last week.

The legislation was finalized under former mayor Bruce Harrell, so it doesn’t bear Mayor Katie Wilson’s stamp. Wilson ran an explicitly urbanist campaign, with a commitment to allowing more housing in more places—something she’ll have a chance to demonstrate in later phases of the comprehensive plan.

Under Harrell, the city delayed the comprehensive plan update repeatedly, which is one reason it’s now broken up into four separate phases; the first phase, which got Seattle into compliance with a state law passed in 2023 requiring more density in former single-family areas, passed in December.

The zoning update also increases the amount of housing that’s allowed along “corridors”—areas directly adjacent to streets with frequent transit routes. As Doug Trumm at The Urbanist reported last week, OPCD reduced the size of some corridors in response to incumbent residents’ complaints about allowing too many apartments near single-family houses.

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“Today in the city, there are really very, very different viewpoints about housing,” Staley said. “There are people who own their home for a very long time. It’s been a great investment. … There are other people who think they will need to leave Seattle because they can’t afford a place to live.” The final legislation, he said, is an attempt to “recognize that both those types of opinions are valid.”

Efforts to accommodate homeowner complaints about apartments—that is, renters—have long been a centerpiece of Seattle politics. The result has been decades of anti-growth policies. Some, like exclusive single-family zoning, have only been eroded by outside intervention—it’s unlikely that Seattle would have allowed up to six units on every residential lot if the state legislature hadn’t passed House Bill 1110, which forced the city’s hand. Others, like the longstanding practice of segregating apartment buildings from single-family areas by concentrating them on busy, polluted arterials, remain in effect and are baked into the comp plan update.

Within those constraints, the remaining phases of the comp plan leave plenty of room for the new mayor (and progressive urbanists on the council, like Alexis Mercedes Rinck, Dionne Foster, and Eddie Lin) to allow more housing in other parts of the city.

After Phase 2—the “centers and corridors” legislation—the city will rezone the existing regional and urban centers, which include downtown, Northgate, and Capitol Hill. That will happen later this year and early next year, as will consideration of of nine more neighborhood centers, which require additional review because Harrell removed them from his plan.In  Phase 4, in 2027, the city will upzone areas around frequent transit stops—another density gift from the state legislature, which forced cities to add more housing near transit through House Bill 1491 last year.

Editor’s note: The original version of this story incorrectly described the city’s midrise zones as allowing six-story apartment buildings. That describes one of the city’s lowrise zones; midrise zones allow taller buildings. The story also misstated when the city will consider adding new neighborhood centers to the plan; that will be later this year, not in the first quarter of this year. 

This Week on PubliCola

This Week on PubliCola: January 31, 2026

CARE Team Struggles Under Cop Contract Restrictions, SPD Loses In Court, County Prosecutors Post Lurid Photos, and More

By Erica C. Barnett

Monday, January 26

Two Years In, CARE Chief Amy Barden Says Her Crisis Response Team Still Faces Roadblocks

In a wide-ranging interview with the podcast I co-host, Seattle Nice, CARE Department Chief Amy Barden laid out some the obstacles her team of unarmed first responders still faces in responding to mental health crisis calls. Among them: A contract with the city’s police union that dictates CARE’s working conditions (even though CARE isn’t party to the contract); later in the week, the guild president mocked Barden for her comments.

Tuesday, January 27

SPD’s Obstructive “Grouping” Policy “Violates the Public Records Act,” Judge Rules

A King County judge ruled in favor of the Seattle Times in their public disclosure lawsuit against the police department, whose policy of refusing to respond to more than one public records request from the same person or outlet at a time PubliCola has covered extensively. The ruling should force SPD to end the current, obstructionist practice, but leaves several other issues open, including whether the city should allow “grouping” to continue.

Wednesday, January 28

County Prosecutors Give Lurid Presentation on Sex Work Featuring Unredacted Images of Brutalized Women to Seattle Council Committee

King County prosecutors gave an shockingly graphic presentation about sex work and human trafficking to a council committee on Tuesday, showing unredacted images of brutalized, identifiable women with bloodied and battered faces and bleeding bodies. The prosecutors said showing these women’s photos was necessary to demonstrate how dangerous sex work is; after enough people expressed outrage, Kettle’s office removed the images from the city’s website and apologized for the presentation.

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Thursday, January 29

Three stories from Fizz today:

More Big Changes at City Hall, as Mayor Katie Wilson continues to shake up the departments. This week’s departures included Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections director Brooke Belman, who’s returning to Sound Transit as deputy director, and Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs director Hamdi Mohamed.

Jamie Tompkins has a Podcast: The ex-chief of staff to former police chief Adrian Diaz, who was fired for dishonesty (along with Diaz) after allegedly lying to investigators looking into the pair’s alleged ethics-violating affair, has a podcast that promises to tell her story, “Real. Raw. Rebellious.” It’s unclear what this means, if anything, for her ongoing gender discrimination lawsuit against the city.

Mike Solan Thinks He’s Cute for posting a photo of CARE Chief Barden, stamped “CLUELESS,” on social media and saying that the CARE Team aren’t real “first responders.” Solan capped off his week on Friday by saying police should ignore orders from Mayor Katie Wilson to document ICE activities in Seattle.

Friday, January 30

Police Launching “Neighborhood Resource Centers,” Starting in Magnuson Park

The Seattle Police Department is setting up a permanent “Neighborhood Resource Center” in Magnuson Park and hiring two full-time officers to staff it, with more locations to come. The park has been a source of complaints about loud parties and late-night music for decades, as well as gun violence. It’s also the location of the low-income housing complex where police shot and killed a pregnant woman, Charleena Lyles, in 2017.

New Drug Sensors Lead to Restroom Closures at Four Seattle Library Branches

The Seattle Public Library has installed “air-quality sensors” that detect vapor from drugs like fentanyl and alert staff to close the restrooms down for at least 15 minutes or until the air quality improves. Although public health experts say fentanyl vapor has little or none of the drug in it, staff have reported getting sick from fumes, prompting the new sensors (and frequent restroom closures).

Drugs

New Drug Sensors Lead to Restroom Closures at Four Seattle Library Branches
Seattle’s Ballard branch library. Photo by Dennis Bratland, via Wikimedia Commons, CC-by-4.0 license.

By Erica C. Barnett

If you need to use the restrooms at the Lake City, Ballard, Capitol Hill, or International District libraries and find them closed, it may be thanks to new “air-quality sensors” that detect vapor from drugs that don’t set off regular smoke detectors, like fentanyl and meth, and alert staff to immediately close the restrooms down for at least 15 minutes or until the air quality improves to a minimum threshold level.

Library staff already have the authority to issue temporary or permanent bans for people who use drugs in the restrooms and other violations of the library’s code of conduct or the law.

According to Seattle Public Library spokeswoman Elisa Murray, SPL decided to start shutting down restrooms at certain branches in response to drug use as a way to protect patrons and staff.

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“Prior to implementing this technology, staff only became aware of unsafe conditions when fumes reached the service desks or when a patron comment prompted staff to enter the restrooms and detect smells, at which point they’re already risking exposure,” Murray said. “An alert allows the behavior to be interrupted as early as possible, and access to live data informs staff decisions about whether or not the restrooms should remain closed without exposing staff to harmful chemicals.”

King County has long advised that fentanyl “fumes” are generally harmless. “When someone smokes fentanyl, most of the drug has been filtered out by the user before there is secondhand smoke. It doesn’t just sort of float around,” Washington Poison Center medical director Scott Phillips said in a King County Public Health blog post in 2022. “There’s no real risk for the everyday person being exposed to secondhand opioid smoke.”

Despite this, Murray said library “staff have reported feeling sick from drug-related fumes, and we have had to close restrooms because of fumes related to drug activity. Air quality sensors help us maintain a safe and healthy environment for both staff and patrons.”

Murray said the library has received no complaints from patrons or staff about the restroom closures. Using or possessing drugs in public became a misdemeanor in 2023, and people accused of either offense can be banished from certain parts of the city even without a conviction.

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