By Erica C. Barnett
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.
On the other end of the income scale, MHA requirements effectively killed small efficiency dwelling units, or SEDUs—the housing type the city reluctantly allowed after banning microhousing, or “aPodments,” for being slightly too small for city officials’ aesthetic preferences and not having enough sinks.
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.
Hi Erica – Thanks for your story, but… I don’t think you need to worry about “the market” building many new fourplex units. Why? I think you missed the impact of the Seattle City Council & their new regulations on small landlords. My wife and I owned both duplex and fourplex units locally for many years. We’ve known other similar landlords, and we all paid close attention to the increased financial risk that goes with the new regulations. Not only have the people we know not been buying or building additional units locally, many are like myself, geezers that intended to turn over the day-to-day management of their building to a management company but instead just cashed out (and we’re very happy we did). Traditionally the 2,3 or 4 unit buildings have been built or converted by small time landlords, a shrinking pool in Seattle. It’s a shame that this type of housing is not currently being built out to any large extent. My tenants could have gone into bigger apartment buildings, but deliberately chose the small buildings. I’m not interested in refighting the council vs. landlord battles (we lost), but it’s perhaps a good time to reflect on unintended consequences.
If by unintended consequences you mean landlords getting out of the business because they are afraid of having to treat tenants equitably, perhaps it’s just as well they are leaving. We need housing that is fair to tenants, not simply profitable for owners.
As a tenant who has generally lived for the last 40 or so years in buildings like this you can kiss my sweet longtime renter patootie with your glib anti-landlord crapola, Ms. Kinney.
You aren’t doing me any favors, so stop pretending you are (and get off of your high horse while you’re at it). Big management companies must really love useful idiots such as you.
100% – policymakers need to study if/how new tenant regulations are negatively affecting the rental market, and adjust accordingly. There have been so many changes in a relatively small period of time. Are the new regulations causing an exodus of affordable units? That would be nice to know.
The new regs do seem to favor larger, more well-capitalized landlords. Ones who can afford the hit if a tenant stops paying for a few months. Whether that’s good or band for affordability is a different question.
You sound just like my old landlord. When I asked him why he rented out the units in his 8-plex at about 15-20% below market rate, he thought for a moment and then started, “well, I’m not a greedy man…” I really can’t imagine renting from one of these large operators that dominate the market today. I mean, you do what you have to, but it just seems like a completely different renter experience.
We are developing a 6-plex on a formerly single family zoned lot in Spokane and revised our pro forma using Seattle construction and land costs to see if it would work here. Land, construction and soft costs are just too high to get a sixplex to reliably pencil here. Once you double the possible units to12 units (1 bedrooms) you have a building that could be feasible, is pretty efficient to build, matches in scale historically popular small apartment buildings, and fits into the urban neighborhood context. It could be:
3 or 4 story building
2500 sq ft footprint
50% lot coverage (not including porches)
2-2.5 FAR with bonuses for affordable housing, green building, porches.
We have shared this information with OPCD’s team. If they are hoping for inexpensive apartments that can be reliably built throughout NR zones, they have to craft the development standards to allow bigger, taller buildings with incentives to outperform townhouses.
As a person who’s worked in the NW construction industry for decades, I’ve never met a builder who was concerned with affordability. The name of the game is to make money, not produce affordable housing. More Seattle construction isn’t going bring about housing affordability… it hasn’t in the last 20 years, nor will it in the next 20.
I think we need be honest about the weird Liberal fetishes over housing. First, there’s only like 12 places in America where Liberals think are fit to live in… Portland, Seattle, Austin TX, the coast of California…. so of course the law of supply and demand makes housing prices in these “Liberal strongholds” completely unaffordable. If you can’t afford to buy a house in Seattle, wake up and smell the coffee! Move to another housing market you can afford and be happy. Google “generational wealth” and “home ownership”. SRO? What the Hell? Those are for drunk dead enders. What a horrible way to live… by yourself in a 250 sq ft room…. for decades?
No one has a “right” to housing in Seattle. Ask those poor bastards living in tents all over the City.
Right now single family homes are coming down and tri-plexs are going up in Seattle, but that’s only to keep building housing for the high income out-of-State buyers moving in. That’s the market the construction industry is interested in… high dollar. Why build 4 affordable units when there’s more profit in building 2 high dollar posh ones?
I came to Seattle in a different decade… a time of change where there was opportunity for guys like me. If I was 18 again, I’d be headed for the Midwest at daybreak. There’s just more opportunity there for blue collar folks. I’m not sure why hard working and talented people like Josh and Erica just don’t move to somewhere else…. buy a big rundown house and start building a new life that involves building the personal wealth and community connections that only come with real estate ownership. https://visitmuncie.org/what-to-do/
“Right now single family homes are coming down and tri-plexs are going up in Seattle, but that’s only to keep building housing for the high income out-of-State buyers moving in”
Incorrect. On single family lots where the ADU/DADU rules allow a main house + a condo-ized ADU + condo-ized DADU to be put in, the main homes sell for around $1.4M on average. The ADU + DADU sell on average in the $700s. Many jobs for local, middle-class essential workers pay in the $80s with a few years in, including Seattle Public School teachers, nurses, UW profs, and skilled tradespeople at the City and County – so (unlike the main house) local 2 earner couple middle class couple qualify for a mortgage for those homes.
Oh no! I’m sorry, but 700K isn’t affordable housing. Let’s say you have $200,000 in cash and want to buy a $700,000 home. Right now a $500,000 30 mortgage payment is over 5 grand a month. That’s $60,000 over a year in payments. Your income requirement would be at least $180,000 a year. I’m in my 50s and me and the Mrs. have done alright, but we’ve never made $180,000. Yet, we have owned real estate for 30 years. Seattle is played out for the working class.
And here’s the kicker… somebody from California bids 10% higher on the home you’re trying to buy. Sorry, you lose. There’s an out-of-State buyer from every DADU that’s going to built for the next five years. We’re talking a few hundred units a year at the most. I personally know couples making $150,000 in Seattle and can’t buy a house anywhere closer to the City than Tacoma.
I worked on these sort of projects for years… builders solid units before they were finished so they could upgrade all the finishes. If you can afford a $700,000 townhome, why not buy $70,000 worth of fancy tile and lighting? Stupid money I tell you. Stupid money.
In the year 2000, it was possible to buy a whole house on Hilltop Tacoma for $70,000.
Seattle school teachers owning their own home! Total fiction.
Market forces will always prevail. They are self correcting, and like water will always seek their own level. Market forces don’t care what the Fed thinks or does, they simply adjust. We can try to slice and dice Seattle up into bite size pieces thinking it will be more affordable, but when prices drop, fresh cash rushes in to fill the void. An amazing amount of Seattle real estate have been bought sight unseen, no inspection, for cash.
ADU’s, DDU’s, Townhouses, Plexes of all sorts, will definitely bring more people to Seattle who are ready, willing, and able to pay market rates. I just saw a 1200 ft., tall skinny townhouse nearby for sale. It was maybe 10 feet wide, sandwiched on both sides between similar units and was almost $800,000. It will probably sell for close to that.
But not to me.
You failed to mention the pivotal role of the Master Builders of King and Snohomish Counties, a major source of PAC independent expenditures in the City Council campaigns. They are the lobbying arm of the smaller infill developers that conveyed the Missing Middle Housing Bill directly from right-wing bill mill American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to our “progressive” legislature. No wonder the bill includes no mandatory affordability!
No Master Builder will build apartments. Their business model is to buy an older house, displace the residents, build 4-6 townhouses that sell for $700k to $1M each, rinse, wash and repeat. They will not build to rent, and a new condo in a 6-plex isn’t affordable.
The Master Builders also sneaked townhouses into the Missing Middle list of building types. Until this, townhouses could only go in multifamily zones and ADUs could only go in formerly single-family zones. When this bill goes into effect, the Master Builders can build their most profitable types (townhouses) without paying the MHA fee.
Also, your understanding of the building development capacity report is incomplete and misses the point. The age, condition and current use of buildings is taken into account. Seattle has three times the zoned capacity it needs to absorb the projected growth. Zoning is not the bottleneck. Subsidized low-income housing is.
Would you please cover land use with your customary depth, or find someone who can?
Nobody really thinks banning assault weapons is the complete solution to the US gun lunacy. Stay with me here.
Assault weapons are a start. Background checks are a start. The real goal is ending the cult of the gun. Realizing that individual gun ownership was failed idea. You get there in steps. Not all at once.
Four and six plexes are a start. People have to get used to the idea that single family is not the ideal. Also we use three times as much water a Canadian, more energy than anywhere else. Americans have a long way to go.
Whether it looks like an “apartment building” or a “plex” or a townhouse, it’s like arguing over whether a hot dog is a sandwich. Anything that adds density is a step in the right direction. Progressive Seattle has regressed so much in recent years, four and six plexes are probably the most we can do now. A major environmental catastrophe, a massive wildfire or flood is probably going to be necessary to get the city to take these problems seriously again.
It’s profoundly depressing. We’re talking the city that’s falling for the shotspotter grift. That elected Ann Davidson. Keep your expectations low.
( Houston has zoning. They just call it the “land use code”. A rose by any other name.)
I’m anecdotally seeing that when a single-family home in a “neighborhood residential” zone is redeveloped today, the builders often put the maximum three units in its place. I don’t see why the same wouldn’t be true if the maximum was increased to four or six units. That said, the number of single-family homes being redeveloped at all is relatively low. A single-family home in good condition is worth enough that the most likely buyer will be someone wanting to live in it rather than someone wanting to redevelop into only a couple more homes than is currently there. Only the very most run-down homes tend to get the teardown treatment, and I don’t see that changing much if the maximum is increased only slightly.
“Architectural fascism????” When everything is “fascist,” then nothing is. We have enough truly violent, undemocratic events unfolding in the world that urban planning doesn’t register. The hyperbole don’t sit well with me.
Your quip about “architectural fascism” also points to troublingly distorted political views. I guess metropolitan Paris is “fascist” in your outlook? That’s pretty disturbing stuff. Would you even know if you encounter what fascism really is? Seems extremely unlikely. Instead, sounds like according to rich white free-market loving liberals, having any sort of public standards is like Nazism. I’d laugh at such deluded thinking if it weren’t so common among urbanists. Instead I find such rabid, willful ignorance disturbing.
I came to say the same. It is fascinating when you drift out in the fringes far enough, you mingle with the other ideological pole. Maybe end stage USA is everyone wandering the frontier complaining about the public health officer, sheriff, land use and 100% sure the schools are harming their children.
One thing you didn’t mention about Minneapolis is the population is declining, and is projected to continue to shrink for the rest of the decade. So it’s a bit dishonest to say more “plexes” aren’t being built because such zoning “simply does not work.” The real reason is far simpler: a declining population does not need them.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities/minneapolis-mn-population
As an urbanist, I see that the rhetorical move away from “build big and tall” (2010’s) to “let’s spread density throughout the region” (2020’s) has been successful in driving policy change across the West Coast.
Many of our residential neighborhoods are less dense they were in the 70’s because the typical number of people living in each house has gotten lower (more elderly, fewer kids, smaller families, etc). The “missing middle” housing push is to correct this imbalance.
While the post notes that townhome construction has collapsed, it doesn’t note what has risen in its place: [homes with two ADUs](https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/seattle-is-now-building-more-adus-than-single-houses/), effectively a “triplex” on a single family plot. These seem real, but are inadequate.
It’s true that we need apartments and density. What’s happened in practice is all that major development has been stuffed into a few Urban Villages in Seattle and a few downtowns in the Eastside. HALA doubled down on general approach and MHA itself is creating some bad outcomes as the post notes. (It seems like that can be fixed rather than accepted.)
These urban villages have not become more affordable because the density is only concentrated in very high-demand areas. These should be more tall density allowed across the city, but probably not in every neighborhood. Further major zoning changes in residential areas on top of the changes in state law are going to be a slow and protracted battle. If we push for 20 story apt buildings in the middle of a tiny neighborhood, we’re going to waste time and lose the political fight. Alternatively if we can craft a decent policy, “hey how about a 4–6 story apt building at e.g. intersections, it’s not so much bigger than the 30 ft height limit next door,” etc. we can win.
> 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.
SROs are good and you’re right. But doesn’t legalizing this additional capacity do the exact same thing as the -plexes being legal? “Will only give NIMBYs another reason to argue that Seattle has plenty of room to grow”
In any case, the response is “the job isn’t done” & to point at actual housing built, not theoretical capacity.
We need high rise housing, plain and simple. Rent or buy is irrelevant. ADUs, microhousing, and “missing middle” units won’t build the tens of thousands of units we need today in 20 years. The only way out of this mess is up.
The only push back I’d say is that this risks pitting different types of density against each other. We need “both and” if we’re going to solve the crisis. we need those triplexes and quad plexes as well as apartments and micro units and ADUs and DADUs and everything else. Legalizing more housing options all across Seattle is the kind of thing we need. Framing the conversation by essentially saying “we dont need plexes, we need apartments,” risks pitting one set of urbanists against others. its what leads to dysfunction and division and ends up resulting in nothing because density advocates couldn’t get on the same page.
You are 100% right that we need more apartment construction and we need to reform (or get rid of) envelope restrictions. We just need a “both and” approach rather than an “vs” approach that this runs the risk of implying.
I don’t think that’s what Erica is saying. Rather, what I read is that we can’t stop at fourplexes because they won’t do what we want. We must instead allow developers to build apartment houses anywhere they can, because that’s the only equitable way to enable true housing density. As one commenter has already said, of course those who own houses don’t want their neighborhoods changed so radically, and they are reasonably upset at the thought of losing what they’ve assumed is theirs by some sort of expected right. It difficult to see your privilege being possibly yanked out from under you. But it’s long past time to do so; if we’d started with fourplexes 20 years ago, apartment house wouldn’t be such a pail of cold water now. But we didn’t, and our housing stock is way out of whack, so we need apartments. That of course will not prevent fourplexes from being built, but it will allow what we really need.
I believe paying more attention to the merits of ADUs is a kinder, gentler approach to increasing housing. I have put an ADU into each house I have lived in since 1986. Nice to see that monthly rental payment helping out with the bills. Nice to see one more happily housed tenant.
Yes, both applause and housing need two hands; both zoning change and market reaction. One hand clapping is just wind. Will and how will the market respond to zoning changes? I like the EB suggestions in the last paragraph: legalizing apodments and SRO. I read SRO are legal in San Diego. In Crown Hill and on NW Market Street, the market is responding to the HALA changes (there is clapping). There are still large SF houses going up.
Thank you. The anemic “urbanism” that’s been discussed in recent years in Seattle is worse than the old CNC rhetoric. We must move beyond this left NIMBYism masquerading urbanism as if we want to actually address our housing crisis.