By Josh Feit
No, you’re not reading the headline incorrectly. If it wasn’t for state Rep. Bateman (D-22, Olympia), who passed pro-housing legislation last year mandating upzones statewide, it’s hard to imagine that Seattle’s actual mayor, Bruce Harrell, would have called for any new density at all in his recently released comprehensive plan update.
“I’m disappointed and underwhelmed with the plan Seattle put forward,” Rep. Bateman told PubliCola. “It barely goes above what new housing production would have been if they did nothing.”
Harrell’s Office of Planning and Community Development, which published the new draft comp plan last week, estimates it will lead to an additional 100,000 new homes in the next 20 years—about 12,000 homes less than the bare minimum Seattle needs to accommodate, according to King County projections.
“They missed the mark. They didn’t aim high enough,” said Bateman, whose legislation requires cities to allow at least four housing units on all residential lots, or six if two of the units are affordable. While Harrell’s “One Seattle” comp plan technically complies, it does so at a minimum with NIMBY caveats and with a proposal that only provides 20,000 more homes than the “no action” option, which assumes developers will build 80,000 new homes under existing zoning rules. Seattle’s own transportation plan, released just a few weeks before the comp plan update, predicts more than 250,000 new people will move here over the same time frame.
Every 10 years, cites statewide are required to update their local comprehensive plans—formal policy documents that govern growth in sync with the state’s sustainability goals. With the mandate in play, Seattle housing advocates saw this year’s comp plan process as a beachhead for finally addressing the issue that defines Seattle’s affordable housing crisis—the housing shortage.
“Think big,” housing advocates from the social justice, business, environmental, and, labor communities urged OPCD in a joint statement last year. Current Seattle zoning prohibits dense development in roughly two-thirds of the city, its “residential zones,” limiting construction to stand-alone homes and attached or detached units. The advocates asked the city to allow four-story buildings in all residential areas, “remove density limits” in those areas, and eliminate minimum parking requirements citywide. Harrell’s comp plan update does none of those things.
Bateman had to make the density mandates in her bill modest because in order to pass at the state level, she needed to tailor the legislation for cities much smaller than Seattle; the bill’s minimum density applies in cities with populations “of at least 75,000,” or one-tenth Seattle’s size. Rather than capitalizing on Bateman’s starter bill and going with a Seattle-size strategy to create a housing-rich city, Harrell’s comp plan proposal goes small. While pledging to “ensure all neighborhoods are accessible to households with a diverse range of incomes and housing needs,” the proposal does not take the necessary steps to do so.
Besides doing the bare minimum to meet the state mandate, Harrell’s comp plan proposal also draws density away from traditionally single-family zones by regurgitating and re-branding the failed “urban village” zoning policy that helped create our housing shortage in the first place.
Per my New Year’s prediction, Harrell’s proposal undermined the state mandate with devil-in-the-details regulations that make building densely untenable. For starters, the proposal would keep total lot coverage locked at 50 percent, meaning that four or six units would now have to squeeze into the same area originally allotted to one house under Seattle’s old single-family zoning model.
Second, the plan sets the maximum floor-area ratio (FAR), a measure of density, lower than it needs to be to make four- and six-unit developments feasible on Seattle’s typical 5,000-square-foot residential lots. FAR is a ratio that determines how much a developer can build on a lot after taking other requirements, like minimum setbacks and lot coverage requirements, into account.
Seattle’s proposal caps this ratio at 0.9, which works out to a maximum of four 1,125-square-foot units or six 750-square-foot ones—far less, Bateman notes, than the State Department of Commerce’s recommendation for implementing her bill. These units are more likely to be stand-alone townhouses, rather than apartment buildings or “stacked flats,” an OPCD spokesperson told PubliCola, since “we don’t see that type of development occurring” now in areas where four- and six-unit buildings are allowed.
In other words, scrunching more units into a smaller envelope means the kind of projects the bill was supposed to legalize won’t pencil out—and so won’t get built. “If you can’t build fourplexes and sixplexes in the largest city in the state, it’s not a refection of the requirements of HB 1110,” Bateman said.
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Additionally, Bateman said, “We want to have three- or four- bedroom units available,” Bateman said—the kind of housing that would enable families to stay in Seattle. “The whole point was to make it legal to build these housing types.”
Besides doing the bare minimum to meet the state mandate, Harrell’s comp plan proposal also draws density away from traditionally single-family zones by regurgitating and re-branding the failed “urban village” zoning policy that helped create our housing shortage in the first place. Like that exclusionary strategy, Harrell’s plan cordons most new housing into existing commercial districts and along arterials. OPCD estimates that 71 percent of the 100,000 predicted new units) will go where they’ve always gone: Into the city’s densest areas, including “regional centers” (formerly: “urban centers”) and “urban centers” (formerly urban villages.)
The benefit of spreading density citywide, by the way, isn’t merely a matter of creating new opportunities for housing and giving lower-income residents access to more Seattle neighborhoods. It’s also a city planning best practice: Increased density is a prerequisite for an expanded, tentacular, and efficient transit system.
Unsurprisingly, Harrell’s plan falls short when it comes to transit-oriented development, a basic housing tenet that promotes sustainability by up-zoning areas around transit hubs to tie housing, employment, and retail to public transit. Yes, the draft proposal incorporates the long-planned light rail upzone around the future 130th St. station in north Seattle. But a new designation in the plan, “Neighborhood Centers,” is less dense than proposed statewide standards around heavily used bus stops, offering moderate (3- to 6-story) upzones within 800 feet, as opposed to the quarter-mile standard Rep. Julia Reed (D-36, Seattle) proposed in her own transit-oriented development bill this year.
Harrell’s provincial vision amounts to a historic missed opportunity. While we need to build six-plexes and apartment buildings citywide to accommodate our transition into a bona fide big city, Seattle is poised to perpetuate the housing crisis that has metastasized during the last 30 years under our existing, exclusionary zoning rules.
Josh@PubliCola.com
Based on the illustration at the beginning of the article the new plan will certainly solve one problem – sunburn. I doubt anyone living in a neighborhood developed like that would ever even see the sun.
There’s going to be a silver tsunami of boomers selling houses in the coming years. If zoning were left to cities, these homes would be affordable to families but since the state couldn’t wait and upzoned, development companies are sure to make it nearly possible for individuals to buy a family size home.
Jessica Bateman’s legislation is not written for homeless. It’s to benefit developers and allow them to make oodles of money.
Homelessness is caused by high rental prices as shown in the book Homelessness is a Housing Problem by UW Prof Gregg Coburn. An easy to read summary of the book can the found at https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/everything-you-think-you-know-about
As for rents and affordable housing, we are in such a crisis that we need to build everything including market rate, affordable, and social housing. But there is not enough money for affordable and social to do it by themselves; we need to greater amounts of housing that can be built by the private market. And increasing amounts of research shows that building high end market rate housing counterintuitively brings down rents for everyone. The most recent paper is https://stephenhoskins.notion.site/Liang-Kindstr-m-2023-Does-new-housing-for-the-rich-benefit-the-poor-On-trickle-down-effects-of–982d9cca809b475b86faca56f131a99b
It’s not a housing problem. All homeless once had a home. They have other problems which is why the majority who get housed end up homeless again.
Also many PHds have written books and theories with no evidence that are adopted by activist politicians. Look at “Harm Reduction” which was created by Caleb Banta-Green PHd. This was adopted by politicians in Seattle and Canada with disastrous and deadly results. Harm Reduction has caused more harm to homeless than any other policy.
So I wouldn’t believe the new PHd theory that homelessness is a housing problem just because it was written by a PHd. Logic tells us otherwise.
The professor from the College of Speculative Real Estate Investment is a classic case of someone not understanding something because his salary (and tenure plans) depend on his not understanding it. This is the same book that fails to understand that poorer cities have lower amounts of homelessness that big cities, completely missing the point that big cities have greater income stratification/wider disparities, which accounts for a lot of the homelessness and epic commutes people here have to deal with. Henry George explained all this in 1879.
Contrary to the comment you replied to, there is plenty of money to build all the housing we needs, it’s just in the wrong accounts. Vienna comes up year after year as one of the most livable cities in the world, for the simple reason it controls the land within its borders and builds housing as needed, rather than leaving it to speculators to either hold land vacant (as happens all over Seattle — look across from City Hall) or build luxe units no one who needs clean safe housing can afford.
Seattle could impose a split rate tax that taxed land at a high rate than improvements which would deter speculation without putting a dead weight on development since it would be taxed at a lower rate.
The homelessness problem is not going to be met by market-driven for-profit housing development. Developers build what will make a profit for investors: not rooming houses that rent for $300-600 a month, which would be today’s equivalent to the SRO’s gentrified out of existence. Seattle lost 15,000 of those affordable rooms between 1960 and 1981. The inhabitants of those units are unlikely to ever afford today’s new market rate $1,300 per month studios or $2,500 or bedrooms. Most are living on the streets.
The crusade to get rid of parking pays no attention to how people actually live and work. The billions of dollars spent on light rail does not serve 75% of the trips people take. Many of the bus lines that served people well have been reduced or removed as light rail is completed. Lyft and Uber are now luxury-priced. People still need a car, and if no parking is supplied, they park it on the streets and the narrow streets become dangerous one way tunnels with cars on both sides. We have the highest car theft in the nation and in six years we are all expected to buy new electric cars costing $40,000 and up and there will be no place to charge them without garages. Garages are not the enemy.
If we really want to stop sprawl on the fringes of the city, we need to create new development that maintains yards and trees and space between existing homes so that people with families actually want to live here. Forcing four-story buildings with no setbacks no trees, and no yards into single-family neighborhoods is a recipe for displacement, just as it has been in the urban villages. When a lowrise smaller house is suddenly surrounded by dense development its property taxes go up beyond what many owners can afford. The homes lose light and privacy, and the environment that drew them into the neighborhood when they bought the home.
What we need is truly gentle density that maintains a tree canopy, privacy and light. We already have an enormous capacity from the last 10 years of up zones that has not begun to be tapped. There is no reason to be forcing this on the cities at this time. Since the law was passed, we have to comply, but we can do it in much better ways. Limiting high-rise development to corners, to minimize loss of neighborhood cohesion and scale should be the baseline. Rather than focusing obsessively on racial equity we should be looking at generational equity and class which crosses all racial categories. a development plan that incentivize is only townhouses excludes the disabled, the elderly and multigenerational families.
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>> The homelessness problem is not going to be met by market-driven for-profit housing development.
No one ever said it was. Read the previous comment. You need both public housing and cheaper market rate housing if you want to reduce homelessness.
>> Developers build what will make a profit for investors
Yes. Just like every other business. If supply is artificially limited, then they build only for the wealthy. Imagine if the government only allowed car companies to build a few cars each year. Toyota would stop building the Yaris. They would charge 50 grand for the Corolla, and people would complain that “car builders only want to make a profit for investors, not build cars for low income people”.
Now imagine that to build every Tesla or BMW every Corolla and Yaris has to be melted down to supply the raw materials for them – because that’s what happens when you upzone older properties and impose a higher property tax bill due to the potentially higher value – those properties get torn down. And they ain’t being replaced with more Yarises.
Supply side economics by any other name is the same old shit, different paper.
“Affordable” housing isn’t. We need subsidized housing if we are to make a dent in the population experiencing homelessness. Seattle is already too dense anyway, we need to stop attracting people to our city.
We spend a lot on subsidized housing. We have for a long time. We are getting less for our dollar (and it is helping a lot less) because market rate housing is a lot more expensive. Subsidized housing can only serve so many people (the waiting list is really long). Again, because market rate housing is so expensive. The problem can only be fixed by making market-rate housing cheaper and continuing to build subsidized housing.
That makes a lot of sense. I moved here in 2008 from a nice suburb, 2 miles from Manhattan. The comparable house here cost almost twice as much as the house I sold there. Housing in Seattle is insanely expensive.
Upzoning every neighborhood in Seattle and tearing down older buildings won’t make market rate housing less expensive.
If we want to address the homelessness problem, which we see on our streets every day, we need to address the housing problem. This article shows exactly what we’re talking about. Thanks, Josh.