By Erica C. Barnett
As Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office prepared to release the proposed 20-year update to the city’s Comprehensive Plan earlier this year, an advisor sent an email to key staffers at the Office of Planning and Community Development, including OPCD director Rico Quirindongo, raising concerns about an “anti-displacement framework” the office submitted to the mayor’s office last year.
OPCD developed the anti-displacement strategy as part of a proposed comprehensive plan update that included significantly more density throughout the city than the plan the mayor eventually released; that plan, as we’ve reported, reluctantly complies with a new state housing law while preserving the city’s exclusionary housing patterns.
The mayor’s office had already deleted sections of OPCD’s proposal “that would suggest some commitment of new dollars or policy pivots that haven’t been vetted” with his office, the staffer wrote, but OPCD still needed to “really beef[…] up” sections of the plan that highlighted the city’s existing anti-displacement interventions, “with a ton more detail (including the millions we [are] spending on these efforts!)”
For example, the staffer wrote, “We should really be talking up our affordable housing investments—I wouldn’t be surprised i[f] Seattle residents are spending more per capita on this than anywhere else in the country.”
When he announced the draft comprehensive plan in March, Harrell said that his experience growing up in the historically redlined Central District “has informed my belief that we need more housing, and we need to be intentional about how and where we grow, addressing the historic harms of exclusionary zoning and embedding concrete anti-displacement strategies every step of the way.”
But a comparison between the 2023 draft of the plan and the version released in March reveals that the mayor effectively vetoed an ambitious plan to combat displacement and replaced it with a list of laws that are already in effect, including the “record high” $970 million housing levy.
The changes aren’t mere trims or cuts. The August draft, which OPCD finalized after four months of community engagement, described itself as “a toolbox for robust anti-displacement strategies needed to achieve equitable growth” and concluded with an appendix titled “Examples of current City anti-displacement tools.”
In the 14-page version Harrell released, that appendix is the plan.
The changes reflect a dramatic shift in the city’s official strategy for addressing displacement through smart planning and investment strategies. Instead of endorsing policy proposals to prevent displacement in the future, the draft plan repeatedly pats the city on the back for policies adopted years or even decades in the past.
For example, OPCD’s draft included five strategies to “Expand Tenant Protections” in the future, such as expanding access to information about vacancies in affordable housing, expanding tenant protections to more people, funding tenant organizing efforts, and paying for short-term rental assistance to prevent evictions.
In contrast, under a section retitled “Protect Tenants,” the framework released in March summarizes existing tenant protections without proposing any new ones. These include the Just Cause Eviction ordinance (1980), the Tenant Relocation Assistance Ordinance (1990), the Rental Housing Inspection Ordinance (2010), the Economic Displacement Relocation Ordinance (2021), and the winter and school-year eviction moratoria (2020 and 2021, respectively.)
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Similarly, the unreleased draft suggested the city expand or establish investments in strategies like land banking (buying land for future use), social housing, and right-of-first-refusal laws that would give community-based organizations or tenants the right to buy buildings that house low-income tenants when they go up for sale.
The March proposal eliminates these proposals, instead listing two existing city programs that help homeowners at risk of displacement from historically redlined communities—the Equitable Development Initiative and a density bonus for religious institutions that build affordable housing on their properties, which has been required by state law since 2019.
A spokesperson for OPCD told PubliCola the slimmed-down anti-displacement strategy “reflects many of the existing City policies and programs that were identified, through extensive stakeholder engagement during the summer of 2023, as strategies that collectively play an important and ongoing role in addressing displacement throughout the city.”
“Before assuming new and different policies are needed, the City needs to assess the efficacy of current policies and where there might be gaps. To the extent current policies are effective, the City may want to double down on those,” the spokesperson added.
As with the draft comprehensive plan update released in March, the draft anti-displacement plan avoids discussion the ongoing impacts of explicitly racist past practices like redlining, portraying displacement as the result of market forces rather than ongoing policies the city has the power to change. But market pressures don’t exist in a vacuum, a now-deleted section of the draft plan reads. They are exacerbated by the preservation of “exclusionary zoning” in whiter, wealthier single-family areas, which “limits access for lower-income people and contributes to displacement in other more vulnerable areas as people priced out of these neighborhoods look elsewhere for housing and bid up homes in relatively lower-cost areas”—not in some distant, racist past, but in our present, because of policies in place today.
These deleted sections, which span pages, weren’t just rhetoric; they directly informed city planners’ proposals for the policies they included in the early draft of the plan, including new tenant protections, more apartments all over the city, and “substantial” increases in funding for existing and new anti-displacement strategies. (I’m not referring to the early draft’s pages of historical context, which have been moved to a different part of the plan, but to the sections describing how past discrimination has reverberations in existing city policies.)
A spokesperson for Mayor Harrell’s office pointed out to PubliCola that the draft plan, including the heavily edited anti-displacement strategy, is “not the final plan, and we are still gathering feedback from residents. We see this process as an opportunity to have a conversation with community about how and where our city should grow and will be reviewing every aspect of the plan in the context of the public feedback we receive.”
Based on an earlier round of community feedback, however, there’s little reason to believe the city will change its plan in response to community input now. According to OPCD’s own report on a series of meetings held across the city between November 2022 and February 2023, Seattle residents overwhelmingly said they wanted to see more affordable housing in their neighborhoods, that the city should allow new density, in general, “everywhere” or “spread throughout” the city, and that their favorite thing about where they lived were amenities they could access without leaving the neighborhood, like grocery stores and transit.
Digging into the database of comments, which OPCD links on its website, “density without displacement” is a common theme, with many people identifying the need to allow more housing everywhere while adopting specific strategies to stall displacement in areas that are being rapidly gentrified. OPCD’s original anti-displacement strategy appears to have incorporated many of these concerns by proposing specific policies to address them. But by the time the plan emerged from the mayor’s office, all those proposed policies were gone.
Use a fraction of that insane levy (tax) money to install utilities in the many large vacant tracts so private sector can build homes on them, room for 50-100K more detached homes?. But didn’t utility districts used do this with bonds covered by future customers? Build it and they will come. And where does all the insane metro capacity charges go now? Pretty sure the treatment facility was completed long ago.
In any case there is no chance of actual cheaper housing as long as it takes years to get the insane cost dozen permits required to build a doghouse in this city. Only when we got permitted in 90 days could we build affordable housing. Building department is a bloated unrestrained unaccountable profit center. 3-5 professionals create the plans that about 30 reviewers do all possible to find excuses for more profitable correction cycles. No reviewer time accounting, no detailed permit invoices, insane site requirements like bio-cells which will all end up sealed and overflowing, dirt and doorbell inspections, severely restricted field changes, every possible insane cost ROW improvement dumped on the private project, no code vesting… Huge surprise its hard to find a general contractor even at 20% on the gross.
And raising taxes to build ‘affordable’ housing is oxymoronic and doomed just like all other bureaucrat controlled social engineering attempts. How many detached rental units are lost and rents increased purely due to destroyed landlord rights? How many trees aren’t being planted or allowed to grow due to insane tree regulations? Rainier Vista and Holly Park were such great examples right? I can’t think of a single successful bureaucrat managed social engineering program. Repeating the same process expecting different results is what?
Thank you for the reporting on this Erica! It is clear that “anti-displacement” is just jargon valorizing displacement itself: there is nothing in past or current planning that insures people will be able to stay in their homes in the face of development. The renter “protections” cited as part of the existing anti displacement strategy are proving disastrous to the future of social housing. Allowing people to withhold rent for an entire school year or “winter” and protecting them from eviction simply undermines the economic survival of housing providers. (Google Seattle Times’ story “Unpaid rent in low-income housing skyrocketed, evictions may be next.”
There is a complete failure of imagination and morality here.
I wish I truly understood what “anti-displacement” really means. Does it mean not tearing down and replacing with 3 floor stacked boxes in places where the tear down would be “affordable” by some metric? Because even though I live in a predominantly SF zoned area of N. Seattle, I see these replacements taking place at a brisk and increasing pace pretty much all around me. The exceptions are the replacements with “Mc Mansions,” built to within inches of the setbacks or sidewalks on every side.
Because I struggle to understand not only what “anti-displacement” may actually mean, and many other phrases of art around this topic, all I can say is that there doesn’t appear to be much balance in the discussion. In particular, I am alarmed about the obliteration of SF zoning and residences so zoned by the whole “anti-displacement” and other new-speak groups. I may be so lacking in understanding that this is a nonsensical statement; I hope that’s the case.
I feel that we as a city or as individuals do not owe anyone housing that they deem “affordable.” Supply and demand will take care of that–once no one works in the fancy restaurants because their commutes have become 1+ hours each way, the market will find a way to solve that that may well be more acceptable than the current options on the table, for example.
I’m old enough to have known about red lining, and my Dad was a real estate broker who deplored it and refused to participate where that was an issue. No one in my family or friend circles believes it was or is appropriate. But some of the so-called solutions look a lot more like grabs for desirable land that could be turned over at a profit than they look at cures of injustices.
“I feel that we as a city or as individuals do not owe anyone housing that they deem “affordable.” Supply and demand will take care of that”
Supply and demand can’t take care of providing housing many people deem affordable if “supplying” anything other than a single family house on 5,000, 7,200, or 9,600 sf of urban land is banned by law on thousands of acres.
Prior to 1923 supply and demand generated both single family (often on smaller lots) and (more affordable) multifamily housing all over the city, on the same streets, with equal access for each all over the city and that’s what we should get back to. (The ADU/DADU changes were a start, but only a start.)
Home ownership is the only way forward. America was built on it and that’s not changing. The County belongs to “landed gentry”. Please, feel free to join our ranks.
Some of us are smart enough to buy a house and cash in on its rising values, use it as a hedge against inflation. Others babble on endlessly about social housing and Vienna and density and zoning and whatever. The average person lives 80 years… most home mortgages are 30 years…. spend a couple of decades of your adult life renting, believing the Leftwing lies, you’ll be renting an apartment at 40…then 50. And the rent monster just keeps coming for you. How can you plan to retire when the rents just keep eating away at your income? Look at all the fucking tents in Seattle. There is no safety net in the real world.
But there’s still hope for some. Forget all the Leftwing drivel you learned in college and leave Seattle. Buy a house! Get married! Have a child even! Plant a garden! Take up woodworking or square dancing or bowling or anything that doesn’t involve politics that makes you happy. Get off the political hamster wheel and start living in real life.
Or you can keep going to protests when you’re 60. Good luck with that.
What does a city owe its resident and taxpayers? Clean water? That’s expensive and will become more so. Do we let that go into the market? I’d like roads to be taxed more effectively, with the per gallon tax matching the weight class of the vehicle (or based on miles driven for non-ICE vehicles). Someone driving a wankpanzer uses more space and creates more wear and tear on roads: that should be clawed back with taxes.
Meanwhile, Vienna, the most livable city in the world, year after year, simply builds housing as needed, and not just SROs or bedsits: it builds desirable residences for middle class and professionals to raise families in. How do they do? The city owns the land. It doesn’t need to buy it from speculators and other parasites. Every surface parking lot downtown (look on your favorite maps app) is a policy fails, paying a pittance to the city while raking in a healthy income stream that often doesn’t even stay in Seattle. Look at the old SPD HQ…a hole in the ground almost 20 years after demolition.
There is no free market. Never has been. What we have is a game run by the owners — just like a casino — designed to fleece the players. Land ownership is the game. The rest is just details. And we don’t have to confiscate land: let people pretend you can own the space inside a set of map coordinates, as long as the city taxes it for its remunerative value. In the case of the Mercer Megabuck the developer offered $3M a year over 99 years with a 2.5% bump each year. You know what compound interest does that modest amount? It becomes $1.2B over the course of the 99 years, an annualized revalue stream of $12M. And the city of Seattle budget office never ran the future value calculation (every spreadsheet has one) and sold it for less than $150M…a fraction of what was offered.
fckin autocorrect…mercer megablock: I have typed that enough, it should know it by now.
In Seattle we already have all the “anti-displa ement” policy we need for renters. We actually have more than we need and we’re seeing the results with the loss of rent due to non-payment in all existing affordable housing apartments. 30% or more of tenants are refusing to pay rent and LIHI plus other housing providers can’t pay mortgages for their buildings. Our $1B housing levy won’t be able to build any housing this year because the money has to be used for those mortgages.
I see no problem using existing policies we already have rather than spending money to legislate new policies! The city needs to be efficient with dollars due to it’s budget shortfall!