Category: Affordability

Affordability, Elections, housing, Mayor Harrell, Taxes

This Week On PubliCola: September 13, 2025

By Erica C. Barnett

Welcome back to us! PubliCola went on a brief summer break, but we returned this week with news about the mayor’s race, the comprehensive plan, the expansion of police surveillance, and much more.

Wednesday, September 10

City Expands Police Surveillance Despite Overwhelming Opposition, Concerns About Civil Liberties

More Seattle neighborhoods will be under 24/7 live police surveillance after the Seattle City Council voted 7-2 to expand police cameras into three additional neighborhoods. Council camera supporters claimed the near-universal opposition among civil rights groups and public commenters didn’t represent a silent and unseen majority of city residents who support surveillance.

Thursday, September 11

Debate Over Affordable Housing Tax Break Heats Up

Opponents and fans of a program that gives tax breaks to developers who set aside some affordable apartments had their say before a briefing on amendments to the plan. Opponents called the changes a giveaway to developers that won’t produce truly affordable housing, while proponents said the changes would make it feasible for them to build affordable housing at a time when development is slowing.

Friday, September 12

“Day Tents” and “Active Rat’s Nests”: Council’s Housing Budget Interrogation Goes Off the Rails

For months, councilmembers have claimed the Office of Housing is “sitting on” hundreds of millions of dollars they should be spending. A hearing where city staff explained why housing grants take time turned into a free-for-all for the council to criticize all sorts of housing policies, from the lack of a real-time vacancy database for affordable buildings to the purported presence of “rat’s nests” at an unspecified building.

Harrell on the Attack and Defensive in First Televised Mayoral Debate

In a debate on the Seattle Channel, Mayor Bruce Harrell went on the offensive with his challenger, labor activist and Transit Riders Union founder Katie Wilson, while also suggesting Wilson is racist for opposing police surveillance, a view she shares with civil rights groups across the city as well as the city’s own Community Police Commission, Office for Civil Rights, and surveillance working group.

Affordability, City Council, housing

“Day Tents” and “Active Rat’s Nests”: Council’s Housing Budget Interrogation Goes Off the Rails

By Erica C. Barnett

For months now, Seattle City Council members have been insinuating that the city’s Office of Housing, along with other departments, has been “sitting on” unused money year after year that could and should be spent on other purposes. Back in July, for instance, Councilmember Maritza Rivera suggested the council should borrow money from the voter-approved housing levy to pay for unrelated city services, given that this money was “not being used” at the moment.

The theory, which is based on a misunderstanding of how funding for housing projects works, is that the city should not be holding on to money it collects for planned housing projects for as long as it does. When it comes to the full budget, the city has an “initial underspend” that includes all the money that hasn’t been spent by the end of the year, currently 9.9 percent; however, that total consists primarily of funds already allocated to specific projects, so the “true” underspend—the amount that goes back into the general budget—is consistently around 2 percent a year.

In addition to that “underspend,” every year, tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in housing funds (and funding for other projects that span multiple years) is “carried forward” to the following budget year, because the projects that money will eventually fund have not received the funding from other sources they will need to actually get built. Because the city is typically the first funder for housing projects—other funders, including the county and state, contribute to full funding for projects later—there’s no way to spend this money until the rest of the funding is in.

However, because the funding is all allocated to specific projects, it isn’t available to use for other purposes; dipping into money that’s already dedicated to specific housing projects (or simply using housing levy funds for non-housing levy purposes, as Rivera previously suggested) would be fiscally irresponsible, to say the least.

Nonetheless, the council is still set on the idea that the Office of Housing—along with other city departments—is twiddling its thumbs instead of getting money out the door. On Thursday, Nelson’s governance committee held what amounted to an interrogation of OH and the city’s budget office about why they aren’t spending money faster. The specific purpose of the meeting was to review the two departments’ response to a council directive requiring them to report on why the city underspends its budget every year.

“I’ll just say that this is this is accountability, full stop,” Nelson said to set the tone. “This is all about our role in in making sure that the things that we allocate money to are actually benefiting from those decisions[.]”

In the first half of the meeting, city budget staffers explained why the city doesn’t always spend 100 percent of funds for multi-year or complex projects, such as executed contracts for human services, in exactly 365 days. In addition to projects that carry over from year to year, the city ends each year with an “underspend” of about 2 percent, which goes back into the general budget. “This is a feature, not a bug,” budget director Dan Eder said. “Those are committed dollars that that were always intended to be spent several years later.”

In its memo explaining why the budget works this way, the budget office noted that forcing departments to spend their budgets down to zero every year would lead to wasteful spending, illustrating the concept by linking to an episode of The Office.

Rivera pushed back on Eder, saying she felt “angsty” about her inability to get questions answered to her satisfaction. “Every time we ask a question, it’s really hard to get a response, and that doesn’t inspire confidence in the fiscal responsibility part of the city,” Rivera said. “So I’d love to have some fiscal systems put in place where every time we ask a question, we should be able to readily get to the answer.”

“Councilmember, I just want to assure you that we absolutely do have a system in place, and we can report out chapter and verse on every one of the grants from 2023 if that’s your interest, or 2025 if that’s your more updated focus,” Eder responded. “I’d love to get that,” Rivera said, but what she really wanted to know was “not just about grants,” but “information about vacancies, about just how much [housing] is being created and how vacancies are being filled. I just feel like every time we have this conversation, there isn’t a one stop shop to get all this information.”

That off-topic grievance—the meeting, again, was ostensibly why the city doesn’t spend money for housing and other priorities faster—set the tone for the rest of the discussion, in which the council grilled OH staff about issues that had essentially nothing to do with whether the department was sitting on money the city could be using elsewhere. Bob Kettle started off down this road, musing (as he has many times in the past) that the housing office should create an easily digestible “housing plan” for the whole city, the same way SDOT consolidated all of its modal plans for bikes, pedestrians, freight, and transit into a single, overarching “Seattle Transportation Plan.”

“You know, there’s [the JumpStart tax], there’s [Mandatory Housing Affordability], you mentioned the Housing Levy, but now we have the social housing levy, we have all these different funds,” Kettle said. “So as you know, there’s permanent supportive housing, there’s affordable housing, and it’s different bands and so forth. There’s social housing and the like. We need to have a comprehensive look.”

As Winkler-Chin gently reminded Kettle that social housing is a separate government entity, he cut her off, saying “I recognize that, I recognize that,” but “if they’re not in sync with what we’re doing, or what [the King County Regional Homelessness Authority] is doing on permanent supportive housing, that’s a problem, and the public should know it.” KCRHA does not directly fund the construction of permanent supportive housing; OH does.

Piling on, Nelson said OH should be familiar by now with the “new council’s concern that it appears that we’re stockpiling housing funds during a housing crisis. … Clearly, if we have these questions, and they’re not going away, it is a call for perhaps a database that tracks every single award, what is happening with that award, and when it’s finished, how are we monitoring the performance of that award? What are the vacancy rates? What the impacts to neighborhoods, et cetera?” It’s hard to imagine how such a database would work (the “impact to neighborhoods” of affordable housing is completely subjective, for example, and vacancy rates fluctuate on a daily basis), or what kind of resources it would require.

Switching topics, Nelson mentioned recent media reports that some housing providers are selling off properties; couldn’t the city think about buying some of those? And then there was the recent audit about waste and potential fraud in King County’s Department of Community and Human Services grants; was OH sure there weren’t similar problems happening with the housing providers it funds?

Piling on, Kettle turned to people who hang around at Third and Pike and use drugs; between 15 and 40 percent of them, he said, actually have homes and use “day tents” to do their business before going home. He then complained about an unspecified public housing building “where there’s an active rat’s nest around it. … On the public safety side, if you have a problematic housing situation because there’s a rat’s nest or there’s other maintenance issues, that’s part of the dynamic that we see on the public safety side in terms of what’s happening on our streets.”

Rivera, riffing on Kettle’s comments, said, “And also, just as a city… we should know what other the other organizations, like the [social housing] PDA and the King County Housing Authority, are doing as part of this overall plan. … I understand that OH is focusing on the funding to build the projects, and you don’t necessarily have oversight of the projects, but I do think that we need to create an expectation with the projects… and the not for profits.”

OH policy and planning director Kelli Larsen assured Rivera that the city does monitor its investments after the fact, prompting Rivera to go on a riff about a recent Seattle Times article that found issues at several housing projects. When Larsen noted that the city didn’t fund those projects—King County did—Rivera quickly pivoted, saying, “we shouldn’t just focus on the units that we’re funding and then not look at the big picture, because what we’re doing will have an impact on the big picture, and vice versa. And then when those types of articles come out, and you just said those weren’t our projects, no one knows that, and we didn’t. I didn’t know that.”

Nelson summed up the discussion by expressing skepticism that “things are going pretty well,” criticizing the budget office for the high “initial underspend” number CBO director Eder explained in detail at the beginning of the meeting.”I see that the … net underspend for the general fund, average [s] 2.1 [percent] per year,” she said. “But then lower on the memo, it says actually … [that] the initial underspend, excluding the impact of carryforwards, average 9.9 percent. That gives me personal pause.” In other words: Don’t be surprised if the council raises these exact same questions again, no matter how many times the city’s budget professionals answer them.

After this story posted, Ryan Packer pointed out on Bluesky that Nelson sent out a campaign mailer focused on the meeting, claiming (falsely) that the city’s spending on housing is “routinely delayed for years” (instead of being spent the year it’s allocated) by “bureaucratic delays.” The meeting did not reveal any “bureaucratic delays”; instead, city staff explained repeatedly that housing cycles take more than a year, and that there would be major negative consequences if the city started backing out of its commitments (including contracts and the voter-approved housing levy) in order to use dedicated housing dollars to pay for other general fund priorities like transportation or police.

Note: The original version of this story misstated the percentage of public drug users Bob Kettle estimated have homes and use “day tents” that make them appear to be homeless. 

Affordability, City Council, housing

Debate Over Affordable Housing Tax Break Heats Up
City Councilmember Sara Nelson said expanding eligibility for tax-exempt housing will benefit moderate-income renters.

By Erica C. Barnett

As the Seattle City Council prepares to update a program that gives tax breaks to developers who set aside apartments for low- and moderate-income renters, opponents of the changes called them a giveaway to developers for housing that will still leave its residents burdened by excessive rents. Proponents, including Habitat for Humanity and for-profit developers, said the changes would make it feasible for them to build affordable housing at a time when development of all kinds is slowing across the city.

The 12-year tax exemption program, called the Multifamily Tax Exemption or MFTE, currently has to be renewed every four to five years. The most recent renewal, in 2019, imposed new affordability requirements and restrictions on rent increases—making higher-income renters ineligible to rent MFTE units and imposing a 4.5 percent annual cap on rent increases, among other changes.

The latest iteration, known as “Program 7,” would bump up the cap on annual increases to as much as 10 percent a year and make higher-income renters eligible for some units, a change opponents say will make MFTE apartments unavailable to lower-income tenants.

Earlier this week, two dozen affordable housing providers and advocacy groups sent an open letter to the mayor and council objecting to the proposed changes, arguing that if the council approves them, “the purpose of the MFTE program would no longer be to ‘increase affordable multifamily housing opportunities … for households who cannot afford market-rate housing in Seattle,’ and would instead focus on increasing multifamily development in exchange for a modest share of MFTE units and no guarantee of rents meaningfully lower than market rate.”

At a meeting of the council’s housing committee on Wednesday—where the committee also took up 14 amendments aimed at various aspects of the program—renters’ rights advocates urged the city to reject the proposal and keep the existing program in place another year while the city comes up with a more equitable plan. (The MFTE update has already been delayed twice, and expired yesterday.)

Miram Roskin, the former deputy director of the city’s Office of Housing, said the program removes about $20 million in “invisible” dollars from the city’s budget every year in the form of foregone property taxes, in exchange for very limited benefits for lower-income renters.

“At the margin, there are certainly financially feasible, on the bubble projects that benefit and come to fruition thanks to the tax exemption. However, this is speculative. It is unquantified, it’s anecdotal. This is why the affordability component of the program matters so much,” Roskin said. “In many cases, rents would be indistinguishable from the market. And in fact, in some cases, the affordable rent would even be higher than the market [rent].”

For example, under the new proposal, renters making up to 50 percent of Seattle’s median income would be eligible to rent small studios (less than 320 square feet); the proposal bumps up the maximum rent for these units to $1,375 a month, just $91 less than the median similar apartments rent for on the private market. The maximum rent for a standard one-bedroom would increase to $2,209, or about $395 less than market rent.

Median incomes, and—indirectly—maximum rents are set by a federal formula that includes both homeowners and renters. The Seattle Renters Commission called out this issue in its own letter opposing the new program, noting that the median Seattle renter makes around $79,000, compared to about $181,000 for homeowner households.

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Developers, in contrast, said they the current standards have made them opt out of the tax exemption program, and argued that the changes would spur them to build more affordable apartments at a time when building permits have slowed down dramatically, a trend that will likely make Seattle’s housing crunch significantly worse over the next several years.

“We are evidence that the program currently is not working,” Kamiak Real Estate founder Scott Lien told the committee. “We rescinded our MFTE applications on four of our last five projects prior to occupancy, and now we have six buildings with 1,100 units in our pipeline, and have no plans to participate in MFTE for most of those” under the current program.

Developers also argued that the MFTE program was never designed to provide housing to low-income residents, but is supposed to create “workforce” housing for moderate-income renters.

A 2024 University of Washington study found that the MFTE program does cost the city money every year, but noted that developers won’t use the program if they can’t make a profit. The study also found that the city has historically seen a benefit of about 50 cents on the dollar, in the form of lower rents, over the life of the program, except under the most recent iteration, where rents decreased and the benefit to the city increased more dramatically.

Over the life of the program, which began in 1998, developers have built more than 7,000 affordable housing units, mostly studios and one-bedrooms, but those lower rents “may only represent a modest discount” compared to the rest of the market, the UW study found. Apartments in areas where rents are already higher, like South Lake Union, are more affordable relative to other available units than they are in areas where rents are lower, like South Park or Rainier Beach, where “there may be negligible differences between the rents of restricted and unrestricted units.”

“Some of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the city,” the study notes, have been categorically exempt from MFTE because they’re zoned for single-family houses. Given that most MFTE units are in three-to-five-story apartment buildings, this isn’t likely to change much, even with zoning changes that allow between four and six units per lot in these areas.

Several of the 14 amendments councilmembers introduced Wednesday would lower the income eligibility thresholds for various types and sizes of apartments, prompting Council President Sara Nelson to object that new affordability restrictions could force renters out of their homes. “We don’t want to be displacing people,” Nelson said. Making people who make more money eligible for MFTE units, she added, “means more access, not higher prices.”

Although a central staffer assured Nelson that the program has a “grace” component that lets existing tenants stay in their homes as their income rises (under the program, existing renters retain their rent discounts until their income rises to 150 percent of the eligibility level, and pay market rent after that), Nelson raised the exact same objection a moment later.

“There are people already living in these units, so what’s going to happen to them if you lower the income per unit? Then the person’s going to have to move out. … I feel like this is going to displace people and in fact that’s what happened to my friend.”

Councilmembers also proposed amendments to allow developers with projects already in the pipeline to opt in to the new, more developer-friendly program, a change the housing advocacy groups called “a bad deal for Seattle” in their open letter. Other amendments would require regular reporting on which developers are participating in the program and what kind of housing they’re building, and reinstate a sunset clause that would require the city to update the program again in 2029, which the original legislation eliminated. Rob Saka, the cosponsor of the sunset amendment along with Alexis Mercedes Rinck, said revisiting the program regularly was a matter of good governance.

“Deleting a sunset date whatsoever, in perpetuity, for something of this significance, and greater scale, and subject to fluctuating market conditions—I don’t know if it’s the best, most appropriate, prudent course of action,” Saka said.

Another amendment sought by developers, from Mark Solomon, would eliminate the requirement that developers who are replacing older, “naturally affordable” housing with (typically denser) new MFTE units add one new unit that’s permanently affordable to renters making 50 percent of median income to their new buildings for every tenant in the demolished building who qualifies for relocation assistance under the city’s Tenant Relocation Assistance Ordinance. Developers argue that this permanent affordability requirement has stopped the development of dense new housing under the MFTE program.

Councilmember Debora Juarez complained that the 14 amendments (including one that was so new it didn’t show up on the council’s online agenda) had been “dropped on us” at the last minute, with little time to analyze or understand them. The committee didn’t vote on the proposed changes; they’ll do that on September 22, with a full council vote likely on September 30.

Affordability, City Council, Mayor Harrell, Renters

Harrell Bill Would Make Venues Liable for Patrons’ Off-Premises Behavior; Moore Bill to Ban Algorithmic Rent-Fixing on Fast Track

By Erica C. Barnett

Mayor Bruce Harrell is proposing legislation that would expand the city’s ability to shut down so-called chronic nuisance properties by holding businesses responsible for incidents that occur “in proximity” to their property, if the person who violated the law was a patron or customer of the business and “facts and circumstances establish a nexus between the property and the nuisance activity.”

The legislation would also add violations of state liquor laws to the violations that can get a property tagged as a “chronic nuisance,” allowing the city to sanction or shut down bars and nightclubs if they violate liquor laws repeatedly—or if their patrons violate liquor laws after they’ve left the premises. If a business violates the nuisance law more than three times in 60 days, or seven times in a year, the city can take actions ranging from a fine to shutting the business down.

Currently, the city’s chronic nuisance law only applies to incidents that occur on the premises of a business or property. This limited approach, according to Harrell’s proposed legislation, has allowed “Nuisance activities … including homicides and aggravated assaults, to occur near certain properties in Pioneer Square.” In May, for example, four people were shot outside the OHM Nightclub near Occidental Park, three of them fatally.

Seattle has a long history of passing legislation to restrict nightlife or expand business owners’ legal liability for their patrons’ behavior in response to tragic incidents or repeated neighborhood complaints.

In fact, Harrell’s proposal is strikingly similar to the 1999 “added activities ordinance,” which would have made bars and clubs liable for noise, litter, traffic, and crime that happened nearby, in areas they don’t directly control. At the time, proponents said expanding the law was necessary because of issues the city tied to clubs in Pioneer Square and on the downtown waterfront. The proposal, backed by then-city attorney Mark Sidran, floundered after a federal  judge ruled that a similar state law that required venues to get special licenses for dancing, live music, and other “added” activities, was unconstitutional.

On its face, Harrell’s proposal seems less restrictive than the added activities ordinance—it doesn’t apply to urban annoyances like noise and litter. But the list of activities it would hold businesses newly liable for on the sidewalks and streets around them is broad, including not only criminal offenses, ranging from assault to failure to disperse, but drug and liquor violations that might occur down the block from a business, or even further away—the bill doesn’t define what it means for a nuisance to be “in proximity” to a property.

Harrell’s legislation notes that the existing chronic nuisance ordinance has only been used 17 times since it was adopted in 2009—a tacit reassurance that if the city gives the mayor and police chief power to hold clubs liable for off-premises activities, they won’t abuse it. But the letter of the proposed law would allow the city to shut a bar or nightclub down if people are caught smoking weed or drinking alcohol in a public area outside the bar, and nothing in the proposal constrains police from keeping an extra-close eye on properties the city has identified as potential targets for abatement under the expanded nuisance law.

The legislation hasn’t shown up in the council’s legislative tracking system yet. When it does, it will go through Harrell ally Bob Kettle’s public safety committee.

2. On Wednesday, the City Council’s housing and human services committee approved legislation that would prohibit property owners and managers from using algorithmic rent-setting companies like Real Page to determine rent prices. The bill, sponsored by Councilmember Cathy Moore, took the committee just 35 minutes—35 minutes!—to discuss and approve. The fast-tracked bill now heads to the full council, which could vote on the bill before Moore departs the council on July 7.

Moore has come under fire for supporting legislation, which she was set to sponsor, that would roll back a number of anti-eviction laws passed by the previous council, including the winter and school-year eviction moratoriums and a $10 cap on late fees. Moore also proposed legislation that would have rewritten the city’s ethics code so that council members could vote in their own financial interest; that proposal faced stiff  opposition, and Moore withdrew it shortly before announcing she would step down a year and a half into her term.

Advocates who’ve opposed Moore on other policies applauded her for pushing the ban on algorithmic pricing, which uses both public and proprietary data to recommend rent prices. The state and federal governments have sued the largest algorithmic pricing company, RealPage, over the practice, which critics say amounts to illegal collusion among property management companies to keep rents high and hold units vacant until they can charge more, contributing to the housing crisis. At the time then-attorney general Bob Ferguson sued RealPage last year, his office estimated that about 800,000 leases had been priced using RealPage in the state since 2017.

“While it’s hard to measure the impact [in Seattle] precisely, it is likely that this has contributed significantly to the rapidly rising rents that we’ve seen coming out of the pandemic,” Transit Riders Union leader and mayoral candidate Katie Wilson said. “Landlords and property managers, following the instructions that they get from RealPage … end up raising rents more than they otherwise would, forcing tenants out when they can’t afford the increase.”

A ProPublica investigation found that companies using RealPage sometimes leave units vacant on purpose to help drive up the cost of other units.

The state legislature took up statewide legislation to ban algorithmic rent-fixing tools earlier this year, but advocates in Olympia opted instead to focus on passing the landmark rent stabilization bill, a legislator who worked on both bills told PubliCola.

Affordability, City Council, Development, Equity

Last-Minute Proposal Could Gut City’s Largest Anti-Displacement Program

By Erica C. Barnett

An anti-displacement program designed to help BIPOC-led community groups develop housing and other projects is on the chopping block.

Late last Friday afternoon, Seattle City Councilmember Maritza Rivera proposed a budget proviso—a restriction on funding—that would prevent the city’s Office of Community Planning and Development (OPCD) from spending $25.3 million allocated for the Equitable Development Initiative in 2024 unless it allocates all the funds that are currently available for the program, around $53.5 million, by September, and provides the council with a detailed analysis of every project funded through EDI.

If those two things don’t happen by the September deadline, the money—most of it ($19.8 million) from the JumpStart payroll tax—would go back into the general fund and could be used to address the projected $250 million 2025 budget shortfall. About 9 percent of JumpStart—a tax on paid by the city’s largest companies on the salaries of their highest-compensated employees—is allocated by law to EDI.

Because it is unlikely that OPCD can allocate all the funds to dozens of projects in various stages of development over the next few months, Rivera’s proviso would effectively gut the program.

The EDI program provides funds to help community groups that have little or no capital development experience with site acquisition or other capital costs that are part of the larger “capital stack” used to fund complex projects, including affordable housing, child care, and community centers; in some cases, the funds help organizations that don’t have a permanent home build capacity and stability so they can grow. If the EDI funds go away, dozens of projects could collapse.

Tammy Morales, who heads the council’s land use committee and , said supporters of EDI were “surprised that there would be such a potentially huge impact on dozens of organizations and projects without notification to anybody. … I don’t know what’s motivating this. All I know is that this would be hugely destabilizing for dozens of projects.”

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Advocates for the anti-displacement initiative have noted that development projects don’t happen in a year; particularly for community groups that may be developing projects for the first time, they can take months or years, which is why the funding for EDI carries forward from year to year. “The nature of development is that sometimes it takes two or three years to get all the financing together,” Morales said.

It’s probably unreasonable, in other words, to expect a community group with no history developing major capital projects–like the Ethiopian Community in Seattle, which has been working for years to develop senior housing on the site of its existing community center on Rainier Ave. S.—to spend its entire EDI allocation right away.

At a meeting of the council’s budget committee earlier this month, Rivera characterized EDI projects as “one-time funding” that might pay for programs that need ongoing funds in future years, creating a funding cliff. “I have questions about what this one-time funding will cover and whether there were any programs being contemplated  this money that would need ongoing funding,” Rivera said.

However, a detailed EDI project list shows that these are generally capital projects, and that the initiative pays for things like site acquisition, planning for capital projects, and construction, as opposed to ongoing programs that require annual funding.

Because EDI is designed to fund projects that address displacement in communities of color, the vast majority of the projects are in Morales’ District 2, which includes all of Southeast Seattle, the most diverse part of the city. There are also a large number of projects in Joy Hollingsworth’s District 3, which includes the historically Black Central District, and Rob Saka’s District 1, which includes all of West Seattle.

Rivera’s district is one of just two council districts (the other is Bob Kettle’s District 1, which includes downtown, Magnolia, and Queen Anne), that does not include a single EDI project.

During the same budget meeting, Rivera complained that OPCD had “consistently rescheduled and delayed” meeting with her to explain EDI. In fact, OPCD director Rico Quirindongo briefed Rivera on EDI individually in her council office on at least two occasions in May, council sign-in sheets confirm. The department also did a full briefing on EDI for the the council’s land use committee, on which Rivera sits, in March. All three of these briefings occurred before last Friday, when Rivera introduced her proviso.

Earlier this year, the council killed another program designed to help community groups prevent displacement by providing density incentives for community groups that develop affordable housing. At the time, Rivera said the city should not provide new housing incentives until the city adopts a final comprehensive plan in the coming year, and suggested (incorrectly) that the city does not know what’s in the housing levy Seattle voters adopted earlier this year.

Mayor Bruce Harrell has been supportive of the EDI program in the past, saying last year that the program “embodies our One Seattle vision, bringing to the forefront innovative community-based programs that increase affordable housing and economic opportunity, and ensure vibrant cultural spaces find permanence in our city.” PubliCola has reached out to the mayor’s office for comment and will update this post if we hear back.

The council is scheduled to vote on Rivera’s amendment at its meeting at 2:00 this afternoon.

Affordability, Density, Guest Contributor, housing, Mayor Harrell

Harrell Throws in the Towel on Housing with a 20-Year Plan to Increase Housing Prices and Worsen Homelessness

By Ron Davis

Mayor Bruce Harrell just released a 20-year plan to give up on the housing crisis. With its proposed update to the city’s comprehensive plan, the administration plans a big slowdown in housing production, and over the course of 20 years, actually aims to make the housing deficit deeper.

This is a stunning surrender from someone who promised he would not play “small ball” and said he wants to embrace “Space Needle Thinking.” Unfortunately, the way state law and the process works, we will be stuck with this feeble framework for quite some time.

Right now, we are tens of thousands of housing units behind, and this plan will take twenty years to make it at least 12,000 units worse, and possibly much more so. It doesn’t improve the housing deficit, and it doesn’t even tread water.

It is literally a plan to fail.

What Is A Comprehensive Plan and Why Do We Have One?

State law requires cities and counties to release a 20-year “comprehensive plan” for how they are going to handle their growth. This includes how much growth, and where it goes. After this plan gets an extensive environmental review, it is much harder to challenge. This makes it expensive, time consuming, and sometimes legally risky to try to change course after the plan is approved. In other words, these plans are hard to unstick.

So the plan to fail will be with us for a while.

The Impact

Failing at housing means prices will climb higher and faster. So unless you have a few million to loan your kids before you die, or a very roomy basement, there is little chance they will be able to afford to live in Seattle. And unless you made around $400,000 a year in your twenties and thirties, people like you will not be able to start a career or raise a family in Seattle.

According to experts, higher housing prices also increase homelessness. This is because when people experience an economic or behavioral crisis in a city with affordable rent, they usually manage to stay housed. But expensive markets like Seattle’s are far less forgiving, so when someone gets into a bad situation, they are far more likely to end up without a roof over their head.

If this all sounds a bit like a certain city by the bay, that’s because it is. San Francisco’s refusal to keep up with housing demand has resulted in $3,200 median rents and people pooping on the sidewalk.

I don’t know about you, but I aspire for more in 2044.

The Numbers, if That’s Your Thing

For those who want to understand the numbers: The slowdown in housing growth relative to population growth over the last few decades created a massive housing debt. Most of the best figures are regional, and address the overall gaps in housing production, production relative to growth (page 20), gaps in affordable housing, even a growing mismatch in the number of jobs homes by one online commentator However you slice the data, the Seattle deficit is tens of thousands of homes, and the regional gap is much larger.

Harrell’s Bizarre Plan To Slow Down Construction

Because of high land prices, stringent zoning and other rules, our ability to add housing is dropping fast. We have built nearly 10,000 units per year in the last five years, but permitting is cratering. If we do nothing, housing production is going to fall off a cliff, to 4,000 units a year for the next 20 years. So the Harrell administration spent a year of staff time and millions of dollars and ignored the overwhelming documented supermajority of feedback they received, and only planned for a little life support to bring it just up to 5,000 units per year. That’s right—we’re going to reach for a sky that is half as high as where we are now.

This plan is likely to yield about 100,000 homes over 20 years, even though King County says Seattle needs 112,000 units just to keep up. The 112,000 unit number comes from the fact that an average rental household in Seattle has 1.85 people, including single family home rentals. Since most of this growth will be apartments, the number of people per unit will be just a bit lower (1.78), which leads to the need for 112,000 homes

In other words, we are planning to fall behind by at least 12,000 homes.

Lest you think no one has thought about sending folks to nearby cities–that’s already baked in. The plan suggests Seattle will add 159,000 jobs, which will support far more than 200,000 people. In other words, the 200,000 person growth target already assumes tens of thousands more commuters from out of town, choking our roads with traffic and paying property taxes somewhere else.

The city says that in the next 20 years, the Seattle population will grow by at least 200,000 people. But if we simply match the growth rates of 2000-2020, we’d grow by 240,000. If we grow at the rate of the 2010s, it will be 363,000 new people. So when they say, “at least” they really mean at least. Those higher rates would increase the housing hole by up an additional 22,000 to 91,000 units!

The plan manages to do all this in especially damaging and clumsy ways.

Racial Inequality

The plan shoehorns a lot of the growth into small areas of the city, an approach Seattle has long called the “urban village” strategy.

And yet the very office responsible for this document called the basic structure of their longstanding urban village strategy racist just a couple years ago. This plan pulls heavily from the same pernicious playbook.

Notably, the plan concentrates poverty, and pushes multifamily housing near large, dangerous, polluted roads. All the while, it shields Bruce Harrell’s neighborhood and other rich neighborhoods with water views, like Laurelhurst and Magnolia, from any real change. And the restricted growth everywhere means higher prices everywhere, which means more displacement for lower-income populations and people of color.

In other words, the city is planning to perpetuate much of the pattern of our openly racist housing history.

Sending Families Somewhere Else

The Harrell administration’s plan is hostile to families.

One of the reasons that family housing is so expensive is our housing deficit, but another is our infinitesimal growth in larger units. Harrell doubles down on this foolish approach, making it much less likely that family housing will be built. For some reason, Seattle seems determined to prevent people from raising kids here.

The state’s “missing middle housing” bill requires cities like Seattle to allow four to six units on normal residential lots. But the plan makes this functionally impossible, especially for family-sized units. If we followed the state’s model code, we could build four 2,000-square-foot homes or six 1,333 square foot homes on a standard lot.

But Seattle cut the square footage allowed by almost 40 percent. Forget decent-sized homes. And in fact, Seattle’s plan also ensures that many more projects won’t pencil out.

In other words, the design is deliberately set up so that that missing middle housing won’t get built at scale, and where it does, the units will be too small for families but still spread around the lot enough to require cutting down lots of trees.

If you think the schools can’t get enough enrollment to stay funded and open now, imagine a future where even fewer families can live here.

Transit, Affordable Housing

The Harrell plan treats taxpayer money with very little respect—notably generating a mere 2,700 units near two new light rail stations, frittering away a billion dollars in taxpayer investment in our regional transit system. It also ignores the overwhelming feedback favoring social housing, as well as the significant margin the social housing initiative passed with. Overall, it fails to tackle the even larger housing gap when it comes to affordable housing of all types.

It plans for less growth than much-smaller Bellevue, much weaker middle housing than Spokane and, and is so bad that state legislators are calling out the BS.

The legislator who led the effort to pass the missing middle housing bill noted that “it barely goes above what new housing production would have been if they did nothing.”

Harrell Gives Up

This is an absurd failure of leadership. Up until now, I’ve wanted to give the mayor the benefit of the doubt. He’s well meaning, and although we disagree about a great deal, he’s not a true conservative like Sara Nelson. He’s just afraid of big business.

But Bruce has lost his touch. Centrist leaders get this. President Joe Biden gets it. Governor Jay Inslee gets it. King County Executive Dow Constantine gets it. Thousands of Seattle residents get it.

Harrell does not.

This article is also available on Rondezvous, Ron Davis’s excellent free Substack newsletter, where you’ll also find details about how to weigh in on the proposed comp plan update.

Ron Davis is is an entrepreneur, policy wonk, and past candidate for Seattle City Council District 4. He lives in Northeast Seattle.