Category: Density

Density, Development

Developer Prevails in Lawsuit Challenging Anti-Density Rule
townhouses
Via PubliCola

In a rare win for dense “infill” housing in single-family neighborhoods, developer Bendare Dundat and the Master Builders Association of King and Snohomish Counties prevailed today in a lawsuit challenging a city ordinance that requires developers who want to build on small, “substandard” lots adjacent to existing developments to submit their proposals to design review, even though the original development was not subject to the same requirement. The ruling means that developers will be able to build small multifamily buildings on lots adjacent to other small developments without going through a time-consuming public process that could add thousands of dollars and months of delay to projects.

Last year, the city council decided to change the city’s land use code to require that if two unrelated but adjacent projects have a combined total of eight units or more, the second project–even if it’s smaller than the first–must go through design review, which takes months and can add tens of thousands of dollars to the cost of a project.

In a declaration included in the lawsuit, Seattle developer Graham Black said the rules had added between $70,000 and $100,000 to the cost of his six-unit townhome development in the Central District, which had to go through design review because he got his development application in to the city later than an adjacent developer. Because of “random chance,” Black says in the statement, “I am at a significant competitive disadvantage so intend to re-design my project” to allow larger townhomes that can sell for more, so that he can “recoup at least a small portion of the financial costs of delay and involved design review.” This, of course, is exactly the scenario opponents of the new law predicted when they decided to challenge the new rules in court.

The law, King County Superior Court  justice Barbara Mack wrote in her decision, “requires design review by the second applicant approved for a permit, even if the second project is smaller than the first. It imposes direct and indirect costs that are neither reasonably necessary nor a direct result of the proposed development. It is hard to fathom how costs and fees could be reasonable and necessary for the smaller project, but not for the first, more impactful project on the adjacent property. The city appears to agree that the ordinance is designed to mitigate collective impacts, not the impact of any individual project.”

Developer lobbyist Roger Valdez, whose clients include the Master Builders, says he believes developers will be able to use today’s ruling in a future lawsuit to stop the city’s Mandatory Housing Affordability-Residential program, which requires developers to make a percentage of new units they build affordable to people making less than 60 percent of the Seattle median income, or pay into an affordable housing fund. In exchange, the city is allowing taller buildings across the city.

“Our argument is going to basically that [the city’s] creating an extraction [of money from developers], because even though you’re giving me this extra density, I lose the rent revenue from the units that I have to rent-restrict or pay a fee,” Valdez says. “I’ll make it up by raising rents, but if the tolerance level of the rents [is lower than] what I have to charge, and projects start to go negative, or the lender says ‘Those rents are too high,’ then the project becomes infeasible and we’ve got a case.”

Assistant City Attorney John Schocet said today that his office had not looked at the ruling in detail, and has about a month to decide if they want to appeal.

Affordability, Density, Development, neighborhoods, Renters

Queen Anne Council Claims to Meet $25,000 Anti-HALA Goal
qa
Via queenanneappeal.org.

The Queen Anne Community Council, which filed a legal complaint to halt the city’s plan to make it easier to build backyard cottages and mother-in-law apartments in single-family neighborhoods, now says it has reached the $25,000 contribution goal it set in July to cover its legal fees.

According to a post on his website and an email sent out to neighborhood activists across the city, complainant Marty Kaplan and other HALA opponents “have now completely funded our appeal,” which seeks to force the city to submit the proposal to a costly, time-consuming, and unnecessary environmental review. The money, Kaplan’s email continues, will pay for a “team of the most qualified experts, witnesses, and land use attorney.  We are ready to advance our defense of every Seattle citizen and neighborhood’s right to a fair, transparent, unbiased, and fact driven public process for professionally evaluating actual environmental impacts from O’Brien’s proposed legislation. “

The legislation, as I’ve reported, would allow homeowners to add both an internal apartment inside their existing house (typically, a basement unit), plus a garage apartment elsewhere on their property, subject to the same lot coverage limits that already exist for backyard cottages. It would also allow homeowners to add a basement unit or backyard cottage without building additional parking spots.

Homeowners opposed to these changes describe a worst-case scenario in which every single-family home is converted into an investor-owned triplex, and every new triplex is occupied by renters not “invested” in their neighborhood. Leaving aside the class judgment inherent in these homeowners’ fear of renters, the scenario they envision is totally contradicted by reality on the ground in Seattle. Opponents painted a similarly dystopian picture when the city allowed backyard cottages citywide in 2009, but since then, fewer than 200 have been built in Seattle. Removing parking requirements might make garage apartments somewhat more affordable to build, but the main barrier remains the cost of construction and the layout of many single-family lots, which just aren’t the right shape or size to accommodate a mini-house in the backyard.

Kaplan’s letter continues in similarly hyperbolic fashion: “We will fight for our right to review actual studies and participate in the process to review and contribute to what should be a city-wide inclusive and honest dialogue, instead of an ideological top-down proclamation from O’Brien and Murray that not one environmental impact will result from converting every Seattle single family neighborhood to multi-family zoning; destroying the very fabric of over thirty very special and different communities, and offering in turn a significant development gift to every investor at our expense!”

The council’s complaint got a boost when the Seattle Times handed over valuable column-inches on its op/ed page to chief complainant Kaplan, who argued that the new rules would lead to “uncontrolled speculation, immediate displacement, removal of affordable housing, and considerable environmental impacts to every single-family property owner.”

The city’s Hearing Examiner will hear Kaplan and the community council’s appeal at 9am on Wednesday, August 31, at Seattle Municipal Tower Room 4009. Details about the case are available on the hearing examiner’s website.

Affordability, Density, Development, housing

Under Neighborhood Pressure, Apartment Building Heads for Fourth Design Review

IMG_3111

In a highly unusual move for such a small project, the Northwest Design Review Board voted Monday to delay a 57-unit, 44-foot-tall, four-story apartment building planned on Greenwood Ave. (on the site of what is now Ed’s Kort Haus and the Stumbling Goat Bistro, which would reopen in the new space) for a third time for additional design revisions. The board came to the split decision after pressure from a large group of Phinney Ridge property owners who argue that the building is—you guessed it—ugly and out of scale. They also argued that the building of small efficiency apartments should have parking for cars (it has none) and that people shouldn’t have to live the way the layout will “force” them to live, which is to say: in compact studios with two washer/dryer units for every 17 apartments and no air conditioning.

The “lack” of washer/dryers (extremely generous by the standards of every apartment building where I’ve ever lived in Seattle, but definitely less so than the one-per-house ratio most of those objecting are used to) and air conditioning (I’ve never lived in a place with A/C, so I’m not sure why this is a deficiency in a city that never gets hot) came up again and again on Monday. Such complaints, in substance if not in exact details, are familiar to anyone who pays attention to the hand-wringing that seems necessary for any north-end development. They are also, with the exception of charges that the building is ugly, totally irrelevant to the work of the Design Review Board. The board is charged with looking at the exterior design of the building, and absolutely everything else—massing, scale, parking, and the size of the apartments–is the business of other city departments (including the city council, which already imposed onerous new restrictions that effectively legislated micro-units, commonly known as “apodments,” out of existence.)

Tuesday’s meeting was a repeat of the gatherings that preceded the previous two delays, according to advocates for the development who have been trying to get the thing approved since last October. Architect Jay Janette of Skidmore/Janette Architects presented the proposal and showed what had changed since the last design review meeting in January. (The major changes involved improvements to facades, larger step-backs on upper floors so the building would feel smaller and cast fewer shadows, and taller ground-floor commercial spaces.) Then the crowd made comments for an hour (the board had allotted 20 minutes). The comments were universally negative, and more than half involved issues board member Dale Kutzera explicitly asked audience members not to bring up, including parking, scale, and the size of the apartments.

IMG_3109

One woman was concerned that the building’s two live-work spaces  would create traffic and crowd nearby sidewalks. “If you’re maybe somebody who has clients coming and going [from the] live-work units, going in and out, and if you’re on Greenwood, they’re going to be crossing the sidewalk. I’m concerned about blocking the sidewalk so frequently and so often,” she said.

Another woman said she “would like the developers and the builders to spend three weeks, 24 hours a day, in those units with no A/C and see how they like it in 80-degree weather. That’s inhumane and unacceptable. How many people go in their houses and it’s hot and they just sit in the heat?” (Another woman chimed in later: “The people whose houses back up to [the apartments] are going to have 30 fans blowing right at them all summer.”)

Others expressed dismay that the newer apartment buildings surrounding the development are now being regarded as part of the “neighborhood character,” said the apartments were “very Soviet Union-like,” and suggested that the tenants would probably want to “party” in the 700-square-foot landscaped open space on the building’s roof. Objections that were ostensibly about design mostly had to do with aesthetic preferences: “This does not have ambiance; this is not what you want to take the tour by,” one man said. “Give us a building that gives us joy to walk by. It’s like that saying, ‘I don’t know what art is but I know it when I see it.’ Well, I don’t know what good architecture is, but I know it when I see it.”

This, by the way, is what the location looks like now:

gw
Does this give you joy?

It’s unclear at what point the design review will decide the building is acceptable enough, aesthetically and from the standpoint of neighborhood support, to move forward. But it speaks to the broken nature of our planning processes in Seattle that a few dozen who currently live adjacent to a building that will house 60 people can drag the design review process out (without substantially changing the building or preventing its construction) for more than a year, adding to the already substantial cost of building housing and keeping new units off the market at a time when the housing market is tighter than it has ever been.

I got the sense that among those who weren’t simply opposed to any development, the only design that might have worked would be a wedding-cake-shaped building set back 15 feet from the street in every direction so that it was barely noticeable. But of course, such a building is impossible—no developer would build it without doubling rents, and no renters would pay twice the current market rate to live in it. Emotions and individual aesthetic preferences will always play a role in development decisions, but there comes a point when it’s up to the city itself to say enough is enough, and this little building in Phinney Ridge is an excellent example of a time when the city should have put its foot down but didn’t.

Density, Development, land use

Another Anti-Density Appeal, This Time in Ballard

imgres

Citizens for Livability in Ballard, a group that includes one current and two former presidents of the Ballard District Council, is appealing the proposed Seattle 2035 comprehensive plan update under the State Environmental Policy Act (SEPA), and has submitted a kitchen-sink discovery request that could end up costing city taxpayers $100,000 or more.

Olympic Manor Community Club representative (and current BDC president) Joe Wert, 36th District Republicans representative Kirk Robbins, and Sunset West Condominium Association representative Steve Cohn filed the appeal, which claims the city hasn’t done an adequate environmental analysis of the proposed comp plan update. That plan, which the city council is considering in conjunction with Mayor Ed Murray’s Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda (which itself is being appealed by Queen Anne homeowner Marty Kaplan) would expand the city’s urban village boundaries to allow more density around neighborhood centers.

The appeal, which you can read in full here, charges that the city made up its mind about how it wanted to shape future zoning before doing a full assessment of the traffic, parking, and “character” impacts the new plan would have on the city’s neighborhoods, and that the proposal allows “upzoning of all [urban villages] into the highs [sic] density provided for in the zoning code with no guidance from the Comprehensive Plan.” It also charges that the plan fails to consider the “fact” that people will always need to own cars, because they’ll always want to drive to the forest.

“Travel mode choice for work or shopping trips has little effect on the individual choice of automobile ownership,” the complaint alleges. (In fact, countless analyses have shown that people with access to frequent, reliable transit are much less likely to own cars). “One of the attractions of the Pacific Northwest is a variety of year-round recreational opportunities. Most of those opportunities for hiking, skiing and other activities are only accessible by private automobile.” Because as everyone knows, Seattle is the only city in the country with natural beauty within driving distance, making it uniquely necessary for every citizen to own a car.

At any rate, the city has asked the hearing examiner to dismiss Citizens’ appeal because this is the first time the group has ever commented on the environmental statement (you’re supposed to raise any objections when an EIS is in the draft phase), and because they can’t identify any specific harm that will result if the 2035 plan goes forward. (The appeal says, vaguely, that Citizens has standing because “the appellants are residents of Seattle and adversely affected” by the land-use changes in the proposal, but the city’s motion for dismissal argues that living in the city doesn’t give you standing to hold up the city’s entire planning process).

As part of the appeal, Citizens has submitted a laundry list of documents it wants the city to provide in discovery, which, if the hearing examiner decides to take up the case, “is probably going to cost the taxpayers at least $100,000 in additional legal costs, if not more,” according to a local land-use attorney familiar with SEPA appeals. The demands include “any auto ownership studies prepared by the city since 2005,” “All parks demand analysis prepared by the City since 2005,” “All travel time surveys or models performed by the City since 2005,” and “The additional number of residential units or commercial, office or other space provided for in all proposed expansions of Urban Centers and Urban Villages,” among nearly two dozen equally broad demands.

Fundamentally, the 2035 proposal is a plan to make room for the 120,000 new Seattle residents who are expected to move here in the next 20 years. The city’s plan is to give those residents opportunities to live in the heart of thriving neighborhood commercial districts. Homeowners who managed to buy in to single-family neighborhoods when they were still affordable, and now dominate groups like the Ballard District Council, are pushing a very different vision.

Affordability, Density, Development

#YIMBY2016 and Beyond

IMG_2982

It was exciting to be present at the first of what I hope will be many YIMBY (Yes In My Backyard) gatherings in Boulder earlier this month. More than 100 people flew in to the college town from both coasts (and some places in between) to talk about how to build better cities and combat naysayers who want to turn back the clock on growth.

This movement, or group of thinkers, writers, builders, and planners, is inchoate, largely coastal, and overwhelmingly white and male, which could condemn it to be another clique of tech bros who think all political problems can be solved by technocratic advances and “systems thinking.” But it’s also politically diverse (the attendees included long-haired libertarians, free-marketeers who supported deregulation, and social justice advocates who believed in rent control) and filled not just with technophiles but street-level activists, single-family homeowners, people from small towns where NIMBYism is quite literal, and at least one current candidate for local office.

So what is YIMBYism? In brief, it’s the idea that a good housing policy is one that supports growth and welcomes newcomers, promoting affordability through a combination of reasonable regulation (opinions on the definition of “reasonable” differ) and new development to address the housing shortages in cities across the US. YIMBYs seek to increase participation by groups that are underrepresented in debates about housing (young people, renters) to combat the disproportionate power that single-family homeowners and their allied activist groups (think: the Wallingford Community Council and the Seattle Displacement Coalition) enjoy.

2b1b83a1-d28c-4a12-a30c-eadf7193b39c

The ideological differences among the YIMBYs I met in Boulder were more significant. Members of the San Francisco Bay Area Renters Federation (SFBARF), for example, considered rent control sacrosanct, which wouldn’t fly with the guys from Brooklyn-based Market Urbanism, whose tagline is “Urbanism for capitalists.” Nor did an excellent presentation on winning people over to your point of view, by the Sightline Institute’s Anna Fahey, win over some in the room, who argued that trying to talk to opponents with totally divergent worldviews was a waste of time.

But after watching and participating in workshops and presentations from YIMBYs from Austin to Iowa City, I ended the weekend feeling like this was the start of something. Maybe not a political revolution or a takeover of the traditional neighborhood movement, but far more than a group hug inside a bubble of consensus.

IMG_2376

One thing that struck me right away was how in awe urbanists from other cities were of Seattle’s Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda (HALA), the plan crafted by a group of urbanists, developers, environmentalists, social-justice advocates, and neighbors to help keep Seattle affordable while preserving the city’s quality of life for the next 20 years. In particular, the Grand Bargain—an agreement in which developers agreed to set aside between 2 and 8 percent of new units for people making 60 percent or less of the area median income, or pay into an affordable-housing fund, in exchange for greater density—seemed to blow people away as an inspiring example of a city working with developers to capture affordability while giving them something of value.

Of course, the reality is that the Grand Bargain remains tentative, threatened by neighborhood opposition to even modest (typically one-story) height increases. Still, it was fascinating to see Seattle held up as a model of any urbanist idea; when you live here, it’s easy to feel that the de-suburbanization of Seattle will never happen because single-family homeowners have all the power. From the outside, at least, things look more promising than they can in the trenches.

a87f2877-9978-437a-9eee-469f1f9ddc8e

“The housing crisis is rarely referred to as a shortage.” This was a concept Sightline’s Fahey introduced on Day 1, and it’s one I returned to again and again over the weekend. It’s absolutely true: When people talk about the “housing crisis,” what they often mean is rising rents, but rising rents happen when there isn’t enough housing, and the solution to the problem is: Build more housing. When you frame Seattle’s increasingly unaffordable rents as a shortage, not the result of nefarious actions by greedy developers, you arrive at different policy solutions: Construction, not height caps. Mandatory affordable housing, not rent control.

The YIMBY movement has its blind spots. The folks who showed up, although surprisingly diverse in ages, skewed strongly male and white, like many discussions that involve stereotypically “male” topics like housing, planning, and development. I proposed, and Seattle YIMBY activist Laura Bernstein co-moderated, a discussion called “Men, Shut Up!” after watching conversation after conversation dominated by dudes who seemed in love with the sound of their own booming voices. Only problem was, our panel got combined with another discussion called “#YIMBYSoWhite”—a marginalization of exactly the sort that both conversations were hoping to address.

IMG_2373

There were other oversights beyond the gender and complexion of the folks at the conference—oversights that, I confess, didn’t occur to me until others pointed them out. Where was the geographic diversity? While the middle of the country was nominally represented by folks from Cleveland, Iowa City, Denver, and Austin, the gathering was predictably dominated by urban dwellers from the coasts, especially California. Also, the very location—a college town where average housing prices are higher than Seattle’s, with an 89 percent-white population—served as kind of a coastal stand-in, totally unrepresentative of the many diverse cities across the US that are facing the same questions about housing costs, density, and gentrification as coastal cities like San Francisco and Portland but with key differences that arise from their locations and demographics.

YIMBYs are acutely aware that power is determined by who gets a seat at the table, but when they’re the ones making that decision, they’re as vulnerable to human nature—inviting the people you’re comfortable with, going to a place that looks like the place you’re from—as anyone. This isn’t meant as a criticism of the specific conference organizers; I’m not claiming I’m above familiarity bias myself. What matters is that when someone points biases like this out to you, you’re willing to listen and change, and my hope (and expectation) is that the next YIMBY conference will be someplace like Atlanta or Miami.

Finally, it’s important to remember that people all arrive at their perspective for reasons, and that people can change their minds. The primary motivation for people who want the police to arrest people for being homeless, or for the city to halt all construction until all of North Seattle has sidewalks, isn’t hatred, it’s fear. People don’t want their cars broken into, so they think the solution is throwing addicts in jail or giving them one-way tickets out of town. People think the people moving here are technodrones with no interest in becoming part of the community or putting down roots, so they fight increases in density that might allow “those people” into “their” neighborhood. The trick is to find community and neighborhood leaders who are willing to listen to evidence and give it to them, along with reassurances. (It helps to have messengers who fit the profile of the people you’re hoping to convince, which is why Ballard homeowner and single mom Sara Maxana—@yimbymom on Twitter ,and pictured below—is such a great emissary for the cause).

IMG_2388

In an example I used in another session on finding consensus, people don’t like heroin addicts shooting up in their local parks, so they think the cops should arrest them for possession. The problem is, there aren’t enough jails or enough financial resources in the entire city budget to keep every minor offender in jail indefinitely, and treatment beds are far more expensive than those who say “just force them into treatment” imagine. If we can agree that some number of people will always use drugs, maybe we can also agree that people can’t get well if they’re dead. And if we can agree on that, maybe we can start to talk about safe consumption spaces where people can use under medical supervision, with access to treatment and other services, instead of on the sidewalk or in the bushes at a public park. And once a few people change their minds on that, a community dialogue can happen. Some people will always oppose safe injection sites or three-story buildings or the removal of even a single tree, but the vast majority are willing to listen, if we are willing to listen back.

I’m looking forward to next year. In the meantime, it’s time for YIMBYs to get to work.

Affordability, City Council, Density, housing, land use

Anti-HALA Testimony: The Annotated Edition

2035

On Tuesday, the city’s Planning, Land Use, and Zoning committee took public testimony on the newly rechristened Mandatory Housing Affordability-Residential (MHAR) component of the mayor’s Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda proposal, which would require all residential developers to either build affordable housing (between about 3 and 7 percent of total units) or pay a fee into an affordable housing fund. The plan would upzone multifamily areas by about one story, and would rezone single-family areas in urban villages to multifamily–a change that would impact about 6 percent of single-family-zoned land in the city.

Neighborhood activists turned out in numbers for the 9:30 am hearing (held at a time, as several HALA proponents pointed out, when many working people were unable to attend), and instead of merely restating their familiar complaints about the HALA plan and process(“Heartless!” “Lack of concern for human consequences!” “Delay!”), I’ve annotated some of their specific claims, showing which ones are based in fact, which ones are really opinions masquerading as truth, and which seem to be fabricated from whole cloth. (Apologies if I misspelled any names.)

“Single-family zoning was never meant to keep minorities out of my community, but to protect families from aggressive development–buildings too tall, too big, and too close.” – Rhonda Bush, Wallingford1

“Trading 6,000 units of affordable housing for citywide upzones is very unbalanced. It eliminates obvious benefits to neighborhood stability related to the single-family model. I’m talking about a couple hundred thousand homes that people can be potentially displaced from. The timeline for this legislation is not in sync with [the Seattle 2035 comprehensive plan update] or public outreach plans.” – Bonnie Williams, MHAR opponent2

“Nowhere in these land use discussions have I heard any talk of their impacts on senior citizens. The proposed upzone boundary in Crown Hill is drawn from a computer model showing a ten-minute travel distance from transit centers. I am in the range of bus service, but the bus stop or transit center is too far for me. I am 72 years old and the bus doesn’t get me to the doctor or the grocery store, and when it does come, it’s standing room only.” – Constance Knutson, Crown Hill3

“There is no plan for preservation in this proposal. The preservation part of HALA depended upon passage of a tax break for for-profit developers which did not go through in Olympia, and in all likelihood would never pass, so we have no plan for preservation, no plan for funding it, and that leaves us 5,000 units short of the 20,000 units promised.” – Sarajane Siegfriedt, Seattle FAIR Growth4

“Why is the city rushing to adopt levies that can only drive up housing costs?” – Tom Noble, Wallingford5

“‘Affordability and inclusion’ is a terrific motto, apparently coined either in New York or London, or perhaps a private jet over the Atlantic, by wealthy people for the wealthy. … The mayor’s plan continues the net loss of affordable housing that’s currently taking place, with about 10 units being destroyed for every one unit we fund.” – Greg Hill, Wallingford6

“The areas directly north of the cut, from the Locks all way to the university area, is the largest sewage problem that we have in the entire city by far, and upzoning that area will compound that problem gigantically. It appalls me that with such an environmental atrocity happening that we want to add more fecal matter to our waterways. Why do we want to turn the Emerald City brown?” – Jim Bentley, Wallingford7

“We have enough development capacity with current zoning. According to a report last year from Seattle DPD, with current zoning, we have development capacity to add an additional 22,000 housing units–a sufficient amount to accommodate 70,000 households.” – Lucy, Wallingford8

“We already have, in Ballard, 440  percent of the housing units required for the year 2024. Crown Hill has 125 percent of the housing units required by 2024. I don’t want to see the developers who wrote HALA being able to build their buildings randomly wherever they choose and how large they choose”. – Sylvia, Ballard

“I took out a $30,000 loan to become a green energy partner with the city of Seattle [by buying solar panels]. If you are considering doing that, I would say don’t, not until the upzoning is resolved. Because if you’re like me, I realized that I could be living in a solar shadow and my $30,000 investment to assist the city of Seattle will be on me. … Affordable housing is really important, but it can’t be done at the cost of our environment.” – Kris, homeowner

And then, of course, there were the comments that invited not so much annotation as a dumbstruck awe–like this one, from a (white) Wallingford homeowner.

“I support density. I support affordable housing. I think most people here do. It comes down this question of, will we really get the affordable housing that we want, or the in-lieu fees which put people into ghettos or put them into lower-income housing areas and not in place in our neighborhoods? I want my teachers to live in my neighborhood. …The people like you with the HALA signs, I want you in my neighborhood. I do. I don’t want you to end up in a ghetto somewhere.” – Becky Benfield, Wallingford

That use of “our.” OK, on to the footnotes.

1 According to a University of Washington report, “Segregated Seattle,”

For most of its history Seattle was a segregated city, as committed to white supremacy as any location in America. People of color were excluded from most jobs, most neighborhoods and schools, and many stores, restaurants, hotels, and other commercial establishments, even hospitals. As in other western states, the system of severe racial discrimination in Seattle targeted not just African Americans but also Native Americans, Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders, people of Mexican ancestry, and also, at times, Jews.

In the absence of formal zoning, Seattle’s historic racial covenants were created by developers, not the government, but they map directly onto Seattle’s modern-day neighborhoods, which are racially segregated along almost identical lines. Single-family zoning, created to “protect” neighborhoods that were created under racist covenants, has the same impact as those covenants–“preserving” Seattle’s wealthier single-family neighborhoods as mostly-white, higher-income enclaves.

2 The expansion of urban villages and transit-accessible walksheds (areas within a 10-minute walk of frequent transit service as well as those adjacent to other amenities and services) will impact just 6 percent of Seattle’s existing single-family zones. The idea that this tiny fraction of Seattle’s exclusive single-family land contains “a couple hundred thousand” houses whose occupants would be displaced under HALA is a fantasy. If the objection, rather, is that HALA as proposed would allow homeowners to build backyard cottages and basement units in all single-family zones, this claim is also a fantasy; backyard cottages are in addition to, rather than a displacement of, single-family houses, and the city council is poised to preserve the owner-occupancy requirement for cottages for a year, addressing (also, frankly, fantastical) concerns that developers will seek to make a killing building two units per lot rather than constructing more lucrative denser housing in actual multifamily zones. Even if that somehow penciled out, it’s absurd to suggest that every single homeowner in the city would sell out to this mythical developer of garage apartments.

3 As Crown Hill is at the very end of Metro’s D Line, the commuter line for Northwest Seattle, this claim is very hard to believe, but even if it is true, the 2015 Move Seattle levy, along with Seattle’s Prop. 1 from 2014, includes funding to expand and add service to RapidRide corridors to reduce travel times and ease crowding. HALA doesn’t specifically allocate better transit service because transit is provided by King County Metro, not the city. Moreover, HALA does talk specifically about senior citizens in several places, specifically suggesting the expansion of the state Housing Trust Fund, enhancing programs to promote homeownership for low-income people and seniors, creating a low-cost capital fund, and foreclosure prevention programs.

4 While it’s true that House Speaker Frank Chopp killed Seattle-backed legislation that would have given a tax break to existing property owners who keep 25 percent of their units affordable to renters making 60 percent of median income or less, the city will have the opportunity to propose a version of the bill again next year including compromises aimed at winning Chopp’s support. In the meantime, HALA includes an 11-point list of proposals to preserve existing housing, only one of which depends on state legislation. That list includes: the creation of a fund for housing acquisition by the city; creating new financing tools and low-cost loans for owners of existing affordable units to  improve their properties in exchange for guaranteeing affordability; and offsetting the cost of code requirements that mandate expensive upgrades to some older buildings.

Additionally, the housing levy renewal on the ballot in August includes funds for strategic purchases of existing housing to preserve affordability  as well as funds to rehab and reinvest in existing affordable units.

5 The housing levy is not being “rushed.” It is the renewal of a 2009 levy that has come up every seven years since 1981. Details of what the housing levy will fund are available here.

6 “Affordability and inclusion” was not, as far as I can tell, a concept concocted in New York, London, or by oligarchs on a private jet, although it’s a laudable goal no matter who came up with combining those two particular words first. Similarly, the ten-to-one ratio of demolished units seems to be a fantasy.

7 Josh covered this issue thoroughly over at PubliCola, but to briefly recap: Neighborhood activists in Wallingford complained recently about the addition of new toilets in new multifamily buildings, arguing, essentially, that new density will leave  Seattle swimming in shit. The city responded by saying that new developments are required to take care of their own stormwater, and noting that raw sewage makes up only 10 percent of city sewer flows, and the city is already designing a Ship Canal Water Quality Facility to bring combined sewer overflows in Ballard, Fremont, and Wallingford into compliance with health standards, preventing nearly all combined sewer overflows in those neighborhoods.

8 Ah, the “we have plenty of existing capacity for everyone” canard. The only way the existing “capacity” would actually provide sufficient housing for the 120,000 people expected to move here by 2035 is if all the current, existing housing on every parcel built under its zoning capacity (say, every single-family home sitting on land that allows a three-story apartment building) was demolished and redeveloped. Additionally, the point of planning development is to channel new residences into urban villages and urban centers in keeping with the existing neighborhood plans: Random development would work against those established goals, and would lead to chaotic neighborhoods with no community cores or rapid transit corridors. In short, this is an absurd and disingenuous claim, and I’m guessing none of the single-family homeowners who raise it would actually want to live with its ramifications.

9 “Growth targets” are another canard. Anti-growth activists like to claim that their neighborhoods are “already above our growth targets” when in fact those “targets” have always been minimum growth projections, not ceilings. Hitting a target does noetmean an area has also hit its growth capacity.

Since the 1990s, Seattle has grown more then planners anticipated. Fortunately, to address the second point of this claim, HALA does not allow “random” growth; as mentioned above, it hews to the city’s adopted urban village and urban center strategy by targeting development in those areas and in places with access to frequent transit service.

10 The notion that solar panels on, say, a two-story house will completely cease to function with, say, a three-story townhouse next door seems to be disproven by the existing of solar panels in proximity to apartments and townhomes all across the city, but I’ll admit I’m no expert on solar. What I do know is that the positive environmental impact of dense cities far outweighs the negative environmental impact of losing some solar power generation on single-family house on a large, suburban-style lot in Seattle. Density produces massive environmental benefits, including lower overall energy and water usage (apartment dwellers save through efficiency and lower energy needs in smaller spaces compared to sprawling houses with lawns); significantly reduced reliance on cars, which are the single largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions in Washington State; and the preservation of forest land that would otherwise be lost to suburban sprawl. Compared to those (and other) proven benefits, I think I’ll take density even at the cost of some solar capacity on individual single-family homes.