Category: Density

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.

Affordability, City Hall, Density, neighborhoods, Renters

Bringing “New” People Into the Planning Process
A Seattle backyard cottage–the kind of development some neighbors say will bring unacceptable density to single-family neighborhoods. via seattle.gov

At an early-morning Downtown Seattle Association breakfast at BlueAcre Seafood last month, the subject was neighborhood involvement in city planning and the speaker (along with Capitol Hill Community Council president Zach Pullin and me) was Kathy Nyland, the Georgetown activist-turned-Department-of-Neighborhoods-Director who’s in charge of getting neighborhood residents involved in implementing the mayor’s Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda.

The question Nyland and Pullin were attempting to answer was this: How can the city get renters, tech workers, and other Seattle residents who don’t participate in the traditional system of neighborhood councils or go to traditional “neighborhood” meetings involved in shaping the future of the city? The problem Nyland and Pullin described is that neighborhood councils tend to be ossified and, as a result, exclusionary, dominated by 50-and-older white homeowners with little incentive to invite newcomers into their midst. Nyland said she hears from those folks all the time; what she wants to do is add new voices to the chorus of retired single-family homeowners. As part of that effort, DON recently took over the HALA outreach process, and actively encouraged people of color, recent immigrants, and renters–who make up half the city–to apply for seats on the four HALA community focus groups.

But integrating new residents and renters into the HALA process remains a challenge, and the loudest voices–the people that occupy most of the city’s field of vision–are the longtime neighborhood activists who have plenty of time to spend at long neighborhood meetings where the overwhelming sentiment is anti-renter, anti-development, and anti-change. At the same time, people who feel alienated from city planning, or who feel (sometimes correctly) that their voices aren’t welcome or being heard, are left on the sidelines and often have no idea how to make their voices heard.

(If you want an example of how NOT to participate in traditional neighborhood organizations, look no further than this guy, a self-described Fremont resident who apparently showed up at the Wallingford Community Council and demanded a seat on their governing board. In a see-I-told-you-they-all-hate-renters gotcha post on the Urbanist blog, he complained that he had been “sidelined” from “my seat” in an elaborate process designed to ensure that no renters would be represented on the board. He does not appear to have participated in the Wallingford Community Council at any previous point, which probably explains the main reason he wasn’t elected: As Nyland and other urbanists who are actually working to organize renters and other disenfranchised folks repeatedly emphasize, you can’t just show up and demand to be taken seriously, you have to organize, and that means getting people to show up in numbers. Tales of woe like this one do nothing but reinforce the common misconception that renters and urbanists have no interest in context or history and don’t care about the concerns of longtime residents. Pullin, in contrast, is working actively on Capitol Hill to organize renters, who represent more than half the city, as my old PubliCola colleague Josh Feit reports today).

So as pro-HALA groups like Seattle for Everyone try to gather steam in neighborhoods across the city for the still-controversial “Grand Bargain”–developer fees for affordable housing as a tradeoff for greater density–I strongly suggest that they attend meetings like the one I went to late last month, where city planning and neighborhood staffers faced off against an angry crowd of more than 100 neighbors who showed up to voice their near-universal disapproval of the proposal at a meeting of the Queen Anne Community Council on top of Queen Anne Hill.

“Those of us who are involved in planning in our communities for a very long time are used to being involved at city hall. … Usually, you go to a public hearing and you get to speak. You get to say, ‘If a guy builds a 27 foot [detached accessory dwelling unit] next to my house, it’s going to wipe out my sun, it’s going to wipe out my light and air,’ and that’s not what’s being done.”

To kick the meeting off, Marty Kaplan, a community council member, homeowner, and former city planning commissioner, offered a lengthy introduction to the two city officials who presented the details of the proposal, Office of Planning and Community Development senior planner Geoff Wendlandt and planning commission staffer Jesseca Brand, which set the (accusatory) tone for the rest of the discussion.

“One of the problems that I have is that those of us in the neighborhoods were left out of the conversation” about HALA, Kaplan said. “Those of us who are involved in planning in our communities for a very long time are used to being involved at city hall. … Usually, you go to a public hearing and you get to speak. You get to say, “If a guy builds a 27 foot [detached accessory dwelling unit] next to my house, it’s going to wipe out my sun, it’s going to wipe out my light and air,” and that’s not what’s being done.”

Kaplan continued: “There’s a lot of things that will eventually take away a lot of the physical things that you enjoy in your house, or even if you’re in an apartment. … There’s a lot of impacts in here [and] we’ve been used to being able to talk about this with planners and city hall and come up with some pretty good and respectful partnerships.” In contrast, Kaplan said, the city is now trying to shove a “one-size-fits-all” approach down longtime neighborhood residents’ throats.

Wendlandt and Brand fielded Kaplan’s comments and complaints from neighbors for about two hours. Most of those complaints fell into one of three categories: 1) Concerns that the city has failed to involve neighbors in the HALA process; 2) Complaints that HALA will upzone the entire city; and 3) Objections related to “concurrency,”  the idea that the city needs  to add roads, transit service, and sewers before adding housing. (The urbanist response to those complaints, in turn: Neighborhoods are well-represented on the four HALA focus groups and the city continues to hold meetings like the very one at which this comment was made; HALA will not upzone the whole city, though it will expand some urban villages and make it slightly easier to build backyard corrages; and Seattle is expected to add about 120,000 people in the next 20 years, and those people need places to live).

Another popular objection, one I’ve heard many times over the years in Seattle, was that the city “already has enough capacity to accommodate all the growth we’re going to get,” a claim based on the absurd premise that many thousands of small apartments and single-family homes will be demolished across Seattle so that all the city’s land can be redeveloped to its maximum zoning capacity. The “existing zoning capacity” objection also ignores the fact that HALA, unlike roughshod redevelopment, will actually build affordable housing, which is what everyone says they want.

So what’s the takeaway from all this? For urbanists, anyway, it’s that if you don’t like the way neighborhood groups are framing development or the shape they want to take the neighborhoods we all live in, it’s important to be meaningfully engaged–not just showing up alone to a meeting or two to shake your fist at the way things are, but turning out in numbers to learn, listen, and participate, both in traditional homeowner-dominated neighborhood groups and new organizations that challenge the status quo. For city officials, it’s that engaging people outside traditional neighborhood groups is critical, and that those groups don’t represent any consensus except a consensus among themselves. Renters, low-income people, disabled and elderly residents, and others who aren’t usually at the table need to be invited in and listened to, whether that means outreach specifically aimed at renters (guess what? When you “inform” a neighborhood by placing flyers on people’s doors or porches, you miss most of the people who live in apartments) or broader outreach at events and in groups that include a more representative sample of Seattle residents than, say, a community council or a private Nextdoor group.  Ultimately, as Nyland noted at the DSA meeting at Blueacre, inviting more people into the planning process may also mean deemphasizing the voices that have traditionally held sway at city hall; the city is well aware of what single-family homeowners tend to think, but they may not be as familiar with what low-income renters or homeless residents think. For those voices to be heard, some people, however reluctantly, are going to have to sit and listen.

Affordability, City Council, Density, housing

HALA Compromise Would Bring Back Owner-Occupancy Requirement for Backyard Cottages

Screen Shot 2016-05-10 at 9.26.49 AM

City council member Mike O’Brien is proposing, and the city’s Office of Community Planning and Development is drafting, a change to the Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda Plan designed to assuage some homeowners’ complaints that allowing more backyard cottages and mother-in-law apartments will lead to a building boom by speculators hoping to cash in on the new, less-restrictive rules. OCPD confirms it is working on the proposal for O’Brien as a response to community input at meetings on HALA over the past few months.

Currently, anyone who wants to build a backyard apartment or a mother-in-law apartment inside their house (known as detached accessory dwelling units, or DADUs, and attached accessory dwelling units, or ADUs, respectively) must live on the premises, either in the new unit itself or in the main house on the property. One of the proposals in the original draft of HALA called for loosening that requirement to encourage more homeowners to build secondary apartments, as a way of enabling less-wealthy folks to live in the city and to very slightly nudge density in the two-thirds of the city zoned for exclusive single-family use.

Some neighbors objected to the proposed rule change, suggesting that it would lead speculative developers to descend on single-family neighborhoods, buy up houses, build backyard cottages, and then rent out both the main house and the secondary apartment. Some also said that rental properties tend to fall into disrepair, suggesting that renters are worse neighbors than homeowners are.

Under the new compromise proposal, property owners would be required to live on their property for at least a year after building a backyard cottage or mother-in-law, on the theory that no speculator would bother buying up single-family houses to build and profit from secondary apartments if they had to live there. The proposal is also based on the assumption that if a homeowner has to live next to a new backyard cottage for at least a year, they’ll be less likely to build something that looms over their neighbors, or that doesn’t fit the “character” of a neighborhood.

O’Brien acknowledges that his compromise is, to some extent, a solution searching for a problem. “No developers are building backyard cottages that I’m aware of,” O’Brien says. “I haven’t looked at any financial analysis, but it’s hard for me to imagine that the math would work for someone to come in and buy single-family homes and build backyard cottages.” Most development in what people consider single-family areas occurs in multi-family zones that have been historically underutilized; developers buy up houses, raze them, and replace them with small apartment buildings.

Backyard cottage opponents’ nightmare scenario–the house/backyard cottage combo, with renters instead of homeowners in both units, is “pretty far-fetched,” O’Brien admits. And he says he’s heard from plenty of people who just don’t want renters next door. “I completely reject that perspective,” he says. “I’m not going to defend anyone who thinks this is going to be bad because there will be more renters living in a neighborhood.”

So if the nightmare scenario is implausible, and not really a nightmare to begin with, why capitulate? The way O’Brien describes it sounds an awful lot like he’s responding to a concern about problem that doesn’t exist and is unlikely to exist in the future, simply because so many neighbors have expressed that concern.

If that’s the case, O’Brien is surely aware that the Ballard and Phinney Ridge residents who show up at his office hours, write him furious emails, and complain about him on social media because they believe he’s in the pocket of developers won’t be swayed by this small concession. And preserving the owner-occupancy requirement could not only hurt homeowners who need the flexibility to move due to unexpected job changes or family obligations, but prospective renters already being priced out of Seattle by strict city zoning that “protects” most of the city from new housing supply.

City Council, Density, Development

Council Could Delay Design Review Changes a Year or More

rec4

In what looks like a concession to single-family neighborhood activists, but which committee chair Rob Johnson insists is merely a concession to reality, the city council could put off controversial changes to the process for approving new development until after several key land-use proposals go through, including the expansion of urban-village boundaries under the Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda, the adoption of the comprehensive plan update known as Seattle 2035, and the approval of a new future land use map for the entire city. (According to the current schedule, draft legislation to make the changes was supposed to come out next month).

That could mean waiting a year and a half or more before making changes proposed by city staffers to help resolve years of complaints: By developers, who call the design review process burdensome and unnecessarily complicated, and by neighbors, who say the process doesn’t  allow them enough time and opportunity to comment on new development.

On Wednesday, the council’s Planning, Land Use, and Zoning committee (which Johnson chairs) discussed five potential changes to design review, recommended by the city after a stakeholder process that started last year. The first recommendation would require (or possibly just encourage) earlier community outreach from developers; the second would create a new form of design review, called a hybrid design review, which would include two phases of review done by the local design review board and city staff, respectively. It would also change the size of projects that would be subject to design review, with the general result that fewer small projects would have to go through the full design review. The third recommendation would expand the city’s definition of outreach, adding online tools (including online comments), video streaming of meetings, and more two-way dialogue at board meetings, for example. The fourth would restructure the geographic reach of the design review boards, expanding the downtown area into a larger central district, for example, so that the city’s densest neighborhoods are all under the same umbrella, and changing the size of other districts to distribute design review workload more evenly. The idea, city planner Geoff Wentlandt said, to “reduce the number of meeting cancellations by providing a quorum, and to provide more checks and balances by having more members on each board.”

rec5

Finally, the fifth and most contentious recommendation would expand on the second by changing the thresholds for design review, so that projects under 10,000 square feet wouldn’t go through design review at all, and only the largest projects (those over 20,000 square feet) would have to go through full design review. This recommendation was by far the most controversial, because it would  result in fewer projects going through design review (and thus fewer opportunities to comment in person on smaller-scale new projects).

A number of homeowners from Wallingford, part of Johnson’s District 4, showed up to oppose the threshold changes. One of them, Max Nicolai, told the committee that the changes would “all but eliminate” what he called “citizen control” over development, and that by adopting them, the council would be ignoring all the public comments at previous meetings favoring more design review, not less. “It’s like you just checked the box and said, now we’re done; we don’t have to listen to them at all,” Nicolai said, adding, “this is the worst possible time to relinquish citizen control and input over development.” Other commenters spoke of buildings going in mere feet from their windows, or of hypothetical row houses (“lot line to lot line development”) that would be vulnerable to quick-spreading fires. (As an editorial aside, the implication of this would be that  row houses are inherently dangerous, which would certainly be news to the many East Coast cities where row houses are the dominant form of single-family dwelling).

Ultimately, whether this was his intention or not, committee chairman Johnson went along with his Wallingford constituents, suggesting that the council delay any changes to the design review process until after the city has finished up all its work on HALA, Seattle 2035, and new future land use map. “I’d like to kind of pump the brakes on design review for a little while,” he said.

“For me, as a linear thinker, the sequence is to start with the broad-scale comprehensive plan and then move to detailed land use changes by neighborhood and then move into design review and design characteristics.” That would mean pushing the schedule to make design-review changes out as far as 2018, a prospect that didn’t sit well with some other council members, who suggested considering some of the other changes now. District 6 (Ballard/Fremont) council member Mike O’Brien, who represents another rapidly growing part of the city, argued that “we’re going to continue to hear from folks concerned about the bulk and scale of projects in communities throughout this whole process,” not just at the end. O’Brien, it’s worth noting, is the only non-freshman council member on the PLUZ committee.

After the meeting, Johnson (who says he had not spoken to his colleagues before proposing the delay) told me he’d be open to adding more comment and feedback opportunities now, but still believed, despite some pushback from his colleagues, that putting off the threshold changes was the way to go.

“My inclination is. until we understand the threshold issues that we’re talking about, we’re putting the cart before horse to change the thresholds, to change community engagement, to act on almost any of the issues that are in [the recommendations,” Johnson said. “If we were to make changes this year and zoning changes came next year [that made those changes obsolete], that could lead to the need to make further design review changes” in the future, he said. “All of these things are so hypothetical because we haven’t even really had a conversation about where the growth is going to go.” Johnson said he isn’t sure when the committee will consider the recommendations again, and said council staff have told him there’s no real risk to waiting on the changes, except for the fact that some of the design review boards are drowning in backlogs, a situation that likely won’t improve until the  council restructures the system.

Addiction, Affordability, City Council, Density, Development, homelessness, housing, neighborhoods

Committees Ask: What Will Affordable Housing Look Like, and Are We Willing to Sacrifice for It?

IMG_2637

Why won’t the city add more density in single-family areas?

Why is the city violating the sanctity of single-family areas?

Those were the two contradictory questions in play at the first meeting of the five focus groups that will help determine the shape of the Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda, a plan to build 50,000 new housing units, including 20,000 affordable units, over the next 10 years through a combination of incentives, zoning changes, and additional affordable housing dollars.

The HALA meeting, held in the Bertha Knight Landes room at City Hall while a separate meeting on the housing levy was wrapping up in council chambers upstairs, brought all the focus group members together for an initial overview of their work plan for the coming year. The focus groups, made up largely of people who aren’t well-represented on the vocal, historically influential neighborhood community councils and citizen interest groups, are divided not by geographic region but by neighborhood type–hub urban villages with hub urban villages, urban village expansion areas with urban village expansion areas, and so on. (Downtown and South Lake Union are part of a separate rezoning process, as is the University District.)

Most of the meeting was procedural–a lineup of city staffers extolled HALA’s virtues using catchphrases like “placing without displacing” and explained the history of HALA and the “Grand Bargain,” a deal struck between developers and affordable-housing advocates like Puget Sound Sage to build more affordable housing while providing upzones that benefit builders’ bottom lines.

But the main focus of the city’s reassurances, and the audience’s questions, was how HALA–which would expand the boundaries of some urban villages, making up a total of about 1 percent of city land, into what are now single-family areas–will impact Seattle’s single-family neighborhoods. Although HALA staffer Michelle Chen told the crowd preemptively, “The mayor is not proposing any changes to single-family zones that are outside the urban villages,” the very first (and majority of) questions were about how the proposals will impact single-family areas; specifically: Does HALA go too far in allowing more development in historically single-family areas, or does it fail to do enough?

The very first question–“Why don’t single-family zones have to contribute to housing?”–got to the heart of this debate. “The mayor has taken a position that outside of the urban village areas we are not changing single-family zones,” Chen said. “That is the direction from the mayor, taken after a big outcry from the neighborhoods, from the communities that are changing.” Diane Sugimura, interim director of the new Office of Planning and Community Development, jumped in, adding that the city’s comprehensive plan (which guides all macro-level development in Seattle) “has directed the majority of growth to urban villages.”

But will growth in urban villages be enough? In addition to the 120,000 people expected to move here in the next 20 years, Seattle has a growing affordability crisis that impacts the people already here, and no one is more impacted than the very lowest-income residents, those who are homeless or in transitional or marginal housing. Upstairs in council chambers, council members heard testimony from dozens of folks who supported the housing levy, and none who didn’t–a unanimity rarely present at public meetings about tax increases. (The $290 million levy would double homeowners’ annual contribution to low-income housing, to $122 a year for a median-value home.)

Organizations that provide or support low-income housing–Solid Ground, the Housing Development Consortium, the Downtown Emergency Service Center, the Low-Income Housing Alliance–showed up armed with damning statistics. “If Seattle wanted to hold a public meeting and invite everyone who is homeless or severely rent-burdened, we would not be able to fit everybody into CenturyLink stadium,” Keri Williams of Enterprise Community Partners said. But it was the recently homeless speakers, who made the case as plainly and indisputably as possible that without housing levy-funded programs, they would still be on the streets, who made the greatest impact.

linda

Linda Pritz*, a formerly homeless woman who lived at the YWCA’s Opportunity Place in downtown Seattle, told the council that “as a resident of affordable housing for the past 12 years, I know firsthand how important it is to have sustainable housing.” After years of spending 80 percent of her income on rent an utilities, eating ramen and neglecting her diabetes, she said that “when I moved into the building in 2004, I was so relieved that I had found a place that I could afford that I sat down on the bed and cried. Pritz now spends just 30 percent of her income on housing.

Another speaker, Hope Green, said she had been homeless for years, dealing with a failed relationship and “an addiction that was spiraling out of control” and moving all over the state before she found affordable housing in Seattle. “I counted 112 places that I slept until I landed in the [Catholic Community Services’] Referral Center … where I received a hot meal, a shower, and referral to a safe and comfortable nightly shelter at the Noel House,” a shelter for single women.” Since then, Green said she has been able to work on her recovery, start paying off her debts, and recovered some of the self-esteem she lost living on the streets.

The housing levy and HALA are inextricably connected, because the city won’t meet its goal of 20,000 new affordable units without levy funding. The levy election is in August, and the HALA focus groups will meet for the rest of this year and into 2017.

* My apologies if I mispelled Linda’s name, which I wrote down as she spoke.

 

 

Density, Development, housing, land use

Geographically, Demographically Diverse HALA Applications Defy Early Trend

Screen Shot 2016-03-06 at 8.29.58 PM

Since I first reported that the vast majority of applications for five community focus groups that will provide input on the city’s Housing Affordability and Livability agenda came from just three North End neighborhoods—Wallingford, Ballard, and Phinney Ridge—hundreds more applications have poured in, and the good news is that they’re far more representative of the city as a whole, demographically and geographically, than the original batch of applications.

The bad news? Some parts of the city, particularly far Southeast Seattle, remain underrepresented among the applications, with only a handful of applicants. North Rainier, Rainier Beach, and Othello each have half a dozen applicants or fewer, as do Roosevelt, Eastlake, and Bitter Lake.

Ballard, Wallingford, and Phinney Ridge remain vastly overrepresented in the applications—with 41, 55, and 26 applications, respectively. Other than Capitol Hill (with 51 applicants), those are the only three neighborhoods with more than 20 applications.

Overall, though, the number of applicants—more than 650, or several times the total number of people who participate in their neighborhood district councils citywide—and their diversity is encouraging to Nyland, who was initially concerned that most of the applications would be from plugged-in homeowners north of the Ship Canal with a vested interest in avoiding zoning changes that might increase density in their neighborhoods. However, she says, people who are opposed to HALA on principle still need to be part of the process. “I think they’ll be part of the conversation whether we put them [on the focus groups] or not, so it’s better that they’re on this list,” Nyland says.

In her office at City Hall last week, Nyland said the goal of the HALA groups is to bring together all perspectives and “push people outside their comfort zone. I think it would be a misstep to only include like-minded people.”

In a departure from the way the city usually arranges advisory groups, the HALA focus groups will be organized by type of neighborhood, rather than geographic area, bringing together “folks who are going to be experiencing like changes, though not necessarily in like parts of the city,” Nyland says. For example, one group, focused on hub urban villages, will likely include not just central neighborhoods like Capitol Hill but also Ballard, Lake City, and the West Seattle junction; another group, focused on areas where urban villages will be expanded under HALA, will include Columbia City, Roosevelt, Rainier Beach, and Crown Hill. All the groups will meet at City Hall so that no one has to drive, bike, or bus all the way across town—say, from Crown Hill to Rainier Beach.

The 661 applications, obtained through a public records request, include:

A young renter and attorney focusing on Indian law who was priced out of Judkins Park and wants to make sure all Seattle residents can afford housing, “Whether that person is currently on the street, makes over $100,000 a year, or makes 60% of the AMI.”

A Beacon Hill resident whose home has been in her family for generations who wants to make sure people are able to keep their homes even as the city densifies around them

A retired resident of Madrona who writes, “I am not an advocate of protecting neighborhoods by creating fortress communities where sensible zoning adjustments cannot intrude.”

A 27-year-old Belltown renter and lifelong Seattleite who says she wants to “be a voice for renters and young people – Seattle’s fastest-growing demographic and that most in need of affordable housing.

A Wallingford homeowner who says it’s “important to me that Seattle protects existing owners from structures that are too tall and/or too close to their existing homes” but also says, “I see way too many people opposing change out of fear, and they don’t even understand what’s in the HALA proposal or have constructive suggestions for improving it.

A New Holly resident and immigrant mother who wants to be a voice for refugees and low-income Somali families.

A property owner and landlord in Green Lake who grew up poor, had “bouts of homelessness in my 20s,” and now says, “I deeply believe in the need to provide a safety net and system for the poor and middle class in order to allow for stories like mine to exist.”

Nyland says the focus groups will be geographically representative despite the fact that certain neighborhoods are overrepresented in the applications.