Category: housing

City Council, Environment, housing, land use

“Ballard is an Environmental Disaster”: Opponents Rail Against Plan to Eliminate One Avenue for Land Use Appeals

By Erica C. Barnett

Legislation would eliminate an early local appeal process that has delayed land use decisions a year or more drew the usual crowd of longtime Seattle property owners to City Council chambers on Wednesday, where they claimed the proposal would eliminate their “voice” in land use decisions and result in the “clear-cutting” of Seattle.

On the other side were environmentalists and housing advocates who argued that the lengthy delays that routinely bog down efforts to add housing contribute to sprawl, worsens pollution from cars, and exacerbates the affordability crisis that impacts Seattle’s growing renter majority.

In recent years, property owners have shifted away from saying out loud that renters will take away “their” street parking and harm their property values, a view that has become somewhat less acceptable amid a growing affordability crisis. Now, they insist that denser housing for renters will turn Seattle into a treeless desert and kill orcas and salmon.

Many of the opponents’ comments on Wednesday bore little relationship to reality. One speaker, for instance, falsely claimed the legislation would “eliminate environmental appeals on all city land use legislation and any city building project” at a time when the city experiences “heat islands because of clear-cutting thousands and thousands of mature trees” for development, which is also untrue.

Another speaker, who identified himself as a Seattle resident for more than 30 years, called the Ballard neighborhood—which has transformed over the past 20 years from sleepy fishing village to lively urban center with the addition of thousands of new residents—”an environmental disaster. … I lived in the New York City area. I moved from the East Coast to here to get away from that. And when I see Seattle changing into something that resembles New York City, it’s very sad to see that we’re going in that direction,” he said.

Other speakers claimed that eliminating administrative appeals would result in deaths due to heat islands caused by apartment construction, “take away the voice of the people” the same way Trump is trying to take away people’s voting rights, and, yes, kill orcas and salmon.

The actual proposal, which is sponsored by District 2 councilmember and land use committee chair Eddie Lin, is much more benign, though it’s obvious why density opponents are against it: The bill would eliminate their ability to delay changes to the city’s land use code by filing the equivalent of a complaint form with the city.

Currently, anyone can halt a proposed land use change in its tracks by paying $120 and filing an appeal with the city’s hearing examiner. Appeals at this level stop the legislative while it’s still ongoing, cutting off deliberation and debate while the hearing examiner considers whether the city has made the right determination about a proposal’s environmental impact.

This process rarely results in changes to legislation—between 2016 and 2026, just three appeals have even partially succeeded—but it does slow down proposals to allow more density in the city’s historic single-family enclaves: Over the last 10 years, cases have taken an average of 151 days to resolve, with two-thirds of all claims resulting in a dismissal or being withdrawn.

While Seattle has offered this “administrative” appeal process since the 1980s, other local jurisdictions, including King County and Bellevue, do not.

Lin’s legislation would get rid of this “pre-legislative” process, while still allowing appeals to the state’s Growth Management Hearings Board or King County Superior Court, which both occur after the city has adopted actual legislation, rather than while the deliberative process is still going on. Although many of the speakers at Wednesday’s hearing said eliminating hearing examiner appeals would “silence” their “voices,” that’s clearly not true: The city’s long-delayed Comprehensive Plan update is currently stalled indefinitely due to a legal appeal.

House Our Neighbors co-executive director Jeff Paul, one of several public commenters who spoke in favor of Lin’s bill on Wednesday, said he was “remarkably frustrated,” as a lifelong environmentalist, to hear so many people claim that dense housing leads to environmental harm.

“According to every environmental scientist in the world, we have to massively reduce the amount of time that people spend driving in cars,” Paul said. “The only way that we can do that is build densely. Public transit only works when people have dense cities. It’s the most important single drawdown that we can do, and we needed to start five decades ago.” Yet Seattle homeowners are still busy “talking about [how] it’s so important that one person can stop the entire city from making decisions about what is going to happen with our land use and our ability to meaningfully address the climate crisis.”

Lin’s land use committee meets again, and is expected to take up the proposal, on July 15.

 

housing, podcasts

Seattle Nice: Is Seattle’s Housing Market In Trouble?

By Erica C. Barnett

On the latest episode of Seattle Nice, we talked to Redfin’s chief economist, Daryl Fairweather, about the recent slowdown of Seattle’s housing market and what it means for the future of our economy.

When we talk about a “decline” in the housing market, that refers to a slowdown or reversal of housing price increases because more people are selling than buying—in other words, it’s bad news for people who already own houses that they are trying to sell, but potential good news for those trying to buy or rent here.

That’s an important distinction I tried to keep in focus as we talked about what a “slowdown” means for the city. Renters, who make up more than half of Seattle residents, bear the brunt of an increasingly expensive housing market; although buying a home in Seattle has become much more expensive than renting, anyone who does manage to buy a house has their monthly housing costs more or less locked in place, apart from annual tax increases, while rent generally increases unpredictably every year.

For those who already own houses, it’s true that the equity they gain through monthly mortgage payments only comes to fruition when they sell, which may not make sense if they plan to stay in Seattle, since they would have to buy a new place in the same expensive market. However, longer-term Seattle house owners whose mortgage is, say, $3,000 a month are exponentially better off than renters who would have to pay thousands more for the same house, since rent goes up so much faster than property taxes.

All of which is to say: If the pace of job growth continues to stall, as Fairweather predicts it will, affordability will improve somewhat. But, Fairweather noted, “we’ve already gotten to this place where affordability has gotten so bad that I don’t know if people will really feel like things are getting better for them” even if housing prices decline a bit. For renters, “if you’re going from $2,000 a month rent to $3,000 a month rent, and then I’m telling you, ‘Oh, but next month or next year it’s going to be $2,995, it doesn’t really feel like things are getting meaningfully better,” Fairweather said.

Fairweather also threw some cold water on David’s belief that AI could be a tool to meaningfully lower the cost of housing. Both she and David are more techno-optimistic than I am, but Fairweather noted that most of the factors that have increased the cost of housing development have nothing to do with brainstorming or permit times (two things David and Fairweather said AI might help with) but construction materials and human physical labor, which can’t be digitized.

Sandeep also brought up his “heretical view” that the region should expand its growth boundaries to allow much more housing outside current growth limits, which already allow significant amounts of suburban sprawl. The argument against sprawl isn’t so much an anti-housing argument, in my view; it’s that sprawl is energy-intensive and destroys natural resources (in our region, forests) and farmland while requiring huge investments in infrastructure that contributes to climate change, like the freeways and feeder roads to move people from the suburbs to their jobs in Seattle by car.

In addition, Fairweather said, moving the urban growth boundary outward “results in longer commute times … and if they’re paying for gas on top of their mortgage, then maybe they’re not actually doing any better, or maybe their quality of life isn’t any better” than it would be if they paid for a more expensive house closer to the city.

homelessness, housing, Trump

New Federal Guidelines Put Funding for Permanent Supportive Housing at Risk

By Erica C. Barnett

After a long delay resulting in part from a lawsuit by the National Alliance to End Homelessness, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development has released a Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) for $4 billion in federal funding for homeless shelters and transitional housing. The new guidelines signal a move toward federal funding for temporary transitional housing, street outreach, and faith-based programs that have not previously received federal dollars, and away from permanent supportive housing for chronically homeless people.

The result could be a significant reduction in federal funding for local homelessness programs and a resurgence in funding for transitional housing. Seattle, like many other cities, moved away from transitional housing about a decade ago in favor of permanent housing programs like rapid rehousing—essentially, subsidies for people to rent in the private market—and permanent supportive housing. The annual NOFO is administered by the King County Regional Homelessness Authority (KCRHA), acting as the Continuum of Care (CoC) for the Seattle region.

The new guidelines serve as a replacement for a proposal last year that homeless service providers and advocates said would make it virtually impossible for Seattle-area programs to get federal funding, largely because they placed a 30 percent on funding for permanent supportive housing programs, which make up the bulk of federally funded homelessness programs in Seattle and King County.

While the new NOFO no longer includes this cap, it also makes about 40 percent of the package newly competitive, using a points system that awards extra points to programs that promote “self-sufficiency” and include service participation requirements, such as mandatory substance abuse treatment.

Currently, almost all of the federal funding for homelessness programs in the region, around $60 million (of $67 million total), goes toward permanent supportive housing for people with disabilities, including mental illness and addiction, who need intensive case management and other services.

The new NOFO includes pages and pages of bellicose language about “housing first”—the idea that housing is a necessary condition for recovery and self-sufficiency—calling the approach “a profound failure by any measure.” (Conservatives and the Trump Administration have defined “housing first,” inaccurately, as “housing only,” when such programs actually include supportive services designed to address underlying conditions that lead or contribute to homelessness.)

And it specifically calls out Seattle and King County, along with Portland, as areas of the country where overdoses are high and crime related to homelessness is supposedly out of control.

“HUD is restoring the CoC program to its original goals of reducing homelessness and optimizing self-sufficiency by focusing on meaningful outcomes, expanding  competition, prioritizing treatment, economic independence, and emphasizing law and order,” the NOFO says.

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Despite some over-the-top political rhetoric, the new requirements do not include restrictions such as mandatory sobriety. They do require homeless service providers to “attest” that they won’t operate safe drug consumption sites or ” knowingly permit the use or distribution of illicit drugs on property under their control” under a law widely known as the “crack house law.” That law says no one can own or lease a property “for the purpose of” manufacturing or selling illegal drugs, a provision that has not been applied to housing for unsheltered people.

The new application guidelines also open the door for nontraditional providers, including faith-based groups and organizations that do outreach, to get federal funding. The guidelines give extra points for organizations who “cooperate and [do] not interfere or impede with the enforcement of local laws such as public camping and public drug use laws and assist/be willing to assist first responders in their efforts to engage homeless individuals.”

A group of providers, advocates, and elected officials are meeting this afternoon to discuss the possible implications of the new NOFO rules.

Earlier this week, HUD also released the national results of the annual Point in Time Count, traditionally a one-night count of unsheltered people conducted in January. That count found 16,936 people living unsheltered in the King County region. The KCRHA had planned to release its own PIT count, which is based on one-on-one interviews and statistical sampling, last week, but is now delaying the release until later this month.

City Council, Courts, Density, homelessness, housing, Mayor Wilson

This Week on PubliCola: April 11, 2026

Shelter expansion, anti-apartment pushback, Northeast Seattle gets dedicated cops, and a bunch of other stories you may have missed this week.

By Erica C. Barnett

Monday, April 6

Seattle Nice: Mayor Wilson Wants to Expand Housing Faster

On this week’s episode of Seattle Nice, we talked about how Mayor Katie Wilson’s personal experience renting in Seattle may have impacted her decision to go “bigger, taller, and faster” on the city’s comprehensive plan. We also talked about City Councilmember Maritza Rivera’s still-vague proposal to “audit the Human Services Department.”

Councilmember Rivera Wants to Audit Human Services

Speaking of which, here’s what we know about that proposal: Rivera believes that in light of King County’s audit, which found serious problems with some its own human services contracts, the city should audit its own human services contracts. The auditor’s office told us this would be a long, involved process; generally, their audits are more focused and happen at the direction of more than just one councilmember.

Tuesday, April 7

Seattle Council Hears from Renters Who Want Quality of Life and Homeowners Who Want to Keep Neighborhoods to Themselves

A meeting on the proposed comprehensive plan update, which could allow some apartments in parts of the city that are not directly on large, polluting arterial roads and highways, broke down along predictable lines: Renters and housing advocates asked for the right to live in Seattle’s quieter neighborhoods, and housing opponents argued that allowing apartments near them would be tantamount to clear-cutting Seattle, murdering orcas, and making birds go extinct.

Wednesday, April 8

SPD Dedicates Three Officers to Magnuson Park, Citing Success with “Disorder” and Property Crimes During Pilot

The Seattle Police Department is permanently assigning three officers to the area around Magnuson Park, a large lakefront park in an affluent part of Northeast Seattle where residents, and Councilmember Rivera, have been calling for more cops to crack down on loud summertime parties and street racing. The park is home to hundreds of low-income residents who live in apartments run by two nonprofits; it’s also where police shot and killed Charleena Lyles, a woman who called 911 during a mental-health crisis.

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Thursday, April 9

Larger Library Levy Moves Forward

The city council added nearly $70 million to a $410 million library levy renewal that will be on the ballot this year, including new funds for repairs and maintenance at the downtown library, air conditioning for libraries that don’t have it, and more electronic copies of popular books. Rivera voted against every amendment, citing the need for fiscal responsibility as the city approaches a state-imposed cap on property tax levies.

Founder of AI Worker Surveillance Startup Appointed to Ethics Commission

Evan Smith, formerly of Starbucks, created a system for companies to spy on retail workers by recording all their conversations and using AI to analyze their speech for compliance with company policy. Councilmembers Rivera and Joy Hollingsworth nominated him to serve on the city’s Ethics and Elections Commission.

County Assessor Pleads Not Guilty to Stalking, Must Wear Ankle Monitor in Five-Year No Contact Order

John Arthur Wilson, who has refused to step down from his elected role as King County Assessor despite being arrested for stalking and harassing his ex-fiancée, was slapped with a five-year no-contact order while awaiting trial on stalking charges. He’ll have to wear an ankle monitor to ensure he doesn’t come within 1,000 feet of his ex; his term expires at the end of this year.

Friday, April 10

Developers Ask for Mandatory Affordable Housing Fee Holiday as Permits for New Apartments Dry Up

Seven years ago, the city approved Mandatory Housing Affordability fees on new development; the fees fund affordable housing projects, or developers can build affordable units on site. Since then, development has slackened and the cost of building has gone up, and developers say the fees are a major reason. Now, they’re asking the city to lower the fees temporarily. But the request raises larger questions about how Seattle funds affordable housing, and whether it’s smart to treat apartments like a negative thing by charging special fees on new development.

Also this week: I covered two stories exclusively on Bluesky.

First, the mayor met with opponents of police surveillance cameras in a Zoom town hall that was clearly frustrating for both sides. (I attended a watch party at Stoup on Capitol Hill.) Wilson seems committed to turning on the cameras proposed by her predecessor, Bruce Harrell, and approved by the previous city council, and opponents of police surveillance feel betrayed by the mayor they supported, in part, because they thought she shared their commitment to getting rid of the cameras.

Second, Wilson announced that the city has secured a site for the first 75 units of new shelter of her term—a small step toward the 1,000 new shelter units she promised during her first year. The announcement came at a public meeting where the mayor moderated a panel and took questions from the public, a dramatic departure from the way most previous mayors have rolled out big announcements.

I also talked about these stories and more on Hacks and Wonks with Crystal Fincher on Friday; we also discussed the lawsuit that was filed this week to stop the state’s new high-earners’ income tax, some sheriff’s opposition to a new law saying they can’t serve if their law enforcement certification has been revoked, and more.

 

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City Council, Development, housing

Developers Ask for Mandatory Affordable Housing Fee Holiday as Permits for New Apartments Dry Up

By Erica C. Barnett

A group of apartment builders is asking Mayor Katie Wilson and the City Council to consider rolling back the fees they pay every time they build new housing. The developers, calling themselves the Seattle Housing Roundtable, are asking the city to reduce Mandatory Housing Affordability fees by 90 percent this year, followed by an 80 percent reduction next year and a 75 percent reduction in 2028, with a goal of permanent MHA reforms by the following year.

According to Ian Morrison, an attorney with the land use firm McCullough Hill, MHA “was a good idea when it was originally envisioned, at a time when interest rates were much lower and the economic climate was a lot more positive and predictable.” But, he added, “What we’re seeing now, using the city’s own data, is MHA as a part of a project that was viable in the late 2010s no longer work.   That means housing will not be built in Seattle today.”

The Seattle City Council approved MHA in 2019 as the final component of former mayor Ed Murray’s Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda (HALA). The program made developers build affordable housing or pay a fee every time they built new apartments in Seattle’s multifamily areas (at the time, Seattle still had single-family zoning). In exchange, they were allowed to build more densely.  The framework took for granted that new market-rate apartments have a negative impact on neighborhoods that developers must mitigate by funding affordable housing.

This consensus has shifted just in the seven years MHA has been in effect, as scarcity has made apartments increasingly unaffordable and more people understand that density is an environmental necessity and an answer to growing demand for housing. At the same time, the funding MHA produces for affordable housing has plunged from a high of $74 million in 2021 to just $22 million last year as development has slowed. Last year, developers filed applications to build fewer than 2,000 new apartment buildings, a drop of almost 90 percent from a peak of 17,400 units in 2020.

Developers and land use attorneys we spoke to seemed reluctant to say outright that the city should get rid of MHA altogether, although it negatively impacts their bottom line. Holly Golden, a land use attorney at HCMP Law Offices, said that with lower fees, “you’d still see millions of dollars of MHA fees, plus new construction jobs and permit fees to keep [the Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections running during the building downturn. … Getting projects started provides a huge financial benefit to the city budget at a time when they really need it.”

Taxes on construction are inherently volatile, and there’s a real question about whether MHA aligns with the reality of Seattle as a majority-renter city with an acute housing shortage. If the city agrees to an MHA “holiday” and development rebounds, a surge in other funding sources like the Real Estate Excise Tax could help offset the loss of MHA dollars.

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Not every jurisdiction funds affordable housing by charging a fee on development. PubliCola has reported on a concept called funded inclusionary zoning, in which developers get tax breaks for including affordable housing in their projects. The concept flips the script on development, treating density (i.e. apartments, i.e. renters) as a good thing while also ensuring that affordable housing gets built. Developers aren’t charitable organizations—if a project doesn’t make sense to them, they won’t build it—so instead of penalizing new housing with fees, cities like Portland are trying incentives to build new housing at all income levels.

“There are ways to ensure that inclusionary zoning programs work for the long term and are well calibrated to ensure they don’t impede housing,” Morrison said. “But getting those details right takes time.”

Eddie Lin, the head of the city council’s land use committee, told us on a recent episode of Seattle Nice that he’s “open to a temporary reduction in MHA fees. It needs to be tailored to the right size to get construction going, but not more than we need.”

Eliminating MHA completely, Lin continued, is a nonstarter; the fee, he said, remains “incredibly important for developing additional affordable housing. … We want to be mindful of not giving away too much more than we need to.” MHA reform, he said, might include addressing the fact that developers currently have to pay a fee for building in low-rise zones but not in neighborhood residential—the former single-family zones that now allow essentially the same density as low-rise areas.

Ray Connell, managing director at the developer Holland Partner Group, said it’s possible the impact of MHA and other taxes and regulations in real time by looking east across Lake Washington. “All the cranes are in Redmond,” where fees are lower, “so projects get started,” Connell said. “It’s amazing to go over there and see a bunch of new projects and cranes in the sky. Why is it happening over there? It’s not a hard cost issue, and it’s not an interest rate issue. Yes, it’s the jobs… but it’s also the additional fees that we have to face on this side of the lake.”

Redmond recently adopted an aggressive inclusionary zoning package that says 10 percent of all new units in housing with 10 or more units must be affordable. In four years, Connell said, “there won’t be cranes in certain areas of Redmond. … We can’t get those areas of Redmond to work anymore.”

City Council, Density, housing, Mayor Wilson, Opinion

Seattle Council Hears from Renters Who Want Quality of Life and Homeowners Who Want to Keep Neighborhoods to Themselves

By Erica C. Barnett

As the council takes up the remaining “phases” of Seattle’s latest 10-year comprehensive plan update—which, as a reminder, was subject to repeated delays by the Harrell administration starting in 2023—opponents of new housing are pulling out all the stops to convince the council that allowing renters to live in neighborhoods will destroy urban forests, kill birds and orcas, and make life unbearable for property owners across the city.

Homeowners, including many who made a point of ID’ing themselves as “native Seattleites,” predicated environmental disaster, community fragmentation, and the extinction of various animal species during several hours of public hearings yesterday on the “centers and corridors” portion of the plan, which would establish density limits in new “neighborhood centers” and along major bus lines and rapid transit routes.

The proposed changes, which would leave the overwhelming majority of the city’s residential land untouched, would give more renters access to neighborhoods with ample public trees, safe sidewalks, and quiet streets. Currently, most rental housing is restricted to highways and large arterial roads, which spew pollution directly into apartment windows and are among the city’s most dangerous, noisy, and unpleasant places to live.

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On Monday afternoon, activists even trotted out a group of young children to perform a song-and-dance routine about “lot sprawl”—a concept promoted by Tree Action Seattle, a group that opposes denser housing in neighborhoods on the grounds that new housing often results in the removal of trees on what were formerly private lawns. “Big trees, we need them so,” the children belted. “Lot sprawl has got to go.”

The agenda of most tree activists in Seattle isn’t about adding street trees or maintaining and replacing trees in parks, where a plurality of the city’s tree loss actually occurs.  In a recent action alert, Tree Action said explicitly that  “street trees are not a solution” to tree loss because there isn’t enough room in public right-of-way to achieve a 30 percent tree canopy citywide. (In reality, development in single-family areas amounts to a tiny fraction of overall tree loss in Seattle.)

As I noted on Bluesky yesterday, little kids don’t understand housing policy, much less arcane concepts like “lot sprawl.” Using children to promote an adult political agenda is particularly ironic in this case, since anti-housing policies will make it impossible for most kids who are six years old today to live in Seattle when they grow up.

You know who can't understand housing policy? Little kids trained to sing a song on behalf of their parents' anti-housing political agendas. You know who won't be able to live in Seattle if we don't allow more housing? People who are little kids today.

— Erica C. Barnett (@ericacbarnett.bsky.social) 2026-04-06T23:02:40.796Z

The fever-pitched backlash is occurring alongside a larger push to go bigger on housing in the remaining phases of the comp plan. This push is coming largely from young Seattleites and others who belong to Seattle’s renter majority, which is getting increasingly fed up with both rising rents and the limited options for people who can’t afford to buy a typical million-dollar house in Seattle.

Last week, Mayor Katie Wilson announced that she wants to accelerate the adoption of the comp plan update, restoring the neighborhood centers Harrell removed from the plan and expanding the frequent transit zones where new apartments will be allowed beyond the (frankly embarrassing) half-block that’s in the current proposal. While Wilson’s proposal isn’t on the council’s agenda yet, it figured heavily in the comments both for and against the “centers and corridors” portion of the plan.

During the recess between the two public hearings, supporters of Wilson’s “taller, denser, faster” agenda rallied outside City Hall for a competing vision of Seattle—one where renters have access to the neighborhoods many homeowners want to keep to themselves.

Wilson herself kicked off the rally by thanking the group for gathering to support a “deeply important, if somewhat esoteric, topic of the day—Seattle’s municipal zoning codes!”

“Last week, you heard me announce my administration’s taller, denser, faster housing program. I guess that’s the official name now,” Wilson said. “What that means is that we’re going to start with a more inviting, optimistic assumption of our growth capacity. … We are going to plan to allow more housing in every neighborhood, creating an equitable distribution and meaningful housing choices. Every neighborhood should be an open, welcoming place for people and families to live.”

The opposition to Wilson’s plan is going to be fierce, as people who bought houses decades ago fight to restrict where housing can go and impose tree planting and retention mandates on apartment developers that do not apply to them. But there was heartening news for housing advocates yesterday, too. After the rally, which also featured disability advocate Cecelia Black, Community Roots Housing leader Colleen Echohawk, and City Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck, pro-housing activists filed upstairs to testify in favor of Wilson’s more inviting, optimistic vision.

One of them, Jason Weill, introduced himself as a longtime Seattle resident and homeowner who was “excited about all the growth and vibrancy happening in our city” but “really concerned about the rising housing costs and the constraints that we have on where we can build housing. I’ve lived in apartments built so close to I-5 I could hear highway noise 24 hours a day, and air pollution was a constant health hazard because I could only cool my apartment by opening the windows.”

Apartment renters across the city can relate to this exact situation—as someone who rented apartments on or within a half-block of three major roadways with nonstop, heavy traffic, I certainly could. The city’s renter majority—a population that  includes the mayor herself— is pushing back on the belief, enshrined in our zoning codes, that only homeowners deserve access to the most livable parts of our city. It’s now up to the city council to resist the urge to maintain the unsustainable status quo.