Category: housing

homelessness, housing, King County, Mayor Harrell

Ambitious New Plan Says King County Needs to Spend Billions a Year on Homelessness. But is that Realistic—or Even Necessary?
A downtown encampment mid-sweep

By Erica C. Barnett

When King County and the city of Seattle established the King County Regional Homelessness Authority in 2019, the two governments signed an agreement that required the new agency to adopt a five-year implementation plan that would include, at a minimum, “strategies to reduce homelessness in at least the following populations: youth and young adults, families, veterans, single adults, seniors, and those experiencing acute behavioral health challenges.” 

The draft plan the KCRHA released late last month later goes far beyond that mandate, proposing a series of actions that would—in combination with separate investments in permanent housing—effectively eliminate unsheltered homelessness in King County within five years, mostly by investing in shelter.

Overall, the plan proposes spending between $1.7 billion and $3.4 billion a year to add 18,000 new temporary spaces for people to live, including 7,100 new shelter or “emergency housing” beds, 3,800 medical respite beds for people with acute health-care needs, 4,600 new safe parking spaces for people living in RVs or their cars, and 2,600 beds for people who need addiction recovery support. Altogether, the proposal represents a more than fourfold increase in shelter beds and safe parking spots over just five years. Separately, the plan says the region will need to invest around $8.4 billion in one-time capital costs for permanent and “temporary housing,” a term that encompasses all kinds of shelter. 

The focus on shelter and other forms of “temporary housing,” like recovery housing for people struggling with addiction, represents a turnaround from the region’s previous strategy of de-emphasizing shelter in favor of programs like rapid rehousing, which aims to move people directly from the street into private apartments, where they receive short-term subsidies but are expected to pay full rent within a matter of months. Rapid rehousing programs still exist (and can be successful), but they are no longer touted as a panacea the way they were during the Ed Murray administration.

“The plan is really structured around ending unsheltered homelessness, not all forms of homelessness, and that is important,” KCRHA CEO Marc Dones told PubliCola earlier this month. “We built this draft plan in relationship to what would be necessary in order to significantly reduce or eliminate folks sleeping outside, acknowledging that that doesn’t address the other forms of homelessness, like couchsurfing [or people living] doubled up. Things that like are also a significant concern. But we decided that we needed to go towards one thing first, and it was ‘people shouldn’t sleep outside.'”

Implementing the new plan would cost an order of magnitude more than what the region currently spends on homelessness. One reason for that is that the KCRHA, using a model created by the state Department of Commerce, now estimates that there are far more unhoused people in King County than any previous study has concluded—around 56,000, or roughly one out of every 50 people. That number dwarfs the county’s own 2021 estimate; it’s also significantly larger than the US Department of Housing and Urban Development’s estimate of 25,000 people experiencing homelessness across the entire state of Washington. 

“For every unit of permanent, affordable housing that comes online, we don’t need as much temporary stuff. If there was a big push to site and develop permanently low-income housing, we could retool [the plan] literally over the course of a week.”—KCRHA CEO Marc Dones

Here’s another data point: As part of its effort to identify and permanently house everyone experiencing homelessness in downtown Seattle, Partnership for Zero, the KCRHA has spent part of the last year creating a “by-name list” of everyone experiencing homelessness in the area, which extends from Belltown to the Chinatown-International District. So far, they’ve identified around 800 people. Even assuming that number is an undercount, it suggests that almost all the homeless people in King County live outside downtown Seattle—an area originally chosen, in part, because it has one of the highest concentrations of homelessness in the county. 

KCRHA community impact officer Owen Kajfasz, who leads the agency’s data team, said 56,000 only represents the “floor” for homelessness in King County—in other words, it could be an undercount. However, he acknowledged that the new estimate includes everyone who identified as homeless at any point during the year—including those who were only homeless for a short period, such as a week or a day, and who found places to live on their own.

The KCRHA’s Five-Year Plan includes no new spending on tiny houses, and actually assumes a reduction in the number of tiny house villages over the next five years.

Numerous studies, spanning decades, have concluded that a large number of people “self-resolve” their homelessness within a few days or weeks, although at least one recent analysis has found that number is decreasing. If the number of people who need longer-term interventions, such as case management and temporary housing, is only a fraction of the total people who are homeless in King County every year, the cost to shelter and assist those who need more help could be lower than the KCRHA’s eye-popping estimates.

“To say we need to stand up 18,000 emergency shelter beds, in absolute terms, for 53,000 people experiencing homelessness in King County doesn’t make sense,” said Low Income Housing Institute director Sharon Lee, whose organization operates low-income apartments and “tiny house village” shelters around the county. “The costs of adding spaces just for RVs and car safe parking total $139 million! This is not the correct strategy nor is this in any way financially feasible.”

Local political leaders praised KCRHA for laying out a plan to address unsheltered homelessness, but also seemed unconvinced that the proposal is politically or financially realistic.

A spokesman for Mayor Bruce Harrell, for example, said that while Harrell “supports KCHRA’s dedicated focus on ending unsheltered homelessness and prioritizing immediate and long-term solutions to help get people indoors with access to services and a path to recovery,” the city already funds the majority of the KCRHA’s budget and increased its contribution slightly last year “despite a significant budget deficit.” Last year, the KCRHA asked the city for an additional $54 million to fund 400 new shelter beds and 130 safe-parking spaces; they didn’t get it.

“For budget estimates included in the five-year proposal, we look forward to better understanding how existing investments will be applied and how we can unite support from local, state, and federal governments—along with private and philanthropic sources—to realistically meet budget expectations and advance solutions that drive tangible positive impact,” Harrell’s spokesman, Jamie Housen, said.

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Seattle City Council homelessness committee chair Andrew Lewis said he has “faith and confidence that that (cost) number does reflect probably what the investment would be to truly end homelessness and have a flexible system where homelessness is brief, people can get rapidly rehoused, and everything else. That said, the product I would like to see is a corollary tactical, substantive plan … that we can implement in one to two years with things like pallet shelters, RV safe lots, tiny houses—things that people can see and have confidence that we can get on top of this problem.”

His fear, Lewis said, is that if Seattle doesn’t make a visible dent in unsheltered homelessness, people will lose confidence in strategies that work, like low-barrier housing for people struggling with addiction. “We did, in this biennium, make a half-billion-dollar investment in housing [through the city’s capital budget], and for a city, that is a really big contribution to the regional solution. So I think it is possible for us to build on that and continue to be a partner within the reasonable constraints of our means. But,” he added, “I do think it requires us to demonstrate visible progress with a shorter-term, tactical plan” that will build “currency” for larger investments later.

Lewis has been a longtime advocate for tiny house villages, noting that people living in encampments will often “accept” a referral to a tiny house after saying no to traditional shelter. Dones, in contrast, has argued repeatedly that tiny houses cost too much and don’t get people into housing fast enough. Notably, the Five-Year Plan proposes spending no new money on tiny houses, and actually proposes decreasing the number of tiny-house units by 55—a stark contrast to the rest of the proposal, which proposes large new investments in every other type of shelter.

According to the plan, just 1 percent of people experiencing homelessness told KCRHA researchers that they preferred tiny house villages to other forms of shelter.

However, that conclusion is based on extrapolation from 180 interviews in which researchers asked people a list of open-ended questions, such as “what things or people have been helpful to you?” These interviews were also used to estimate the number of people experiencing homelessness in last year’s “point-in-time count,” and to describe the living conditions of the county’s homeless population as a whole.

Researchers never asked respondents to identify which type of shelter they preferred. Instead, they asked then to describe, in an open-ended way, “an optimal condition that would support them to move on in their housing journey,” Dones said. The things they mentioned, Kajfasz added, “were very infrequently aligned with the tiny own village model.” For example, some people said they would prefer to have their own restrooms, or running water in their unit—in other words, a hotel room.

According to the plan, just 1 percent of people experiencing homelessness told KCRHA researchers that they preferred tiny house villages to other forms of shelter. However, that conclusion is based on extrapolation from 180 interviews in which researchers asked people a list of open-ended questions, such as “what things or people have been helpful to you?”

Lee called the KCRHA’s plan, which singled out tiny houses while lumping all other forms of shelter, including hotels, into a single category, “anti-tiny house,” adding, “we question the methodology and numbers.”

For example, “How come they don’t have breakout categories for congregate shelters, noncongregate shelters, hotels, and overnight shelters?” Lee said. “We actually need all of them.” During a recent meeting of the KCRHA’s implementation board, several speakers urged the committee to support funding for tiny house villages. After listening to their comments, board member and former Bellevue mayor John Chelminiak said, “I agree with the speakers today who say, ‘Don’t take options off the table,’ and this [plan] takes options off the table.”

Dones said the authority put tiny houses in their own micro-category because “the community has sort of held [tiny houses] apart from other forms of shelter investment,” adding, “I recognize this is a departure, but what I heard [from the interviews] is that folks do prefer hoteling or emergency housing. … There is a point at which ‘because they told me’ is enough.”

Even if the KCRHA were able to secure funding for a sizeable portion of its five-year plan, some of its elements—like the proposal to secure and open hundreds of parking lots across the county for people living in RVs and cars—seem obviously unworkable based on the region’s recent history trying and failing to open even one such lot.

Consider, for example, the fact that the city of Seattle has been trying unsuccessfully for well over a decade to create a single safe lot for people living in their cars or RVs. So far, every attempt has been a failure. Just last year, plans for a small RV safe lot in SoDo were scaled back, then shelved, due to opposition from people living in the adjacent Chinatown/International District neighborhood—long before neighborhood opposition doomed an adjacent shelter expansion.

LIHI, which was the only applicant for a contract from KCRHA to open an RV safe lot last year, told KOMO recently that they’ll need a 30,000-to-40,000-square-foot parking lot to hold just 35 RVs. After six months of looking, they have not found a suitable lot.

Dones said the plan could change based on feedback the KCRHA receives about the draft, including the public. (The three-week public comment period closed on February 8). The level of need the plan anticipates, they added, could change dramatically if state and regional invests in housing quickly. “For every unit of permanent, affordable housing that comes online, we don’t need as much temporary stuff,” Dones said. “If there was a big push to site and develop permanently low-income housing, we could retool it literally over the course of a week or so to say ‘Now we need this much.” The question, for many of the officials who’ve staked their hopes on the new authority, may not be “how much” but “how?”

Density, housing, land use, legislature, Transit

Seeking Compromise, Lawmakers May Preserve Local Parking Mandates in This Year’s Pro-Housing Bills
Photo of empty parking garage
Mandatory parking often sits empty, especially in dense neighborhoods near transit stops. Photo credit: Enoch Leung from Canada, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

By Ryan Packer

Democrats in Olympia are making good on their pledge to remove local regulatory barriers to housing by proposing bills that would require cities and towns to permit diverse types of new housing. Many of these bills are being passed over the objections of local elected officials, who are wary of changes in state law that take away their authority to maintain status-quo land use policies.

But while lawmakers seem willing to go against the recommendations of some cities when it comes to density limits, they seem more hesitant about getting rid of local parking requirements. Parking requirements add costs to new housing—garages aren’t cheap to build—and are often unnecessary as cities become denser and easier to navigate without a car. Cities across Washington currently require a certain number of parking spaces for each new housing unit they permit, though Seattle has removed that requirement for buildings close to transit lines.

Many of the bills proposed this session remove or reduce minimum parking requirements in order to reduce construction costs. But those provisions are now proving to be a sticking point for both parties.

Rep. Julia Reed (D-36, Seattle) is leading the charge to eliminate parking minimums, particularly in areas that are close to transit. “A lot of these parking minimum laws that are in place from cities and counties, they were created a while ago and they’re not really revisited that often,” Reed said. “It’s not tied to how people really move around that neighborhood, it’s tied to an assumption that parking is needed.” Reed cited the high cost of parking spaces in new buildings: $50,000 or more per spot.

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Reed’s House Bill 1351 would prohibit cities from requiring parking in new buildings within a half-mile of frequent transit lines, and within a quarter-mile of half-hourly bus service. But by the time that bill passed the house local government committee this week, the restriction only applied to areas within a quarter-mile of any level of transit service. And even that major change wasn’t enough to get any Republicans in the committee to vote for it, in a year when Democrats are counting on some Republican votes to get their housing votes across the finish line.

The state senate is where that support might matter the most. When the bill’s senate counterpart received a hearing earlier this month, it was a Democrat, Sen Claudia Kauffman (D-47, Kent), who expressed concerns with how this would impact downtown Kent, where street parking is generally free. “If you start reducing [required parking] because of the transit center, it’s going to reduce people’s ability to have their car. … For me, this doesn’t work within the transit system that we have,” Kauffman said. “In my area this just wouldn’t work.”

Many of this year’s senate housing bills would also reduce or remove parking minimums. Senator Marko Liias’ (D-21, Edmonds) Senate Bill 5466 would require cities to allow substantially denser developments around transit stations, and would ban parking minimums within three-quarters of a mile of any major transit stop.

“It doesn’t make sense, when we’re saying [that] in a transit zone, the way we want people to move is by transit, to also require and guarantee that you can get to those destinations by car,” Liias said at the bill’s first public hearing. “Overlaying the two creates really incompatible and inefficient land uses. … When we require parking minimums, that’s when we get empty parking lots right next to light rail stations.”

Under the new version of the bills allowing more apartments near transit, a potential fourplex just outside a transit corridor would have to include  four parking spaces, which might push a homeowner or developer to consider a different type of building altogether—like a single-family home.

Housing advocates are in broad agreement that it’s essential to eliminate parking minimums as part of this year’s housing bills. “If the bill doesn’t do that, local parking mandates will force developers to build more parking than communities need, and that excess parking will undermine the state’s goals to create transit-oriented communities that give residents good alternatives to cars,” Dan Bertolet of the Sightline Institute, the Seattle-based think tank, testified at a committee hearing on SB 5466 this week. A 2021 paper by a researcher at Santa Clara University showed that when Seattle reduced required parking near transit in 2012, developers built 40 percent fewer parking spaces, translating to around 18,000 fewer stalls and over half a billion dollars in reduced housing costs.

Though it’s still early, efforts to weaken parking restrictions are already becoming a trend. This week, the house and senate housing committees approved both House Bill 1110 and its counterpart Senate Bill 5190, which require cities inside the Seattle and Spokane metro areas to allow fourplexes on all residential lots, and sixplexes close to transit. But both chambers did so only after approving a new version that allows cities to require at least one parking spot for each housing unit for areas away from transit, when the previous version only allowed them to require one spot per lot. That means a potential fourplex just outside a transit corridor would have to include four parking spaces, which might push a homeowner or developer to consider a different type of building altogether—like a single-family home.

Even as that bill passed its senate committee with his vote, one of its Republican sponsors, Sen. John Braun (R-20, Centralia), said he isn’t ready to vote “yes” when it gets to the Senate floor, suggesting there’s more bartering ahead on the Senate. A majority of Republicans in both chambers oppose the bills in the name of maintaining local control—as opposed to supporting them based on developers’ private property rights, a traditional conservative position.

With the proposals to eliminate parking minimums getting the most vocal pushback from local leaders, and many lawmakers apparently listening to those concerns, these urbanist provisions might be the first casualties as deadlines approach and leaders in both chambers look to create compromises to reach a deal.

ryan@publicola.com

Affordability, Elections, Guest Contributor, housing, labor

Guest Editorial: City Employees Need Social Housing
Image via City of Seattle.

By Karen Estevenin, Executive Director, PROTEC17

Collective action is the heart of the labor movement. As a public sector union, PROTEC17 members work together to improve conditions at our own workplaces. What is often lost in the public understanding of unions is how we also strive to improve the communities where we live.

The inadequate and shrinking supply of affordable housing in our region has become a crisis. That’s why our union, along with a number of coalition partners, is supporting Initiative I-135, which would create a public developer to build and acquire permanently affordable social housing in Seattle.

During the 2010s, Seattle saw some of the highest rent increases in the country, with an average rent increase of more than 90 percent. Between 2021 and 2022 alone, rent increases approached 20 percent per year between 2021 and 2022. The current median rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Seattle is $1,895, an amount that prices many Seattleites out of their own neighborhoods.

PROTEC17 represents the largest number of union workers at the City of Seattle. Through mobilization, negotiating strong contracts, and workplace wins, union members’ ability to create positive change undoubtedly fosters a better workplace and livelihood for themselves and their colleagues. However, with the rising cost of living and housing in Seattle, it is increasingly difficult to raise city employees’ compensation to fit the realities of living in Seattle. The simple fact is that too many city employees cannot afford to live in the very city they support, shape, and serve.

It is in this context that I-135, the social housing initiative, offers a proactive, transparent, and inclusive pathway to the development of truly affordable housing in the city of Seattle. I-135 does this by creating a Public Development Authority that will enable the city of Seattle to acquire properties, renovate existing housing, and build affordable homes, removing the pressure for profits and allowing more collective and collaborative management. The authority itself will be directed by a public oversight board composed of renters, union members, experts in affordable and green development, as well as City Council and Mayoral appointees. It is collective action in action and as an ongoing model.

Housing created by the authority would include units to fit a mix of household sizes, as well as units that are affordable to a cross section of tenants—from those with extremely low incomes to those making up to 120% of Seattle’s median income. If passed, the tools provided by I-135 will be a critical component to restoring and maintaining living communities that cross incomes, ages, and backgrounds.

For these reasons, and many more, a broad range of community, labor, and small business partners have come together to support I-135.  Join us in this collective action and vote YES on I-135. Let’s give our city the opportunity to create affordable housing by and for the people.

Karen Estevenin is the executive director of PROTEC17, a member-powered labor union representing nearly 10,000 public employee professionals across the Pacific Northwest. PROTEC17 members work in city, county, and state government, public health, and beyond to support the programs and services that our communities rely on everyday.

City Council, Elections, Equity, housing, Police, Transportation

They Want to Stay: Tammy Morales and Andrew Lewis on Why They’re Running for Reelection

By Erica C. Barnett

A lot has been written—including here on PubliCola—about the coming mass exodus from the Seattle City Council. Five council members—Lisa Herbold, Kshama Sawant, Alex Pedersen, and Debora Juarez— have either said they will not run for reelection this year or that they will run for a different office. At least four, and probably five, council seats will be filled by new people next year; depending on how things shake out, the most senior council member could have just four years’ experience.

Amid that churn, two freshman council members—Tammy Morales and Andrew Lewis, whose districts encompass southeast Seattle and downtown, respectively—have said want to stay on the job. (Dan Strauss, who represents northwest Seattle, has not announced his intentions yet.)

In conversations with PubliCola, both cited unfinished business, a need for continuity in the legislative branch, and a sense of optimism about the future among their reasons for running again despite a working environment that has been chaotic, toxic, and full of unexpected challenges—including the COVID pandemic, a racial reckoning whose promise is largely unfulfilled, and a mainstream backlash against people experiencing unsheltered homelessness.

“None of us expected the kind of term we had… and it takes a toll,” Morales said. “There were definitely times when I was like, ‘What the hell? This was not what I expected.’ It’s stressful and I don’t begrudge any of my colleagues for wanting to find a different way to give back to the community.”

That said, Morales added, “given that I represent a district that has historically been ignored, I don’t want to lose momentum.”

When Morales ran for her seat four years ago, she focused on issues like preventing economic displacement and ending encampment sweeps. Four years later, she says she’s still focused on those issues, but with a deeper understanding of how the city’s policies promote gentrification and make long-term solutions to Seattle’s housing crisis a complex challenge. “I’m especially interested in seeing through the comprehensive plan”—a planning document that guides housing, parks, jobs, and transportation in Seattle—”and really trying to change the way we manage growth in the city … so we’re not just rubber-stamping a perpetuation of the existing strategy,” Morales said.

“We know that transit corridors have high rates of pollution associated with them, at least the way we have allowed them to be built. Now we’re saying, ‘put a lot of poor people there and let’s use them a as buffer between homeowners and the road.'”

For example, Morales said, one major reason for the housing shortage is the city’s decades-old “urban village” strategy, which concentrates dense housing along busy, polluted arterial roads while locking up most of the city’s residential land for suburban-style single-family houses. Next year, the city will adopt a new comprehensive plan that will guide development for the next 20 years, and some of the options under consideration would concentrate development along “transit corridors”—those same busy, polluted arterials.

Morales wants to work to ensure that doesn’t happen.

“We know that transit corridors have high rates of pollution associated with them,” Morales said, “at least the way we have allowed them to be built,” with buses and cars competing for space along fast-moving arterials like Rainier Ave. S. “Now we’re saying, ‘put a lot of poor people there and let’s use them a as buffer between homeowners and the road.'”

Morales, who has a background in urban planning, emerged as a vocal advocate for pedestrian safety during her term, a time when almost half the fatal crashes in the entire city of Seattle occurred in her district. For decades, the city has failed to meaningfully address traffic violence along most of Rainier Ave. S., with the exception of the gentrified Columbia City neighborhood, where a controversial road-narrowing project successfully calmed a section of the road where crashes were once frequent.

Morales has been critical of the Seattle Department of Transportation’s uninspiring traffic-calming efforts, like lowering the speed limit on arterials by five miles an hour and posting signs encouraging drivers to slow down.

“We need to design roads differently so that people slow down” while also enforcing traffic laws in places where people continue to speed—for example, with automated traffic cameras that result in warnings, then fines, Morales said. “I drive down Rainier and I see people blow past me in the bus lane, the turn lane—that is a problem. But we’re not going to solve it with a public education campaign.”

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If she’s reelected, Morales said she plans to focus on building generational wealth for Seattle residents of color through programs like community land trusts, which enable low-income people to buy homes, programs that help potential homebuyers qualify for loans, and a pilot program, which she’s introducing this spring, to give developers incentives to work with small, community-based groups to build 35 small affordable housing project throughout the city.

In addition to securing public funds for public parks, beach restoration, sidewalks, and other “quote-unquote back to basics things,” Morales says her office has “really increased the explicit discussion of racial equity” on the council. “When I first got here and I was talking so much about racial equity, I feel like I got a lot of pats on the head,” she said. “Because of the team that I’ve built and the work [we’ve done[ on behalf of District 2, I think other council member are  talking more about the need to center racial equity and acknowledging the ways that the South End has been left out.”

Lewis, like Morales, said he’s motivated to run again by the desire to complete work that he started in his first term, particularly when it comes to alternatives to police response. For more than two years, the city has been debating whether and how to establish a program that would send unarmed civilian responders to some non-emergency calls, with little progress; last year, Mayor Bruce Harrell agreed to move forward with a small pilot program while his office and the police department continue to analyze 911 call data.

During his confirmation hearing last month, then-interim Police Chief Adrian Diaz estimated that over the next two years, the police department would gain a net total of about 18 officers, assuming the rate at which officers leave the department continues to decline. “We have to have leaders who are willing to soberly acknowledge that even that 982 number may unfortunately be an optimistic one,” Lewis said. “We have a civic consensus that we need more police, but where that conversation never goes is that it may be necessary, but it’s not in and of itself sufficient.”

While Lewis noted that Harrell has been far more willing to work with the council, in general, than his predecessor, Jenny Durkan, the time could eventually come to “call the question” on civilian responders by amending the city charter to create a new department dedicated to certain kinds of non-emergency calls.

“We have this really difficult and intractable public safety challenge that comes down to the fact that—very, very stubbornly—we haven’t been doing the things that we need to do as a modern American city to keep people safe,” Lewis said. “I don’t know what it is about our local politics that holds us back from making similar progress that other cities have,” like Denver and Albuquerque, which both set up alternative response programs in 2020, during nationwide calls to reduce reliance on police for many types of emergencies.

Albuquerque Mayor Tim Keller, a moderate Democrat, is “not too dissimilar from the folks who tend to be mayor in the city of Seattle, but … they have a very mature (alternative response) system while we are still screwing around on this,” Lewis said.

“To the extent that things are more collegial now, the council didn’t really change all that much but the mayor did. Maybe that is a clue to where the preponderance of the problem was.”

Lewis currently heads up the council’s homelessness committee, and has advocated for more spending on tiny house villages, in particular, throughout his term. If he gets a second term, he says he’d like to serve on the council’s transportation committee in addition to working on homelessness and police accountability.

“My district has quite a few bridges that need work done,” including the high bridge to Magnolia, Lewis said. “I think bridges are going to be a dominant infrastructure issue over the next decade, because we are going to see more bridge failures.” Part of the problem, he added, is that “there’s been a lot of instability” at the Seattle Department of Transportation, which has had five directors since 2018.

“Despite the fact that we’ve come up with a lot of resources that we’ve directed toward bridges as a council, SDOT hasn’t taken that money and actually done anything to help those bridges. A lot of that money gets reshuffled for other priorities or put on hold.” Urbanists, meanwhile, often understandably advocate for other priorities, like safe bike lanes and pedestrian safety projects, instead of road infrastructure that primarily serves cars. Continue reading “They Want to Stay: Tammy Morales and Andrew Lewis on Why They’re Running for Reelection” →

endorsements, housing, Uncategorized

PubliCola Picks: “Yes” On Initiative 135

Seattle is facing a historic housing shortage. In 2019, according to one national report, the region had a housing gap of almost 82,000 units, and the problem has gotten worse, not better, since the pandemic began. The lack of housing for people at all income levels has made this a dual crisis: With rents at all-time highs, even people with moderate incomes can barely afford to live in the city, and those at the bottom are suffering most of all. According to a recent study by Challenge Seattle, a business-backed group headed by former Gov. Christine Gregoire, there is a “severe shortage of affordable rental units for lower income households” in Washington state, particularly for those making less than 30 percent of median income—those most likely, in other words, to fall into homelessness.

PubliCola Picks graphicSocial housing—specifically, mixed-income rental housing that would remain permanently affordable and publicly owned—could be a key part of the solution to this multifaceted problem. Initiative 135, on the February 14 ballot, would create a new public development authority— a kind of quasi-governmental organization with the power to build, acquire, and operate housing in Seattle.

People with incomes ranging from 0 to 120 percent of Seattle’s median income would be eligible to rent apartments in these new and repurposed buildings. Renters in social housing wouldn’t get kicked out if their incomes rise; instead, their rents would increase too, though never higher than 30 percent of their income, the widely accepted definition of affordability. Crucially—and in contrast to other types of affordable housing—renters themselves would make up a majority of the new PDA’s governing board, and would also have a say in how their building is run, along with a budget for amenities and events.

This type of mixed-income housing won’t, on its own, fix the city’s housing crisis. What it will do is provide badly needed housing for hundreds of people who have been, or are at risk of being, displaced from Seattle, augmenting other efforts to build government subsidized public and nonprofit housing such as apartments for people exiting homelessness. Many more ambitious initiatives—such as Gov. Jay Inslee’s recent commitment to commit $4 billion to affordable housing and legislation that would allow denser housing across the state—will be necessary to fill the gap. Social housing is a key piece of the puzzle, not the whole solution.

Critics, including the Seattle Times, have claimed the initiative is toothless because it lacks a funding source. This is disingenuous: As supporters of the initiative have pointed out repeatedly, including a revenue source would risk violating the state’s “single-subject rule” for initiatives. Previous public developers, like the Pike Place Market PDA, have been established in exactly the same way I-135’s sponsors, House Our Neighbors!, are proposing: Get the developer going first, identify revenue sources second.

Nor is it true that social housing supporters haven’t thought about how they would pay for it. In fact, they’ve identified numerous potential revenue streams, including federal housing funds, new progressive local taxes, and funding from the state, whose Democratic leadership, including Gov. Jay Inslee, has recently shown a renewed interest in investing in new affordable housing. Longtime State Rep. and housing advocate Frank Chopp, now a senior advisor to the housing nonprofit Solid Ground, has publicly said he would work to secure funding if the measure passes—a strong vote of confidence from someone with a wealth of experience making housing happen.

The measure has also garnered opposition from members the anti-development left, who argue in the King County Voters’ Guide that the measure is a waste of money because it would create mixed-income housing, rather than housing exclusively for homeless or very low-income people. The idea that very poor people should be segregated into apartment buildings that bar tenants with modest incomes (or kick people out if their income rises) has been debated ad nauseam for decades, but the US has broadly abandoned Cabrini-Green-style public housing projects in favor of mixed-income communities where better-off renters help fund the “operations, maintenance, and loan service” for the community by paying higher rents than those making little or nothing.

This element of the plan should give skeptics cause for optimism: Once built, social housing should become a self-sustaining system—one solution, among many that must happen simultaneously, to Seattle’s affordable housing crisis.

PubliCola picks a “Yes” vote on Initiative 135.

The PubliCola editorial board is Erica C. Barnett and Josh Feit.

Development, housing, legislature

State Proposal Would Ban Design Review—Except for Historic Buildings and Districts
Wallingford Historic District map
Under one amendment, proposals for new housing in the “Wallingford-Meridian Historic Streetcar District” would still be subject to strict aesthetic review.

By Ryan Packer

Last week, the state House housing committee approved a bill that would effectively prohibit cities, including Seattle, from subjecting housing developers to design review—a controversial process in which a group of volunteers make aesthetic judgments about, and require often minute changes to, proposed developments.

These boards can subject architectural firms to multiple rounds of tweaks, adding unpredictability to project timelines, with potential new homes frequently held up for months based on highly subjective aesthetic criteria.

The bill would upend that process. But a proposed amendment could leave a large loophole by preserving design review for projects in so-called historic districts.

House Bill 1026, introduced by Rep. Amy Walen (D-48, Kirkland), would restrict design review for proposed housing developments to “administrative” review, conducted by city staff who would would be limited to considering whether a project adheres to guidelines established by the city.

The amendment added last week by Rep. Mari Leavitt (D-28, University Place) would allow cities to keep design review boards for buildings, and entire neighborhoods, that are listed on a local, state, or national historic register.

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Historic districts within the City of Seattle, like Pioneer Square, Columbia City, and the International District, have boards that review proposals to build or modify housing and other buildings in those areas. Leavitt’s amendment would not only allow this review process to continue while other design review boards elsewhere are being phased out, but expand this enhanced review process to all neighborhoods on the National Register of Historic Places. In Seattle, that would include neighborhoods like Montlake, Roanoke Park, and a broad swath of Wallingford, which was added to the federal register, despite significant opposition, last year. These districts include many non-historic buildings alongside arguably historic ones.

Immediately after the housing committee unanimously adopted the amendment, lawmakers started talking about walking it back. “I do have concerns. I think we can refine the language to make sure that entire neighborhoods…aren’t said to be historic for the purpose of limiting opportunities to increase housing and increase density,” Rep. Strom Peterson (D-21, Edmonds), who chairs the housing committee, said.

Peterson is now proposing an amendment that would only require design review for individual structures, not entire historic districts. It’s not clear how this would impact historic districts like the International District, where every structure is not a city landmark, or whether cities could skirt the restrictions by landmarking every single building in a neighborhood. Legislators will vote on that amendment on the House floor before the bill proceeds to the Senate.

Density, housing, legislature, Maybe Metropolis

Maybe Metropolis: A Tale of Two Densities
TOD in Alexandria, Virginia. Image by m01229; licensed under Creative Commons

by Josh Feit

Urbanists, YIMBYs, and transit advocates are understandably excited about the pro-housing legislation that state senate transportation committee chair Sen. Marko Liias (D-21, Edmonds) has proposed this year.

Liias’ legislation would accelerate transit-oriented development—a guiding principle of progressive city planning. TOD helps create sustainable cities by siting housing, retail, and community assets like schools, childcare, green space, and artist spaces around transit hubs. Basically, the idea is: Dense, climate-friendly, urban paradigms become the best routes to equity and opportunity when life’s fundamentals are accessible without a car.

Liias’ bill, SB 5466, would encourage new growth around transit hubs by allowing mid-sized apartment buildings within three-quarters of a mile of rapid transit stops (including bus rapid transit and frequent bus service), and larger buildings within a quarter-mile of light rail stations. The pro-housing intellectuals at Sightline gushed that the legislation “would be a first for Washington, and the strongest statewide policy of its kind in North America.” Urbanists have been pushing for legislation like this since 2009, when a rookie news site called PubliCola editorialized in favor of a bill that would up-zone areas around transit stations while old-fashioned Seattle—and the Seattle Times— predictably and successfully shot it down.

Unfortunately, Liias’ exciting legislation may end up sabotaging an adjacent pro-housing bill. 

Almost 15 years on now, with a broad coalition of pro-housing advocates supporting up-zones for transit-oriented development, the chances for Liias’ bill to pass seem good. Unfortunately, Liias’ exciting legislation may end up sabotaging an adjacent pro-housing bill that we’re even more excited about this year: Rep. Jessica Bateman’s (D-22, Olympia) HB 1110.

Bateman’s “middle housing” bill, which I covered last month, would allow fourplexes in residential areas of cities across the state anywhere detached single-family homes are allowed. Erica cannot stand the term “middle housing” (middle of what?), but essentially it means this: Let’s stop forgoing vast amounts of land—75 percent of the residentially zoned land in Seattle—where apartment buildings, triplexes, fourplexes, and sixplexes are currently prohibited. Bateman’s bill would allow all of these housing types, and sixplexes too within a half-mile of transit, if two of the six units are affordable.

Efforts to add multiplex and apartment housing to low-density residential zones routinely bite the dust in Seattle, where NIMBY liberals pay lip service to pro-housing efforts by deferring to Seattle’s outdated, status quo zoning, which sequesters density into designated urban villages centered on large arterial roads. This “urban-village” strategy allows advocates who oppose density in their own residential neighborhoods to pose as urbanists by supporting something they used to oppose: TOD. We’re with you, they say—of course we need housing!—but let’s not change our residential neighborhoods. Instead, let’s sequester all that multifamily housing near busy streets.

Opportunistically seizing on TOD and refashioning it as a bulwark against more density in residential neighborhoods misconstrues the whole point: TOD is meant to build multiple city centers that create a network of spoke and wheel systems citywide, not build islands of sustainability in otherwise unsustainable cities. Let’s be clear: transit nodes only make sense when they function in sync with the surrounding city infrastructure of connector bus lines and abundant housing. More to the point: Connector bus routes are not sustainable without the appropriate density in surrounding neighborhoods.

You can’t put hyper-dense transit hubs flush up against low-density neighborhoods and expect it to generate sustainability in isolation.

Keeping this broader idea of transit oriented communities front and center, pro-housing advocates should insist that Liias’ and Bateman’s bills exist as a package deal. That is: If NIMBYs start using Liias’ bill as cover to dismiss Bateman’s bill, urbanists should pull their support from Liias’ bill. And Liias should too.

“We are investing billions into new transit service,” Liias told me, “and we need to make those work. If we don’t add housing and jobs around transit, we aren’t delivering maximum value for tax payers.”

True. But we aren’t maximizing TOD if we don’t honor its internal logic. You can’t put hyper-dense transit hubs flush up against low-density neighborhoods and expect it to generate sustainability in isolation. Unfortunately, as PubliCola reported earlier this week, Liias seems to be promoting his bill by playing it against Bateman’s. Bad look. He has a chance to call the NIMBYs’ bluff by taking advantage of the consensus on TOD while supporting its corollary: Nearby neighborhoods need to scale up proportionally themselves by adding apartments.

Just as urbanized transit nodes and adjacent residential neighborhoods can work in sync to build the kind of interlocked communities cities need to achieve equity, Liias and Bateman should work in sync to neutralize opponents of new housing options. By identifying different types of increased density, their complementary bills map out gradations of development from tall buildings around light rail stations, to apartment buildings around busy bus stops, to sixplexes nearby, to fourplexes even further out.

By leveraging the universal agreement that dense transit centers are the building blocks of sustainable cities, the Liias and Bateman bills should work in tandem to plug residential neighborhoods into those transit centers.  In this tale of two densities, we have a chance to up-zone TOD into EOD—Equity-Oriented Development. It’ll be a shame if housing advocates settle for anything less.

Josh@PubliCola.com

Elections, Guest Contributor, housing, Media

Don’t Believe the Seattle Times—Social Housing Will Play a Vital Role in Solving Our Affordability Crisis

Editor’s note: This piece was written in response to the Seattle Times’ endorsement of a “no” vote on Initiative 135, a Seattle ballot measure that would create a new public development authority (PDA) to build, acquire, and operate publicly owned, permanently affordable mixed-income housing in Seattle. The PDA would be run by a majority-renter board, giving residents a direct influence over issues that impact their community.

The Times’ editorial made a number of bombastic, questionable statements in its argument against the initiative, including many PublICola found misleading. We offered advocates for the initiative an opportunity to respond to some of the factual claims the Times made in its editorial advocating a “no” vote on this measure.

Initiative 135 will be on the February 14, 2023 ballot in Seattle.

By House Our Neighbors! Coalition

The Seattle Times editorial board decided they were against Initiative 135 before the endorsement interview even started. It seems as though they simply worked backwards from their “no” position to find reasons that they were going to present to the public, including many they didn’t even ask about during the endorsement interview. The editorial board has yet again contradicted itself, holding I-135 to a completely different set of standards than past measures it has supported while flaunting the deeply flawed arguments we’ve highlighted here.

Yes on I-135“I-135 has no funding and no accountability for public dollars.” When they raised this concern, we reminded the editorial board that they didn’t have concerns about the lack of funding in the proposal for Charter Amendment 29—the “Compassion Seattle” initiative, which would have required the city to add thousands of new housing or shelter beds with no additional funding—which they endorsed.

Unlike the CA29 campaign, we’ve been honest with the public from day one that state law prevented us from including a funding source for the Seattle Social Housing Developer in the language of the initiative. We made it clear to the editorial board that public development authorities do not have taxing authority. In fact, it would be illegal to give a PDA taxing authority. However, the new PDA would receive bonding authority, creating leverage to finance new housing without large infusions of funding.

While we couldn’t provide ongoing funding for the PDA, we wanted to secure some start-up funds so it wouldn’t start out with no financial support. This is why we included 18 months of in-kind support from the city, which the city’s own budget office has estimated at a cost of just $750,000— a sliver of the $7.4 billion annual budget the council recently passed. It is important to note that from day one, the PDA has the authority to seek out funding on its own from private foundations and all levels of government, including the state.

The Times also complains that Washington State already spends millions of taxpayer dollars on housing, which is precisely the point: Social housing, which includes housing affordable to people making between 0 and 120 percent of median income, is a model that leverages rental income to reduce the need for outside funding.

While the housing I-135 would create wouldn’t be considered “homelessness housing” in a legal sense, it would nonetheless be housing that would be available to people coming out of homelessness or transitioning out of the city’s limited supply of permanent supportive housing, including families with housing vouchers that many private landlords won’t accept.

“Housing experts say it ultimately doesn’t pencil.” The editorial board makes this claim without saying who they consulted with, nor what numbers they used to reach this conclusion. There are no examples of social housing in Seattle, so it could not have been from here.

Furthermore, our research shows that the social housing model would indeed work in Seattle. Utilizing publicly accessible financial statements from an existing recently constructed housing development, affordable housing expert and PhD candidate Julie Howe, as well as economists Paul Williams and John Burbank, assisted in the creation of a pro forma that demonstrates the model remaining financially sustainable for more than 80 years.

“The theory is that people would be willing to pay above market rates to subsidize the lower rents of their neighbors in the same building.” Where did they get this from? Whose theory is this?

Let’s root this assertion in an actual pro forma, drafted from the financial statements and construction costs of a recently constructed apartment complex, the Station House.

If this were a social housing building, renters making 120 percent of the area median income would pay $2700 a month, compared to the current market rate of $2800 a month with utilities.  They would be living next to the light rail station in a high-quality Passivhaus building. Their building would have a resident governance board, and community spaces dedicated inside the building. They would be living in a space with no fear of retaliatory evictions or drastic rent increases, a place with inherent protections from the typical practices of predatory private property owners. Additionally, their rent would be going directly to the social housing developer to buy and build more housing (especially after the 30-year loan is paid off), not a private equity firm or for-profit rental corporation.

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 “Real Change has traditionally focused on advocating for those who are experiencing homelessness” and is straying from its mission. This is simply laughable and further cements the disdain the Seattle Times editorial Board has for Real Change. The board describes Real Change as “a social justice advocacy group that runs a newspaper.” The editorial board is well aware that Real Change has an Advocacy department and a separate Editorial department, and that journalists staff, and write, our paper. Real Change also served on the Times’ Project Homeless community advisory board, until the paper disbanded that board last year.

The editorial board takes umbrage with the fact the I-135 “ordinance does not concern homelessness housing” exclusively—instead, it would enable new housing for people making between 0 and 120 percent of the Seattle median income. This criticism shows how little they know about what is permissible in ballot initiatives and what isn’t. Housing for people experiencing homelessness is the direct purview of the City Council and the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, and cannot be superseded in a ballot initiative. Our lawyer advised us to make this point explicit so it couldn’t be seen “to interfere with or exercise the City Council’s powers” under state law, including the state law about homelessness housing.

And while the housing I-135 would create wouldn’t be considered “homelessness housing” in a legal sense, it would nonetheless be housing that would be available to people coming out of homelessness or transitioning out of the city’s limited supply of permanent supportive housing, including families with housing vouchers that many private landlords won’t accept. What’s more, it would help keep additional families from being pushed into homelessness by creating more affordable housing options for those struggling with unrelenting increases in housing costs.

We have to be honest with the public that our current affordable housing production levels will never meet the scale of our need. We need a new model.

We are deeply curious what the Seattle Times Editorial Board thinks the city should be doing to address the homelessness and housing crisis. They repeatedly push for the criminalization of homelessness. They speak out against increasing the housing levy so that affordable housing providers can do more. They don’t find it wise to increase our debt limit to build more affordable housing across the state. In spite of overwhelming evidence that homelessness is primarily an economic issue, they continue propping up the narrative that the homelessness crisis is actually a drug crisis. They take issue with the fact that I-135 would make it harder to evict people, in spite of clear evidence that evictions overwhelmingly lead to homelessness. They support the unlawful placement of eco-blocks in public rights-of-way, which make it harder and harder for our unhoused neighbors living in RVs to find a safe place to sleep.

Unlike the Seattle Times Editorial Board, here at Real Change we have the privilege of interacting with our unhoused, and low-income, neighbors and hearing directly from them. We know that they want deeply affordable, quality housing that won’t lose if they start making a little bit more money.

Here is what some of our Real Change vendors have to say about the need for social housing:

Darrell Wrenn, “The whole process is outdated. Housing needs to be reimagined and housing needs to be a human right. Things can’t change without social housing and Initiative 135.”

Susan McRoy: “It’s not something that is an experiment or a dream. It’s being put in place around the world. And Seattle can step up to the plate and say ‘We don’t need to be victims of gentrification. We can do something where we have stability in our community.”

Carl Nakajima: “We need to create more affordable housing for people at every income level, not only low-income, but all-income housing.”

At Real Change, we know that homelessness is a housing issue. While there are several non-profits and current public developers doing tremendous work to house our neighbors, we have to be honest with the public that our current affordable housing production levels will never meet the scale of our need. We need a new model. One that works in tandem with current affordable housing developers, to rapidly scale up housing outside the private market. Housing that is owned, and operated, as a public good. Housing that more Seattleites are eligible for. We can create a Seattle where all can afford to live and thrive. We can create this vision with social housing.

House Our Neighbors! is a political committee of Real Change.

homelessness, housing, legislature

With an Eye on Preventing Homelessness, State Dems Introduce Tenant Protection Bills 
Graph showing strong correlation between rent increases and housing instability/homelessness
Homelessness is a housing crisis: As rents go up, so does housing instability.

By Andrew Engelson

Responding to Washington’s ongoing homelessness and housing affordability crisis—more than 25,000 people across the state live without permanent housing—several Democratic state legislators have introduced bills that would protect tenants and help prevent them from becoming homeless.

Last week, Reps Nicole Macri (D-43, Seattle), Alex Ramel, (D-40. Bellingham), and Strom Peterson (D-21, Edmonds) each introduced rent stabilization bills intended to give tenants advance notice of rent increases, set limits on how much landlords can raise rent, cap move-in fees, and give the state attorney general authority to pursue violations under the Consumer Protection Act. 

Separately. Gov. Jay Inslee proposed a $4 billion referendum that would raise the state’s constitutionally mandated debt limit to fund a host of new capital housing projects over the next six years. 

Lack of housing and high rents are the primary causes of homelessness, and the state Department of Commerce estimates Washington will need more than 1 million new homes by 2044, with more than half of those affordable to people earning 50 percent or less of the median income in their area. Though the rise in rents in Seattle actually tapered off slightly in the past year, rents in other cities across the state saw significant increases, including Bellingham (5.5 percent), Kent (8.9 percent), Renton (10.1 percent), SeaTac (9.4 percent) and Spokane (5.1 percent).

Macri’s bill would limit annual rent increases to 3 percent or the rate of inflation, capped at 7 percent per year, limit total move-in fees to the equivalent of one month’s rent, and give the state attorney general new power undert to investigate and prosecute landlords that flout the new rules

Shannon Corrick, a Safeway employee who lives in Cheney, a college town south of Spokane, spoke at a press briefing for Macri and Ramel’s bills this week, noting that in 2021, her landlord raised the rent on her $995-a-month, 3-bedroom house by $300. 

“He wasn’t very nice about it,” Carrick told PubliCola. “He was like: Well, that’s what the market will bear.” Since more than half of her minimum-wage income went to paying rent, Carrick had to move to an apartment that was much smaller. “I could have swallowed maybe 5 percent or 8 percent, because I could always pick up more hours or work some overtime or volunteer to work the holidays,” but not an increase of more than 30 percent, she said.

Macri’s bill would limit annual rent increases to 3 percent or the rate of inflation, capped at 7 percent per year. The bill would exempt buildings newer than ten years old from the caps. Macri’s legislation would also limit total move-in fees to the equivalent of one month’s rent, and give the state attorney general new power under the state Consumer Protection Act to investigate and prosecute predatory landlords that flout the new rules. 

“We have to respond to people who are homeless, and we have to do all that we can to keep people who are precariously housed in their homes,” Macri said.

Ramel’s bill would also limit annual rent increases to 3 percent or inflation, capped at 7 percent, but would allow landlords to “bank” rent increases—so, for instance, an apartment owner could choose to not raise the rent by 3 percent for five years, and then raise it 15 percent in the fifth year of a renter’s tenancy.

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Macri says allowing periodic larger increases would “invite more uncertainty for the tenants, but a lot less uncertainty than they have right now.” She notes that her bill also allows landlords to raise rent beyond the limits, but only if they can prove hardship or the need for large capital or repair costs. 

“Legislators like the concept of consumer protection, generally,” Macri said. “They like the framing of this as prohibiting predatory behavior.”

Peterson’s more modest bill would require landlords to give six months’ notice before any rent increase of more than 5 percent and allow tenants to terminate their leases, without penalty, at any time after learning their rent will be increasing by more than 5 percent. It would also cap late fees for rent paid more than five days after the date it’s due to $75.

A similar bill failed to pass out of committee last session. 

Peterson, who chairs the House housing committee, is optimistic about moving a host of housing reform and tenant protection legislation this year. “I think the tenor has changed,” Peterson said. “I think our caucus has changed. We have a bunch of new members that are the most diverse class that’s ever come in, and they’re extremely motivated when it comes to housing.” 

As part of this sea change, the House Democratic Caucus recently removed Rep. Gerry Pollet (D-46, Seattle) from a leadership position he had used to block pro-housing legislation, as PubliCola reported in December.

Macri noted that city and county jurisdictions aren’t affected by her bill or Ramel’s. “We can set statewide policy on rent stabilization,” she said, “But what neither of these bills do is expand the authority for local [governments].”

Other tenant protection legislation includes a bill from Rep. My-Linh Thai (D-41, Bellevue) that would require landlords to provide evidence of damage or disrepair in order to justify not returning deposits. Another bill that Peterson is co-sponsoring would give groups of tenants or nonprofits the opportunity to purchase manufactured home communities if they’re put up for sale. Peterson he crafted the legislation inspired by three manufactured home parks owned and operated by the Housing Authority of Snohomish County.

Katie Wilson, general secretary of the Transit Riders Union (and an occasional writer for PubliCola), says these tenant protection bills complement policies her organization and the Stay Healthy Stay Housed Coalition have been pushing in Seattle and across King County for several years, including limits on move-in fees and advance notice for rent increases.

“Macri’s bill is particularly exciting,” Wilson said, “because it deals with very large rent increases.” She noted that because state law prevents cities and counties from limiting rent increases, to have a state-level law “would be amazing.”

Macri noted that city and county jurisdictions aren’t affected by her bill or Ramel’s. “We can set statewide policy on rent stabilization,” she said, “But what neither of these bills do is expand the authority for local [governments].” Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant recently floated the idea of a local $10 cap on late fees. 

The Washington Multi-Family Housing Association, an organization representing large apartment landlords, declined to comment to PubliCola and the Rental Housing Association of Washington, which generally represents smaller, independent landlords, did not respond to requests for comment.

Density, housing, legislature, neighborhoods

Sponsors of Pro-Housing Bills in Olympia Emphasize Statewide Affordability Crisis
Image of a four-unit apartment building
One Salient Oversight at English Wikipedia, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

By Ryan Packer

In response to rising housing costs and increased homelessness statewide, the state legislature is considering an unprecedented number of bills that would influence the ability of cities across the state to set local policy around housing, density, and land use. 

Among the proposals introduced so far: A bill that would eliminate most minimum parking requirements near transit stations; one cutting local design review boards out of the approval process for residential construction; one streamlining permitting; one allowing residential lots to be split into multiple lots so additional units can be built on those lots; and one reforming condominium laws. Many of these bills have already had a public hearing and are headed toward committee votes—extremely fast work compared to past years.

House Bill 1110, introduced by Rep. Jessica Bateman (D-22, Olympia) and Rep. Andy Barkis (R-2, Olympia), is taking center stage as a retooled version of similar legislation, HB 1782, that never made it to the House floor last year. This year’s bill would require cities to legalize sixplexes within one-half mile of frequent transit. It would also allow fourplexes as a base level of density in areas in and around Seattle and Spokane, and in towns and cities with more than 6,000 residents elsewhere in the state.

This so-called “missing middle” bill would attempt to add a level of density between single family homes and large apartment buildings currently absent from many Washington cities.

Last year, opposition from the Association of Washington Cities (AWC), a lobbying group for cities, helped prevent HB 1782 and other housing bills from advancing; the group argued that zoning changes that preempted city rules would take away local control and impose “one-size-fits-all” regulations on cities across the state. In 2023, legislators hope to bypass that criticism by focusing on the impacts of high housing costs.

“I feel more confident this year because we’ve been doing a lot of coalition building and a lot of work to talk about the real causes of our housing shortage and crisis,” Bateman said. During its first hearing last week, elected officials from Olympia, Bothell, Everett, and Burien turned out to support the bill, with much less direct opposition than last year.

Supporters also say they’ve done work to broaden the coalition that supports the bill. The AWC, unlike last year, is not currently opposing HB 1110, but is pushing to water down changes to single-family zones to only include triplexes, and to not impact every lot within a city.

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Another bill, introduced by Senator Marko Liias (D-21, Edmonds), focuses on loosening restrictions on density directly around transit stations, preserving traditional single-family zoning in wide swaths of cities across the state. That bill may prove an easier political sell compared to opening up single-family areas to increased density, particularly in the state senate, where there are fewer Republicans ready to partner on housing bills.

“As I talk to my constituents, I’ve got folks in Edmonds, Lynnwood, Mukilteo, that are really wary about missing middle [housing]” housing, Liias said, referring to moderately dense housing that’s affordable to middle-income earners. In contrast, Liias said, “when I talked about transit-oriented development, virtually everybody’s in agreement that we should be siting more housing next to transit. That’s a much more consensus perspective.”

The local control issue may still be a hurdle, though. Rep. Spencer Hutchins (R-26, Gig Harbor), who sits on the housing committee, suggested during a meeting with the Gig Harbor city council earlier this month that even if he agrees with a policy change on housing, he might still oppose it on principle. “I will be looking at things through the lens of, making sure that we are protecting the ability of our local governments to represent their local citizens well, and not have Olympia run roughshod over cities and counties,” Hutchins said.

Rep. Bateman doesn’t give a lot of credence to the local control argument. “Currently what cities are doing is, they’re limiting what private property owners can do with their property,” she said. “You don’t have the freedom to make your own decision about adapting to the market, responding to what the market need is. People want more diverse housing options.” 

This year, Democrats are trying to zoom out on the issue of housing and focusing on multiple aspects of the state’s housing crisis. The Democratic caucuses in both chambers have begun referring to three “pillars” that lawmakers will attempt to tackle around housing this session: Increasing public subsidies for affordable housing, passing tenant protections for renters, and loosening restrictions on housing supply that are limiting growth. 

The first housing “pillar” is clearly a priority for Governor Jay Inslee, who is pushing to raise the state’s debt limit to fund $4 billion in investments in housing over the next six years. That proposal, even if lawmakers approve it, would need to go to voters statewide in November, adding an extra level of uncertainty. 

The sheer number of housing bills this session  is itself a strategy to avoid a repeat of last year, when almost no housing bills made it past legislative deadlines. “It’s one thing to say that one bill can’t solve all the problems, but it’s another thing to actually have a whole bunch of other bills that are working to solve these challenging areas that make it more difficult to build housing,” Rep. Bateman said. 

ryan@publicola.com