A Google Maps image shows trees on the site where Habitat for Humanity is building 22 new affordable homes, and planting 26 new maple trees.
By Erica C. Barnett
Earlier this month, NPR ran a story (“Why preserving trees while meeting housing demand is a good thing”) produced by Seattle’s KNKX radio station about efforts to integrate existing trees into new developments, calling tree preservation a “climate solution” that doesn’t have to conflict with new housing development. Trees lower temperatures on the ground and reduce carbon pollution, among many other benefits. The story highlighted two Seattle developments: A high-end project designed by local architects in the tony Bryant neighborhood in Northeast Seattle, and a 22-unit development in South Park, just north of Seattle’s southern city limit.
The first development, according to the story, used what one of the architects called an “enlightened” approach: Instead of removing trees, the architects designed around them, preserving trees that the architect sees as neighborhood “residents” in their own right.
The second development—the one the story uses as an example of a developer thoughtlessly removing trees for density—is happening in South Park, on “cleared lot [where] 22 new units are going in where once four single-family homes stood.” The story quotes an activist with Tree Action Seattle, a group that routinely opposes development in formerly single-family areas, positing that the developer could have easily spared a half-dozen trees by adopting a different site plan Tree Action posted on its website.
But the NPR story omitted a number of key facts. The biggest is that the project in South Park, unlike the million-dollar-and-up townhouses in Bryant, is an affordable housing project being developed by Habitat for Humanity, with 22 units available to homebuyers making 80 percent or less of Seattle’s area median income.
Another fact the story didn’t mention is that Habitat isn’t scraping the site clean: Their plan preserves several trees on the north end of the property, and the affordable-housing provider is planting 26 new maple trees to replace the ones they plan to remove—”effectively doubling the number of trees” on the site, according to the group’s chief operations officer, Patrick Sullivan.
“We appreciate community engagement and have reviewed the alternative site plan proposed by Tree Action Seattle. Based on our assessment, that proposal does not align with current city code,” Sullivan said.
Sandy Shettler, a member of Tree Action Seattle, said the group’s alternative site plan, which would effectively turn 16 of the 22 freestanding homes into duplexes with shared walls, would save most of the trees on the site and save money. Shettler argued that dozens of new trees will never make up for removing the trees that are currently on the site, including three large evergreens. “It is physically impossible for the 26 replacement trees to reach the canopy volume of what is already on the property,” Shettler said, arguing that the new trees will be packed in too tightly to thrive in the spaces between the new affordable housing.
“Large, established conifers in particular provide critical health benefits to a community with elevated pollution and sparse tree canopy,” Shettler said, noting that South Park has less tree canopy than almost any other areas in Seattle.
Sullivan, from Habitat, countered that the plan “meets all regulatory requirements and will ultimately result in more trees on the site and a healthier tree canopy over time.” The project will also provide a rare commodity in Seattle: 22 homes with mortgages set at no more than 35 percent of their income, and will place the property in a land trust that ensures the housing stays permanently affordable.
Aerial shot of Maple Leaf Community Center, courtesy City of Seattle
By Erica C. Barnett
City Councilmember Cathy Moore complained bitterly last week over the fact that—despite her frequent demands and a Change.org petition with more than 1,500 signatures—the Maple Leaf Neighborhood Center will remain in the mayor’s proposed update to the city’s comprehensive plan.
The designation would allow moderate density—3-to-6-story apartments— in an eight-and-a-half-block area directly adjacent to an existing commercial center. Despite its diminutive size, Moore has characterized the proposed center as a death knell for the area, saying she was not willing to “sacrifice my neighborhood” to allow rental housing in the area. (Moore lives elsewhere).
Moore spoke for ten minutes straight at last week’s meeting, at times seeming near tears as she described what she characterized as an abandonment and betrayal of her district by the city’s Office of Planning and Community Development.”
“I just remain incredibly disappointed,” Moore began. “I remain incredibly disappointed that the tremendous amount of public feedback that was given to OPCD was not really taken fully into consideration. And I would take issue with the characterization that you really listen to everybody.”
Moore went on to describe all the dense housing, including affordable housing, that’s going up along busy streets and next to light rail—”a tremendous amount of growth”—saying that this type of housing is “fantastic” and “supported by everybody” currently living in the district. Maple Leaf, she said, was an exception, “the only [neighborhood] in which there has been strong, vocal, consistent opposition.”
Boundaries of the proposed Maple Leaf Neighborhood Center
What about the neighborhood’s drainage capacity, transit access, the traffic all those new apartments would cause? Why hadn’t the city “walk[ed] the district” with residents who opposed allowing more people to live in the area?
“You’re not listening,” Moore said, “and I don’t understand, why is it? Is it because somebody is trying to put the screws to the council member for [District] 5 with some ideological position? … There has been an absolute hardcore resistance to this.”
At the very least, Moore continued, OPCD should “walk the damn neighborhood center with us and explain to the 1,400-plus people [who signed the online petition] why you’re unwilling to reconsider the boundaries, why you’re unwilling to look at other places that might be more appropriate and actually have people walking to the light rail that is so vital to our community.”
Michael Hubner, the mild-mannered OPCD planning manager who typically does the presentations at the council’s comp plan committee meetings, pointed out gently that the department has, in fact, done multiple walks with residents through every neighborhood center, including Maple Leaf, while mayoral staff Krista Valles pointed out that sometimes city departments make decisions individual council members don’t like. “It’s not that we haven’t been listening. We’ve just arrived at a different conclusion,” Valles said.
In other words: A legislator may really, really want something to happen, but sometimes they just don’t get their way.
Moore’s anti-apartment diatribe, which came during her first public appearance after announcing her resignation last week, was another example, among many, of her obvious frustration with how the legislative process works—even when something seems obvious to her, she doesn’t always get her way.
The version of the comprehensive plan the council is considering is much more modest than the proposals most of the current council including said they supported on the campaign trail in 2023, with half as many neighborhood centers and much more modest density increases than the preliminary alternatives OPCD floated that year.
Last year, the city’s Planning Commission declared that an earlier version of the plan would worsen inequities in the city and fail to address Seattle’s affordable housing crisis because it didn’t allow enough rental housing in enough areas. Advocates for housing, including many renters, have been saying the same thing about the comprehensive plan for years now. Moore has never demonstrated much of an interest in listening to them.
City Councilmember Cathy Moore announced she would step down after a year and a half on the council; because she waited until just after the 2025 election filing deadline, her appointed replacement will serve until at least November 2026. Moore has complained frequently about the negative public response to many of the council’s proposals, including her own bills to roll back the city’s ethics code and eliminate some eviction protections.
On the podcast, we discussed the tactics of counterprotesters who let a far-right anti-LGBTQ group know that their hateful belief are out of step with Seattle values. David thought protesters should moderate their approach to appeal to swing-state voters; I countered that this was a losing approach and that no one should have to be polite when faced with eliminationist rhetoric.
Newly released records from the investigation into former police chief Adrian Diaz and his former chief of staff, Jamie Tompkins, shed new light on efforts by Tompkins and Diaz to discredit SPD staffers who believed Diaz had hired, and created a new position, for Tompkins because they were having an affair.
On this week’s emergency podcast, Sandeep and I (David’s out of town) discussed Moore’s decision to resign and what it means for the council going forward. Sandeep continues to find Kshama Sawant and her protesters annoying; I argue that they’re a far less potent force than when Sawant was on the council, and that what Moore really appears bothered by is the fact that her ideas are unpopular.
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In a rare appearance of my old The C Is For Crank column, I argued that Moore is a throwback to a time when NIMBY (not in my backyard) homeowner views were dominant at City Hall. That time is past, and Moore’s views are broadly unpopular—which is why she’s getting pushback against not just her proposal to roll back eviction protections but her opposition to allowing apartments in more parts of her district.
Seattle Police Chief Shon Barnes has added at least five new executive-level staff to the department, at a price tag of well over $1 million for salaries alone. SPD will also spend $30,000 training officers on “stratified policing,” which Barnes implemented as chief of Madison, WI. The big spending comes at a time when even the police have been told to implement a civilian hiring freeze to help close a massive budget shortfall.
City Councilmember Bob Kettle is sponsoring a new anti-graffiti bill that would establish a civil penalty of $1,000 for every “graffiti violation,” defined as “a single piece of graffiti, including but not limited to a graffiti tagger name or design, in a single location.” Graffiti is already a gross misdemeanor punishable by a fine of up to $5,000 and up to a year in jail.
I was this week’s guest on the Hacks and Wonks podcast, where host Crystal Fincher and I talked about the news that Moore is stepping down, the latest revelations from the Diaz-Tompkins investigation, King County Assessor John Arthur Wilson’s refusal to step down amid stalking and harassment allegations; and Sawant’s entrance into the race against US Rep. Adam Smith (D-9).
A studio apartment building owned by Community Roots Housing
Affordable housing providers say they need a range of solutions from the city, from funding for maintenance and operations to investments in new housing construction.
By Erica C. Barnett
Chris Persons, the longtime director of the low-income housing provider Community Roots, recently recounted a frightening incident that took place at a building the group owns on Capitol Hill: A resident—someone Community Roots had been trying to evict for unpaid rent for more than a year—shot a gun into the sprinkler head in their living room, flooding every apartment under theirs, along with a ground-floor daycare center. It was the second time this person had shot a gun inside the building; the first time, they fired shots into the washers and dryers in the laundry room.
Community Roots moved the displaced residents into hotels and got the daycare up and running again as quickly as possible, but the incident and others like it have eaten into the organization’s operations and maintenance budget.
“These kinds of problems are really prevalent in our sector right now,” Persons said. “The behavior of a really small number of residents who have high-acuity needs, whether because of untreated mental illness or substance use disorder, has led to a lot of property damage [and] a lot of threatening and dangerous behavior.”
Community Roots has sold off several buildings in the past few years, a move Persons said has more to do with the cost of maintaining older buildings than keeping the organization in the black. But, he added, Community Roots is spending more on security than at any time in its history, and the time to turn over units when someone moves out has increased dramatically.
“Some of the units have been so damaged that it’s costing us tens of thousands of dollars to do the turn,” Persons said, noting that this is a nationwide problem not unique to Seattle. At one building between Pike and Pine that serves single people making up to 50 percent of the area median income, Persons said, people have not only been “breaking in all the time,” putting tenants in danger, but taking over vacant units between tenants, “totally destroying” those apartments and preventing new tenants from moving in.
In addition to repairs and maintenance, Community Roots is out of pocket for about $4 million in unpaid rent, with no remaining COVID emergency funds to address the shortfall. “The [emergency rent assistance] funding stopped, but the payment of rent has not ticked up to where it was prior to the pandemic,” Persons said.
“Prior to the pandemic, we rarely evicted anybody,” Persons continued. “Typically, they would talk to us and we’d put them on a payment plan or find another place for them. But over the last several years, that kind of process has broken down.”
The Seattle City Council is preparing to consider legislation, sponsored by Councilmember Cathy Moore, to roll back parts of the city’s landlord-tenant act passed by the previous, more progressive council, including a law allowing tenants to add new roommates without prior approval, laws barring school-year and winter evictions, and a law setting the maximum late fee for unpaid rent at $10. The legislation will reportedly also eliminate a complaint process for three-day eviction notices that landlords claim has made it harder to evict people for dangerous behavior.
In a written response to PubliCola’s questions, Moore called her legislation—which she has not yet introduced—”a proposal that protects tenants while addressing the challenges facing our housing providers to ensure Seattle’s rental housing ecosystem remains viable and can meet the housing needs of all our residents.”
Moore’s legislation would give landlords more leverage over tenants, removing eviction protections sponsored by former councilmember Kshama Sawant and passed by the previous, more progressive council. That’s why they’re opposed by tenants’ rights advocates, who argue that removing renter protections will just result in more people living on the streets.
But many organizations that provide affordable housing or represent low-income housing providers, including the Low-Income Housing Institute, and the Housing Development Consortium, are supporting the proposal—along with other, more immediate actions they say the city could take now to help them shore up their operating budgets so they don’t have to sell off some of the city’s already inadequate affordable housing.
HDC, which includes all the major nonprofit housing developers in Seattle, worked with Moore’s office to narrow an initial list of 18 changes down to the four in Moore’s draft proposal, and the group has been a vocal advocate for repealing the eviction moratoriums and increasing late fees, among other elements of the bill Moore plans to sponsor.
“All of the [proposed] changes, quite frankly, are very intentional,” HDC director Patience Malaba said. “They are informed by affordable housing providers who understand, from a mission perspective, the need to keep buildings operating while providing the right protection for tenants at the same time.”
Alexis Mercedes Rinck, the council’s most progressive member, told PubliCola she hasn’t seen Moore’s draft legislation yet, but “I struggle to see how compromising our tenant protections helps anyone. I have concerns about the operational sustainability of affordable housing and am actively talking to providers about their challenges and portfolio health. However, these are fundamental system issues that will not be solved by punishing people who can’t afford rent.”
Sharon Lee, the director of the Low-Income Housing Institute, became the somewhat unsympathetic face of the movement to roll back Seattle’s renter protection laws when she argued, along with GMD Development partner Emily Thompson, that the city should end the winter eviction moratorium.
Lee says the problem of rent nonpayment became acute when COVID-era rent assistance began drying up and hasn’t improved much since. “We need to correct the situation of people who have the ability to pay their rent but are hiding behind the eviction moratoriums,” she said. A $10 fee for late rent isn’t enough to motivate people to talk to their building managers or get on a payment plan, Lee believes. “Sometimes, by the time you give tenants notice that they haven’t paid rent and you’ve sent it for legal action, [it’s after] you’ve tried and tried to get them them to do a payment plan or talk with the manager and they ignore you.”
Like Persons, Lee said LIHI has struggled to evict tenants who cause significant property damage. “We had a tenant who would just pile everything on the bed and light it on fire, and we couldn’t get them evicted,” she said. “In some cases, when we tried to get someone evicted, the response we get is ‘This person will become homeless, or this person has a mental health issue.’ …The problem is that they don’t consider other people in the building who are who are in harm’s way in if we keep an arsonist in the building.”
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Affordable housing providers also say the cost of doing business has increased dramatically since the pandemic, in ways that wouldn’t be fixed by eliminating laws designed to protect low-income tenants from eviction.
Some providers started construction in 2020 or 2021, when interest rates were low, then saw their expenses balloon as construction costs rose across the country. Others have had trouble converting their high-interest construction loans (which are more expensive because construction carries greater inherent risk) into permanent loans at lower interest rates. (The city has spent $137 million so far helping developers pay down their construction loans).
Some housing providers have become increasingly dependent on the developer fees they receive when they close on a new development, using the fees from these new housing projects to fund the operations of the organization. And many affordable housing developers built too many small studios and micro-apartments, which now cost about the same in market-rate buildings as they do in buildings dedicated to affordable housing. While demand for those units will likely rebound as the housing shortage worsens (this online dashboard shows the downward trend in residential permits), for now, the result is that units that would ordinarily be bringing in revenues are sitting vacant.
Lee and other affordable housing providers have argued that the city should provide stabilization funding so providers can replenish their operating budgets and not have to sell off buildings, as Community Roots has done. Last year, the city’s Office of Housing did just that—providing $14 million in JumpStart payroll tax funding to 24 organizations for rent assistance, security expenses, repairs, and other costs through a process called a Notice of Funding Availability, or NOFA.
Lee said she believes OH should provide about double that amount through a NOFA this year, using a newly created JumpStart reserve fund as the funding source. That money, Lee said, “could help pay for the lost rent. It could pay for very high insurance costs. It could pay for very expensive damages that are caused by tenants.”
Councilmember Rinck said helping housing providers pay their operating costs would be a better solution than making it easier for them to put tenants out on the street. “We must focus on solutions that meet the needs of the people, and fix our affordable housing financing model by increasing funding for operations,” she said.
Thompson, whose firm owns several affordable housing buildings in Seattle, said three of GMD’s buildings are currently operating at a loss, and one, located next to the Othello light rail station in the Rainier Valley, is “in the red zone” and may face foreclosure if the city doesn’t intervene.
“Economic vacancy is just crippling our building,” Thompson said. “Our [rent] collection rate averages around 85 percent.” Even a NOFA without any funding attached would help the city better understand the extent of the problem and triage providers, Thompson said. “If you don’t have a scope of what the issue is how do you know how much to fund they can
A spokeswoman for the Office of Housing, Nona Raybern, said OH “is engaging with housing providers, public funders, and stakeholders to fully understand the breadth of the challenges and to help inform longer-term stabilization strategies” but has not made any decisions about funding yet.
Thompson said the Office of Housing may be too focused on the need to get more housing projects in the pipeline, while ignoring immediate problems in housing that already exists. “Maybe you have to make hard business decisions,” she said.
But Malaba, from HDC, said it’s critical for the city to keep funding new affordable housing projects, both for the infusion of cash providers receive through developer fees and because Seattle still faces an acute shortage of affordable housing.
“We are asking for the city to fund a pipeline of new resources that can be used to support the future construction of housing,” Malaba said. “If the city uses all of the existing resources for preservation when we already have [housing construction] numbers that have been down since 2022, the affordability crisis is going to be felt by the lowest-income people in the city.”
Landlords have frequently complained about the longstanding backlog of eviction cases at King County Superior Court, arguing that it amounts to another, de facto eviction moratorium. Legislators took action to help address the backlog during the legislative session that just ended, passing a bill sponsored by State Rep. Nicole Macri (D-43) that allows counties to appoint special housing court commissioners to oversee eviction cases, increasing the number of people who can hear eviction cases.
Tenant advocates, Macri said, were “not enthused” by the proposal, which they said should be counterbalanced by more funding for defense attorneys for tenants, who have a legal right to counsel under state law. Macri got more funding for tenant attorneys in 2026 but says 2027 will be a separate fight.
Unsurprisingly, landlords have blamed the right-to-counsel law for the backlog, arguing that tenants with attorneys slow down the process because they’re more likely to fight their evictions. But Macri argued that the real issue is that landlords haven’t adapted to a legal environment where they no longer hold all the cards.
“For many years, landlords had grown accustomed to eviction cases being pretty fast,” Macri said. “Because there was no due process for tenants, the no-show rate for tenants was extremely high—over 85 percent of tenants did not show up, pre-pandemic, to unlawful detainer cases,” so landlords won by default. Now, the two sides are more balanced, and the courts need more resources to catch up.
“If a court is working in an appropriate way, and the right to counsel is functioning appropriately, then having it work in a normal fashion is better for everyone,” Macri said. “We can’t say that a dysfunctional slowdown of the courts is the protection for tenants.
Like many tenant advocates, Macri doesn’t support rolling back laws designed to protect tenants in Seattle. “Creating more opportunities for people to become homeless does not solve the problem, it just shifts the problem someplace else,” Macri said.
The underlying issue, Macri continued, is that more people with very high behavioral health care needs, including people with active fentanyl addiction, are moving into buildings that weren’t designed for them. “We’ve seen a greater and greater number of people in these nonprofit low-income housing buildings who … have fairly serious behavioral health conditions and there’s not adequate support.”
The “long-term solution,” Persons said, is “more treatment centers for people with mental health issues that aren’t being treated and drug addiction that isn’t being treated— there’s very few places for the folks who are suffering the most to get the kind of treatment they need, because they don’t have the capacity or the skill set to live even in permanent supportive housing. We need to make some deep changes to our housing system or these issues are going to persist.”
King County Council chair Girmay Zahilay and budget chair Rod Dembowski want the county to impose a new sales tax of 0.1 percent to boost funding for the county’s criminal legal system, including sheriff’s deputies, prosecutors, public defenders, and diversion programs. The tax could help close the county’s $160 million budget shortfall.
As the Seattle Police Department faces multiple lawsuits by women alleging harassment, discrimination, and a toxic work environment, new police chief Shon Barnes and Mayor Bruce Harrell touted an uptick in police hiring, with a large group of men standing as a backdrop. So far this year, SPD has hired 60 new cops, just five of them women.
Joe Mallahan, the T-Mobile executive and 2009 mayoral candidate who lost to Mike McGinn in that year’s general election, is reportedly considering a run against Harrell. And Takayo Ederer, a Seward Park resident who’s been raising money to run for City Council District 2, has more household wealth than the entire current council combined.
A story on a new website started by a former Stranger reporter claimed, incorrectly, that the Seattle Public Library has ordered its staff not to record ICE raids in library buildings and to stand by and do nothing if ICE shows up. The site’s editor claimed SPL was “capitulating to fascism,” and doubled down on most of the inaccurate claims in the initial piece, which continued to spread online (and cause misguided alarm and outrage) all week.
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Not only is SPD failing to come close to its stated goal of hiring a 30-percent female recruit class by 20230, it’s going backward; this year alone, five women have left the department, canceling out the five new female hires. And the legislature chose not to save a successful program that helped people living in encampments come indoors and find housing, treatment, and other services through intensive case management.
Two years have gone by since Republican City Attorney Ann Davison unilaterally ended community court, which allowed some people charged with misdemeanors to bypass prosecution if they connected with social services. Last week, Davison rolled out a new “drug prosecution alternative” that is structurally identical to community court—and it doesn’t include some of the features Davison said were non-negotiable, like mandatory community service as a condition for receiving city services.
Council members have come up with a lot of ways to say “we should force more people to retain trees on their private property” over the years, but “private trees are better because street trees are expensive and get in the way of theoretical future projects” was a new one for me. The argument for forcing people to keep private trees always comes up in the context of developments that would allow more people to live in former single-family neighborhoods; “saving” a tree usually means preventing someone from building denser housing
Update on Mallahan: He’s still calling around, but apparently not getting any bites from local consultants. Update on Ederer: We hear she won’t make her campaign official during filing week, which runs from May 5-9. Finally, we put a council proposal to weaken the city’s ethics rules in a recent historical context.
This post has been updated to include more information about SDOT’s pothole budget.
Several recently elected members of the City Council raised a novel objection to pro-housing advocates who argued the city should allow more density and plant more public trees yesterday: Trees in the private yards of single-family houses, they argued, are better for people than those in parks and public rights-of-way.
The arguments against public trees took place during a discussion about the impact proposed changes to the city’s comprehensive plan would have on tree canopy. Two years ago, the city updated its tree code to place new restrictions on some tree removals; since then, groups like Tree Action Seattle have argued that the tree code will lead to the “clearcutting” of Seattle.
Whatever individual tree advocates’ motivations, the impact of forcing Seattle property owners to retain trees in their private lawns is to prevent density in Seattle’s traditional single-family neighborhoods, worsening Seattle’s housing shortage as the population grows. (For people motivated by the desire to keep renters out of “their” neighborhoods, trees have largely replaced the blunter objections of the past, such as complaints that renters ruin people’s property values.) Advocates want to revamp the two-year-old tree code to make it difficult or impossible to remove large private trees for development or any other purpose, and Moore is their main champion on the council.
Addressing several staff for the city departments that deal with planning, land use, and trees, Moore kicked things off by saying that planting trees in street rights-of-way, such as planting strips and medians, is “problematic” and potentially “not sustainable” because sometimes the city ends up removing those trees anyway; for example, Moore said, a SDOT was “wanting to cut down all those trees” on a landscaped median on Beacon Avenue.
After staffers responded that most of those trees were actually going to stay in place—the city puts signs on trees to indicate that they could be removed, not that they will—Moore made her case that trees in people’s private yards are actually better than trees in parks and other public spaces.
“While you say everybody is 10 minutes’ walking distance from a park, not everybody is mobile,” Moore said, addressing city staffers who had been describing the city’s tree planting and maintenance program. “And also, I don’t think that you can necessarily get the benefit of a tree by it being in a park. I mean, sometimes the benefit of the tree is that you’re standing outside your apartment building or your house when it’s 90 degrees and you’re getting some relief from the heat. You have the benefit of looking out a window and seeing a tree that you might not see in a park.”
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Moving beyond parks, Moore said that planting trees in public rights-of-way could also be “problematic,” because the city might have to remove the trees later for unanticipated reasons. For example, she’s “received a lot of emails about Beacon Avenue,” where the city has to repair sidewalks damaged by the roots of large street trees, “[and] SDOT wanting to cut down all those trees,” Moore said. “I appreciate the idea of wanting to put trees in the right-of-way, but that, too, comes with with issues.”
The trees Moore was referring to were marked with evaluation notices earlier this year; as a staffer noted in response to Moore, most will be retained thanks to sidewalk redesigns that allow the trees to keep growing while keeping the sidewalk accessible to people with disabilities.
Moore also brought up her favorite straw-man argument, one I’ve never heard anyone actually make: People who want to allow private property owners to remove trees, she said, inaccurately believe that any new housing that gets built in its place has to be affordable. (In other words, she’s saying that you probably believe any townhouse that goes up in your neighborhood is reserved for a low-income person).
“So this narrative that [if we remove trees for development], suddenly we’re going to have affordable housing, is incorrect,” Moore said. “I challenge the department, [the Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections], to show me how many of these permits were for affordable housing, I submit to you that none of them were affordable housing.” This is the point when I started yelling “Literally no one has ever said that!” at my laptop screen.
Moore wasn’t the only council member to come up with reasons that forcing property owners to keep trees in their private yards was superior to planting and maintaining public trees.
Rob Saka, who set aside $2 million in last year’s budget to remove a traffic barrier that prevented illegal left turns into his children’s preschool, pointed out that if trees are allowed to grow tall in city rights-of-way, it makes it harder to remove them later for other “transportation purposes.”
“I definitely recognize that the right of way is it is an appropriate place to to plant trees and build our tree canopy,” Saka said, but “there are associated costs, nontrivial costs, associated with maintaining these tree canopies in our public right of ways.” Every year, SDOT’s budget for trees seems to “grow and grow. … I love arborists out there [but we’re] getting to a point, getting to a state where our ongoing annual maintenance costs for maintaining tree canopy alone, in shrubbery alone, eclipses our ability what we spend to repair basic potholes.”
“Planting trees is expensive,” Moore chimed in later, adding that the city should create a new fund to move existing trees, like a sequoia whose owner has become the target of protests, to other locations because the trees the city is planting now aren’t comparable to the ones in people’s existing yards. (City staff who compared new tree plantings to evergreens planted when Seattle was being developed were also being “disingenuous,” Moore said, because the new trees won’t live as long.)
SDOT’s general-fund budget for tree planting and maintenance is $11 million this year, up from $6.9 million in 2024 and $7.5 million in 2021. The general fund budget also includes $19 million for pavement maintenance and repair, which includes potholes—roughly the same amount as last year, and up from $15 million in 2023. Of that total, according to SDOT, about $4.2 million pays for pothole repair. Repairing each pothole costs a few hundred dollars.
The voter-approved 2024 transportation levy has an additional $29 million for urban forestry and citywide tree planting, and $67 million for pavement spot improvements, including potholes.
Planting “trees in a specific location,” Saka continued, has other inherent problems: “It limits our freedom to operate, and removes any flexibility, sense of flexibility or agility, that we need as a city. … So when you plant a lot of trees in rights-of-way and fully leverage that space, again, it limits our flexibility to accommodate new travel, new modes of travel, new traffic patterns, and make the most beneficial use of our roads that works for all.”
I have to admit, “street trees are a problem because you can’t move them” was a new one for me. So it was almost comforting to hear Moore return to a very, very old argument against adding density in single-family areas.
Contrary to what urbanists claim, Moore said, “it is disingenuous, I think, to talk about, you know, ‘if we don’t build density, then we’re going to sprawl.’ We are constrained by the Growth Management Act. If we don’t have density in Seattle, we’re not going to sprawl out, because we’re constrained by state law. So that’s a red herring, frankly. … People recognize when they’ve been sold a bill of goods.”
In reality, the red herring here is that the Growth Management Act prevents sprawl. King County’s growth management boundary—where, according to Moore, sprawl is prohibited— includes every sprawling bedroom community in the region, from Black Diamond and Maple Valley to North Bend and the Issaquah Highlands. (That sprawl exists, by the way, because developers cut down actual forests, as opposed to the “forest” of individual trees in people’s private yards that’s the subject of so much handwringing in Seattle.)
Moore’s wrong about the reason it’s happening, too. Seattle has created a housing shortage by adopting policies that prevent housing. That increases housing prices in Seattle and forces middle- and working-class people to move out into the sprawl that surrounds the city. The “bill of goods” is that Seattle’s anti-housing policies—and, yes, proposals to prevent development by forcing property owners to retain trees are anti-housing—don’t have consequences for the entire region.
