Category: podcasts

housing, podcasts

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

By Erica C. Barnett

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mayor Wilson, podcasts, Transit

Seattle Nice: How Badly Did Sound Transit Screw Seattle Over?

By Erica C. Barnett

On this week’s episode of the Seattle Nice podcast, we did a deep dive on the Sound Transit board’s decision last week to indefinitely defer the voter-approved light rail extension to Ballard, a stretch that boasts by far the highest projected ridership of any line in the Sound Transit 3 package voters approved ten years ago.

Seattle City Councilmember Dan Strauss, who represents Ballard, has been beating the drum on this issue for months, arguing it would be irresponsible to renege on such a significant commitment to Seattle voters. The new plan preserves the “spine” to Everett and Tacoma, along with a second light rail tunnel through downtown Seattle, leaving Ballard in limbo unless Sound Transit can come up with cost savings and unless someone, most likely Seattle voters, can provide the funds to build the expansion.

The board adopted a couple of amendments last week that will move planning for a potential Ballard line forward and that commit to looking for ways to make the plan more affordable. But they rejected a proposal from Strauss that would have switched up ST3’s sequencing to build a “starter” line between Westlake and Ballard before adding a second transit tunnel.

Suburban Sound Transit board members said last week that prioritizing Ballard would doom the rest of the system. As a result, Sandeep noted, the suburbs got everything they asked for,  leaving Seattle without any leverage to get additional funds for its projects in the future. Indeed, several board members made that explicit, saying Seattle would need to find its own money if it wants to build to Ballard and complete the West Seattle line in the future; there will be no regional Sound Transit 4, they said.

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One suburban Sound Transit board member and longtime light rail proponent who voted (along with Strauss) against the entire proposal, King County Councilmember Claudia Balducci, told me last week she thought it was time to take a serious look at Sound Transit’s governance. Currently, the agency is run by an 18-member board of elected officials who represent every “subarea” of the region—an ever-changing cast of characters with no specific transit expertise. This structure, Balducci suggested, has made it difficult to anticipate and forestall cost overruns like the $34.5 billion hole Sound Transit is currently attempting to fill.

David, Sandeep, and I also discussed some of the potential reasons for Sound Transit’s persistent overruns—excessive process, changes in response to neighborhood complaints, and engineering decisions that add millions to even relatively simple projects, like the long-deferred Graham Street Station, which the latest plan at least moves into the “funded” column.

Finally, we had to spend a few minutes on the latest shakeup in Mayor Katie Wilson’s office—the departure of housing and homelessness advisor Jon Grant, who was at the center of the mayor’s plan to add thousands of new tiny house-style shelters around the city. Grant, along with Wilson’s former chief of staff Kate Kreuzer, reportedly clashed with council members and staff while the council was working to pass emergency legislation to expedite Wilson’s shelter proposal.

City Council, Mayor Wilson, podcasts

Seattle Nice: Mayor-Council Conflict and a Data Center Moratorium

By Erica C. Barnett

This week on Seattle Nice, we discussed tensions between Mayor Katie Wilson’s office and members of the City Council, whose frustration with a lack of collaboration between the second and seventh floors of city hall erupted last week when a Wilson staffer asked the council to hold off on passing a bill to implement the final part of Wilson’s shelter surge plan.

As I reported, Wilson was apparently unhappy with some of the amendments councilmembers proposed and wanted the council to change them.  The council—already irritated that Wilson sent them the shelter bills without first securing a council sponsor and trying to elicit support—was not pleased that the mayor seemed to be ordering them around, and after a reportedly heated meeting between countil members and three Wilson staffers, the council passed the legislation, which Wilson had asked to be expedited as an “emergency” bill, with the (relatively minor) amendments intact.

The tension, Sandeep pointed out, has been brewing since well before the latest conflict; when Wilson fired former City Light director Dawn Lindell, some councilmembers were sensitive to union complaints and excoriated the mayor for what they called a rash decision. Just yesterday, Councilmember Bob Kettle took up that torch again during a discussion about a proposed one-year moratorium on data centers, saying, “We had top notch leadership with Seattle City Light, and this is a failure of our city right now.”

And speaking of data centers, our second segment is all about whether saying no to companies that want to build massive data centers to power AI is a good idea.

Sandeep argued that if Seattle doesn’t embrace the AI future, we may fall behind economically and turn into a hollowed-out shell of a city, like Rust Belt cities did in the 1980s. David some economists claim AI could help solve the affordable housing crisis and doesn’t want to dismiss possibilities like that out of hand. And I, as the resident Luddite, argued that we shouldn’t hitch our entire economy (and the future of our climate) to technology most people don’t like or want.

FYI: Seattle Nice Patreon donors got an early preview of our show this week. Supporting Seattle Nice gets you access to some of our episodes a day before they go out on the regular feed, along with occasional Patreon-only exclusives and the knowledge that your contributions go directly toward making Seattle Nice for you every week, including paying our editor, Quinn Waller.

Mayor Wilson, Media, podcasts

No Wonder the Pundit Class Can’t Stand Her: We Discuss the Mayor’s “Gaffes,” Shelter Buffer Zones, and the KCRHA’s Financial Plight
Mayor Wilson is excited about fixing transit! Or IS she??

By Erica C. Barnett

Is Mayor Katie Wilson proving herself to be a “gaffe”-prone executive, stumbling and bumbling her way into damaging missteps, as Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat argued recently? Or is she exactly who she appeared to be on the campaign trail—an authentic lifelong activist with socialist leanings who refuses to play the game pundits like Westneat want her to play? That’s our first topic on the Seattle Nice podcast this week.

Here’s my take: Westneat’s column was a confusing, first-pass confabulation of unrelated incidents, including a Starbucks rally before Wilson took office, an out-of-context remark about millionaires fleeing the state in response to taxes, and a comment Wilson made at an event in February about social housing.

In addition to these “gaffes,” Westneat was incensed that Wilson allowed a city staffer to steer her briefly away from KOMO’s Chris Daniels, who was interviewing the mayor in a one-on-one after a press conference where she took questions from all members of the media.

(Westneat, like most pundits and the Seattle Times editorial board, failed to summon similar outrage when Wilson’s centrist predecessor, Bruce Harrell, routinely deployed the phrase “how dare anyone question” him when deflecting questions he didn’t want to answer, ended press conferences abruptly, and was rude to unfavored reporters, including on Election Night 2021 when he literally pretended I was invisible. Wonder why.)

Although Daniels, Westneat and seemingly everyone who’s still on X treated this brief faux pas as an assault on journalism itself, Wilson actually did answer the question—which was about whether a recent shooting made her want to add more surveillance cameras faster. (No.)

Sandeep and David think there’s something deeper here—Sandeep in particular argued that it’s important to play nice with the business community—but I think what’s really going on is that people who didn’t want Wilson to win in the first place are now angry that she isn’t playing the usual political games by slapping backs and spooning up sound-bite pablum on command. Despite their outrage about this supposed assault on the free press, it’s clear that Westneat and the rest of the pundit class are perfectly happy when politicians give meaningless comments like “that’s a great question, Chris, and it’s a matter of great concern to me,” as long as the politicians treat them like they’re important.

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Case in point: Westneat praised Wilson’s counterpart at King County, County Executive Girmay Zahilay, for giving “a classic ‘I feel your pain’ answer” to the question Wilson was answering—at much greater length than the out-of-context clip—about millionaires leaving Seattle because of the new state tax. “He said he supports progressive revenue, but that every policy has trade-offs that ought to be acknowledged,” Westneat wrote. Then Wilson “did the very thing Zahilay had just suggested was bad to do.” She was honest. No wonder the pundit class hates her guts!

Later in the podcast, we talked about a couple of stories I covered last week: A proposal to create 750-foot “buffer zones” around schools, child care centers, and parks where new tiny house village shelters would be prohibited, and the ongoing fallout from a damning forensic evaluation of the King County Regional Homelessness Authority’s finances, which has left many of the people with the power to shut down the agency convinced it’s time to do so.

homelessness, podcasts

Alarming Audit, Missing Millions: Is the End Nigh for KCRHA?

By Erica C. Barnett

On this week’s 🚨emergency episode🚨 of Seattle Nice, we discussed a damning new forensic report into the King County Regional Homelessness Authority’s finances, which revealed that the agency could not account for millions of dollars in public funds.

As I reported earlier today, the audit revealed that the KCRHA couldn’t account for $8 million; it also revealed an “administrative overspend” of more than $4 million, on top of a previously reported programmatic overspend of more than $6 million. Beyond the missing money, the repord raises serious concerns about the KCRHA’s accounting practices and use of restricted funds, some of which may have been used for unauthorized purposes.

We discussed what Sandeep described as the “overlapping failures” early in the agency’s history, when the founding CEO, Marc Dones, established a culture in which lived experience of homelessness took primacy over traditional government qualifications, a practice that pushed many of the people who had been managing homelessness contracts at the city of Seattle out and set the agency on a path of lackadaisical record-keeping, few formal financial controls, and accounting practices that included reconciling funds over chat, email, and constant revisions to Excel spreadsheets, rather than traditional government accounting practices.

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A number of elected officials at the city and county have already called for the dissolution of the KCRHA, expressing outrage at the audit findings. That process, if it happens, will be long and arduous, and could spell the end of the much-touted “regional approach to homelessness,” which was the ostensible reason the KCRHA was created in the first place.

But as we also discussed, the city and county—the KCRHA’s two primary funders—also bear some responsibility for letting the agency’s finances and accounting get so out of hand and allowing their bank accounts to fall so far into the red. The KCRHA has long served as a bit of a punching bag for its primary funders, but it was it set up to struggle from the very start, when the city and county signed an agreement creating the agency that did not give KCRHA its own funding source, making it basically a pass-through agency that was occasionally allowed to do side missions—like the ill-fated “Partnership for Zero,” which was supposedly going to end unsheltered homelessness downtown.

The KCRHA’s board will meet at 3:00 on Friday, when it will hear from both agency CEO Kelly Kinnison and Clark Nuber, the agency hired by the city and county to do the forensic report. The public can tune in to the meeting on Zoom.

Affordability, Density, podcasts

Will Dialing Back Fees on Housing Fix Seattle’s Construction Crash?

 

Photo by Joshua T. Garcia, via Wikimedia Commons. Creative Commons CC0 1.0 license.

By Erica C. Barnett

On Seattle Nice this week, Sandeep and I brought on two special guests to explain why developers want a holiday from Mandatory Housing Affordability fees, which are added on to of the cost of every new multifamily residential building in Seattle. The fees pay for affordable housing (or a developer can skip them by building affordable units on sight), but they’re bringing in less money than ever as housing development slows.

Since MHA passed, in 2019, Seattle has undergone a political evolution on housing. Density, which neighborhood activists and most political leaders once saw as having an entirely negative impact on neighborhoods, is increasingly seen as a necessity as Seattle’s renter majority grows. Many people no longer agree that the city should segregate renters from property owners by restricting them to dirty, polluted arterials far from parks, libraries, and tree-lined streets. There’s a growing consensus that to reduce the cost of housing, you have to build more of it.

Our guests this week, land use and housing consultant Natalie Quick and former Seattle Chief Operating Officer Marco Lowe, don’t go so far as to call for a total repeal of MHA, but they do make a strong case for its eventual replacement with an incentive-based approach called funded inclusionary zoning. FIZ, which we’ve covered at PubliCola before provides tax breaks, similar to Seattle’s existing Multifamily Tax Exemption program, in exchange for a requirement that developers build affordable units on site. Instead of charging a fee for housing, which drives up rents, FIZ makes it possible for affordable and market-rate housing to coexist.

As Marco points out, housing slowdowns don’t just lead to a shortage of housing, driving up rents. They also deplete city resources, because when developers decide it’s too expensive to build, the city loses out on all other kinds of non-MHA revenues, from sales taxes on materials to taxes on real estate transactions to property taxes on the housing itself.

This one’s a wonky episode, but one well worth listening to if you want to understand why so little new housing—particularly larger units—is getting built right in Seattle right now and what the city could do to reverse the trend.

Editor’s note: This story originally identified Marco Lowe as the former Office of Economic Development director. This error has been corrected.