housing, legislature, Renters

Your Local Car Dealer Can’t Deceive You, But Your Landlord Can
Photo via Artspace.

By Katie Wilson

On June 30, 2023, tenants at three Seattle apartment buildings owned by Artspace, a national nonprofit real estate corporation, received notice of a rent increase effective January 1, 2024. Almost everyone was on month-to-month leases, and if they continued that way, their rent would go up 9.5 percent. But if they signed a new year-long lease, the increase would be only 8 percent.

“After asking for months to view a copy of the new lease, tenants finally received it late on the day after Christmas,” said Zade Gueble, an organizer with the Puget Sound Tenants Union who has been assisting some of the tenants. “They were expected to sign it by that Friday, three days later.” Gueble says tenants at one of the three buildings may have received the lease about a week earlier.

The email landed in some residents’ spam folders. Others were on vacation and didn’t see it until after the new year, automatically bumping them to the more expensive month-to-month option.

Washington state has robust consumer protection laws to protect people from unfair, deceptive and abusive business practices, but these laws don’t protect residential tenants. If your local car dealer tries to scam you, the state might actually do something about it. But if it’s your landlord, you’re out of luck.

The residents of the Hiawatha, Mt. Baker, and Tashiro Kaplan Lofts are all artists—painters, sculptors, dancers, playwrights, and musicians. They’re also low-income, as the units are designated for households making between 50 and 60 percent of the Seattle area median income. Tom Nelson, a tenant at the Tashiro Kaplan who asked to be identified by a pseudonym, says he was on the waitlist for six years before getting an apartment. “There is little to no turnover,” he says. “Many have lived here since the building opened for residential living over 20 years ago, and rarely does someone move out.”

When the tenants examined the new lease language, many were taken aback. It seemed to suggest that their rent could be bumped up to market rate the following year; that the landlord could take, alter, and publish their photos at will; that pets, which many residents have, would now be prohibited without written permission; and that residents weren’t allowed to conduct business from home without written approval. 

“For many, the late lease delivery felt like an attempt to coerce them into accepting unfair terms that they had no chance to review or negotiate,” said Gueble.

In a statement responding to questions from PubliCola, Indigo claimed the problem was isolated to the manager of the Tashiro-Kaplan building. “[W]e acknowledge that our dedicated property manager should have proactively communicated with residents well before this date [December 26th], and we regret that this did not happen as expected.” However, both Nelson and Gueble maintain that tenants of all three buildings are facing the same issues.

The state Attorney General’s Office routinely prosecutes businesses that deceive their customers, whether it’s a lingerie company sneakily signing people up for monthly “VIP Membership” payments, or debt adjusters charging students excessive fees and misrepresenting their services and expertise.

Residents of mobile home parks, who own their homes but rent the land underneath, can also turn to the state for help; Washington’s Consumer Protection Act has been interpreted by the courts to cover the Manufactured/Mobile Housing Landlord-Tenant Act. But these laws are useless to the Artspace tenants, because in 1985 the Washington Supreme Court ruled that other renters aren’t protected by the Consumer Protection Act.

Talk to anyone whose job involves trying to assist distressed tenants, and you’ll hear about plenty of unfair and deceptive practices. 

“The classic one is security deposit retention,” said Edmund Witter, senior managing attorney of the King County Bar Association’s Housing Justice Project. A tenant moves out and a landlord refuses to return their deposit, citing costs for which the tenant isn’t actually liable under state law. Or a landlord may tell tenants that it’s their responsibility to pay for repairs or pest control (it’s not). Or a landlord may give incorrect termination notices, representing to tenants that they have less time to come up with back rent than they are actually allowed under the law.

Then there’s the Artspace tenants’ new lease, which reads: “At the expiration of your lease term, should you choose not to renew with another lease, your current lease will convert to a month-to-month lease at the current market rate.” 

But the three buildings receive low-income housing tax credits and other public subsidies. “They have a covenant with the city that this is supposed to be low-income housing and it’s supposed to stay that way,” said Nelson. 

“Threatening to raise the rent to market rate when a landlord can’t is clearly deceptive,” says Witter.

Asked about this provision, Indigo responded, “The term ‘market rate’ as used in the lease agreement does not imply a shift to conventional market rates but rather refers to the highest permissible rents under the affordable housing program, or to the established rates for month-to-month leases.” In other words, according to Indigo, “market rate” doesn’t mean market rate.

What recourse do tenants have when landlords engage in unfair, deceptive, and abusive practices? If a Seattle landlord actually breaks the law—by refusing to do repairs or wrongly withholding a deposit, for example—a tenant can file a complaint with the city and hope for intervention. The state and most other jurisdictions don’t actively enforce tenant protections, so tenants outside Seattle would have to sue to force the landlord to comply with the law. Or, if there are clear monetary damages involved, they could try small claims court.

But what if the problem is language in a lease or notice that contradicts the law? A tenant can point it out, and the landlord may back down. That’s good news for that particular tenant. But the landlord has every incentive to continue putting that same deceptive language into future leases and notices, since the vast majority of tenants won’t realize that it misrepresents their rights. The deception itself has no consequences.

When an unfair, deceptive or abusive practice doesn’t involve unambiguously breaking or misrepresenting a law, tenants have even less recourse. The Artspace tenants’ new lease included extensive language giving the landlord permission to “take, use, reuse, and publish” photos and videos of the tenants “and any minor occupants,” and to use their “name, picture, written comments, and statements” for any lawful purpose, including advertising. 

The notion that a person should have to license their own and their children’s identities to a landlord to rent a home is bizarre, and potentially dangerous. “What if a parent and their child are hiding and trying to protect their location from an abusive ex-spouse?” Nelson said. For a building full of artists whose images may be part of their livelihood, it’s doubly offensive. The new lease, he said, “violates the heart of what this place is.”

But there’s nothing outright illegal about this provision. Nor is it illegal to suddenly disallow pets, or prohibit a building full of artists from working at home. Indeed, Indigo says that these terms are “aligned with standard National Apartment Association (NAA) lease provisions” and that the language about photos and licensing allows the company to “use photos from items such as community functions for promotional purposes.” 

The company added that they now “recognize concerns about this and will introduce an addendum to remove this clause, affirming there’s no intent to infringe upon residents’ privacy.”

But what if a landlord refuses to bend? “A tenant could bring an action to have a term declared unreasonable and thereby unenforceable, but that’s it,” Witter said. And, he added, “a tenant isn’t likely to do that because no attorney would take that case, since there’s no money in it.”

Of course, tenants can also band together and try to negotiate with their landlord collectively. But they won’t have much support from the law.

Lawmakers have the power to improve this situation. At the state level, the obvious solution is to make landlords liable for damages under the Consumer Protection Act and give the Attorney General the authority to enforce tenants’ rights under both that act and the Residential Landlord-Tenant Act. One of the two rent stabilization bills introduced in the 2023 session, HB 1388, would have done this.

This year’s version, HB 2114, would have given the Attorney General the authority to enforce landlord-tenant laws related to security deposits, just cause eviction, rent increases, and rent increase notices. That bill also failed to pass out of the legislature this year.

But local elected officials don’t have to wait for state lawmakers to act. Seattle City Councilmembers can pass their own ordinances banning unfair, abusive, and deceptive practices, as unincorporated King County and the city of Kenmore have already done.

In Kenmore, a landlord who violates the law banning deceptive practices has to pay the tenant “the greater of double the tenant’s economic and noneconomic damages or three times the monthly rent of the dwelling unit at issue, and reasonable litigation costs and attorneys’ fees.” By attaching meaningful consequences to unfair, deceptive and abusive practices, landlords might actually get sued sometimes, creating a stronger incentive for them to clean up their act.

“This is what makes consumer protection laws work in general,” Witter said. “Even when you are suing over a $15 toaster, UDAP [unfair, deceptive and abusive practice] laws encourage a person and an attorney to bring them.”

Until then, tenants are at the mercy of landlords and management companies. Indigo says their “ethos” includes “[e]ncouraging our residents to engage with their lease agreement. … We believe in clear communication and have always been here to provide answers and clarity when needed.”

“Indigo management has not responded to a single email or certified letter about the lease, and their onsite manager is unable to help,” Nelson said.

City Council, Mayor Harrell

In Unusual Move, Council Reverses 20 Budget Bills Imposing Checks and Balances on Executive Departments

By Erica C. Barnett

Every year, as part of the budget process, the Seattle City Council adopts dozens of Statements of Legislative Intent (SLIs) and budget provisos, which serve as checks on the power of the mayor and executive departments and provide transparency into how the city is spending its money.

A typical SLI might require a department to report back on its progress or reveal more about its spending (or lack thereof); in recent years, SLIs have required Mayor Bruce Harrell’s Unified Care Team to provide reports on its ever-expanding “encampment response” work; established a task force to come up with progressive revenue options to address a yawning budget deficit; and mandated a new online portal to help renters understand their rights.

Last year, the city council passed 36 SLIs. On Tuesday, the City Council—voting unanimously, and without discussion, for a bill sponsored by Council President Sara Nelson—undid all but 16 of them. Although the council passes legislation every year signing off on, and making technical edits to, the previous year’s SLIs, this is ordinarily a perfunctory measure; for the council to reverse most of the accountability and transparency measures imposed by a previous council is an extreme move that may be unprecedented.

The bills the council reversed included directive to the city’s Office of Construction, Planning and Development and Office of Housing to collect data on rents, unit size, and other information about rental units in the city. Nelson was a staunch opponent of this rent transparency requirement last year

During Tuesday’s council meeting, Nelson portrayed the decision to reverse the previous council’s directives as a necessary corrective on the previous council’s misplaced priorities as well as a matter of budget necessity.

“Some of the SLIs are intended to establish a glide path, or lay the foundations, for a policy priority of council members who are no longer here. to eventually advance that initiative in the future,” Nelson said. “Second, SLIs take a lot of staff time, especially to do them right, and the mayor has enacted a hiring freeze. … So in this One Seattle [a reference to Mayor Bruce Harrell’s official slogan], I am trying to to remove some of the unnecessary burden on our on our executive departments.

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“And then finally, some were removed because they contemplated … a future legislative action that would have fairly broad budget implications.”

Here are some of the SLIs the council has abandoned, meaning they’ll no longer be implemented, along with their primary sponsors:

• A bill directing the city to convene a team to make recommendations for helping people who violate the city’s vehicle equipment laws—those who get pulled over for broken taillights and other minor issues—comply with the law, including a potential grant fund to help low-income people pay debt from fines. The SLI would have also required “an update on SPD’s efforts to determine how to de-prioritize traffic stops regarding vehicle equipment violations.” (Teresa Mosqueda)

• A SLI directing the City Budget Office to come up with a plan, including cost estimates and legal issues that would need to be resolved, for making the Office of Police Accountability independent from the Seattle Police Department—a longstanding goal of police accountability advocates. (Mosqueda)

• A directive to the city’s Office of Construction, Planning and Development and Office of Housing to collect data on rents, unit size, and other information about rental units in the city. Nelson was a staunch opponent of this rent transparency requirement last year, arguing that requiring landlords to divulge what they charge tenants would “burden small landlords” who are “really struggling to deal with the impacts of the pandemic on their businesses.” (Alex Pedersen)

• A SLI asking the city’s Finance and Administrative Services Department to propose responsible contractor requirements for large city contracts, in line with those imposed by other agencies like Sound Transit. These requirements might have included things like prevailing wages, policies that support workplace equity, health insurance and other benefits. and respect for the right of workers to organize. (Mosqueda)

• A bill that requesting a study of a four-day work week for most city employees “to address gender and racial pay gap issues and improve work/life balance.” Nelson has been a vocal proponent of mandatory back-to-office policies and in-person council meetings, describing full-time on-site work as a way to improve camaraderie between office workers and support downtown businesses near City Hall. (Morales)

homelessness, Mayor Harrell, Morning Fizz, Police

KCRHA Plans to Ask City for Budget Increase, SPD Command Staff Loses Sole Female Officer

1. Earlier this year, Mayor Bruce Harrell asked the King County Regional Homelessness Authority to come up with potential budget cuts of 2 to 5 percent in response to a $230 million projected city budget deficit next year; the city, which pays for more than half the KCRHA’s budget, contributed $109 million to the homelessness agency’s budget last year.

Although the KCRHA provided the city with a list of potential cuts earlier this year, the agency is asking its implementation and governing boards to approve a budget proposal that would include a $25 million “stabilization” increase as well as $2.3 million for two new programs: A new tiny house village and a new “overflow” shelter that could serve between 30 and 50 people a night when other shelters are full. About half this request would come from the city; the rest would come from King County, the KCRHA’s other primary funder.

Last month, city officials announced that they would be taking over homelessness prevention and outreach contracts previously administered by the KCRHA, a move some homeless advocates called an abandonment of the regional approach to homelessness embodied in the KCRHA. Those programs totaled almost $12 million. Accounting for this transfer, the KCRHA is asking the city for $112 million.

Without those funds, KCRHA staff told the agency’s implementation board last week, the agency would be unable to pay for commitments like inflationary pay increases, and would have to cut a number of existing programs that face a “funding cliff” next year. “Based on information obtained from potentially-affected agencies in the summer of 2023,” an agency budget memo says, “KCRHA estimates a likely loss of as many as 300 shelter beds and the inability to prevent homelessness for over 265 additional households.”

Programs that could be cut or eliminated if the city fails to fund them include the Benu Community House, a men’s shelter in the Central District that specializes in serving Black men; staffing and services at several Low Income Housing Institute-run tiny house villages; and several projects funded with short-term federal COVID funds since 2021, including 169 shelter beds, two outreach agencies, and a day center.

During last week’s implementation board meeting, board member Simha Reddy called the budget outlook “really sobering” and “a little bit scary. … We need to ask for a significant increase in funds just to hold steady in terms of services mentioned, at a time when our primary funders are facing difficult, difficult budgets. And I’m really, really worried that they will not be able to meet these kind of stabilization requests that we have.”

The board will vote on the budget proposal in April; historically, the board has adopted the proposed budget without making alterations.

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2. When challenged about gender discrimination and parity in the Seattle Police Department, Mayor Bruce Harrell and Police Chief Adrian Diaz frequently mention that there are many women in leadership at SPD—recently telling PubliCola, for instance, that “half of the department’s command staff are women.” When the mayor’s spokesman made that comment, the number was actually five out of 13, including just one sworn officer, assistant chief Lesley Cordner.

Now that Cordner, a 35-year veteran of the department, is retiring—and leaving SPD’s command staff with no sworn women—how did Diaz choose to thank her? By sending out an all-staff email misspelling her name.  “Please take a moment to watch this heartfelt and congratulatory video, as we celebrate and honor the career of Assistant Chief, Leslie Cordner,” Diaz wrote. About ten minutes later, he sent a second email identical to the first, but with Cordner’s name corrected.

Last year, Cordner reportedly left SPD’s Before the Badge program, where she was one of the program leaders, because of one of the instructors’ views on what he called the LGBTQ “lifestyle,” including his opposition to same-sex marriage. Before the Badge is SPD’s marquee program designed to prepare new recruits to work with diverse communities in Seattle.

homelessness, King County

Burien Officials Make Threats, Cast Blame—But Continue to Defend Their Ban on “Living” in Public

By Erica C. Barnett

Burien city officials escalated the drama over the city’s total ban on “living” outdoors last week after King County Sheriff Patti Cole-Tindall sued the city for what she called the city’s “unconstitutional” new law. As we reported last week, City Manager Adolfo Bailon immediately responded to the lawsuit by instructing employees to stop paying the sheriff’s office, which serves as Burien’s police department. (The move makes Burien, ironically, the first local city to actually defund its police.) Bailon also canceled the city’s recently signed homelessness outreach contract with REACH, leaving Burien without any professional homeless outreach services.

On Thursday, a man died in an encampment in downtown Burien; his body was discovered by outreach workers from REACH. Burien officials  immediately politicized the tragedy.

Speaking to the B-Town Blog, Burien Mayor Kevin Schilling lashed out at Cole-Tindall and a nonprofit run by a former city council member that ran a short-lived sanctuary encampment at a local church. Schilling said the man’s death, from an overdose, was a “direct result of the Sheriff’s Department and the County Executive suing us so they don’t have to enforce our common sense tent regulating measure, as well as not enforcing drug laws in the Downtown core. … I sure hope the Sheriff and County Executive staff taking their roles seriously, and stop wasting taxpayer time and money with their stunts that are leading to deaths.”

“We do not have capacity to provide continual management and oversight of conduct in encampments of unhoused persons that have been part of the community for the entire time I have worked with the City.”—Burien Police Chief Ted Boe

The new ban on “living” in public spaces includes appearing in public with any “indicia of camping,” including blankets, sleeping bags, and cooking equipment.”

The sheriff’s department has repeatedly told city officials that their priority is 911 calls and serious crimes, not the presence of homeless people in Burien. In a deposition last week, Burien Police Chief Ted Boe said his deputies spend most of their time responding to emergency calls, which “means we do not have capacity to provide continual management and oversight of conduct in encampments of unhoused persons that have been part of the community for the entire time I have worked with the City.”

Boe, who has been Burien’s police chief since 2018, said he had no issues getting people living unsheltered in Burien to “voluntarily move” when asked— until the city council hired Bailon in 2022.

Starting that year, Boe said, Bailon “put continual pressure on me to redeploy resources away from other public safety matters such as 911 calls and to address several non-criminal aspects of camping. I requested he provide support for addressing non-criminal behaviors to prevent police from being responsible for managing camp rules.”

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Boe also revealed that during a recent conversation with Bailon, the city manager told him he “would be demanding that I be removed as the City’s Chief” and replaced by someone who would be willing to accede to Bailon’s demands.

Another option the city is reportedly considering: Hiring their own police force, and ditching their contract with the county. This, however, would almost certainly be more expensive than the county contract. When the city looked into creating its own police force in 2011, a consultant concluded that it would cost between 12 and 35 percent more for the city to fund a similar level of service. Policing makes up about 45 per cent of Burien’s annual general-fund budget.

“I have grown to love this community and it is upsetting to have this assignment taken away for doing what I not only believe is right, but what I think our courts expect me to do as a police leader in Washington,” Boe said in his deposition.

At tonight’s Burien City Council meeting, the council will discuss a proposal to take away federal ARPA dollars that the council allocated to a day center for homeless Burien residents at Highline United Methodist Church last year. Opponents of providing shelter and services to homeless Burien residents have made similar arguments against providing them an indoor space to be (and access services) during the day, claiming that they will bring drugs and violence into the area.

City Council, homelessness, Mayor Harrell, Opinion, Police

The New City Council Is Just Asking Questions

By Erica C. Barnett

As I’ve noted previously, with some frustration, the Seattle City Council—which includes six brand-new members and a council president with just two years’ experience—is still spending most of its public meeting time getting up to speed on various city departments and offices do.

This slow-moving crash course in Civics 101 is probably necessary, since most of the new council members have never worked in or around City Hall, but the endless PowerPoint parade does give the impression the council has nothing urgent on its plate, even as a $230 million budget shortfall looms.

One thing the new council has been doing plenty of is asking questions. Although many are rhetorical or more-a-comment-than-a-question (looking at you, Rob Saka), they still say a lot about what the council hopes to do whenever they get around to governing full-time. Here are a few examples, from who recent council briefings about housing, homelessness, and public safety.

Sara Nelson wants to know if the problem with police hiring is the exams.

Nelson, a former council aide and two-year council veteran, pressed the director of the city’s two Civil Service Commissions, Andrea Scheele, about the city’s contract with the National Testing Network, a company the city uses to test new recruits’ knowledge, skills, and aptitude for the job, suggesting that the city should consider picking another vendor that could move applicants through the hiring process faster. The Public Safety Civil Service Commission administers tests for applicants for SPD and Seattle Fire Department applicants.

The city “invested heavily” in helping to develop the NTN test, Scheele noted, after a judge put the city under federal oversight amid allegations of bias and excessive use of force in 2012. (The US Department of Justice terminated most of that consent decree last year).  “The exam was tailored to assess a candidate’s cognitive abilities, but also to evaluate candidates’ skills and abilities related to judgment, appropriate human interactions, and integrity and ethics,” Scheele said.

“I don’t get a sense of urgency, frankly, when I’m listening to your presentation. And that’s not acceptable. You’re here to serve the city, the citizens of the city, and the citizens of the city deserve to have police officers put on the streets as quickly as possible.”—Councilmember Cathy Moore, speaking to Public Safety Civil Service Commission director Andrea Scheele

About a month and a half ago, Scheele added, Mayor Bruce Harrell asked the PSCSC to “consider either adding or switching to” a test from a company called Public Safety Testing. Currently, between 60 and 65 percent of applicants either drop out during the testing phase or fail the NTN test, Scheele said. According to the Seattle Times, 90 percent of applicants pass the PST test.

Cathy Moore wonders if the problem with police hiring is that civil servants have no “sense of urgency.”

During her presentation, Scheele noted that the PSCSC now provides a list of candidates who have passed the application test to SPD, but said it would take another full-time employee to accelerate that process to every two weeks or faster. Currently, the two civil service commissions have three staff.

“I just think we’re moving way too slowly, and basically what I see here is a bureaucracy that’s clunky,” Moore responded. “We need to go faster. There’s no reason that we should be waiting to [administer exams and] send [SPD] a list of eligible candidates every six to eight weeks.”

“I don’t get a sense of urgency, frankly, when I’m listening to your presentation. And that’s not acceptable,” Moore said.

Scheele said the reason the PSCSC would need another employee to speed up the testing process is because the commission would have to stop processing test scores in batches—a change that would speed things up from the applicants’ perspective, but would add a new inefficiency at the end of the process. Moore said Scheele’s answer was “not satisfactory,” and told her to come back to the council in 30 days with “concrete steps that you’ve taken, because this is just too slow.”

“You’re here to serve the city, the citizens of the city, and the citizens of the city deserve to have police officers put on the streets as quickly as possible. Obviously, they need to be qualified, and we need to go through this process,” Moore continued. “Although there’s some question about whether we actually do need to, but nonetheless, this is where we are. So we have to light a fire under our our civil servants’ feet, because you are here to serve the city of Seattle.”

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Sara Nelson wants to know if we could subsidize cops’ housing (and day care, and cars, and college, and child care…)

Police officers in Seattle make a starting salary of around $83,000 before overtime and hiring bonuses, but could Seattle do more?

Nelson and other council members think they could, starting with perks like housing subsidies, “take-home cars,” subsidized day care, medical benefits after retirement, and other goodies that aren’t available to other city employees.

Rob Saka, elected last year, siad the city should consider paying relocation assistance for police who move here from elsewhere; when he learned that the city already does this, Saka said, “that’s great—and then paired with an actual housing subsidy, I think that that will be the most impactful.” Los Angeles provides new recruits with a $12,000 annual housing subsidy for their first two years, but the subsidy is only for housing in the city; currently, most SPD officers live outside Seattle.

Rob Saka wants to know why Seattle prioritizes homeless people’s privacy.

Washington state law allows unsheltered people to opt out of putting their personal and medical information into the county’s tracking system for homeless services, the Homeless Management Information System (HMIS). A significant number of people choose to do so because of privacy concerns, since the information the county tracks includes detailed information about substance use, time spent in hospitals or jail, and information provided to case managers. This “opt out” option means that Seattle’s homelessness data is never perfect; shelter referrals, for instance, represent an undercount.

Saka, along with council newcomer Maritza Rivera, wanted to know if there was a way to get around these requirements in order to “run analytics capabilities and use services to help us make better informed decisions and monitor trends, get ahead of trends, [and] plan—better planning, better outcomes.”

Saka, a former attorney for Meta, said he was aware that “there are some some notable potential privacy and security challenges with collection of certain data. But just because that is the case, and just because … the same issue applies to various technologies, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t use them or adopt them. Let us have effective safeguards in place to to control for that. But we need strong data collection capabilities to help us make better data-informed decisions.”

Requiring people to opt in to HMIS in order to receive homeless services would require a change in state law, something Rivera suggested the the city should support in an upcoming legislative session.

“What I know is that when budget time comes around and the REACH [homeless outreach] coordinators come in, they yell, ‘Stop the sweeps! Stop the sweeps!’ and then they are making it easier to stay in these dangerous environments.”—City Council President Sara Nelson

Maritza Rivera wants to know why we let people say “no” to shelter.

Rivera also questioned why the city allows people to decide whether they want to go indoors based on what shelter is available—saying no, for example, if the only option is a mat on the floor in a mass shelter.

“We do need to prioritize getting people indoors, whether or not we’re able to—you know, the goal is their first choice, but if that’s not available, we nevertheless have to get folks indoors. … I feel it’s inhumane to leave people on the street regardless” of whether they get their choice of shelter, Rivera said.

Tanya Woo wants to know how the city can help police feel safer at encampment sweeps.

Woo, who lost her race against District 2 incumbent Tammy Morales before the council appointed her to a citywide seat in January, said she has seen plainclothes police officers show up at encampment removals in the past, but “most of the time they don’t attend these, because they’re afraid of interactions during protests or interactions with unhoused residents. So,” she asked, “is there is there a plan going forward and how to mitigate some of that during resolutions?” Woo heads up a volunteer night watch in the Chinatown/International District, and led a successful effort to prevent the expansion of a Salvation Army-run homeless shelter in SoDo.

Deputy Mayor Tiffany Washington, who was leading a presentation about the Unified Care Team (the city’s umbrella group for encampment response) said police do show up at every encampment removal, adding that “the issues are, 98 percent of the time, with the protesters and not the actual people that are unhoused at the site.”

Sara Nelson wants to know: Why do we even pay for homeless outreach, anyway?

Nelson, whose beer business was one of the first to place eco-blocks in the public right-of-way to keep people from parking their RVs there, singled out the outreach provider REACH in asking Washington what the city’s outreach contracts are for.

“When we talk about outreach, what is it really supposed to do? Because when I hear you say you said earlier, that we want our outreach providers to stay engaged week after week, and we hear that they meet people where they’re at to build trust—toward what end?” Nelson asked. “Because if they’re just if we’re just building trust so that they can stay in these dangerous situations, exactly what is the programmatic goal of our outreach investments?”

“What I know,” Nelson added, “is that when budget time comes around and the REACH coordinators come in, they yell, ‘Stop the sweeps! Stop the sweeps!’ and then they are making it easier to stay in these dangerous environments.”

Although Washington noted that outreach is “a critical part of the homelessness response system,” Nelson’s disparaging comments about REACH could be a preview of the city’s upcoming budget discussions, where spending on everything but police, fire, and 911 will be on the table for cuts.

Affordability, Density, Guest Contributor, housing, Mayor Harrell

Harrell Throws in the Towel on Housing with a 20-Year Plan to Increase Housing Prices and Worsen Homelessness

By Ron Davis

Mayor Bruce Harrell just released a 20-year plan to give up on the housing crisis. With its proposed update to the city’s comprehensive plan, the administration plans a big slowdown in housing production, and over the course of 20 years, actually aims to make the housing deficit deeper.

This is a stunning surrender from someone who promised he would not play “small ball” and said he wants to embrace “Space Needle Thinking.” Unfortunately, the way state law and the process works, we will be stuck with this feeble framework for quite some time.

Right now, we are tens of thousands of housing units behind, and this plan will take twenty years to make it at least 12,000 units worse, and possibly much more so. It doesn’t improve the housing deficit, and it doesn’t even tread water.

It is literally a plan to fail.

What Is A Comprehensive Plan and Why Do We Have One?

State law requires cities and counties to release a 20-year “comprehensive plan” for how they are going to handle their growth. This includes how much growth, and where it goes. After this plan gets an extensive environmental review, it is much harder to challenge. This makes it expensive, time consuming, and sometimes legally risky to try to change course after the plan is approved. In other words, these plans are hard to unstick.

So the plan to fail will be with us for a while.

The Impact

Failing at housing means prices will climb higher and faster. So unless you have a few million to loan your kids before you die, or a very roomy basement, there is little chance they will be able to afford to live in Seattle. And unless you made around $400,000 a year in your twenties and thirties, people like you will not be able to start a career or raise a family in Seattle.

According to experts, higher housing prices also increase homelessness. This is because when people experience an economic or behavioral crisis in a city with affordable rent, they usually manage to stay housed. But expensive markets like Seattle’s are far less forgiving, so when someone gets into a bad situation, they are far more likely to end up without a roof over their head.

If this all sounds a bit like a certain city by the bay, that’s because it is. San Francisco’s refusal to keep up with housing demand has resulted in $3,200 median rents and people pooping on the sidewalk.

I don’t know about you, but I aspire for more in 2044.

The Numbers, if That’s Your Thing

For those who want to understand the numbers: The slowdown in housing growth relative to population growth over the last few decades created a massive housing debt. Most of the best figures are regional, and address the overall gaps in housing production, production relative to growth (page 20), gaps in affordable housing, even a growing mismatch in the number of jobs homes by one online commentator However you slice the data, the Seattle deficit is tens of thousands of homes, and the regional gap is much larger.

Harrell’s Bizarre Plan To Slow Down Construction

Because of high land prices, stringent zoning and other rules, our ability to add housing is dropping fast. We have built nearly 10,000 units per year in the last five years, but permitting is cratering. If we do nothing, housing production is going to fall off a cliff, to 4,000 units a year for the next 20 years. So the Harrell administration spent a year of staff time and millions of dollars and ignored the overwhelming documented supermajority of feedback they received, and only planned for a little life support to bring it just up to 5,000 units per year. That’s right—we’re going to reach for a sky that is half as high as where we are now.

This plan is likely to yield about 100,000 homes over 20 years, even though King County says Seattle needs 112,000 units just to keep up. The 112,000 unit number comes from the fact that an average rental household in Seattle has 1.85 people, including single family home rentals. Since most of this growth will be apartments, the number of people per unit will be just a bit lower (1.78), which leads to the need for 112,000 homes

In other words, we are planning to fall behind by at least 12,000 homes.

Lest you think no one has thought about sending folks to nearby cities–that’s already baked in. The plan suggests Seattle will add 159,000 jobs, which will support far more than 200,000 people. In other words, the 200,000 person growth target already assumes tens of thousands more commuters from out of town, choking our roads with traffic and paying property taxes somewhere else.

The city says that in the next 20 years, the Seattle population will grow by at least 200,000 people. But if we simply match the growth rates of 2000-2020, we’d grow by 240,000. If we grow at the rate of the 2010s, it will be 363,000 new people. So when they say, “at least” they really mean at least. Those higher rates would increase the housing hole by up an additional 22,000 to 91,000 units!

The plan manages to do all this in especially damaging and clumsy ways.

Racial Inequality

The plan shoehorns a lot of the growth into small areas of the city, an approach Seattle has long called the “urban village” strategy.

And yet the very office responsible for this document called the basic structure of their longstanding urban village strategy racist just a couple years ago. This plan pulls heavily from the same pernicious playbook.

Notably, the plan concentrates poverty, and pushes multifamily housing near large, dangerous, polluted roads. All the while, it shields Bruce Harrell’s neighborhood and other rich neighborhoods with water views, like Laurelhurst and Magnolia, from any real change. And the restricted growth everywhere means higher prices everywhere, which means more displacement for lower-income populations and people of color.

In other words, the city is planning to perpetuate much of the pattern of our openly racist housing history.

Sending Families Somewhere Else

The Harrell administration’s plan is hostile to families.

One of the reasons that family housing is so expensive is our housing deficit, but another is our infinitesimal growth in larger units. Harrell doubles down on this foolish approach, making it much less likely that family housing will be built. For some reason, Seattle seems determined to prevent people from raising kids here.

The state’s “missing middle housing” bill requires cities like Seattle to allow four to six units on normal residential lots. But the plan makes this functionally impossible, especially for family-sized units. If we followed the state’s model code, we could build four 2,000-square-foot homes or six 1,333 square foot homes on a standard lot.

But Seattle cut the square footage allowed by almost 40 percent. Forget decent-sized homes. And in fact, Seattle’s plan also ensures that many more projects won’t pencil out.

In other words, the design is deliberately set up so that that missing middle housing won’t get built at scale, and where it does, the units will be too small for families but still spread around the lot enough to require cutting down lots of trees.

If you think the schools can’t get enough enrollment to stay funded and open now, imagine a future where even fewer families can live here.

Transit, Affordable Housing

The Harrell plan treats taxpayer money with very little respect—notably generating a mere 2,700 units near two new light rail stations, frittering away a billion dollars in taxpayer investment in our regional transit system. It also ignores the overwhelming feedback favoring social housing, as well as the significant margin the social housing initiative passed with. Overall, it fails to tackle the even larger housing gap when it comes to affordable housing of all types.

It plans for less growth than much-smaller Bellevue, much weaker middle housing than Spokane and, and is so bad that state legislators are calling out the BS.

The legislator who led the effort to pass the missing middle housing bill noted that “it barely goes above what new housing production would have been if they did nothing.”

Harrell Gives Up

This is an absurd failure of leadership. Up until now, I’ve wanted to give the mayor the benefit of the doubt. He’s well meaning, and although we disagree about a great deal, he’s not a true conservative like Sara Nelson. He’s just afraid of big business.

But Bruce has lost his touch. Centrist leaders get this. President Joe Biden gets it. Governor Jay Inslee gets it. King County Executive Dow Constantine gets it. Thousands of Seattle residents get it.

Harrell does not.

This article is also available on Rondezvous, Ron Davis’s excellent free Substack newsletter, where you’ll also find details about how to weigh in on the proposed comp plan update.

Ron Davis is is an entrepreneur, policy wonk, and past candidate for Seattle City Council District 4. He lives in Northeast Seattle.