Tag: affordable housing

Affordability, City Council, housing

Debate Over Affordable Housing Tax Break Heats Up
City Councilmember Sara Nelson said expanding eligibility for tax-exempt housing will benefit moderate-income renters.

By Erica C. Barnett

As the Seattle City Council prepares to update a program that gives tax breaks to developers who set aside apartments for low- and moderate-income renters, opponents of the changes called them a giveaway to developers for housing that will still leave its residents burdened by excessive rents. Proponents, including Habitat for Humanity and for-profit developers, said the changes would make it feasible for them to build affordable housing at a time when development of all kinds is slowing across the city.

The 12-year tax exemption program, called the Multifamily Tax Exemption or MFTE, currently has to be renewed every four to five years. The most recent renewal, in 2019, imposed new affordability requirements and restrictions on rent increases—making higher-income renters ineligible to rent MFTE units and imposing a 4.5 percent annual cap on rent increases, among other changes.

The latest iteration, known as “Program 7,” would bump up the cap on annual increases to as much as 10 percent a year and make higher-income renters eligible for some units, a change opponents say will make MFTE apartments unavailable to lower-income tenants.

Earlier this week, two dozen affordable housing providers and advocacy groups sent an open letter to the mayor and council objecting to the proposed changes, arguing that if the council approves them, “the purpose of the MFTE program would no longer be to ‘increase affordable multifamily housing opportunities … for households who cannot afford market-rate housing in Seattle,’ and would instead focus on increasing multifamily development in exchange for a modest share of MFTE units and no guarantee of rents meaningfully lower than market rate.”

At a meeting of the council’s housing committee on Wednesday—where the committee also took up 14 amendments aimed at various aspects of the program—renters’ rights advocates urged the city to reject the proposal and keep the existing program in place another year while the city comes up with a more equitable plan. (The MFTE update has already been delayed twice, and expired yesterday.)

Miram Roskin, the former deputy director of the city’s Office of Housing, said the program removes about $20 million in “invisible” dollars from the city’s budget every year in the form of foregone property taxes, in exchange for very limited benefits for lower-income renters.

“At the margin, there are certainly financially feasible, on the bubble projects that benefit and come to fruition thanks to the tax exemption. However, this is speculative. It is unquantified, it’s anecdotal. This is why the affordability component of the program matters so much,” Roskin said. “In many cases, rents would be indistinguishable from the market. And in fact, in some cases, the affordable rent would even be higher than the market [rent].”

For example, under the new proposal, renters making up to 50 percent of Seattle’s median income would be eligible to rent small studios (less than 320 square feet); the proposal bumps up the maximum rent for these units to $1,375 a month, just $91 less than the median similar apartments rent for on the private market. The maximum rent for a standard one-bedroom would increase to $2,209, or about $395 less than market rent.

Median incomes, and—indirectly—maximum rents are set by a federal formula that includes both homeowners and renters. The Seattle Renters Commission called out this issue in its own letter opposing the new program, noting that the median Seattle renter makes around $79,000, compared to about $181,000 for homeowner households.

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Developers, in contrast, said they the current standards have made them opt out of the tax exemption program, and argued that the changes would spur them to build more affordable apartments at a time when building permits have slowed down dramatically, a trend that will likely make Seattle’s housing crunch significantly worse over the next several years.

“We are evidence that the program currently is not working,” Kamiak Real Estate founder Scott Lien told the committee. “We rescinded our MFTE applications on four of our last five projects prior to occupancy, and now we have six buildings with 1,100 units in our pipeline, and have no plans to participate in MFTE for most of those” under the current program.

Developers also argued that the MFTE program was never designed to provide housing to low-income residents, but is supposed to create “workforce” housing for moderate-income renters.

A 2024 University of Washington study found that the MFTE program does cost the city money every year, but noted that developers won’t use the program if they can’t make a profit. The study also found that the city has historically seen a benefit of about 50 cents on the dollar, in the form of lower rents, over the life of the program, except under the most recent iteration, where rents decreased and the benefit to the city increased more dramatically.

Over the life of the program, which began in 1998, developers have built more than 7,000 affordable housing units, mostly studios and one-bedrooms, but those lower rents “may only represent a modest discount” compared to the rest of the market, the UW study found. Apartments in areas where rents are already higher, like South Lake Union, are more affordable relative to other available units than they are in areas where rents are lower, like South Park or Rainier Beach, where “there may be negligible differences between the rents of restricted and unrestricted units.”

“Some of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the city,” the study notes, have been categorically exempt from MFTE because they’re zoned for single-family houses. Given that most MFTE units are in three-to-five-story apartment buildings, this isn’t likely to change much, even with zoning changes that allow between four and six units per lot in these areas.

Several of the 14 amendments councilmembers introduced Wednesday would lower the income eligibility thresholds for various types and sizes of apartments, prompting Council President Sara Nelson to object that new affordability restrictions could force renters out of their homes. “We don’t want to be displacing people,” Nelson said. Making people who make more money eligible for MFTE units, she added, “means more access, not higher prices.”

Although a central staffer assured Nelson that the program has a “grace” component that lets existing tenants stay in their homes as their income rises (under the program, existing renters retain their rent discounts until their income rises to 150 percent of the eligibility level, and pay market rent after that), Nelson raised the exact same objection a moment later.

“There are people already living in these units, so what’s going to happen to them if you lower the income per unit? Then the person’s going to have to move out. … I feel like this is going to displace people and in fact that’s what happened to my friend.”

Councilmembers also proposed amendments to allow developers with projects already in the pipeline to opt in to the new, more developer-friendly program, a change the housing advocacy groups called “a bad deal for Seattle” in their open letter. Other amendments would require regular reporting on which developers are participating in the program and what kind of housing they’re building, and reinstate a sunset clause that would require the city to update the program again in 2029, which the original legislation eliminated. Rob Saka, the cosponsor of the sunset amendment along with Alexis Mercedes Rinck, said revisiting the program regularly was a matter of good governance.

“Deleting a sunset date whatsoever, in perpetuity, for something of this significance, and greater scale, and subject to fluctuating market conditions—I don’t know if it’s the best, most appropriate, prudent course of action,” Saka said.

Another amendment sought by developers, from Mark Solomon, would eliminate the requirement that developers who are replacing older, “naturally affordable” housing with (typically denser) new MFTE units add one new unit that’s permanently affordable to renters making 50 percent of median income to their new buildings for every tenant in the demolished building who qualifies for relocation assistance under the city’s Tenant Relocation Assistance Ordinance. Developers argue that this permanent affordability requirement has stopped the development of dense new housing under the MFTE program.

Councilmember Debora Juarez complained that the 14 amendments (including one that was so new it didn’t show up on the council’s online agenda) had been “dropped on us” at the last minute, with little time to analyze or understand them. The committee didn’t vote on the proposed changes; they’ll do that on September 22, with a full council vote likely on September 30.

City Council, housing, Taxes

City Plans Major Overhaul of Affordable Housing Tax-Break Program
An MFTE building, Mad Flats, on Capitol Hill

By Erica C. Barnett

The city is getting ready to overhaul a program that provides tax breaks to developers who agree to keep 25 percent of their apartments affordable for 12 years (or 20 percent if 8 percent of the units are two-bedroom), known as the Multifamily Tax Exemption program (MFTE). It’s the city’s main program for providing housing affordable to moderate-income people; as of November 2024, according to a University of Washington evaluation of the program, there were nearly 7,000 income-restricted units in Seattle as a direct result of MFTE tax breaks

The MFTE program has been overhauled several times in its 27-year existence; the current program, known as “Program 6,” has been in place since 2019. In that update, the City Council imposed a cap on rent increases of 4.5 percent a year and reduced the maximum income for eligibility, opening up the program for lower-income renters.

While those changes made more people eligible for MFTE units, they also made developers less likely to participate in the voluntary program. As construction costs ballooned starting in 2019, market rents in Seattle softened, making MFTE units less competitive with the market–and the program less appealing to developers who might otherwise participate in it.

According to the UW study, “The City of Seattle has a difficult responsibility to calibrate the relationship between the costs of the program (benefit to developers) and the public benefits it delivers (more affordable housing). As the City pushes for greater public benefits, the program becomes less attractive to developers. This is the central tension.”

The proposed update, known as “Revised Program 7” to distinguish it from an earlier proposal that came out of the city’s Office of Housing, would set new (generally higher) rent and income limits for most of the affordable units created under the MFTE program, adjusting eligibility standards so that the program would be geared toward people earning between 40 percent of Seattle’s median income for the smallest units to 90 percent—about $113,000 for a two-person household—for two-bedrooms.

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Updating the tax-break program has been fairly uncontroversial so far—somewhat surprisingly so, given some council members’ recent opposition to other proposals that would encourage new housing, such as density increases in the comprehensive plan, on the grounds that they aren’t tailored to very low-income people.

It may help that the council’s most vocal opponent of such measures, Cathy Moore, is off the council and no longer chairs the Housing and Human Services Committee, which discussed the legislation last week. During public comment at last week’s housing and human services committee, just one speaker vociferously opposed the proposed changes to the program: Longtime Phinney Ridge neighborhood activist Irene Wall, who argued that MFTE was “a failed program” that served too few people for the amount it costs homeowners like herself in additional taxes.

“The Office of Housing spent months trying to figure out what to do with this program,” Wall said. “They asked tenants if they like their rent reductions in their new buildings, but there was no outreach to any of the taxpayers who are funding this graft. Why are the taxpayers not considered equal stakeholders in this scheme?”

Overall, a median homeowner in Seattle spends $145 a year in property taxes to offset the taxes developers who participate in the program don’t pay in exchange for providing affordable housing.

Council President Sara Nelson, who has frequently beat the drum for more “workforce” housing, called MFTE “a program that’s extremely important because it it makes it easier to build housing across the board.”

The proposal would also replace a 4.5 percent annual cap on rent increases with the statewide rent cap (which doesn’t currently apply to MFTE buildings) of 7 percent plus inflation or 10 percent, whichever is smaller. Separate from the legislation, Office of Housing director Maiko Winkler-Chin told the council that OH is simplifying the income verification process for renters, which can require prospective tenants to fill out a lengthy, complex application for each MFTE unit they apply to rent.

“The city doesn’t have any program that supports workforce housing besides MFTE, really, for rental units,” Nelson said. “And that, I would say, is the greatest need because of the sheer numbers of people that fall within the category.”

The council, which is currently on its annual two-week summer recess, has until September 3 to propose amendments—for example, adjusting the maximum income levels so that higher-income renters are ineligible for the program—in advance of the next meeting to discuss the program on September 10.

housing

NPR Piece Criticizing South Park Development for Tree Removal Omitted Key Facts
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.

City Council, housing

Affordable Housing Providers are Losing Money and Selling Their Buildings. But is Eliminating Eviction Protections the Answer?
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.”

City Council, Density, homelessness, labor, Mayor Harrell, Transportation

This Week on PubliCola: May 4, 2024

A roundup of this week’s news.

Monday, April 29

Planning Commission: Harrell’s Growth Plan Will Worsen Inequities and Keep Housing Unaffordable

The Seattle Planning commission weighed in on Mayor Bruce Harrell’s proposed comprehensive plan update, which proposes a continuation of thepr “urban village” strategy developed to preserve single-family enclaves in the 1990s, calling it unrealistic and inadequate. ““In order to ensure everyone has a home they can afford in the neighborhood of their choice, we need to plan to increase, not reduce, our current rate of housing production” to allow “five to eight story multifamily housing in many more areas of the city,” the commission wrote.

Burien Moves Forward on Tiny House Village as Mayor Vilifies Police Chief for Not Enforcing Camping Ban

The city of Burien tentatively approved a zoning change that could help advance a long-planned tiny house village on property owned by Seattle City Light (see below, though, for an update). Meanwhile, Burien Mayor Kevin Schilling claimed the city is selectively paying the King County Sheriff’s Office for police service except for what they would owe the county for enforcing the city’s homeless ban—a claim the sheriff’s office couldn’t verify, since the city doesn’t owe them a payment until next month.

Tuesday, April 30

“I’m Losing My Temper”: Moore Accuses Morales of Calling Her Council Colleagues “Evil… Corporate Shills”

In comments that rattled some of her colleagues, Cathy Moore accused her fellow council member Tammy Morales of “vilifying” Moore and other council members in the media, saying she had called them “evil… corporate shills” who “don’t care about our fellow human beings” because they voted against an affordable-housing pilot Morales had been working on for years. Morales did express disappointment in the vote, but there is no evidence for Moore’s specific accusations. Moore also threatened to use council rules to silence Morales if she failed to be “civil.”

Labor Fizz: City Reduces Delay for Workers’ Retro Pay; Harrell Praises SPOG Contract for “Enhancing Accountability”

City workers learned this week that they’ll get retroactive pay increases in July, rather than October. Last month, the city told employees working under a new contract that the city would have to delay paying back wages because they’re implementing a new payroll system later this year. Also, Mayor Bruce Harrell released a tentative police contract that would make Seattle police the highest-paid in the region, boosting their starting pay, before overtime and bonuses, into six figures.

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Wednesday, May 1

Council Kills Morales’ Affordable Housing Bill, Arguing for More Process and Delay

The Seattle City Council voted 7-2 to kill legislation aimed at helping community organizations with “limited development experience” build small-scale affordable housing developments. Morales had been working on the program, called the “Connected Communities Pilot,” since 2022. Council members called the legislation premature, saying such proposals should get in line behind the 2024 housing levy and what will likely be the 2025 comprehensive plan.

Thursday, May 2

Officer Who Joked About Pedestrian Death Will Speak on Traffic Safety at Conference; Moore Calls for “More Vice Squads”

Daniel Auderer, the Seattle Police Officers Guild vice president who laughed and joked about a fellow officer’s killing of pedestrian Jaahnavi Kandula, will speak at a prestigious conference on traffic safety later this year. The conference program says Auderer will be representing SPD, although SPD denies this and says they aren’t paying for him to attend. And: At a meeting on public safety, Councilmember Cathy Moore said that in addition to bringing back an old prostitution loitering law, she wants to see “more vice squads” on Aurora Ave. N.

Friday, May 3

Harrell’s Transportation Levy Proposal Boosts Tax Measure to $1.45 Million, Front-Loads Sidewalk Construction

After advocacy groups expressed disappointment that the proposed transportation levy renewal backed off on bike, pedestrian, and transit projects, the mayor proposed a revised version that adds $100 million to the ballot measure and pushes sidewalk construction to the first four years of the eight-year levy proposal, which now heads to the city council for amendments.

Harrell Discusses Gig Worker Minimum Wage Repeal, Burien Restrictions Could Prohibit Tiny House Village

Remember what we said about Burien’s tiny house village vote? Well, it turns out the zoning legislation they’re considering on Monday will prohibit a proposed tiny house village unless the council amends it, because it restricts transitional housing to parcels much smaller than the one where the village is supposed to go. And: Will Harrell come out against Sara Nelson’s proposal to repeal the current minimum wage and labor protections for delivery drivers? Organized labor seems to be banking on it.

City Council, Density, housing

Council Kills Morales’ Affordable Housing Bill, Arguing for More Process and Delay

By Erica C. Barnett

The Seattle City Council voted 7-2 to kill legislation sponsored by Councilmember Tammy Morales aimed at helping community organizations with “limited development experience” build small-scale affordable housing developments and “equitable development” projects, such as health clinics, day care, and retail space.

Morales had been working on the program, called the “Connected Communities Pilot,” since 2022. The five-year pilot would have helped as many as 35 community organizations build larger, taller buildings, as long as they preserved a third of their rental units for people making 60 percent or less of the Seattle’s area median income (AMI), or built homeownership units for people making 100 percent of Seattle AMI or less.

It would have also allowed community groups to build apartments in areas of the city that have historically been reserved for single-family houses, and exempted certain projects in historically redlined areas from design review and parking minimums, two requirements that can add significant time and cost to projects.

The council’s land use committee, which Morales chairs, voted against her bill last week, citing vague concerns that the bill had been rushed and that there were more appropriate avenues for building affordable housing.

At Tuesday’s meeting, Morales’ new colleagues repeated those claims, suggesting that the city should instead provide affordable housing through the comprehensive plan, the housing levy, or some unspecified future legislative route.

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“After the comp plan process is finalized, we can determine if additional legislation is needed to achieve our housing goals,” Councilmember Maritza Rivera said on Tuesday. “In addition, the city just passed a nearly $1 billion [housing levy] and we do not yet know how these funds will be implemented. … Finally, given our housing shortage and the slowing down of recent development, we need to consider how to incentivize all development, rather than singling out some investments over others.”

In fact, as Morales pointed out, the city does know how the Housing Levy funds will be spent. And the comprehensive plan update is a set of policy guidelines, not legislation—the city can still pass housing legislation and incentives before finalizing the update, which might not happen until next year. “This is just another tool to help us meet our housing shortage, which we all acknowledge we have,” she said. Continue reading “Council Kills Morales’ Affordable Housing Bill, Arguing for More Process and Delay” →