Tag: Cathy Moore

City Council, housing

Cathy Moore: City Isn’t “Listening” to Homeowners Who Want to Keep Their Neighborhood the Same
Aerial shot of Maple Leaf Community Center, courtesy City of Seattle

By Erica C. Barnett

City Councilmember Cathy Moore complained bitterly last week over the fact that—despite her frequent demands and a Change.org petition with more than 1,500 signatures—the Maple Leaf Neighborhood Center will remain in the mayor’s proposed update to the city’s comprehensive plan.

The designation would allow moderate density—3-to-6-story apartments— in an eight-and-a-half-block area directly adjacent to an existing commercial center. Despite its diminutive size, Moore has characterized the proposed center as a death knell for the area, saying she was not willing to “sacrifice my neighborhood” to allow rental housing in the area. (Moore lives elsewhere).

Moore spoke for ten minutes straight at last week’s meeting, at times seeming near tears as she described what she characterized as an  abandonment and betrayal of her district by the city’s Office of Planning and Community Development.”

“I just remain incredibly disappointed,” Moore began. “I remain incredibly disappointed that the tremendous amount of public feedback that was given to OPCD was not really taken fully into consideration. And I would take issue with the characterization that you really listen to everybody.”

Moore went on to describe all the dense housing, including affordable housing, that’s going up along busy streets and next to light rail—”a tremendous amount of growth”—saying that this type of housing is “fantastic” and “supported by everybody” currently living in the district. Maple Leaf, she said, was an exception, “the only [neighborhood] in which there has been strong, vocal, consistent opposition.”

Boundaries of the proposed Maple Leaf Neighborhood Center

What about the neighborhood’s drainage capacity, transit access, the traffic all those new apartments would cause? Why hadn’t the city “walk[ed] the district” with residents who opposed allowing more people to live in the area?

“You’re not listening,” Moore said, “and  I don’t understand, why is it? Is it because somebody is trying to put the screws to the council member for [District] 5 with some ideological position? … There has been an absolute hardcore resistance to this.”

At the very least, Moore continued, OPCD should “walk the damn neighborhood center with us and explain to the 1,400-plus people [who signed the online petition] why you’re unwilling to reconsider the boundaries, why you’re unwilling to look at other places that might be more appropriate and actually have people walking to the light rail that is so vital to our community.”

Michael Hubner, the mild-mannered OPCD planning manager who typically does the presentations at the council’s comp plan committee meetings, pointed out gently that the department has, in fact, done multiple walks with residents through every neighborhood center, including Maple Leaf, while mayoral staff Krista Valles pointed out that sometimes city departments make decisions individual council members don’t like. “It’s not that we haven’t been listening. We’ve just arrived at a different conclusion,” Valles said.

In other words: A legislator may really, really want something to happen, but sometimes they just don’t get their way.

Moore’s anti-apartment diatribe, which came during her first public appearance after announcing her resignation last week, was another example, among many, of her obvious frustration with how the legislative process works—even when something seems obvious to her, she doesn’t always get her way.

The version of the comprehensive plan the council is considering is much more modest than the proposals most of the current council including said they supported on the campaign trail in 2023, with half as many neighborhood centers and much more modest density increases than the preliminary alternatives OPCD floated that year.

Last year, the city’s Planning Commission declared that an earlier version of the plan would worsen inequities in the city and fail to address Seattle’s affordable housing crisis because it didn’t allow enough rental housing in enough areas. Advocates for housing, including many renters, have been saying the same thing about the comprehensive plan for years now. Moore has never demonstrated much of an interest in listening to them.

City Council, Density, Opinion, The C Is for Crank

Cathy Moore’s Opinions on Growth and Housing Aren’t New. What’s New is That Most Voters Disagree With Them.

By Erica C. Barnett

On Wednesday, City Councilmember Cathy Moore lashed out at members of the public who she said attacked her personally over her support for legislation (which Ryan Packer covered in detail at the Urbanist) that would have required Sound Transit to create bespoke Community Outreach Plans for every light rail-related project that requires the city to approve a master use permit, about 60 projects in all. The original proposal, sponsored by Maritza Rivera, would have added more process, delay, and cost to the already delayed, over-budget light rail expansion to Ballard and West Seattle.

Moore—whose comments I quoted at length in yesterday’s post about the latest episode of the Seattle Nice podcast, and which you can view above—said people were directing “hate” and “personal attacks” at her over the legislation. She spoke at length about her long record of public service, suggesting that her critics were unfairly maligning someone who has “dedicated 30-plus years to improving the lives of people who don’t have a voice and have chosen to put myself out here,for all this love that I get every day.” Prior to her 2023 election, Moore served in many different judicial roles, including five years as a King County Superior Court judge.

It’s true that Moore didn’t get much love from the public for supporting proposals that would slow down or prevent housing from being built, and that hundreds of people mobilized to write emails to Moore and other councilmembers urging them to vote against the amendment.

Ultimately, the legislation—a bill from the mayor’s office that was actually supposed to speed up permitting for light rail-related projects in the city—moved out of the council’s land use committee without the red-tape amendment—not because the public was mean to council members, but because it didn’t have majority support. Instead, the committee considered and passed an unpublished walk-on amendment from Rivera that requires Sound Transit to produce a report about its public outreach for each project that requires a permit.

One thing that was striking about Moore’s comments yesterday, and comments she’s made about other hot topics like tree preservation requirements and proposals to allow more apartments in her district, is that she isn’t proposing anything new. Rather, she’s calling for a return to policies that the council and mayor generally supported 20 years ago. But those policies are no longer in step with the majority in Seattle, which is why most of them have failed to pass. This is how democracy is supposed to work. The fact that people are calling Moore a NIMBY—for “not in my backyard”—reflects dramatic changes in public opinion about housing in recent decades. NIMBY isn’t a slur—it’s a description.

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Having covered City Hall in the old NIMBY days—back when councilmembers openly used terms like “protecting neighborhood character” and neighborhood activists denigrated renters as “transients” who had no right to comment on land use or housing—I can tell you that pro-housing advocates used to be pariahs at city hall. (Hell, I remember being called a “clueless little twit” by a West Seattle homeowner because I argued that renters deserved a voice at City Hall). The very idea that we should allow duplexes, much less apartments, in single-family areas would get you shouted down by homeowners furious that renters thought they had any right to encroach on the sanctified character of “their” neighborhoods. Think of the shadows those huge new three-story buildings would cast on their tomato plants!

Things have changed; public opinion in Seattle has shifted. The views of people who bought their houses for five-figure sums in the ’60s and ’70s are no longer massively overrepresented on the city council. Even as a body made up overwhelmingly of homeowners (the job pays well enough that renters who join the council can usually buy at least a condo, and do), the council now represents renters’ perspectives better than it ever has in the past, and that trend is unlikely to reverse.

Bottom line: We’re a bigger city now than we were in the old “lesser Seattle” days, and the people who live here—Moore’s constituents—generally want to do away with “not in my backyard” policies, including red tape and design review requirements that slow down and prevent housing and transit. Moore wouldn’t have gotten much pushback for her views if she’d been on the council in 2001, but in 2025, she represents a minority perspective, and she’s facing inevitable criticism for policy proposals that are broadly unpopular.

I empathize with the pain Moore is clearly feeling as the result of public opposition; being attacked and called names is unpleasant and can be very upsetting. But the fact is, calling someone a NIMBY isn’t an expression of “hate.” It’s just a description of a once-dominant perspective that most of the Seattle public no longer holds.

City Council, Elections

Cathy Moore Will Step Down After a Year and a Half On Council

By Erica C. Barnett

City Councilmember Cathy Moore will resign her position on July 7 after representing North Seattle’s District 5 for a year and a half. PubliCola exclusively reported the news on Bluesky on Monday after confirming with multiple people familiar with Moore’s decision.

Moore did not respond to our request for comment. She gave an interview to KOMO, the station that produced the infamous civic snuff film “Seattle Is Dying.”

Although Moore cited unspecified health concerns in a late-afternoon press release, the sources we spoke to said Moore is fed up with the job, which involved listening to sometimes harsh public pushback from constituents who disagreed with her legislative priorities.

Most recently, Moore faced criticism of her proposal to amend the city’s ethics code to allow city council members to shape and vote on legislation that presents a financial conflict of interest. That opposition included not just chants and shouts from former councilmember Kshama Sawant and members of her organization, Workers Strike Back, but emails and public comments fromhundreds of individual Seattle residents who opposed the proposed rollback of the council’s ethical standards.

The legislation, which Moore withdrew last week, was widely seen as an effort to allow the council’s two landlords, Mark Solomon and Maritza Rivera, to vote on upcoming legislation, also from Moore, to roll back eviction protections passed by the previous council. Last week, Solomon told PubliCola he was a “no” vote on Moore’s legislation, after voting for the bill in committee.

Moore’s distaste for the kind of public pushback that’s part of the job she ran for was evident from the very start of her term. In February 2024, when the council was still busy patting itself on the back for their camaraderie and commitment to Mayor Bruce Harrell’s “One Seattle Agenda,” Moore demanded that police arrest a group of demonstrators who were protesting outside council chambers, claiming they posed a “physical threat to the safety of each one of us. “Arrest those individuals,” Moore told police, adding that this kind of protest was “not to be tolerated.”

After that initial salvo, Moore would frequently object to the way people voiced their opposition to legislation, suggesting that it represented a new kind of incivility toward council members from a small segment of the public. In fact, Seattle has a long tradition of rowdy protest against council actions, going at least back to the Teen Dance Ordinance, when a dance-based protest led Margaret Pageler (the Cathy Moore of her day) to chase one of her constituents around the room at a public meeting.

Moore’s departure will almost certain mean the end of the road for her ethics rollback bill, which faced an uncertain future already.

It could also mean the end of her proposal to roll back eviction protections.

Moore’s legislation, according to sources familiar with its text, would have repealed the winter and school-year eviction moratoriums; overturned a law allowing tenants to add new roommates without prior approval; revised the process for landlords to file three-day eviction notices; and eliminated the requirement that landlords offer tenants the opportunity to renew their lease when it expired, among other rollbacks.

Moore passed little legislation during an impact during her brief time on council. Her biggest legislative achievement was passing a law that re-criminalized so-called “prostitution loitering” (targeting sex buyers instead of sex workers) and reinstated a “Stay Out of Prostitution Area” zone along the length of Aurora Avenue North. She also directed funding originally intended for groups that work with former sex workers on Aurora to The More We Love, a group started by a Kirkland real estate broker named Kristine Moreland that began as a for-profit company offering private encampment “sweeps” in Burien.

Moore was less successful in her efforts to revise the city’s comprehensive plan, the document that determines how much new housing can be built in Seattle and where, to make it harder to build apartments in her district and around the city. Moore attempted repeatedly to water down legislation to implement House Bill 1110, the bill that requires the city to allow at least four housing units on every residential lot—first suggesting that every privately constructed fourplex should have to include affordable housing, a proposal that would have ensured that no such housing got built, then proposing an amendment to require 20-foot yards in front of every new low-density development.

The comprehensive plan has been pushed into next year, and the bill to allow fourplexes passed without Moore’s amendment.

Moore also didn’t manage to amend the city’s tree code to make it harder for property owners to remove trees they own, a priority she brought up often during discussions about development.

Nor did she pass a capital gains tax as part of last year’s budget, or bring the idea up again in the six months since then.

She did manage to throw a wrench in plans to relocate Tent City 4, a sanctioned encampment, within her district; instead of staying a year at the Lake City Community Center as previously planned, Tent City 4 will have to move elsewhere within one to six months.

Once Moore leaves on July 7, the council will have 20 days to appoint a replacement—a process that has become familiar to this council, which previously appointed Tanya Woo to replace Teresa Mosqueda and Mark Solomon to replace Tammy Morales, who resigned after what she described as relentless bullying by her fellow council members at the beginning of 2025. Whoever gets the appointment will serve until November 2026, when there will be another election to determine who represents District 5.

Calling around on Monday about potential candidates, we learned that a number of previous contenders and progressive who live in the district are not interested in the job. One person who just might be, though, is Housing Development Consortium Patience Malaba—who gave a polite no comment when we asked if she was interested in running for the position.

City Council

At Ethics Meeting, Moore Says Changing Ethics Code Will Improve Representation and “Transparency”
Kate Rubin from Be:Seattle testifies before the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission.

By Erica C. Barnett

In advance of today’s meeting to discuss legislation to weaken conflict-of-interest rules for the City Council, the Seattle Ethics Elections Commission met Wednesday afternoon to discuss the implications the changes will have, if they pass.

The proposal, by Councilmember Cathy Moore, would eliminate a requirement in the city’s ethics code that council members recuse themselves from voting on matters in which they have a personal financial interest. Instead, council members—alone among all city officials—could simply disclose that they have a financial conflict before voting.

The change, if it passes, will go into effect just as the council is getting ready to vote on another piece of legislation from Moore that would roll back or alter tenant protections passed by the previous city council, including moratoria on winter and school-year evictions, a maximum $10 fee for late rent, and changes to the so-called “roommate law,” which allows tenants to take on new roommates as long as they go through a screening process after moving in (the law also allows any immediate family member, including people a tenant is dating or has dated in the past, to move in without any screening.)

The vote is likely to be contentious. Two councilmembers, Mark Solomon and Maritza Rivera, own rental propery and could be disqualified from voting under the current rules.

A dozen public commenters, including many who crowded into the small Seattle Municipal Tower conference room where the commission meets, spoke out against the proposal. Several mentioned that this was the first time they had ever offered public comment on any subject.

“For the past 45 years, elected officials in Seattle have been required to recuse themselves from votes involving financial conflicts of interest,” Kate Rubin, the co-director of Be:Seattle, said. “Voters elected this council with the understanding that those rules would still apply. Changing them mid term is a clear violation of the public’s trust. Disclosure is not accountability.”

Commissioner Zach Pekelis said he was concerned that the latest draft of Moore’s legislation differs from the one the commission considered back in March, a modified recusal bill that said that a financial conflict was not a conflict “if the prohibited financial interest is no greater or less than that of other members of the same profession, occupation, class, or group affected by the legislative matter.” That legislation also effectively replaced the recusal requirement with simple disclosure.

Moore, who attended the meeting virtually, said the reason she proposed eliminating the recusal requirement was “so that people who were elected to represent particular voices that are sometimes a minority in the city are not disenfranchised” by having to abstain from issues where they have a financial conflict of interest. (This caused many of the public commenters in the room to scoff loudly).

“I just want to be clear,” Moore continued, “that I, too, share the concerns that [elected officials] should not be there for personal gain, but we also have to balance that with making sure that all voices are heard and people are not disenfranchised.”

Moore struggled, she said, to address this “disenfranchisement” issue in her legislation, and ultimately decided to go with a “full disclosure” model (which she argued could increase “the amount of sunshine and transparency”) instead of requiring council members to abstain when legislation would help or harm them financially. Moore added that if the legislation passes, the council will count on the public to keep them honest.

“As seen here today, we have very proactive, active voices in the city who have no compunction, nor should they, about holding their elected officials accountable.”

The council’s governance committee will take up Moore’s proposal at 2:00 Thursday afternoon. On Wednesday afternoon, Councilmember Dan Strauss issued a statement in his newsletter opposing the changes. “We are just over 100 days into the Trump administration,” Strauss wrote. “We are seeing in real time what happens when our elected officials are not held to the highest ethical standard. As people in power continue to cross ethical red line after red line, now is not the time for the Seattle City Council to roll back its ethics laws.”

Responding to similar complaints at Wednesday’s meeting, Moore said, “Yeah, we have to be aware of what’s happening at a federal level. But in some ways, the greatest way to continue to have trust in local government is for local government to be effective, for local government to be able to actually solve problems.”

City Council, Renters

The Most Common Reason for Past City Council Recusals: Owning Rental Property

By Erica C. Barnett

As the city council considers eliminating the requirement that council members recuse themselves from matters in which they have a financial interest—a change that would, at the very least, eliminate pressure for landlords Maritza Rivera and Mark Solomon to sit out an upcoming vote to roll back laws that help tenants avoid eviction—we took a look back at the other times city council members have recused themselves in the past.

Currently, the city’s ethics code requires all city employees, including city council members, to recuse themselves from taking action on anything that would present a financial conflict. (The code also requires employees to disclose other potential conflicts to the head of the city’s Ethics and Elections Commission).

As we’ve reported, it has been extremely rare for city council members to recuse themselves because of financial conflicts in the past; looking through a list of past “disqualifications” maintained by the City clerk, we found nine potential examples of such recusals between 2001 and 2025. (The numbers are not exact because, in some cases, the disclosure form explaining the reasons for the recusal was not available online).

In addition to those recusals, there were dozens of examples in which council members sat out votes because they had a direct interest (such as when a council member was getting an appointment and didn’t want to vote for himself or herself) or when the interest was direct but not financial, such as several instances in which then-councilmember Bruce Harrell sat out votes that would benefit the University of Washington because his wife Joanne was on the school’s Board of Trustees.

What’s interesting about the council’s past financial conflicts—and is directly relevant to the timing of the proposal to loosen the city’s ethical standards for council members—is that most of them involved legislation that would benefit or harm council members directly because of property they owned, including rental properties.

If the ethics changes, sponsored by Councilmember Cathy Moore, pass quickly, Solomon and Rivera will be under no official obligation to abstain on legislation Moore plans to introduce in the next few weeks that would alter the city’s landlord-tenant rules.

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According to multiple sources familiar with internal deliberations on the plan, Moore’s bill would eliminate the winter and school-year eviction moratoria, raise the minimum fee for late rent from $10 to $50, and repeal a law requiring landlords to allow renters to add new roommates to their lease without asking permission first.

Landlords and property owners on the city council haven’t always recused themselves from voting for (or against) their own interests. But they also have done so, with some regularity. In 2013 and 2018, for example, then-councilmember Sally Bagshaw sat out votes establishing new taxes for property owners near the waterfront and downtown, respectively, citing the fact that she lives in the area and would have to pay both taxes (which were approved).

Harrell and former councilmember Mike O’Brien recused themselves from multiple votes on the Rental Registration and Inspection Ordinance (RRIO), which requires landlords to register their rentals with the city and allow regular inspections, because they were both landlords at the time (according to campaign finance reports, Harrell no longer owns any rental property.)

Jan Drago, who lived in Pioneer Square, also recused herself from legislation that allowed more density in her neighborhood. (This was in the era before district elections, which pretty much sent that sort of recusal out the window.)

And Jean Godden and Tom Rasmussen recused themselves from voting on a deal with Triad Development that was supposed to build a 650,000-square-foot office and residential tower in the hole in the ground across from City Hall (stop by that block sometime if you want to know how that project went), although public records and media coverage from the time don’t indicate why (and I don’t remember.)

And, of course, Tanya Woo (very reluctantly) recused herself from a vote on legislation that would have lowered the minimum wage for “gig” delivery workers, because she and her husband own a restaurant. Woo’s family also owns an apartment building that provides affordable housing under a tax-credit program.

In those cases, council members’ recusals didn’t affect the vote. But they could in the case of Moore’s rental housing legislation, which faces stiff opposition from tenant advocates (add tenants themselves). If the new law was in place now, Rivera and Solomon (who own a single rental apartment each and earn between $0 and $29,999 a year from rental income, according to their campaign finance reports), would only have to disclose their conflicts, rather than determining with Ethics and Elections whether they’re conflicted out. Without their votes, the legislation would face a tougher path to passage.

The city also keeps records of city officials’ conflict-of-inflict disclosures, which include everything from personal or family relationships (as when Harrell appointed his niece, Monisha Harrell, as senior deputy mayor) to business ownership (Council President Sara Nelson disclosed her ownership stake in Fremont Brewing, but did not recuse herself, during a vote on the city’s maritime-industrial land use policy.)

Most of these documents are straightforward descriptions of a potential appearance of conflict. One, though, is the exact opposite: A defensive letter from Rob Saka, who added $1.5 million to last year’s budget to turf the field where his kids play, and Saka coaches, Little League.

Saka began his “disclosure” by noting that he was only making it because he recently “became aware of certain criticism from a member of the public that there was an alleged appearance of a conflict of interest” in his budget add.

Saka goes on to cite “numerous calls for more turf playfields from members of the public” and an “extensive consultation process” that just happened to conclude that the field where Saka coaches his kids was the best candidate for a new turf field. Also last year, Saka set aside $2 million to remove a road divider that prevented drivers from making a left turn across a double yellow line into the preschool his kids attended, which he compared to Trump’s border wall.

City Council, Density, housing, land use

Cathy Moore Wants to Make it More Expensive to Build Middle Housing

By Erica C. Barnett

In a recent meeting of the Seattle City Council’s special committee on the comprehensive plan, Councilmember Cathy Moore laid out her case for imposing fees on new housing in the city’s traditional single-family areas, where—under a state law passed two years ago, HB 1110—the city is required to allow up to four units on each lot (or six within a quarter-mile of frequent transit stops or when two of the units are affordable.)

The council is gearing up to adopt “interim” zoning changes to comply with HB 1110, which Seattle must do by June; ordinarily, the city would have adopted the new rules as part of the city’s overall comprehensive plan update, but Mayor Bruce Harrell introduced his legislation far behind schedule, leaving the council with little time to consider the plan.

A half-dozen homeowner groups have appealed the plan, arguing that specific new “neighborhood centers”—commercial areas near transit where the proposed plan would allow apartment building—will harm the character of their historically single-family areas.

Simultaneously, the city is considering changes to its Mandatory Housing Affordability (MHA) legislation that would expand MHA to the new neighborhood centers, adding 21 percent to the area of the city that’s subject to MHA, while continuing to exempt the new “neighborhood residential” zones—the new name for the city’s former single-family areas—from the fees.

Moore’s objections boiled down to two main points. First, she argued against the concept of neighborhood centers, noting that the city is already increasing the amount of housing that can be built “throughout the city,” by allowing up to four units on every single-family lot. (Moore specifically opposes a new neighborhood center in Maple Leaf, which she argued would amount to “sacrificing” the entire neighborhood to density.)

Second, and more vociferously, she argued that the city should impose Mandatory Housing Affordability (MHA) requirements on all new housing in former single-family areas, effectively mandating that developers build or fund the construction of at least one affordable unit for every three to five market-rate units they build.

MHA, which has been in place since 2019, allows developers to build more housing in certain parts of the city; in exchange, they agree to build affordable housing on site or pay the city’s Office of Housing, which funds housing elsewhere. The size of the fee varies depending on where in the city the new housing is located, and by how much of a height bonus developers receive. As housing construction slows, so do MHA revenues; currently, the City Budget Office projects that MHA will bring in $22 million in both 2025 and 2026, down from $68 million in 2022 and $59 million in 2023.

“We’re going to open up the city to tremendous development and density, which is good, but we need to make sure that we’re utilizing all our tools,” Moore said, “and MHA is a powerful tool. It can be tweaked, but to simply say it shouldn’t apply across the board, I think, is a missed opportunity. And again, it’s a calibration of, what are the costs that we consider valuable in this society?”

Representatives from the mayor’s office, the Office of Planning and Community Development, and two consultants that looked at the impact of the MHA program on housing in Seattle, BERK and Heartland pointed to 2024 BERK/Heartland study showing that developers of low-rise housing—the townhouses, fourplexes, and other low-density housing types that will be allowed in single-family zones under 1110—opted to build these units outside MHA areas because the additional height bonus didn’t benefit low-rise developers enough to make up for the large fees they would have to pay to build in those areas.

A separate study, from ECONorthwest, showed that “middle housing” developments are extremely sensitive to cost increases, falling off dramatically as the cost to develop each unit increases. That same study found that middle housing is currently feasible in only 19 percent of the proposed new neighborhood residential (former single-family areas), and most of those won’t be redeveloped; imposing new fees on new housing in those areas would make it far less likely that developers would choose to build new housing there.

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OPCD planning manager Geoff Wentlandt noted that by adding new neighborhood centers to the city’s zoning maps, the city will be increasing the areas of the city subject to MHA requirements by 21 percent. But imposing MHA fees on small developments in former single-family areas, Wentlandt said, would reduce the amount developers would make on projects below levels that most developers would be willing to accept. “We really want to prioritize seeing the production of middle housing in the new neighborhood residential zones. Everyone agrees that middle housing is a high priority, and want to make sure it comes to fruition,” Wentlandt said.

Moore pushed back on this, arguing that developers should be willing to accept lower profit margins in exchange for the ability to build in new areas. “My understanding is, in the past, when they were building, they expected 15 to 20 percent return on investment, and they’re still seeking those kinds of high level [returns],” Moore said.

“If you talk to some of the smaller for-profit developers… they’re not looking to make more than 10 percent return on investment. And so things do actually pencil out. When we talk about penciling out, are we talking about we’re penciling out at 15 percent profit, or are we talking about penciling out at 10 percent profit? Nobody’s really answered that question, what does it truly mean to pencil?”

Moore also suggested that OPCD was arguing that “six dollars”—the difference between a typical $22-per-square-foot MHA fee when the program was introduced and the $28 it costs today—is making it so that projects don’t pencil out. “I think we need a policy discussion about whether we think $6 to ensure that we continue to have affordable housing in the city is a cost that we think is appropriate for our developers to absorb and reduce their return on investment a little bit,” Moore said. “I guess I’m unconvinced that the $6 is really, across the board, going to be the thing that prevents affordable housing.” (The $6 change reflects an annual inflation adjustment, not an increase in real terms.)

Christa Valles, a senior advisor in the mayor’s office, pushed back on this, saying, “I would just like to be really clear we do not consider our position on this as backing away from MHA. …  This is a really difficult environment right now for housing development, and we want to make sure that the infill that we hope to see under HB 1110 has the support that it needs to happen.”

According to the BERK study, the MHA fee itself makes up a small percentage of overall development costs; but, as costs for other elements of development increase, the fee can be a deciding factor in whether a project gets built. In real dollars, building four 1,250-square-foot units would add $140,000 to the cost to develop a property, using the current $28 “typical” fee. Even if a developer decided it was worth it to pay an extra $140,000 to build those four units, the fee would get passed on to future renters or buyers, making the housing less affordable.

Moore also suggested “carving out an exemption” to MHA requirements “for people, families, who are wanting to develop their lot,” as opposed to developers building the same type of housing for new residents.

Implementing the changes Moore suggested—that is, eliminating at least some neighborhood centers and imposing fees on all new development in the city’s traditional single-family neighborhoods—would make it far more expensive, less feasible, and less likely that middle housing would be built in neighborhoods across Seattle. Developers would reasonably opt out of building in places where they would make less money, choosing either not to build in Seattle or to concentrate new housing in areas where it has always been allowed—along large, busy arterial roads where Seattle’s renter majority is currently concentrated.