Tag: comprehensive plan

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.

Density, Development, housing, Maybe Metropolis, Mayor Harrell, Uncategorized

Thank You, Seattle Mayor Jessica Bateman!

By Josh Feit

No, you’re not reading the headline incorrectly. If it wasn’t for state Rep. Bateman (D-22, Olympia), who passed pro-housing legislation last year mandating upzones statewide, it’s hard to imagine that Seattle’s actual mayor, Bruce Harrell, would have called for any new density at all in his recently released comprehensive plan update.

“I’m disappointed and underwhelmed with the plan Seattle put forward,” Rep. Bateman told PubliCola. “It barely goes above what new housing production would have been if they did nothing.”

Harrell’s Office of Planning and Community Development, which published the new draft comp plan last week, estimates it will lead to an additional 100,000 new homes in the next 20 years—about 12,000 homes less than the bare minimum Seattle needs to accommodate, according to King County projections.

“They missed the mark. They didn’t aim high enough,” said Bateman, whose legislation requires cities to allow at least four housing units on all residential lots, or six if two of the units are affordable. While Harrell’s “One Seattle” comp plan technically complies, it does so at a minimum with NIMBY caveats and with a proposal that only provides 20,000 more homes than the “no action” option, which assumes developers will build 80,000 new homes under existing zoning rules. Seattle’s own transportation plan, released just a few weeks before the comp plan update, predicts more than 250,000 new people will move here over the same time frame.

Every 10 years, cites statewide are required to update their local comprehensive plans—formal policy documents that govern growth in sync with the state’s sustainability goals.  With the mandate in play, Seattle housing advocates saw this year’s comp plan process as a beachhead for finally addressing the issue that defines Seattle’s affordable housing crisis—the housing shortage.

“Think big,” housing advocates from the social justice, business, environmental, and, labor communities urged OPCD in a joint statement last year. Current Seattle zoning prohibits dense development in roughly two-thirds of the city, its “residential zones,” limiting construction to stand-alone homes and attached or detached units. The advocates asked the city to allow four-story buildings in all residential areas, “remove density limits” in those areas, and eliminate minimum parking requirements citywide. Harrell’s comp plan update does none of those things.

Bateman had to make the density mandates in her bill modest because in order to pass at the state level, she needed to tailor the legislation for cities much smaller than Seattle; the bill’s minimum density applies in cities with populations “of at least 75,000,” or one-tenth Seattle’s size. Rather than capitalizing on Bateman’s starter bill and going with a Seattle-size strategy to create a housing-rich city, Harrell’s comp plan proposal goes small. While pledging to “ensure all neighborhoods are accessible to households with a diverse range of incomes and housing needs,” the proposal does not take the necessary steps to do so.

Besides doing the bare minimum to meet the state mandate, Harrell’s comp plan proposal also draws density away from traditionally single-family zones by regurgitating and re-branding the failed “urban village” zoning policy that helped create our housing shortage in the first place.

Per my New Year’s prediction, Harrell’s proposal undermined the state mandate with devil-in-the-details regulations that make building densely untenable. For starters, the proposal would keep total lot coverage locked at 50 percent, meaning that four or six units would now have to squeeze into the same area originally allotted to one house under Seattle’s old single-family zoning model.

Second, the plan sets the maximum floor-area ratio (FAR), a measure of density, lower than it needs to be to make four- and six-unit developments feasible on Seattle’s typical 5,000-square-foot residential lots. FAR is a ratio that determines how much a developer can build on a lot after taking other requirements, like minimum setbacks and lot coverage requirements, into account.

Seattle’s proposal caps this ratio at 0.9, which works out to a maximum of four 1,125-square-foot units or six 750-square-foot ones—far less, Bateman notes, than the State Department of Commerce’s recommendation for implementing her bill. These units are more likely to be stand-alone townhouses, rather than apartment buildings or “stacked flats,” an OPCD spokesperson told PubliCola, since “we don’t see that type of development occurring” now in areas where four- and six-unit buildings are allowed.

In other words, scrunching more units into a smaller envelope means the kind of projects the bill was supposed to legalize won’t pencil out—and so won’t get built. “If you can’t build fourplexes and sixplexes in the largest city in the state, it’s not a refection of the requirements of HB 1110,” Bateman said.

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Additionally, Bateman said, “We want to have three- or four- bedroom units available,” Bateman said—the kind of housing that would enable families to stay in Seattle. “The whole point was to make it legal to build these housing types.”

Besides doing the bare minimum to meet the state mandate, Harrell’s comp plan proposal also draws density away from traditionally single-family zones by regurgitating and re-branding the failed “urban village” zoning policy that helped create our housing shortage in the first place. Like that exclusionary strategy, Harrell’s plan cordons most new housing into existing commercial districts and along arterials. OPCD estimates that 71 percent of the 100,000 predicted new units) will go where they’ve always gone: Into the city’s densest areas, including “regional centers” (formerly: “urban centers”) and “urban centers” (formerly urban villages.)

The benefit of spreading density citywide, by the way, isn’t merely a matter of creating new opportunities for housing and giving lower-income residents access to more Seattle neighborhoods. It’s also a city planning best practice: Increased density is a prerequisite for an expanded, tentacular, and efficient transit system.

Unsurprisingly, Harrell’s plan falls short when it comes to transit-oriented development, a basic housing tenet that promotes sustainability by up-zoning areas around transit hubs to tie housing, employment, and retail to public transit. Yes, the draft proposal incorporates the long-planned light rail upzone around the future 130th St. station in north Seattle. But a new designation in the plan, “Neighborhood Centers,” is less dense than proposed statewide standards around heavily used bus stops, offering moderate (3- to 6-story) upzones within 800 feet, as opposed to the quarter-mile standard Rep. Julia Reed (D-36, Seattle) proposed in her own transit-oriented development bill this year.

Harrell’s provincial vision amounts to a historic missed opportunity. While we need to build six-plexes and apartment buildings citywide to accommodate our transition into a bona fide big city, Seattle is poised to perpetuate the housing crisis that has metastasized during the last 30 years under our existing, exclusionary zoning rules.

Josh@PubliCola.com

City Council, Crime, Density, Drugs, homelessness, housing, Mayor Harrell, Renters, State of Washington, zoning

Nine PubliCola Predictions for 2024

PubliCola columnist Josh Feit and PubliCola’s hoary original publisher (and Seattle Nice contrarian) Sandeep Kaushik are joining Erica here to kick off the year with some soothsaying.  Specifically tailored for PubliCola’s policy obsessed readership, these aren’t prognostications about 2024’s headlining concerns (like the threat of Trump II), but rather, as you’ve come to expect from the most in-depth local news site in Seattle, this is deep political wayfinding for the year in local politics ahead —The Editors

Sandeep Kaushik:

1. The Real Change, House Our Neighbors crowd announced just before Christmas they will put a measure on the Seattle ballot in 2024 to establish a permanent funding source for I-135, the social housing measure they passed in February. I will take the bait and predict that funding measure will fail.

I say this because I have yet to see any evidence House Our Neighbors has an actual, serious, and detailed proposal (you know, one that includes actual, vetted numbers) to build such mixed-income public housing in a way that is going to be operationally viable and fiscally self-sustaining (which was part of the original promise)—much less one that’s better than the well-established existing model for building affordable housing.

It’s one thing to ask voters to support a gauzily intersectional dream of a new, supposedly self-sustaining form of socialistic self-governing housing when there’s no price tag attached (57 percent of Seattle voters supported I-135), quite another when they’re asking for an endless stream of money before any proof of concept. It also doesn’t help that in developing I-135, its backers spent infinitely more time and thought on calibrating the mix of marginalized identities that are represented on the governing board than on an actual plan showing how this sort of housing would pencil.

Maybe House Our Neighbors will prove me wrong, and come forward in January with a viable proposal rather than just a leap-of-faith money ask. It’s quite possible that famously generous, progressively-inclined Seattle voters will pass the funding even if they don’t. And if that happens, maybe they’ll actually deliver on their dreams and promises. If so, fantastic! I would love to be proven wrong, and would be thrilled to see a new, viable, fiscally defensible model of public housing take root in Seattle. But I’m not holding my breath, and I going to predict that if they don’t have a real plan, Seattle voters won’t hand them a blank check.

2. The King County Regional Homelessness Authority (KCRHA) will die a whimpering death in 2024. It pains me to make this prediction. In theory, a regional approach to homelessness policy makes enormous sense. In practice, though, the promise of regionalizing our homelessness response has—at least so far–face planted.

When KCRHA’s CEO, the charismatic and energetic Mark Dones, came on board in April 2021, and when KCRHA’s signature Partnership for Zero initiative to end visible homeless downtown was announced in February 2022, I was one of the cheerleaders for this promising new model.

But it was all downhill from there.

It soon became apparent that KCRHA had deep problems that seriously curtailed its effectiveness. To begin with, suburban buy-in to the idea of handing off and consolidating homelessness efforts in the KCRHA was nominal at best. Moreover, KCRHA had no independent funding source, and instead relied on pass-through funding from the city and King County, and that funding model quickly became fraught when some of the policies Dones advocated (no sweeps, opposition to tiny homes) ran counter to what some of their funders wanted.

The region’s key agency for dealing with its most serious problem will remain largely rudderless for more than a year, as staff and talent continue to decamp for greener pastures.

The governing structure of KCRHA, with multiple boards and committees, turned out to be an unwieldy mess, and the powers that be made things much worse by ingraining some of the most chuckleheaded aspects of cultural progressivism—for example, the fixation on centering “lived experience” as opposed to, say, prioritizing actual experience running large organizations implementing complex policies—into that governance, leading to several high profile, avoidable scandals. Internal, back office operations were chaotic, and staff turnover high, leading to further credibility-sapping problems.

It all came to a head when Dones announced their resignation in May, and then when KCRHA admitted failure and threw in the towel on Partnership for Zero in September. A huge amount now rests on the search for a new CEO for the organization, and word on the street is there isn’t likely to be a hire for that critical position until the second half of 2024, if it even turns out that anyone with the requisite experience and skill sets wants the job. That means the region’s key agency for dealing with its most serious problem will remain largely rudderless for more than a year, as staff and talent continue to decamp for greener pastures.

Under that sort of slow death spiral circumstances, writing off KCRHA as a misfire—perhaps triggered by the CEO search producing underwhelming candidates—might be best option. Of course, pulling the plug would be a spectacular embarrassment, so maybe the powers that be will allow to KCRHA to limp along in some sort of awful twilight state for at least another year. But I’m going to go out on a limb and bet the end is in sight.

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3. The 2024 governor’s race will be the closest since Jay Inslee won his first term in 2012 by narrowly besting Republican Attorney General Rob McKenna, 51-48. First, Washington State voters are in a pretty sour mood, and Inslee, now exiting after his third term, has middling-to-underwhelming approval ratings. There was even a recent poll showing (relatively) moderate Republican Dave Reichert nipping presumed Democratic frontrunner Bob Ferguson in a head-to-head matchup.

To be clear, I don’t think it’s likely Reichert will actually win, given that he’s strongly anti-choice, but if he gets through the August primary —not at all a sure thing, since he faces a semi-serious challenger on the MAGA right in Semi Bird, and moderate Democrat Mark Mullet is also making a play to consolidate a cross-party middle coalition to leapfrog Reichert in the primary—he could (at least conceivably) make a race of it, particularly if Ferguson veers too far left. Anyway, if it is Reichert in the general, this is a race Democrats can’t take for granted the way they have the last couple of gubernatorial races, even if (as is also likely) Trump is the Republican presidential nominee this November.

Josh Feit:

1. Last year at this time, I predicted that after booting single-family-zone preservationist Rep. Gerry Pollet (D-46, North Seattle) from his powerful position as chair of the local government committee earlier that month, the new wave of young Democrats in the state legislature would finally be able to pass some Yes-in-My-Backyard legislation.

Here’s me on December 22, 2022 writing about Rep. Jessica Bateman’s (D-22, Olympia) plan to authorize fourplexes in residential areas anywhere detached single-family homes were allowed: “With much better odds of passing their bills intact out of [new chair] Rep. Strom Peterson’s (D-21, Everett) committee than under Pollet’s provincialism, pro-housing legislators could bring some necessary state governance to Seattle’s failed local policies.”

Bam, they passed it. I was actually a little surprised. Bateman’s legislation made it legal in places like density-phobic Seattle to build four units per lot in residential zones, six units per lot within a quarter-mile walking distance of a major transit stop; and six units per lot in residential zones if at least two units are affordable housing.

Unfortunately, that’s way too progressive for Seattle. So, here’s my prediction for 2024 as the city updates the document that governs local zoning policy, its Comprehensive Plan: The newly elected slow-growth city council (I’m thinking of Joy Hollingsworth, Bob Kettle, and Rob Saka joining incumbent anti-growther Sara Nelson, along with Mayor Harrell himself) will use the Comp Plan update as an opportunity for undermining urbanism. First, they will come up with rules to minimize lot coverage, require setbacks, and establish height limits, along with levying hefty affordable housing fees that will keep housing developers from building any apartments in Seattle’s touchy neighborhood residential zones.

There’s also a provision that anxious city lobbyists statewide forced into Bateman’s bill that allowed local governments to limit the upzones to 75 percent of single-family areas.  I can see Seattle’s anti-housing faction using that “neighborhood character” card to stall density in hand-picked neighborhoods as well.

2. Speaking of pro-housing bills going awry: Watch for an attempt by state legislators to re-do last year’s stalled Transit-Oriented Development bill—legislation that would upzone land around light rail stations and bus lines—to disappoint pro-housing urbanists this year.

With the original senate TOD champion, Sen. Marko Liias (D-21, Everett), deciding not to sponsor the bill this year—I’m guessing he was frustrated by the overemphasis on inclusionary zoning (mandatory affordable housing quotas) that House Democrats tried to work into the bill last year—anti-developer lefties like Rep. Julia Reed (D-36, Seattle) are now in control of the legislation. Count on minimal upzones near transit (say five stories as opposed to eight) and steep affordability requirements that will chill development.

TL;DR: The very thing the lefties say they want, lots of housing, won’t get built.

3. I’m going to be vague about this one, but here’s what I will say: Even though Mayor Bruce Harrell got the conservative council he wanted, look for new D-3 council member Joy Hollingsworth—who appears to share Harrell’s brand of homily populist politics (even more so than the others)—to begin clashing with him behind the scenes. By year’s end, her frustrations with Harrell will be evident at City Hall.

Erica C. Barnett: 

1. The pundit class (looking at you, Sandeep) may have convinced voters that a local law governing minor drug offenses, like using drugs in public, was the most critical issue in the 2023 election, when moderate candidates denounced lefties who opposed it. But 2024 will prove that the impact of the drug law will be minimal.

As we’ve reported, the city’s new law does not actually criminalize low-level drug offenses; the state legislature did that already, when it passed the so-called “Blake fix” earlier this year. Instead, it empowers City Attorney Ann Davison to prosecute people for using or possessing drugs in public; without the new law, only the King County Prosecutor’s Office could do so, and they have historically shown little interest in spending scarce county resources on these relatively minor offenses.

While Davison has reportedly been eager to prosecute drug users, the jail isn’t booking people on misdemeanor drug charges alone, making it hard for Seattle’s Republican city attorney to pursue this law-and-order approach to addiction. Meanwhile, as we predicted, putting drug offenders on the “diversion” track—which was supposed to appease progressives— has just meant that other people who would have received help through the city’s main diversion program, LEAD, are being displaced by people who get arrested first.

Seattle always rolls out supposedly transformative (but, in this case, totally unfunded) new initiatives with a big burst of energy, only to let them fizzle—remember “Operation New Day”?

It’s notable, too, that the city has done exactly one big, flashy event to show off its new authority to arrest people for using drugs in public, then send them immediately to LEAD, with no public follow-ups since October. The mainstream press dutifully reported on the event, noting that it resulted in ten people going to jail on outstanding felony warrants (my question: Given that SPD could have located, interrogated, and arrested this group for their serious offenses at any point, why didn’t they?) and 13 entering diversion.

The biggest reason you haven’t seen a spate of similar headlines about drug arrests leading to diversion since that initial push is that the city didn’t provide any additional funding for diversion; as we’ve reported, LEAD—which is no longer accepting community referrals, just referrals from arrests—will run out of money to accept new clients by May. A secondary reason is that Seattle always rolls out supposedly transformative (but, in this case, totally unfunded) new initiatives with a big burst of energy, only to let them fizzle—remember “Operation New Day”? We don’t either.

2. One area where the new council may throw its weight around is by reversing outgoing council members’ renter protection laws, including the $10 maximum late fee, 180-day notice for rent increases, bans on winter and school-year evictions, and the “first-in-time” law that requires landlords to rent to the first qualified applicant. As I reported this week, small landlords complained about the first-in-time law more than any other renter protection. The law, sponsored by outgoing Councilmember Lisa Herbold, was intended to help reduce the potential for landlords to discriminate against prospective tenants based on factors like race, gender, and sexual orientation.

Although most of the city’s renter protections passed before his term, Harrell opposed the $10 maximum late fee, allowing it to pass into law without his signature earlier this year.

3. We may be entering a newly cozy era of mayor-council relations (with Harrell’s picks triumphing in nearly every 2023 council race), but camaraderie alone won’t solve the structural problems facing the city: Fentanyl addiction, a city budget deficit of nearly $220 million, the city’s inability to hire police despite generous financial incentives and a homelessness crisis for which Seattle is on the hook, at least financially.

The candidates who won this year talked a lot about resetting the culture at City Hall, finding fat in the budget and cutting it, letting police know they’re valued and trusted, and using a carrot (diversion) and stick (arrest and jail) approach to the addiction crisis. But the problems these platitudes purport to address are structural, and don’t respond readily to legislation: Every dollar of “waste” in the budget has a constituency (want to cut back on permitting times? Good luck doing that and instituting a hiring freeze) and many of the issues councilmembers brought up during their campaigns are structural and even nationwide, like police hiring. It’s one thing to denounce people for supporting proposals to reduce police funding three years ago, and quite another to solve a nationwide lack of interest among young people in becoming cops.

homelessness, land use, Mayor Harrell, zoning

At Most, 11 Percent of Encampment Residents End Up Sheltered After Sweeps; City Could Bring Back Neighborhood Corner Stores

1. The city’s Unified Care Team, which removes homeless encampments and informs their displaced residents about open shelter beds, “extended a total of 1,830 offers of shelter” between July and September 2023, converting 587 of those offers into “referrals” to specific shelters, according to a report released earlier this month. Of those referrals, according to the report, only 209 people, or just over 11 percent of the people who received shelter “offers,” actually showed up at a shelter and stayed for at least one night. (This number, the report notes, could be a slight undercount due to incomplete data.)

This means that almost nine in ten people the UCT contacted prior to encampment sweeps did not end up in any form of shelter—a decline from the UCT’s previous report, which showed a 15 percent shelter enrollment rate. The UCT (which includes the Human Services Department’s team of outreach workers) does not make contact with everyone at an encampment, so the official numbers don’t include people who move elsewhere before a sweep or don’t engage with city workers for other reasons, such as a lack of outreach or because they know they don’t want to move into congregate shelter.

The city’s “One Seattle Homelessness Action Plan” website includes the UCT’s offer and referral numbers, but not the much lower number of people who actually ended up in shelter.

The numbers show some geographic differences, and includes some of the reasons people gave for declining the UCT’s offers of shelter. The highest shelter acceptance and enrollment rates were in Northwest Seattle, and the lowest were in West Seattle and the center city, which includes downtown and Capitol Hill. In West Seattle, just 4 percent of people who received shelter offers ended up going to shelter (largely because only 11 percent accepted these offers), while just 8 percent ended up in shelter in central Seattle. Mayor Bruce Harrell has focused a huge amount of attention on “reopening” downtown Seattle, which has included swiftly removing encampments or tents that pop up in the area.

When asked why they didn’t accept a shelter offer, most people told the UCT they didn’t want the specific bed they were being offered. Often, the data indicates, this was because they were only offered an “enhanced shelter bed”—a term that encompasses group shelters that are open 24 hours and offer services—rather than permanent housing or a spot in a tiny house village. Others said they wanted to stay with their partners, family members, or pets; didn’t want to relinquish the car or RV where they were living; or didn’t find the shelter location acceptable. The UCT does not offer transportation to shelter, which may be far away from the communities where unsheltered people live.

The UCT is required to produce quarterly reports on their work under a statement of legislative intent imposed by the City Council in 2022. The council imposed a similar requirement for next year as part of its 2024 budget.

2. As Josh reported in his column last week, Seattle doesn’t have a program to activate or site corner retail in residential areas—yet.

According to Office of Planning Construction and Development director Nathan Torgelson, OPCD is “considering allowing corner stores in [neighborhood residential] zones as part of the Comprehensive Plan Update process.” Torgelson is referring to the city’s Environmental Impact Statement Scoping Report, released last November, which outlined potential policy and zoning changes that should be studied in advance of considering alternatives for Seattle’s 2024 Comprehensive Plan update. The comp plan is a document that guides future growth across the city over a 20-year time span; the plan undergoes a “major” update every eight years.

On its final pages, the 29-page scoping document says that in order to “support City goals such as allowing more people to walk or bike to everyday needs,” the city could consider “Allowing more flexibility for commercial uses such as more retail on arterial streets, home businesses, and corner stores in certain areas” and “Combining the multifamily and mixed-use/commercial designations on the Comprehensive Plan’s Future Land Use Map categories to reflect that commercial space may be reasonable in a wider variety of areas.”

As we’ve reported, the release date for the EIS has been pushed back repeatedly, so there’s no word yet about any substantive corner store proposal.

As Josh noted, Spokane’s planning department identified 95 spaces, including in residential areas, that could be converted to retail. This fall, Vancouver, BC’s planning department surveyed the public in a proactive corner store push to “gather feedback on how residents feel about corner stores and potential opportunities for expanding uses, locations, and building types.”

—Erica C. Barnett, Josh Feit

Density, Development, Guest Contributor, housing

Ten Questions to Ask About the City’s Draft Comprehensive Plan Update
A satellite view shows a typical suburban-style north Seattle neighborhood, with one detached single-family home per lot.

By Andrew Grant Houston

It’s December 2023, and as a local architect and housing advocate, I—along with many  other Seattleites—have now been waiting more than eight months since the city’s initial April release date for the Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) on the Housing Element of Seattle’s Comprehensive Plan Update. 

The DEIS currently identifies five possible paths for Seattle’s growth over the next 20 years and how that growth—or lack thereof—will impact our urban and natural environment.

Although the Comprehensive Plan is a complete vision that includes a number of elements (as defined by the state’s Growth Management Act), typically the most contentious and complex of these elements is the Housing Element, which sets the upper limit for how many housing units Seattle will plan for in the next 20 years. This element, and the public engagement that will come with it, is a once-in-a-decade opportunity for Seattle residents to voice our views about whether that the number of homes in Seattle is sufficient or insufficient for us as well as future Seattleites, and to weigh in on where new homes should be added. 

The city of Seattle has delayed releasing the draft statement multiple times, which should tip you off as to just how critical the Housing Element update is. But if you aren’t the sort of person who spends their time either wishing Seattle looked more like Paris or hoping your neighborhood will be preserved in amber until the end of time, what are the questions you should be asking yourself as you attempt to engage with such an important topic? There are certainly a multitude, but here are my top 10.

Population Growth

In May, the Seattle Times reported that, according to census data, Seattle is the fastest-growing large city in the United States. How does this news change the proposed number of housing units in the EIS draft, given that people are moving here faster than new homes are being produced?

Planned Growth vs. Actual Growth

How does the housing allocation proposed in the previous Comprehensive Plan, compared to actual housing production since that time, influence the proposed number of units in the Draft EIS, given our current housing deficit?

Zoning Capacity vs. What is Actually Built

New buildings typically have a lifespan of 50 to 100 years, meaning that there are tracts of land that have been developed since the previous Comprehensive Plan that may see zoning changes but will not see any actual increases in housing over the next 20 years. Are these parcels included in calculations around achieving increased housing capacity as part of the Draft EIS, or are they excluded?

Mandatory Housing Affordability

How is the Mandatory Housing Affordability (MHA) program being factored into the number of proposed housing units, given that the Community Indicators Report (September 2020) released by the City’s Equitable Development Initiative identified a need for 68,000 “affordable” units at all income levels below 80 percent of Seattle’s area median income, as well as the latest numbers from the city on MHA showing that just 7 percent of all housing units created over the last year qualify as “affordable?”

Homelessness

King County’s Point in Time count showed an increase in unsheltered individuals in 2022 compared to 2020, from 11,751 to 13,368. How does this increase in unsheltered homelessness influence the types of housing allowed as part of the Comprehensive Plan, as well as the allowed uses across Seattle?

The Urban Village (UV) Strategy

The Seattle Planning Commission’s 2020 paper “Evolving Seattle’s Growth Strategy” noted that the current Urban Village strategy perpetuated inequities that have existed in Seattle land use patterns since the creation of the city. A focus on equality would allow more homes in all neighborhoods, whereas a focus on equity would allow more homes in areas where historic redlining prohibited people of color from living and neighborhoods that have seen little to no change in zoning since the implementation of the Urban Village strategy in 1994. Does the draft EIS address this and if so, how? 

The 15-Minute City

How does the concept of creating a “15-Minute City” influence where the city will allow commercial or non-residential uses in each neighborhood? How does this inform the minimum number of homes we will allow on every lot in Seattle?

Climate Refugees

In 2023, we’ve seen a massive increase in heat waves across the US and in other countries. Given Seattle’s relatively mild climate, as well as the city’s status as a sanctuary city, how does the potential increase in climate refugees over the next 20 years the plan covers influence the number of proposed housing units across the city?

Trees

What methodology is being used to ensure that the tree canopy across the city is preserved or increased while also taking into account reductions in the buildable area on individual lots that may be necessary to achieve this goal?

The Climate Future of South Park

At the beginning of this year, South Park experienced a king tide, which flooded the neighborhood. Given that climate change will increase instances of this kind of phenomenon, including rising sea levels, does the Comprehensive Plan consider any forms of managed retreat and the impact climate change will have on proposed housing and development capacity in South Park and around the Duwamish floodplain?

 

The questions I’ve outlined above may appear intimidating, but I share them because, just as an informed voter is the best kind of voter, an informed citizen is the best kind of citizen. Seattle must change the way we do business in order to become the city we all wish it was for every resident—a place where everyone can work, live, and play safely and in community together. 

But in order to get there we must first map the difficult road ahead. We must recognize that we are in a tumultuous time but that by working together we make overcoming the major issues our city faces that much easier for all of us. The Draft EIS must be the first plan for how we move forward, toward a Seattle for everyone. And if the city tries to turn away from this path, whether due to fear or a delusional sense of nostalgia, it’s up to us to collectively reject that false future.   

When the draft plan is released, I encourage everyone in Seattle to take just five minutes to make one comment on the plan. That comment can simply say “we need to be more ambitious in how many homes we’re planning for” or “we need to be honest about how many people want to live here.” The amount of good each comment could do for our city would mean a lot less time having to write op-eds like this and a lot more time spent out enjoying all the best aspects of what it means to live here. 

Andrew Grant Houston, also known as Ace the Architect, is the Founder and Head of Design of House Cosmopolitan, an architecture and urban design practice focused on celebrating culture and creating places where people belong. A former candidate for Mayor of Seattle in 2021, he also serves on the board of Futurewise.

City Council, Density, Development, housing

Council Holds Lone Public Hearing on Legislation to Allow “Impact Fees” on New Housing

By Erica C. Barnett

A public hearing to consider an amendment to the city’s comprehensive plan that would allow transportation impact fees on new development was bumped by more than two hours to make room for public comment on a resolution from outgoing councilmember Kshama Sawant demanding “an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, an end to U.S. funding for the Israeli military, the safe release of all hostages, the restoration of humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza, and an end to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands.”

After hours of public comment from Sawant’s supporters that included chants of “from the river to the sea,” the resolution failed for lack of a second, prompting a chorus of denunciations from the crowd and a brief recess to clear council chambers.

By the time the council returned about 10 minutes later, it was past 4 pm and tensions were high. Lisa Herbold, who sponsored the comprehensive plan proposal along with Alex Pedersen, teed up a presentation on the amendment by accusing her council colleagues of misrepresenting her legislation and confusing the public by raising questions about the fees themselves.

“I’m really frustrated that … when I ask questions, I’m being treated as if it is unreasonable. These questions are coming from community.”—Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda

Transportation impact fees are based on the number of units in a building, based on the premise the denser the development, the more of a negative “impact” it has on the city’s infrastructure, like roads and bridges—a assumption that conflicts the urbanist view that density is greener and more efficient than sprawl. The legislation Herbold and Pedersen are sponsoring would allow the council to adopt impact fees in the future, “identify deficiencies in the transportation system associated with new development,” and adopt a list of projects that could be funded through such fees.

“I can’t tell you how many emails we’ve received commenting on whether or not people want a transportation impact fee or oppose a transportation impact fee,” Herbold said. “There is no transportation impact the proposal before the council today. People have pointed to the questions about the potential transportation impact fee program as a reason to not support this amendment. … These are not questions for today.”

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Councilmembers Dan Strauss and Teresa Mosqueda disputed this characterization, noting that while amending the comprehensive plan to allow impact fees might technically be “procedural,” the only reason to pass such an amendment is to move impact fees forward—a longtime goal for both Herbold and Pedersen, who are leaving at the end of the year and won’t get another chance.

Ordinarily, amendments to the comprehensive plan—the document that guides all planning and land-use decisions in the city—go through the land use committee, which Strauss chairs, but the council voted last month to bypass the normal committee process and push the amendment through before the end of the year—all very much over Strauss’ objections. “This is a big piece of legislation,” he said last month, on par with the tree protection ordinance and changes to the city’s maritime industrial zoning. “I believe it is important that we have the time to understand the policy.

“It really upsets me to hear people say that this impacts the cost of affordable housing. We have not set a fee. … And I just really think that we’re doing a big disservice to the public by continuing to suggest that we’re making those decisions today.”—Councilmember Lisa Herbold

“I’m really frustrated that … when I ask questions, I’m being treated as if it is unreasonable,” said Mosqueda, who submitted 20 questions about the proposal back in September and said she is still waiting on responses to most of them. “These questions are coming from community. These questions are coming from people who are very interested in [ensuring] that there’s no impediment to building housing. These questions and concerns are essential for us to address and should have been addressed in a committee setting, not in the middle of budget” season, a time when the council ordinarily does not consider major legislation.

“It really upsets me to hear people say that this impacts the cost of affordable housing,” Herbold retorted. “We have not set a fee. … And I just really think that we’re doing a big disservice to the public by continuing to suggest that we’re making those decisions today.”

According to a presentation by council staff in September, the fees could add millions of dollars to the cost to build new housing and “generate between $200 million – $760 million over 10 years.” The housing developers and attorneys who stuck around to testify against the legislation (their comments limited to one minute each because it was so late in the day) said impact fees could make some of their recent projects prohibitively expensive.

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“I feel like I’m in an alternate reality when I hear a council member saying that this is not a policy change, when the comprehensive plan is actually the city’s main policy-setting document,” said McCullough Hill attorney Jessica Clawson.  “Make no mistake—you’re setting policy, and again, I have never seen the council rush to make such an important policy decision—ever.”

The council will take up the proposal again next week, and is expected to vote on the amendment on November 21. It will then be up to the next city council—including a group of newcomers that does not include a single outspoken proponent for density or renters—to take action on impact fees, and to decide how much to penalize developers for building new apartments in a city with an acute housing shortage.