Tag: housing

Development, housing

After Protesters Block Street and Occupy Building Site, Dubiously Named “Grandma Brooks’ Cedar” Comes Down
A crew member removes limbs from the tree late Monday morning.

By Erica C. Barnett

Between 20 and 25 protesters blocked a tree service company that was trying to reach a construction site in the Ravenna neighborhood on Monday morning, where residents and activists from outside the area have been protesting the removal of a western red cedar since earlier this month. About 10 police officers came out later to remove protesters from the development site, arresting at least one who refused to leave. PhotogSteve81, on Instagram, captured the chaotic scene.

The tree stood on the corner of a lot where a builder, Ashworth Homes, plans to replace a single-family house with four new townhomes—and where Barbara Brooks, the former owner, lived for more than 70 years until she died three years ago at the age of 101.

Although Tree Action Seattle claimed, on its action page for “Grandma Brooks’ Cedar” (later changed to “Grandma’s Cedar”) that Brooks “cherished” and lovingly cared for the tree, Brooks’ daughters said the opposite was true—in fact, they said, their mother “hated” the tree because it shed constantly and was so work to maintain.

The sisters, Barbara and Beverly, said no one in the neighborhood offered to pitch in as their mother, and later Beverly, struggled to keep the roof, sidewalk, and gutters clear of debris from the tree. “My mom would cut back the branches and clean it up just constantly,” Barbara recalled. “We didn’t have a lot of money growing up. Mom always said, ‘If I could afford to get rid of this tree, I would.'”

Although Tree Action and others have suggested that the property developer promised the Brooks family they would keep the tree, both the developer and the builder who bought the property say that wasn’t true. Roque de Herrera, a representative for property developer Legacy Group Capital, said “there were no conversations, promises made, or agreements regarding the tree” when Legacy signed on as the site developer. Erich Armbruster, the president of Ashworth Homes, said no one brought up the tree at any point during the sale.

By 11:00 on Monday morning, the truck the protesters blocked earlier had made its way onto the property, and a crew member was busy limbing the tree from a bucket two stories above the ground. Despite the wind and rain, a handful of people watched from across the street as a pile of branches accumulated on the ground and a swirl of sawdust spun through the air.

One, Lynnwood horticulturist Gabriel Kearns, walked across the street periodically to film the workers and yell at them for removing the tree. She said her biggest issue was that developers were killing healthy trees to build “million-dollar crap” and creating “mini-deserts,” with dead soil and no shade, in the city. Gesturing at an apartment building next to the property, she said, “Those apartments are going to be 100 degrees this summer—they will not have shade. … Trees provide a livable community.”

Kearns said she wanted to see Seattle tighten its tree code to make it more difficult to remove trees, perhaps by imposing a waiting period between when developers remove a tree and when they can begin development.

Another person didn’t want to be quoted but told me they heard I was being paid by developers.

Michelle Tanco, who lives nearby and spent part of the previous night at the protest, told me she has no problem with new housing—”we really need new houses”—but was sad to see the tree cut down. “I spend a lot of time walking up and down with my kids, learning the names of the local trees, and this was the first one one my kids learned—western red cedar,” she said.

Standing with her was Kim Butler, who lives about a mile away. She said that when she heard the tree was going to be removed, she reached out to Armbruster to see if he would agree to keep the tree if advocates could come up with a different site plan that would keep it in place without reducing the value of the final development. As PubliCola reported yesterday, the site plan proposed by Tree Action would have substantially reduced the size of one unit and eliminated two garage parking spaces, lowering the value of the site plan to less than Armbruster paid for it.

“He said he was willing to work with me… to consider keeping the tree, but he couldn’t have it interfering with his development timeline and he couldn’t have any additional expense, so it had to be net neutral,” Butler said. “We were getting there, but it wasn’t ever going to be fast enough—it just wasn’t going to happen.”

Armbruster, who was standing on the site across the street from Butler on Monday, said that even though Butler and other advocates weren’t able to come up with a workable alternative site plan on extremely short notice, he found Butler “a little different” than most of the people who have protested his project, because “she asked a question—’What would it take? Help me understand this from your perspective.'”

Butler said that even though her efforts didn’t save the tree, her conversations with Armbruster gave her hope that the new development, which will include six new on-site trees and one new street tree, will be better. “That’s what I’m doing to honor this tree,” she said. “This line of communication that opened up is integral to having a better process in the future.”

Tanco said one thing she learned during the protests is that the most effective way to ensure trees don’t get cut down is for the property owner to place a protective covenant on the property. (Covenants are a tough sell because they generally lower a property’s resale value.) “This brought a lot of neighbors together,” Tanco said. “It’s good to know more community members, so we can come together and look at other trees in the neighborhood, and reach out to the people who own them to see what they want to do and help them with that process.”

podcasts

Seattle Nice: Your Questions Answered!
It will never fail to make me laugh that the city uses this example—a Seattle coffee shop that is NOT ON A CORNER—to illustrate its new leniency toward corner stores, which the comprehensive plan will only allow on literal corner lots.

By Erica C. Barnett

This week on Seattle Nice, we solicited questions from listeners for a mailbag edition of the podcast. (If we didn’t answer your question or you sent one in too late for this episode, don’t worry, we’ll do it again!)

A surprising number of listeners had questions about the ongoing comprehensive plan process, which will determine how much new housing the city allows and where. People wanted to know what the plan is for, whether it can be changed in the future if and when the city council gets more pro-housing members, and what’s currently happening with the plan, which the city has allowed to fall many months behind schedule.

The questions are timely, because the city has already failed to hit several deadlines for completing the plan, and as a result is currently rushing the latest proposal through with less time for public input than usual for such an important, city-shaping document.

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And there’s plenty to critique about the plan, especially if you’re an urbanist—someone who supports more housing options in all parts of the city for people at every income level, including the renters who make up more than half Seattle’s population.

Even after amendments made in response to pushback from pro-housing advocates, Mayor Bruce Harrell’s comprehensive plan proposal continues to embrace the city’s longstanding policy of segregating most renters onto dirty, traffic-clogged arterial roads, while just barely complying with a new state requirement to allow up to four units (such as four freestanding townhouses) on every residential lot.

The new plan calls for 30 new “neighborhood centers”—areas directly adjacent to major intersections and high-traffic transit stops where the plan will allow new housing. Already, anti-housing advocates in Seattle’s traditional single-family-only neighborhoods are pushing to eliminate some of these centers, and they could find a receptive audience on the city council, where District 3 Councilmember Joy Hollingsworth will oversee the process as the new chair of the council’s land use committee. (She’ll replace Tammy Morales, who resigned).

We also discussed next year’s elections, answering questions about why Council President Sara Nelson is widely considered vulnerable to a challenge from the left while Mayor Bruce Harrell isn’t. We also answered a reader’s question about the “wildest” city stories of the year before discussing our local-politics wishes for 2025.

Density, Development, Equity, housing, Mayor Harrell

Planning Commission: Harrell’s Growth Plan Will Worsen Inequities and Keep Housing Unaffordable
Diagram by Matt Hutchins, from Planning Commission letter

By Erica C. Barnett

The city’s Planning Commission, which advises the mayor and City Council on policies related to Seattle’s growth, sent a point-by-point critique of Mayor Bruce Harrell’s proposed 20-year Comprehensive Plan Update to Harrell and Office of Planning and Community Development (OPCD) director Rico Quirondongo last week, echoing many of the issues PubliCola has identified with the status-quo proposal.

As we’ve reported, OPCD originally proposed a plan that would have included significantly more density throughout the city than the anemic version Harrell ultimately introduced, along with an “anti-displacement framework” that deleted dozens of proposals aimed at addressing ongoing harms caused by city policies, like zoning and development rules that prohibit most housing in single-family neighborhoods.

“The [Anti-Displacement] Framework, as drafted, is a list of what the City is already doing to address displacement, yet displacement has already impacted many people and continues to happen,” the commission wrote.

By failing to provide enough housing of all types, especially apartments, in more parts of the city, Harrell’s proposal perpetuates the existing “urban village” strategy, which preserves most of the city for single-family homeowners while concentrating apartments on major arterials and highways. “Upholding this pattern of economic and racial exclusion will do little to reduce disparities in housing affordability, access, and choice,” the commission wrote.

Instead of remedying the existing housing shortage and planning for continued growth in the future, the proposal assumes housing growth will slow down dramatically over the next 20 years, from about 8,000 units a year to just 5,000.

“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.” Specifically, the commission recommends expanding “neighborhood centers”—small, isolated where Harrell’s plan would allow three-t0-five-story apartment buildings—to include high-end neighborhoods like Laurelhurst and Seward Park, and allowing higher-density housing further away from “high-volume, high-speed” arterials, so that renters could more easily access amenities like “large parks and quiet streets for recreation” that single-family homeowners enjoy.

“The current housing market locks the most affordable homes, multifamily apartment buildings, into small areas of the city that are often along noisy and polluting major highway corridors or in areas that historically faced disinvestment,” the commissioners wrote. “If the City continues to concentrate affordable housing types like multifamily apartments in the same areas of the city, these long-term patterns of inequity will not change.”

While Harrell’s proposal technically complies with state law by allowing four housing units on all residential lots, the city envisions these units as tall, narrow townhouses, not apartments or “stacked flats,” which are generally more affordable (and accessible to people who can’t climb multiple flights of stairs.) Increasing density in formerly exclusive single-family neighborhoods to allow  small apartment buildings would make it more likely that people with modest incomes could live in these units, the commissioners wrote.

In addition to growth, the comprehensive plan includes strategies related to transportation and parking; these, too, fail to acknowledge 21st-century reality, the Planning Commission argues. Like Harrell’s back-to-office mandate for city of Seattle workers, the plan “overemphasizes centralized employment in Downtown and other Regional Centers,” despite the fact that “daily life and commuting patterns have shifted significantly with many more daily needs being met closer to home.” Acknowledging this reality would mean allowing more neighborhood businesses (not just corner stores on literal corners) and “incorporat[ing] flexibility into land use policies associated with residential and commercial uses,” the commission wrote.

As PubliCola reported, Harrell’s office deleted an OPCD recommendation to get rid of minimum parking requirements throughout the city, a decision the commission recommended reversing “to reduce housing costs and encourage alternative transportation modes.” In addition, the commissioners noted, Harrell’s plan focuses on private vehicle electrification to reduce greenhouse gas emissions—a future in which Teslas, rather than gas-fueled vehicles, clog city streets every morning and afternoon. With Seattle already “leading its peer cities in the number of cars owned per capita,” the commission argued, the city should focus on reducing vehicle trips by investing in alternatives to driving. 

It isn’t too late to weigh in on Harrell’s vision for growth, housing, and transportation in Seattle, but the deadline is approaching. The city will hold its final in-person open house on the comprehensive plan from 6 to 7:30 pm on Tuesday, April 30, at McClure Middle School on Queen Anne, followed by a virtual open house starting at 6:00 on Thursday, May 2. The public has until 5 pm on Monday, May 6, to submit comments on the proposal.

Arts, Economy, land use, Maybe Metropolis, neighborhoods

Maybe Metropolis: Seven Must Dos for Seattle’s Recovery

Public right-of-way isn’t just for cars anymore.

by Josh Feit

In a recent opinion column for the Seattle Times, Seattle Metro Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Rachel Smith and Downtown Seattle Association President and CEO Jon Scholes published “7 ‘must dos’ for downtown Seattle’s recovery,” a prescription for renewing downtown after the pandemic. Their list is premised on the idea that, “Every great city has a great downtown. Downtowns are the heartbeat of a region.” In other words, downtowns make the city go.

I like a lit-up downtown as much as anyone, but their column represents pre-pandemic thinking. The focus on “saving downtown” that’s emerging right now (most recently as a nascent local campaign issue) is a revamped version of a bygone Seattle policy agenda dressed up as urbanism; while it appears to be about bright lights and big cities, following this fussy narrative will simply drag us right back to where we’ve always been stuck: In a mindset that promotes suburban seclusion within the city itself.

There are certainly some important ideas on Smith and Scholes’ list, especially their calls for a robust transit system and for keeping shovels in motion on major infrastructure projects (which repeats the mass transit shoutout). Additionally, two of their seven agenda items, which I see as intertwined—activating public space and making it easier for entrepreneurs to set up shop—are also smart.

But these concepts are more urgent and relevant in the rest of the city; promoting them as downtown ideas runs the risk of reiterating and re-instituting a false dichotomy that has set Seattle off course for decades: The old-fashioned idea that downtown, not the rest of the city, is the only place for growth and energy.

The post-pandemic focus for making Seattle vital again should be on harnessing the new neighborhood energy—not sending it back downtown.

What we’ve actually learned during the past year not spending much time downtown is this: neighborhoods are the magic quadrants of cities. I don’t mean this in the trite, anti-downtown tribalist way of the old neighborhood movement, which saw every public-private partnership as some elitist conspiracy to crush the Wedgwood Community Council and rob the city of its authenticity. What I mean—as I’ve documented before—is that the past year has energized business districts outside the city center and alerted us to a new Seattle model. The post-pandemic focus for making Seattle vital again should be on harnessing the new neighborhood energy—not sending it back downtown.

Our past strategy of channeling city action to core neighborhoods such as downtown and Capitol Hill has prevented density in other sectors of the city, which has led to a housing shortage, and thus untenable housing prices. It also makes for dull neighborhoods.

The good news is: There are signs we’re moving in a new direction. Talk of sticking with outdoor street dining is already afoot. And just look at one of the key items on the DSA/Chamber list: “Completion of major infrastructure projects.” This item (unwittingly?) pinpoints where the real focus already is and should be.

Their first example? Light rail expansion. Well, light rail already exists downtown. The bulk of the expansion is coming to the non-downtown neighborhoods. Starting this year, that means the University District, Roosevelt, and Northgate. In 2023, that means Judkins Park (perhaps the most underrated and overlooked transformative capital project in the city!) After that, it means four stations from SoDo out to West Seattle and nine stations from the International District out to Ballard.

Continue reading “Maybe Metropolis: Seven Must Dos for Seattle’s Recovery” →

Affordability, housing, Sightline

Nonprofit Housing Providers Struggle to Pay Bills In COVID Crisis

This is an excerpt from a piece that originally appeared at Sightline.org, where you can read the entire story.

It’s the first of May. As another rent day arrives, tenants aren’t the only ones seeking relief from the financial fallout of COVID-19, which has led to widespread job loss in nearly every economic sector, and the highest unemployment rate since the Great Depression.

Cascadian affordable housing providers that receive funding through the federal Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) program, which helps to fund about 90 percent of all new affordable housing in the US, have also been hit hard by the crisis. Nonprofit providers of subsidized housing for low- and moderate-income wage earners report unpaid rent rates of 20 percent or more, a shortfall that has left many struggling to balance their books.

“Our delinquency rate shot way up, and we are now accepting partial payment for rent and doing some payment plans,” said Sharon Lee, the director of the Low Income Housing Institute, which serves communities throughout the Seattle metro area and in Olympia, Washington. “We’re working with tenants and doing partial payment plans for people who’ve recently become unemployed.”

In Oregon, about half the tenants in buildings owned by REACH Community Development earn income from wages. Anthony Petchel, REACH’s philanthropy and public relations director, says about 10 percent of their tenants had asked for rent forbearance as of late April, but he expected that number to go up as people continue to weather the economic collapse. “[The issue] is having the cash to manage the cash flow disruption” from missed rents, and “how long can all the organizations manage that,” Petchel says.

Daniel Delfino, the program and planning development director for the Alaska Housing Finance Corporation, said that once the 60-day rent and mortgage freeze ordered by Gov. Mike Dunleavy ends, there are few protections for struggling tenants or for nonprofit housing owners with mortgages to pay.

Currently, nonprofit landlords are working out arrangements with tenants on a “case by case basis,” he said, but with more than 40,000 Alaskans unemployed, it’s unclear when or whether rent payments will get back to normal. “There are usually reserves that are put in place to handle four to six months of operating expenses and debt payments. Those aren’t set up to handle something like COVID-19, when the economic occupancy”—the percentage of people who pay their rent—”goes down from 93 percent to 40 percent.”

Enterprise Community Partners, a national low-income housing advocacy and funding group, estimates that a 10 percent income loss among renters could add up to $238 million per month in losses to groups like these that run LIHTC-funded buildings across the US. That’s based on an average loss of $792 in monthly rent from the three million tenants in LIHTC buildings that Enterprise estimates could miss rent payments if they don’t get assistance.

Susan Boyd, the executive director of Seattle nonprofit provider Bellwether Housing, said wage earners had a delinquency rate of about 21 percent as of mid-April, up from 2 to 3 percent in a typical month, as “about 30 percent of the people who were wage earners have lost all or a part of their income.” Likewise, Chris Persons, the director of Seattle’s Capitol Hill Housing, said April rents are falling about 22 percent short.

It’s easy to see why. With a patchy social safety net, hourly wage earners were already on the precipice of financial disaster before a nationwide economic shutdown led to mass unemployment.

A full-time worker making minimum wage in Oregon earns just over $23,000 a year; in Washington, that number is just over $28,000. According to the Urban Institute, the median income for US renters in low-income tax credit buildings was $17,470 before COVID, and about four in ten of these renters spent more than 30 percent of their income on housing.

In King County, which includes Seattle, about 77,000 people making less than $40,000 a year had lost their jobs as of April 16; in Multnomah County, which includes Portland, about 38,000 low-income jobs had vanished. The pandemic puts the US housing crisis on steroids. Low-income renters often live paycheck to paycheck, and if they lose their jobs they simply can’t pay rent. The eviction moratoriums enacted in many jurisdictions throughout the US only grant a reprieve.

Even organizations whose revenues don’t rely primarily on renter incomes—groups like Plymouth Housing and the Downtown Emergency Service Center in Seattle, whose tenants pay their rents using federal vouchers and stable income sources like Social Security Insurance (SSI)—are struggling.

“We rely a lot on local dollars, most of which come from specific local taxes and fees like the [state] document recording fee for housing and homelessness, and of course those could go down if real estate transactions slow down, which seems likely,” DESC director Daniel Malone said. “And as local government taxation goes down, there certainly could be some squeeze on what they choose to fund and what they choose to cut.”

On April 21, Seattle’s City Budget Office released a worst-case revenue forecast that predicts a 2020 funding shortfall of up to $300 million, with some of the biggest revenue losses coming from the construction, retail, and food service sectors. In Portland, a smaller city, the shortfall could be as much as $100 million.

Read the entire story here.

homelessness, housing, human services

City Auditor: Homelessness Contracts Awarded “Properly,” but Delays, High Turnover, and Inappropriate Metrics Remain Issues

The city auditor issued a report last week on the city’s Homelessness Strategy and Investment division, which concluded that while HSI is awarding contracts to homeless service providers “properly, HSD is not executing contracts in a timely manner.” Because the city is awarding budgeted contracts late, providers are being forced to use their own funds to cover services during these delays.

“We reviewed a sample of 29 contracts and found that all of them were signed late,” the report says. “Ten contracts were executed over 50 calendar days late and three were six months late. This resulted in some service providers not being able to invoice the City for program expenses[.] …We reviewed a sample of 29 contracts and found that all of them were signed late. Ten contracts were executed over 50 calendar days late and three were six months late. This resulted in some service providers not being able to invoice the City for program expenses and needing to use other funding sources to keep programs in operation.”

(The Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion program, which is considered a homelessness program despite the fact that it focuses on criminal recidivism and quality of life outcomes, not housing, finally received city approval for its 2020 contract in late March).

A big reason for the delays, according to the auditor’s report, is that most contracts start on January 1, which gives the city’s grants and contracts administrators only a few weeks after the budget is adopted in November to execute these contracts. Another issue is that turnover among the grants and contracts specialists who are in charge of monitoring contract compliance is extremely high—30 percent in the first half of 2019, according to the audit—and new hires are being trained by their coworkers instead of through any formal training program. In his response to the audit report, acting HSD director Jason Johnson, who has announced he will leave in June, said HSD has hired temporary workers to help grants and contracts specialists who are “working beyond their capacity.” These are among the workers who are being trained on the job by their peers.

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As I reported last year, the Human Services Department dismantled its formal contracts compliance unit and directed contract specialists in each division to have “a high level of individual accountability” to catch errors in contracts. HSD set up the unit in 2014 after a scathing state audit found that the HSD lacked “adequate controls” to monitor how contracts were being written as well as how human service providers were spending grant money.

The city auditor did not report on specific errors that had escaped contract reviewers’ attention, but did note that many large contracts were being reviewed through “desk reviews” that do not involve on-site visits, meetings with program staff, or reviews of client files.

The auditor also highlighted an issue homeless advocates have been pointing out since before the city implemented “performance-based contracting,” which allows the city to withhold funding from providers if they fail to meet certain milestones: Requiring homeless service providers to produce a high number of “exits to permanent housing” in order to get full funding is unrealistic in a city that is not building enough of this type of housing to serve the need, and ignores other types of success stories that do not involve, say, a person leaving emergency shelter and moving directly into permanent housing.

For example, the city’s performance metrics penalize programs that move clients into “foster care, nursing homes, hospitals, domestic violence shelters, and transitional housing and transitional living programs for youth” by counting those as “negative” rather than positive exits from the programs. In its response to this criticism, included in the audit, HSD said that it chose exits to permanent housing as a performance metric “because the goal of the homeless response system is to end an individual’s experience of homelessness and HSD is committed to ensuring investments work towards this goal”—a response that ignores the fact that the city’s homeless population far outnumbers the number of units that are available to house it.

Additionally, the audit found that the fact that the city has no way of tracking how many shelter beds are available in real time “creates inefficiencies for overworked shelter staff” who are forced to call around to other shelters when clients show up at shelters that are full. And it concluded that the current system for tracking client’s “vulnerability,” which puts some people on track for housing while leaving others in limbo indefinitely, exacerbates the existing racial inequities in the homeless service system, particularly for undocumented people.