Here in our wonderful, walkable Wallingford, we’re neighbors. Some of us have been in Seattle, or in Wallingford, for decades. Some of us have recently moved here for a job, or for school, or seeking an opportunity not available in our home town. We own our homes, after saving for years. We’re renters, because we like the freedom, or because we can’t afford to buy. We have kids at home. We’re single. We’re empty nesters. We represent diverse identities and backgrounds. We work as teachers, software developers, deli clerks, lawyers, artists, architects, postal carriers, advocates. We are Seattle.
Our city has long shown leadership in progressive values and economic innovation, and we continue to break new ground in progressive policy—raising the minimum wage to the highest in the country, guaranteeing every worker sick leave, voting through one of the largest transit expansions of the modern era.
And yet….
We’ve got a housing affordability crisis.
Our neighbors across Seattle are struggling to make ends meet as housing costs rise. Many are being pushed out of their homes by rising rents and into under-resourced suburbs, often far from their jobs. Seattle’s communities of color and our low-income neighbors are disproportionately burdened by displacement and economic exclusion, and the loss of long-term residents poses a critical threat to many communities. In five years, rents increased 43% while homelessness increased 73%. The bottom third of wage earners spends 50% of their income on rent. Sales prices of homes in Seattle have increased by 63% in the last five years, and 118% in the last fifteen years. In Wallingford, homes sales prices saw a 21.7% increase over the last year. Houses that aren’t even livable sell for $700,000! (Just look at this location: fire-damaged and long-abandoned.) Some of us—those of us fortunate enough to have purchased houses years ago—have seen a significant increase in our home equity. But others of us—those renting, those looking to buy, our children—are not so lucky.
This is why we—those of us signed below—generally support the goals and methods of the Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda (HALA) and Seattle 2035. We respectfully disagree with the Wallingford Community Council’s conclusions. We understand that changes to height and density in our urban villages, including Wallingford, make many of our neighbors nervous. While a watchful eye is warranted, we do not want fear of change to overwhelm our values of inclusiveness, sustainability, and progressive innovation. And we want to join with the rest of the city to address this crisis.
HALA is not any one solution: It is a breadth of 65 recommendations identified by a 28-member advisory committee representing a diverse range of interests. (Check the full list of participants here.) It represents one of the most progressive efforts in the country to address housing affordability and avoid the fate of San Francisco. Some recommendations are straightforward, while others reflect political compromise and legal constraints. More work is needed, but the goals of HALA and Seattle 2035—including housing affordability, equitable development, livable and walkable neighborhoods, and environmental sustainability—are critical to our future, and likely shared by our neighbors.
If we in Wallingford say “NO” to the core strategies of this affordability effort while offering no better alternative, what will we say “YES” to in order to achieve these goals? Can we engage to improve, rather than squash, the proposed strategies?
As we walk around Wallingford, and the rest of Seattle, we see duplexes and triplexes, corner stores and small apartments—all of which are excluded by Seattle’s single-family zoning. Our neighborhoods would be impoverished if previous generations had insisted that only stand-alone houses, one family per lot, were allowed. Neighborhoods with a mixture of housing options and types of development make for more diverse, affordable, and livable cities.
We worry about our kids, and our neighbors’ kids. We work to secure funding for their schools, to build parks they play in, to save for their college. But when they grow up and leave our homes, where will they live? Can they afford to become artists or teachers, work for environmental justice or own a small business, and still live in their hometown? Our millennial children earn 20% less than boomers did at the same age. In Seattle, it takes twice the median income to afford to buy a home at the median price. Is it fair, let alone just, to expect that our restaurant cooks, baristas, shop clerks, and nurses must commute long distances to work in Seattle because they cannot afford to live here?
Yes, Seattle is changing, because that is what successful and vibrant cities do. Thriving cities also make space for the breadth of humanity, welcoming both the artist and the CEO; the barista and the billionaire.
We want to create a Welcoming Wallingford, one that affirms inclusivity and works toward affordability; and yes, that will require that we make space for new neighbors.
- We know the status quo cannot deliver us affordability or long-term livability. We don’t accept that solutions lie only elsewhere in our city.
- We recognize that homogeneity—of income, race, education, or employment—makes for an anemic and unjust city. We recognize that homogeneity of housing options impoverishes our city.
- We agree that in a rapidly changing climate, urbanism and transit are part of the solution. We need to reduce the need to drive alone and the scarce real estate devoted to parking.
- We don’t want “can afford to live here” to stand in the way of “being able to work here” in one of the most prosperous cities in the nation. We wish to welcome everyone who contributes to our community to also share in our livability and prosperity.
Welcoming Wallingford
- Paul Chapman, Seattle resident since 1988, Wallingford homeowner since 1998
- Mark Foltz, Wallingford homeowner since 2008
- Bryan Kirschner and Holly Ferguson, Seattle residents since 1996, Wallingford homeowners since 2003
- Michael and Julie Mayer, Seattle residents since 2001, Wallingford homeowners for over a decade
- Rick Mohler, Seattle single family homeowner since 1986, Wallingford property owner since 1991, Wallingford single family/ADU homeowner since 2004
- Doug Trumm, Seattle resident and Wallingford renter since 2014
- Jessica W., Seattle resident for 10 years, Wallingford renter, volunteer with Seattle Tilth and KEXP
- Tim Gould, Seattle resident since 2000, Wallingford renter, UW staff member and volunteer environmental advocate
- Kevin Kane and Jake Weber, Seattle single family homeowners since 1984, small business owner in Wallingford/Fremont for 20 years and director of local non-profit
- Clare Breidenich and Carson Lemmen, Wallingford homeowners since 2008
- Tiare Mathison, Wallingford renter
- Jeffrey Linn, Wallingford homeowner since 2003
- Ben Anderson, Seattle resident since 2007, Wallingford homeowner since 2013
- Erin Sterling, Seattle resident since 2007, Wallingford resident since 2013
Paul and supporters:
Thank You. I have felt much as you do and have struggled with my feelings around HALA, my neighborhood’s fight against it, and the WCC.
Wallingfordians (Wallingfordites?):
This is a complex issue, and I urge everyone to read this article and follow the links.
It is time for you to consider your opinions and ideas about community, diversity, tolerance, sacrifice, commitment, and participation.
Oh look, Paul wants us to join his new “Welcoming Wallingford” club! I guess those of us who aren’t members are part of the “UNwelcoming Wallingford” club? And btw, Paul, at Hamilton on the 17th, you were merrily marking all over the HALA map places outside the Urban Village you’d like to see upzoned as well. And yet, you didn’t make any marks anywhere near where YOU live, just a few short blocks away from the UV boundary. That doesn’t seem very “welcoming” and “inclusive,” Paul. Are your new members aware you’re a closet NIMBY?
And tell me, how welcoming has HALA been to us and other neighborhood supporters? Were we winvited to the table when they hashed out the Grand Bargain with developers and urbanist activists? And how about that “diverse range of interests” you mentioned on the 28-member HALA advisory committee? I see lots of developers on it, as well as some familiar names from urbanist foundations. How many neighborhood reps were invited to have a seat on the committee?
The truth is, Wallingford is ALREADY a very welcoming neighborhood. Many of us have gotten to know each other not just as neighbors, but a friends, and we don’t care what background you come from. You yourself have even come to WCC meetings. Furthermore, you mention the “loss of long-term residents.” My elderly neighbor Dave, whose probably lived here than any of us, sold his home last year BECAUSE of the density he sees already happening. We went to his goodbye party and were sad to see him go. But his home has since been moved into by a new family, and we and other neighbors have been very happy to welcome them and socialize with them, just like we’ve welcomed many others here. And btw, I noticed Bryan is one of your signers. In all our years of having our neighborhood night out block party, I’ve never once seen him there. Any neighbor is more than welcome to go to these events, but it’s hard to feel welcome if you don’t make an effort, hmmm?
And when you say about our kids that “We work to secure funding for their schools, to build parks they play in,” why won’t you push for developers to pay impact fees, as they do in most other cities? Especially when we don’t even have the proper infrastructure for the current population? It seems to me that would be part of the solution.
And we have engaged to offer other solutions. Jeff Lindstrom for example, has some good ones, and I think there’s room for compromise on the ADU/DADU issue as well. But when the city tries to exclude our voices on HALA, I would argue it’s not our responsibility to come up with a solution for you. The onus is on you and the HALA team. If HALA fails, whether due to too much pushback, or because of lawsuits from developers, you have none to blame but yourselves.
Framing those who have problems with poorly planned development as “Unwelcoming” is misrepresenting those who oppose HALA, and the valid problems they have with some of it’s features.
All of us want the same thing, affordability and diversity, but HALA doesn’t get us there, it only creates higher apartment buildings and destroys what is so good about current neighborhoods.
If the city and those in favor of density were serious about their motivations, they’d use the following “carrot” instead of the HALA “Stick” approach:
1. Create tax incentives for homeowners in single family zoned properties to create ADU’s and DADU’s. Instead of the giveaways to big developers, give these incentives to homeowners!
2. Create 8-10 standard ADU and DADU designs which homeowners can chose from, which are inexpensive to build, and would have streamlined permitting in the city. Don’t make it complicated like it is now.
3. Create low interest loan programs so that homeowners can get easy access to the capital needed to build these affordable units
4. Make the homeowner who gets the low interest and streamlined process agree to set rent at a certain level for affordability
Sign me up for that! Can you IMAGINE how many affordable units we would get as a result! AND, these new developments would fit in neatly into EXISTING neighborhoods, providing a WAY better “Livability” factor than putting people in 4-5 story apartment buildings.
Now THAT’S WELCOMING, to BOTH current homeowners, AND to lower income families who’d likely rather live in a neighborhood setting, than an urban concrete jungle.
Unfortunately it seems that HALA is designed to create REVENUE to the city because of the massive development it creates, and gives the benefits to Developers, instead of homeowners. Let’s turn that model on it’s head Seattle.
Again, use the Carrot instead of the Stick, and you’ll have community buy in, and better results as well.
Honestly, the people who stand to win the biggest as part of any upzone are current landowners. There are many developers, all bidding on the limited land. So the financial winners here are small number of homeowners who are getting upzoned, and the much larger number of property owners along the commercial corridors whose land value will go up dramatically.
I’d also add that the planning for this development is happening now! The city is highly engaged with the neighbourhoods on this planning – I just went to the U-District PLUZ committee (planning, land use and zoning) and was very impressed with the changes being made, driven by the U-District students, residents, workers and business owners. We should be just as engaged. We just need to be rational in terms of recognizing that affordability and diversity require density. Without dictating who is allowed to buy a house in Wallingford, as long as it’s a desirable place to live with a limited stock of housing, we aren’t going to get either. MHA is a good compromise to both make sure the most financially vulnerable get a chance to move in, even if it’s in small numbers, while pushing the price floor down from its current “you must be a tech exec or high powered lawyer” levels to something more like the “you must be a dual income household who scrimped and saved for years” level it was at 5-10 years ago” by adding some multi-family apartments and condos.
The U district upzone is a juggernaut that’s running over resident and business groups who oppose it. There’s a chance that it may at least be delayed a little for a study, Steinbrueck commissioned by small businesses to look at impact, but my bet is they won’t wait for what they don’t want to hear, and they’ll plow ahead. They also need to insert language for the MHA exactions that triggers a rollback on developer court challenge, which is a pretty sure thing, and waiving recovery of MHA exactions if the challenge succeeds … but they won’t do that either.
I have to say, from attending the PLUZ committee meeting, the voices for and against seemed very evenly split, and the amendments under consideration seemed to address nearly every concern presented. The upzone has been a long time coming, and we really need it to happen while the economy is hot enough to support the kind of development we need.
Ben, I’m a current homeowner, and all I get are higher property taxes (I was already rezoned). There is ZERO “WIN” for me with increased land value, as all that does is make it LESS AFFORDABLE for current residents. I want to stay, invest in my neighborhood relationships, and retire here. Can’t do that with higher and higher taxes.
I should also mention the massive new 35ft tall townhomes to be sold for $800K each that are going up next door to me. They are displacing TWO low income families in a nice house that currently are paying $1300/month in rent. Tell those families how HALA is helping them please?
For a moment I thought I’d better check to see if you’re living in my house! But the $800K townhouses next door sold last year, and the two lower income families are long gone. One of the kids chalked a rather poignant farewell on the sidewalk before she left.
Sorry to hear about the downsides for you. Hopefully, the added property value will allow you to move to a house in the neighborhood that isn’t upzoned if the property taxes become to great. In fact, your relatively higher property values should let you move into a much nicer house. I’m a current homeowner too. Sadly, without more housing, all of us are going to continue to see higher property taxes, it’s just that those of us not in an upzoned area will get nothing for it since our property values are not rising relative to other similar houses (as those in upzoned areas are).
It’s also a shame about the families you mention that were displaced. It’s too bad the upzone for your block was so small it only accommodated one additional unit of housing compared to before. If it was larger, there could have been more benefit.
Hopefully you’re glad though that you got two town homes at only 35 feet instead of one giant McMansion at 40 feet, which is what’s happening to non-upzoned lots that sell.
That was a very honest and yet hurtful reply Ben. It truly shows that HALA supports do want to displace current residents at all costs.
Would you like a tour of the property we have been lovingly restoring, so you can see the negative impact that these new Big Box Rowhomes and Apartments have on actual low income families?
I’d love to meet you.
I’m happy to meet! I’ll be at the WCC meeting tonight for the Q&A with the city planner and will be attending future neighborhood meetings on MHA and HALA. I’m also saddened that the city has put in restrictive zoning in a way that means housing prices have so dramatically outpaced income levels. My hope of course is that housing can keep pace so that no one has to make the decision between moving or being priced out and that with MHA, we can loosen up zoning while also getting some mandatory affordable housing out of it. Those are my hopes, and my current view is that HALA + improvements from the neighborhood will help make them a reality.
And I’d point out that no one wants to make things worse for anyone. Doing nothing is already doing that just fine. No one is rooting for current residents to be displaced – housing prices rising due to the shortage are already doing that. We should do something about it! HALA is one way to do that. As you note, if you are in a single family house you like, and we do nothing, all housing prices go up and it makes it harder to pay property taxes to stay. With HALA, if a house gets upzoned, its value increases, and property taxes go up, but because your house is now worth more than other houses in the same area, you can afford a lot more if you choose to move. It’s a bummer to have to choose between moving and paying higher property taxes, but it’s better than getting displaced out of the city. Without HALA, your property taxes were going up anyway, but nothing was being done to make sure that the average cost of housing in Seattle is suppressed rising at a lower rate or even dropping. If we can keep the upzones limited by making them bigger, fewer people have to be put in that situation (where they become house-rich at the cost of higher property taxes).
“Hopefully, the added property value will allow you to move to a house in the neighborhood that isn’t upzoned…It’s too bad the upzone for your block was so small.”
Don’t you see, Jeff? It’s a GOOD thing you’re getting those tall 800K townhomes crammed in next door to you. Ben only wants to help you!
Hey Ben, I’m sure you have receipts on your claim that giant McMansions are filling non-upzoned lots in Wallingford at a dangerous clip, right?
Let us know if he has anything.
I was curious, so I counted on my walk this morning. In the time it took my dog to relieve himself (about 10 minutes), I saw 9. I took a few pictures, but I won’t share them publicly as I don’t want to shame my neighbors – they’re perfectly within their rights and I actually don’t think it’s a problem that they build what they want. If you want, I can fill you in offline on my route or show you some photos, but I think it’s trivial to do your own research – just take a walk in the neighborhood!
That said, I really don’t see the difference in whether those lots get filled up with one giant house looming over its neighbors or a duplex, triplex or a few townhomes that do the same other than the fact that one will go for $1-2 million and house one family and the others will go for $400k-$1 million and house several.
Other than the income level of your future neighbors, what do you object to?
I don’t think the question is whether you can find over-sized houses. Your assertion was, that “is what’s happening to non-upzoned lots that sell”. So one would expect to see that everywhere a house changes hands.
But don’t get me wrong, there would be plenty of support around here for code standard changes that reduce the potential footprint and overall size of a house, relative to its lot, I think. The effect of overbuilding on neighbors is not usually welcome.
As a parent, my main concern is the schools. As density goes up there is less than zero space in the current schools. John Stanford now uses the hall as classroom space, and Hamilton has no play space…because there’s portable classrooms in the only play space.
Hi szaske – I’m a parent of a young child too, and this is a great concern to bring to the city as part of improving the draft zoning and rules! For what it’s worth, the rezone will help somewhat because it automatically increases property values which is what the school levies are based on. The mayor’s proposal also includes incentives for school construction. That said, we should think of more ways to help schools in the neighborhood and bring them to the city and the school district. The real estate to the east of John Stanford is actually relatively cheap – maybe a campus extension would be in order. The city wants this rezone, and wants it to be a success, which gives the neighborhood leverage for improvements – after all, the designation as an urban village means we’re supposed to be the recipient of targeted improvements as well as growth.
Totally agree we need tax reform in Washington State. This is an issue for which WCC and other Community Councils could advocate!
If we can move past saying NO, and move on to saying YES to better proposals, we’ll get further with our government, and our neighbors.
We need a state income tax. We are one of the very few (7-8) states without one. It is not regressive, like sales tax and property tax. To further explain, a person earning 6K a year is paying the same sales tax) as a person earning 30K a year. Almost 10% of each purchase. If a home has been owned for a long time, the property tax takes a huge bite out of a new owner (maybe just beginning their work life) and a retired person (who has no future earnings coming, and is relying on savings (if they did save) and Social Security
Thank you !
The city is not talking about adding some multi-family apartments and condos. They’re maps show many places with as many as 4 upzone levels. I think we need to go up but this is a lot for so little. If we’re going to go up 4 levels, instead of the one, then give us 4 times as many affordable units.
I’m one of those landowners. I could sell a rental house I own and make a profit. I could also, along with my business partner, tear down two adjoining houses and put up multifamily condos. We will never voluntarily do either because it would mean that our tenants would lose their homes in Wallingford and two historic cottages would be lost. We are already providing low income housing. Get rid of us and the replacement housing would be far from low income. HALA is a scam. It is a fraud. Mayor Murray and his co-conspirators are the ones that need to go. We need to protect and preserve our neighborhood. All you HALA Yes folks out there, have you actually walked around the Wallingford neighborhood and seen which signs proliferate. There are hundreds of “No Grand Bargain” signs in people’s yards. I haven’t seen a single “Hala Yes” sign anywhere. The people have already spoken. HALA Hell No!
I am a tech worker. I could have bought a nearby SFH, turned it into our 3 flat our relatives who are teachers could live in securely and indefinitely (along with 2 other families renting at market rates) and the numbers would work out such that it was a viable and sustainable investment for my family.
Except singe family zoning made it illegal.
You could have built a ADU/DADU, which is essentially a duplex, under current zoning rules. The upzone impacts as described in many of the pro-HALA posts here are nothing like what is being proposed by the City.
The City and Rob Johnson severely misrepresented the up zone proposals when they told us, repeatedly, that any upzones would have the same height, bulk, scale, and setbacks as existing SF housing. Far from it.
It is my understanding that the current proposal would allow, in essence, a 7500 sq ft building (6000 sq ft plus a basement), with four floors, and unlimited units (and no parking) to be built in the Urban Village. Heights would be 10 feet taller than the current maximum for existing homes in the LR2 upzone area and 17 feet closer to the sidewalk (5 feet from the property line) than the typical Wallingford SF home. Property values and real estate taxes are anticipated by the City to increase at least 20 percent in the urban villages as speculation takes hold.
Why is it necessary for the pro-HALA folks, including the City, to downplay the impacts. My background as a scientist and engineer trained me to base decisions on facts, yet we are not being given the facts, especially on the pro-HALA sites where many negatives are dismissed. Part of the reason for this appears to be because many of the most vocal YesHALA folks do not live in the affected areas and will not see any of the adverse impacts. The chant for YesHALA, but on others’ property seems a bit disingenuous.
There are many ways to accommodate increased growth in a reasonable manner that will not be accompanied by the incredible adverse impacts to current property owners, many of which have lived here for a long time and snuggle the same as others just to pay the high property taxes. The recommendation by the City that folks should just take out a home equity loan to pay real estate taxes is absurd, and horrible financial planning.
I, too, recall Paul circling a bunch of property that he would like to see up zoned, carefully skipping around the location of his home. Too often, this has been my experience with many HALA supporters, including the Mayor, O’Brien, and Rob Johnson, all of whom would not bear the adverse impacts because they do not live in an urban village.
One loses a LOT of credibility when they are not willing to walk-the-talk. Misrepresenting the impacts in order to try to make the Livable Wallingford folks appear unreasonable is neither helpful nor effective. Assess the impacts accurately, tweak the proposals to mitigate the impacts, and include the folks most affected in the discussion.
Following through with the original promise of “same height, bulk, scale, and setbacks” would be a good start. One can build a very nice 3-flat within the envelope of such a structure… but that is NOT ANYWHERE CLOSE to what is being proposed.
“Following through with the original promise of “same height, bulk, scale, and setbacks” would be a good start. One can build a very nice 3-flat within the envelope of such a structure… but that is NOT ANYWHERE CLOSE to what is being proposed.”
HALA committee recommendation SF2 retained the same height limits and lot coverage as today’s single family zones (basically 35% lot coverage and 30′ high) but allowed the same sized structure to be divided into (for example) a three flat.
It was dropped after outcry by single family zoning advocates.
If you support this proposal, so do I.
With regard to the LR stuff, as far as I am concerned they are small ball and the tail wagging the dog in terms of how much land they affect. I’d trade city-wide SF scale open zoning for a few small upzones in a hot minute.
Jeffrey — your ideas for improvements to the ADU/DADU legislation are great! We need more like these. Rather than blocking change (like the Queen Anne Community Council did with the ADU/DADU legislation), we in Wallingford can focus our efforts on fine-tuning the various HALA proposals to make them better. Unfortunately, Queen Anne has tied up any changes that might make ADU/DADU more inviting with an expensive-to-us-taxpayers and months long process. And also, unfortunately, some in WCC and Queen Anne view the ADU/DADU proposals as “developer giveaways”.
For what it’s worth, developers get no benefits from HALA unless they give us something in return, whether that is paying for/building affordable units or paying us top dollar to purchase our land.
O’Brien’s misguided backyard cottage legislation does not do what he’s talking about, in any way, you know that and you know why the legislation is objectionable. Is it pointless to talk about productive strategies here, because you and BK are so committed to undermining single family zoning that anything else is kind of beside the point?
so committed to allowing small wooden multi-family homes everywhere, because most places, most of the time, they are the most affordable form of housing, so anything less falls short
What policies do you find misguided? As someone who would love a backyard cottage to rent, I’d like to know what has you concerned about O’Brien’s proposal.
We are allowed to build ADUs & DADUs now. (apologies if this is already well known) The city’s own study showed that the biggest reason people are not building is the cost. One of the big costs comes from the city – in the form of the sewer hook up fees for a DADU (backyard cottage). I am sorry, I don’t have time to find the reference for this info, but I believe it is on the city’s site & in the WCC call-to-action from last year on this subject. My friends told me that they were quoted around $50,000 for the sewer hook up. This makes it at least twice as expensive for the do-it-yourself-build-from-a-kit people. I heard this number from two different friends in two different parts of Seattle. If you already have a mortgage, plus school loan, plus childcare, taking another loan for $100,000 – you may be denied or it may just be too much financial burden to take on at this time (or any time) even though in the long-term it could bring you additional income. I just point this out as there are significant costs from the city to the homeowner, in addition to the cost of materials & labor, but the only solution I saw in the city’s proposal to help with cost was to remove the owner-occupancy requirement – with the idea being that
speculators would provide the money to address all of these costs. There are downstream pros & cons to this which you may be fine with or not; there are 5 sides to every coin.
Personally, I was hoping for something more creative from the city to help with costs to help the current homeowner build a backyard cottage and thus to make it more desirable to add one. If I have to sell my house so that a speculator can put one in, then uhh, wait, what?
Hey Paul,
I agree with much of the desire of HALA, but developers who just pay into an “affordability” fund for the city, well, we know how effective the city is with development funds……
As a renter, I would relish being able to find a small backyard cottage or a Mother-in-Law apartment. Financially crippled with student debt, if I ever do buy a house, it will be when I’m well into my 50’s. An apartment, even just a small space in someone’s backyard, that costs $800 or less a month would allow me to continue an urban/metropolitan lifestyle.
I hear a lot of push back about how backyard cottages would change the character of the neighborhood and would have large environmental impacts. These arguments aren’t true, and all they do is delay a form of design that would compliment a Single Family neighborhood, such as Wallilngford, so well.
There are already backyard cottages in Wallingford. No one I know of has any plan to prohibit them.
Production of cottages and ADUs has been dismal because of regulations and thus costs. O’Brien’s changes were both reasonable and targeted at addressing the blockages to building more of them.
Jeffrey’s proposals — unlike Queen Anne’s categorical NO — enhance O’Brien’s and work to shape it into something even better.
We need more imaginative and generous solutions, and fewer rejections of change.
O’Brien’s changes were a mixed bag, some of them responsive to issues that had come up and others essentially directed at turning single family lots into rental triplexes. If he really wanted to do something about the production of normal accessory units as we know them today, he could have breezed through with the items that really helped with that, even though support was not universal by any means, but with typical contempt for Seattle residents he felt that he could stuff whatever he wanted through. Queen Anne and the hearing examiner slowed him down, but I’m sure the same attitude will be there when the EIS is finished.
Out of curiosity, what’s wrong with triplexes?
You mean, what’s wrong with using code standards to allow triplexes in single family zoned areas? Because of course it isn’t that there’s anything inherently wrong with triplexes, it’s just that single family is by definition one “single” unit per lot. ADUs are a real departure from that, but because they have some redeeming qualities we allow them, with restrictions. O’Brien’s bill peeled off enough of those restrictions, that the hearing examiner agreed there was a serious potential impact that justified and EIS. The effect is to turn what had been a minor feature of single family standards, into a covert, backdoor rezone to triplexes. If your steady diet of Kool-Aid has left you with the usual hostility to single family residential, then you may see this as a good thing.
You can build a single family home in literally any of these residential zones can you not?
I respect your right to state your opinion (and you state it eloquently), but I don’t agree with making entire neighborhoods sacrifice their quality of life for the benefit of the thousands of expected newcomers to Seattle.
I’m not a newcomer. I’ve lived in Wallingford as a renter and a good neighbor for 9 years. And I’ve been displaced. Don’t buy into the city-scale version of xenophobia. Long term renters are struggling just as much (or, in lots of cases, more – newcomers with shiny jobs at Amazon are not struggling to afford rents.)
You say you’re a longterm renter who has been displaced. Why have you been displaced?
KD- I’m a renter too! I’m still in Wallingford. Are you, or did you get displaced out of the neighborhood? Did you know that for every 600 people that move to Seattle, that there are only 400 available apartments? When I heard a statistician give those numbers, I had to give a closer look into HALA. I’m in a good situation currently, with an awesome landlord, but if development doesn’t start now, affordability won’t even be on the table until almost a decade from now.
I hope we can accommodate some new neighbours without sacrificing quality of life! I can think of lots of ways some more neighbourhood appropriate density could help Wallingford and the businesses and residents already here. I’d rather see that than have a bunch of wall-to-wall 40 foot $3 million lot-filling single family square boxes 6 feet apart from each other with no retail which is what the current Single Family lots in the neighborhood are turning into.
If you’ve got concerns, I hope you attend the various neighbourhood workshops and zoning committee meetings that will occur between now and any changes (like the one on the 17th at Hamilton). I recently attended the city’s Planning Land Use and Zoning (PLUZ) committee meeting on the U-District’s upzone – one much more significant than our mostly minor 1-story addition, and was really impressed with the thoughtful changes the city made to address nearly all the concerns from the neighbourhood stakeholders (students, residents, workers and business owners). They added features like requirements for smaller retail spaces for small businesses, family sized units in multi-unit buildings, moved some of the added height around, added design requirements, protected some historic buildings, added requirements for publicly accessible green space, etc.
I should write up a separate post on that meeting, but in any case, there are lots of ways we can push for benefits to the neighbourhood as part of this upzone (and downzone in the case of a large part of the neighborhood being changed to residential small lot) if we engage with the city – they want this to be a success for us! So long as we provide constructive feedback, recognizing that Wallingford, like all of Seattle needs to contribute to providing additional housing, they city is ready to make changes. A great example would be some people’s concern for winter sunlight along 45th street – we could easily accommodate that by appropriate height limits and setbacks on the south side of the street offset by some additional height on the north side, or widening the zoning a bit on the south side.
Just a lack of intellectual rigor, or intentionally clouding the issue? Many paragraphs of song and dance about the difficult situation we’re in, which anyone who’d be reading this would know very well, but we have to search pretty hard to find the point.
It seems to be where you refer to HALA “core strategies”. Let me pull aside your veil of obscurity here and say you’re talking about a city wide upzone program, connected with Mandatory Housing Affordability developer fees and performance requirements. And the notion that Seattle can’t afford to have single family neighborhoods. We’ve discussed this all before, and as time has passed it has become ever clearer that these programs don’t accomplish any of your objectives. They won’t increase economic diversity here, at all. There’s increasingly reason to think they won’t even increase housing production, as developers are starting to line up behind the analysis that the significant impact on profit will reduce the housing growth that up to now has been rather spectacular – with the existing zoning.
Donn… we don’t know that at all. But what we do know for absolute certain is that our current context — for which you are a strong advocate — definitely does produce displacement, unaffordable housing, and decreased diversity. We know that we’re failing, and failing fast.
We can keep rowing the sinking boat, or we can start bailing the water and plugging the holes. Simply spending all efforts lambasting people who are bailing with cups rather than buckets doesn’t actually help.
I’m saying you should stop bailing water into the boat.
…Which no one is doing.
As someone who owns an expensive house with a lot of equity, it’s easy to dismiss the plight of others because you’ve got yours good.
The plight of others is not a reason to support policies that won’t work.
The assertion that a policy you don’t like won’t work isn’t the same thing as that policy not working.
Pay attention! MHA doesn’t work, to relieve “the plight of others” or in general to serve the goals in its propaganda.
You keep saying that, but you have not established that other than citing Dan Bertolet’s advocacy for lower MHA affordability requirements on behalf of developers who would like lower requirements (duh). The MHA sweet spot depends on current market conditions, and I’d really like to see it more forcibly tied to more localized performance, but the currently required annual reassessments have me mollified. There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with MHA that can’t be tuned over time.
Yes, city hall can reduce the fees, now or later, or both. Note that this has a substantial effect on MHA’s already somewhat meager portion of rent-restricted affordable unit production, so when we point out that it doesn’t do much, you may expect it to do even less. And Bertolet goes a ways past just arguing for more profits (though you have to recognize, capital goes to development only when there’s a favorable calculation of profit vs risk, so production necessarily depends on that), he also addresses the question of whether MHA capacity increases actually add anything of value for the developer. That’s a key premise of the grand bargain, and if it’s false you have to wonder how well it could possibly work.
That analysis aside, we have the pathetic MHA contribution to rent-restricted housing units, and the market rate units that get built. The market rate units will continue to be at least as expensive as they ever were, because there isn’t going to be a big surge that accounts for all the demand and brings prices down – because developers will carefully avoid any such overbuilding, and because the big surge has already happened anyway, 2016-2017. As more lots are developed, any lower market rate old stock is gradually reduced, with ripple economic effects as the elimination of lower price alternatives will tend to raise the potential rates on other units in the same class. Nothing in this picture does anything for the plight of any others, except maybe the plight of affluent high tech guys.
“Increasing Reason” is not as valuable as actual facts. The way things are current, the Actual Facts Are that displacement will happen.
Do you have Actual Facts that economic diversity or housing options won’t increase? Or is it only a feeling that you have?
I refer you to sightline.org articles from Dan Bertolet, you can go right there and find one from the front page. This is a developer expert, telling you that MHA is not so viable as currently configured.
Bertolet’s analysis shows that MHA will fail because the upzone has been whittled down (thanks to people like you) to a measly 1 story upzone in most places, and that’s not enough to sustain a 7% affordable requirement.
You effectively broke the proposal so that you could point to it and say it’s broken.
That was remarkably efficient of us, we somehow must have gotten this done through Cindi Barker, the only neighborhood activist type allowed to participate in the HALA committee. Those one story increases are right there in the HALA report appendixes, for all the mid height zones like NC45.
As for additional upzones, Wallingford has a revolting amount of 3 and 4 level upzones, from Single Family to LR2 or LR3, but does that make the developer jump for joy? No! Unless they already own the land today, they’re going to pay LR3 prices for it, and then get socked with an M2 extra-extra MHA penalty.
And what makes your story particularly laughable is that if you read the Bertolet analyses, an extra floor is not what they need anyway. The issues vary from one zone to another, but for example, on LR2 “Even worse, the units get a fourth floor, which undermines marketability because it’s not desirable to walk up and down four stories in a home. It also bumps the project out of the residential code and into the more expensive building code intended for commercial structures. Required setbacks on the fourth floor would also tend to increase construction costs.” In higher NC zones, building technology is much more expensive to take advantage of the extra 10 or 15 feet.
We didn’t have anything to do with this, it’s a basic problem that if you try to squeeze something substantial out of a market, it becomes less financially rewarding. We might have thought that they’re raking in big money in this business, but Bertolet’s saying that taking a third off the profit margin is enough to significantly reduce the numbers willing to take the gamble for that return. Maybe he’s lying – it is Sightline, after all.
I agree with much of the goals of HALA but when I saw the city’s presentation with only 45-74 affordable units expected for Wallingford, I thought, what a joke. The city says that’s an estimate and half of the units, and the other half will be built by the city. But that’s still a miniscule number. With the multi-level height increases, as many as 4 levels, and the city’s estimates of thousands of new units, it’s plan of 45-74 being affordable out of those thousands is pathetic. I can get behind their goals but not their methods which appear to me will result in 99.99% luxury units. The fund that developers can pay into, instead of building affordable units in Wallingford, is the big big problem.
Keep in mind that non-market-rate units with mandatory affordability thresholds can only be a small part of any solution without a dramatic increase in taxation which the state won’t allow. Even then, it’ll only help people who qualify for affordable housing, not the many lower through upper middle class households who are being priced out of the city.
To help the city as a whole, we need to have the housing supply keep up with the number of jobs added. If we don’t prices will just go up and only the top X% of households will be able to afford to live in the city. As jobs outpace housing, that X% will shrink and the Y% below that will be pushed further and further out, or into homelessness (those are the two options).
Even if most of these new units end up being luxury condos, that just means that those buyers will live in those luxury condos rather than bidding up the existing housing.
The important part is to ensure that the new development is either in lots that don’t currently have housing or that the new development has way more new units than were there before – which means an upzone :).
Actually, I see a lot of places around Wallingford that I didn’t realize until the city’s design workshop are zoned for 4 stories. Some of them are parking lots. If we actually had more buildings that go up to 4 stories where they’re allowed to but currently only go to 1, imagine how much more housing there would be in Wallingford!
Yep! We do have a lot of capacity where there’s no housing at all right now. There are a number of reasons why not every lot is built up to its maximum allowed density – the current owner isn’t interested in developing or selling, developers don’t see $ signs in the conversion (either due to limited demand or not enough of an upside to justify the cost of acquiring the property and then developing it), and the high cost and uncertainty of doing new development. You saw that with the CVS, which ended up deciding to just rebuild within the existing structure’s walls so they could classify the work as a “remodel” rather than have to meet the requirements of doing a new building, which include a lot of red tape around neighborhood design reviews, commenting periods, risking lawsuits from groups like the WCC attempting to slow things down, and waiting a long time.
I’m not saying we should get rid of all that, but I bet we could front-load a lot of the red tape by having some sort of design checklist – if you tick the boxes, you don’t have to go through design review.
If you want to see how hard it is to redevelop, even an existing lot and why a developer has to make sure they’ve got a real pay off at the end to risk all the obstacles and all the time involved, check out this piece on adding a mixed-use PCC in Madison Valley (housing + a grocery store): http://www.capitolhillseattle.com/2017/01/madison-valley-pcc-project-moves-forward-barely/
The architect and developer has clearly put a lot of time, money and effort into the project, and they may not find out for years whether or not they’ll actually get to do it.
As a result, there has to be a big payoff at the end to justify both the risk that the project might eat a bunch of money and then not happen and the money that goes into doing the development – defending lawsuits, doing redesigns, engaging with the community etc.
WE have a check list – it’s called the building code, and if developers and builders would just follow the rules, things would go faster. But they don’t – they start off by asking for variances, pushing the envelope, seeing what they can get away with. This is standard practice. Spare me the sob stories about the architects/developers – I work in the industry. You apparently don’t realize it, but it’s possible for a project that doesn’t get constructed to be profitable for the design team, and lawsuits are a sign that someone screwed up.
Excellent point. I think too many of us, myself included, know too little about commercial real estate development and finance, especially as both change so quickly now.
What about asking Amazon to allow a stipend for their employees that can’t afford to live nearby? Stanford University has been doing this for years for tenured and tenure track faculty that can’t afford to live in Palo Alto. Since Amazon is responsible for so much of the job growth but hasn’t so far contributed to the increase in housing prices it has created, why not ask them to be a good community member?
Do you mean give the employees more money so they can afford to live nearby?
Not sure this sounds so great to me, without some assurance that it wouldn’t drive prices up for everyone else. If Amazon needs security guards but doesn’t employ them directly, they should also get that stipend. If Amazon employees depend on restaurant/food truck workers, they should get it too. Bus drivers, school teachers, window washers etc.
Without HALA there would be ZERO affordable units built.
There’s other options, but it requires things like a change to the State Constitution. We’d love for you to join us in working for positive change on issues like these!
I posted a question above – I see building happening, and empty spaces and a housing shortage, so why isn’t the demand caused by the shortage being met by builders? I didn’t know until the city’s workshop that there are so many parts of Wallingford that are currently 1 story or parking lots and are zoned for 2, 3 or 4 stories.
That’s not accurate. There are affordable units being built, from other funding mechanisms – see the redevelopment at Sand Point for example. In fact, about 3/4 of the 20,000 “affordable” units the mayor likes to refer to would be built from sources other than MHA generated funds.
Let me clarify: without MHA (or similar incentive programs) the private developer would not build affordable housing.
Paul, you were at tonight’s meeting. If I remember his figures correctly, Geoff said that 14,000 “affordable units were slated to be built, and that MHA/HALA would build 6000 of those. That means 8,000 would be built.
Actually, I got those numbers wrong. The correct figures are actually 20,000 affordable units, of which MHA/HALA would build 6,000. So even without MHA, that’s actually 14,000 more affordable units than you claim.
Furthermore, as I now recall, it was YOU who asked Spencer Williams and Geoff Wendlandt the question of how many units would be built without MHA! So you already knew that when you posted your comment above. Since you’re obviously pulling stuff out of your backside here to back up your position, is there anything else you’d like to own up to?
I think about 5000 units have been built through the city’s MFTE (Multi-Family Tax Exemption) program. Those are built by private developers in exchange for tax exemptions. Most of the new developments in Wallingford participate in this program.
Margie74, I’m not that knowledgeable about Sand Point, but from what I know that is state land and a project that our state representative and speaker of the house, Frank Chopp pushed through, amid a lot of opposition from residents.
It’s not a project I’m personally involved in but I know someone who is working on it, so if you are interested in info like number of units, number of bedrooms, I can easily find out. Don’t know if I might be able to track down construction cost. The land came to the state as military surplus when the Navy closed Sand Point Naval Air Station. The buildings are WW2 or maybe a little earlier, former barracks. I do remember there was a lot of fuss, but not the specifics.
Paul: “Without HALA there would be ZERO affordable units built” That is simply not true. There are many other options that have been used for years. for low-income people. And I’m not talking about public housing. Do a little research. You can even find some of these other options in the HALA proposals.
Paul, as someone who has lived in Washington for awhile, you must know how resistant the population has been over the years to an income tax. It rarely even makes it to the ballot.
Yes. A joke.
Thank you for creating Welcoming Wallingford. Affordable city housing is a complex issue and there are diverse opinions in our neighborhood. The Wallingford Community Council does not speak for all of Wallingford; they do not speak for me.
As someone who grew up in Wallingford and is now raising my children here, I look forward to hearing more from Welcoming Wallingford.
What’s your name LM and where do you live? Outside of the proposed upzone perhaps?
We’re about welcoming everyone in Wallingford, not just a few.
I live outside the proposed upzone already. I’m an advocate for neighborhoods, even though I don’t live in a Single Family Zone. I already live in a TriPlex, because I like people, and welcome everyone. It’s just how we house them that’s the issue.
Why would you make that assumption? LM can live in any part of Wallingford. I thought we were talking about Wallingford as a WHOLE community, not just the proposed upzones.
Thank you for saying this on Wallyhood. As a long term renter in Wallingford, with no hope of ever owning a home here (or probably anywhere in Seattle) I have been a good neighbor and I love this neighborhood. It is my home. Seeing my wealthier neighbors letting their NIMBY show with those “No HALA” signs while I walk around has made me feel increasingly unwelcome in my neighborhood. Every sign feels a little bit like a middle finger when you’re a renter struggling to afford the skyrocketing cost of living here.
I see the signs as protesting the city’s methods, not their goal of providing affordability and diversity. I know some of the people with the signs and they want affordability and diversity as well.
Affordability means producing more housing at a faster pace than we add jobs. New good jobs should be a huge benefit to the city as a virtuous cycle of economic investment occurs (people with the new, higher paying jobs buy more stuff locally, new businesses open to serve them and the businesses they buy from, creating new higher paying jobs, etc). However, if we don’t have somewhere for the people in those new high paying jobs to live, they will have to outbid the existing residents, driving up prices, and sucking up all that new money, meaning no economic benefits to the city.
Housing production really is the civil rights issue of our time, one in which many otherwise progressive cities are hugely regressive, and Seattle is in danger of failing at it.
Ben, read my post above regarding incentivizing building infill. It’s the Carrot not the Stick that Wallingford families who care about our neighborhood are looking for from the city.
I think you may have the economic impact of growth backwards. The big infrastructure cost falls on existing residents, who pay for long term improvements needed to meet forecasted growth. When the new businesses and their employees arrive, they may pick up part of that burden, but only what’s left to pay by the time they get there, if any at all.
Surely the budget for infrastructure is city-wide and not a burden shared only by those adjacent to the improvements? Additionally, when new development takes place, it is the responsibility of the developer to bring the property up to current code requirements for things like water retention, lowering the burden on our outdated sewer infrastructure rather than raising it.
If new development means new infrastructure, it seems like we get a benefit (more transit, more services like schools and libraries) due to our higher use with the new density rather than less? Since most of these budgets are city wide or more, and improvements driven by use, having more density and use should lead to more improvements for the neighbourhood at no additional cost to the neighbourhood.
You’re really grasping at straws here, aren’t you? The rate of growth here is manifestly overwhelming the existing infrastructure. Streets choked, buses leaving people behind, a big levy for affordable housing that won’t come near to meeting the need, schools that are at the limit right now with no prospect for more. Will we catch up? You know better – not if it keeps up like this, we haven’t nearly reached the bottom yet. And we’re benefiting from this? The “urbanist” Kool-Aid is not good for our health. There are plenty of examples of livable, attractive higher urban density, but you can’t build stuff like that in a couple years, or a couple generations, it takes time.
We better start now then right? If I’m reading you correctly, your proposal is instead to make Seattle a less desirable place to live and start a business to limit growth?
I completely agree. Doing nothing means the problems get worse. And Donn, I’d really like to hear how you plan to keep people out. Do you propose locking down all sorts of growth (e.g. commercial development, etc)? Or, will we rely on skyrocketing rents to keep away unwanted immigrants?
Ahhh, now I see where the “xenophoic” label comes from. Why do you specify “unwanted immigrants” in your statement? I realize Seattle’s “sanctuary city” policy creates lots of problems and expense, but you think skyrocketing rents only affect “unwanted immigrants”? You’re so very wrong. Last night I met a woman up on Capitol Hill who was selling a piece of furniture on Craigslist I was interested in. She is probably 29-30 years old, social worker, living in one of those newer large buildings full of studio units and has to move out of the building because the rent has become unaffordable. The latest notice she received said the rent is going up $300 per month! So, she’s selling her furniture and looking for something cheaper elsewhere. She said the building is full of mainly Amazon and Microsoft workers and they can absorb these high rents easily, as none of them move. So, if our neighborhood gets stuck with projects such as these, who do you think will be able to afford to live in them?
Lisa,
I was thinking of people coming to Seattle of all socioeconomic classes and nationalities. Donn was advocating for keeping people out and I was curious how he proposes to accomplish that.
As for your social worker example, I think we both agree she’s reflective of a big problem for the city. Where I suspect we disagree is how to solve the problem. Your post suggests that building more “projects such as these,” by which I assume you mean large apartment buildings, will cause rents to increase. The law of supply and demand says otherwise: build more housing and costs will decrease. In fact, resisting additional development is the worst thing we can do for your social worker, and for renters generally.
the guy” The law of supply and demand says otherwise: build more housing and costs will decrease. ” You may as well be invoking the Bible for this reductive belief in the law of supply and demand. I made a point about that earlier. International and national financial markets and bank loans to developers have much more to do with the price of housing than supply and demand.
I’m not sure I get the question, but if you want a specific proposal, at the top of my list, don’t upzone the University District for high rise office buildings. That would be a big one. For an example of what I would not have done, we gave Russell Capital a significant tax break to move here, from Tacoma where there was room for their employees to live. I assume city hall continues to offer inducements like that and you could find them behind the Expedia move, etc., but of course they do their best not to be transparent about it (the Russell tax break was camouflaged.) We can’t pretend that this stuff just happens like the change of the seasons.
Donn- You can’t stop people from moving here for viable jobs. The purpose of HALA and these neighborhood conversations is to make sure that those of us who are here can still stay here.
There is nothing you can do to stop the economic growth in Seattle, unless you somehow make a Nationwide boycott of Amazon.
I’d be all for a nationwide boycott of Amazon. I already do boycott it for its greedy policies toward third party sellers.
There was a national boycott in 2001, urged by the Free Software Foundation because Amazon was pestering online retailers with their bogus one-click-purchasing patent. They subsequently lifted it, but it has been convenient for me to personally continue to boycott Amazon anyway.
Ben: “Surely the budget for infrastructure is city-wide and not a burden shared only by those adjacent to the improvements?” You never heard of LIDs? Also, every property owner since a 1930’s ordinance was passed is responsible for the condition of the sidewalk abutting their property. It seems that most property owners are not aware of that or don’t care — until someone sues them.
We’d love people to join us in creating positive improvements to HALA, rather than focusing on blocking change.
KD, you mention in your earlier reply to my post that you’re been a renter for 9 years in Wallingford yet you’ve been “displaced”. What does that mean? And, frankly, had I not bought a zillion years ago, I would not be able to afford to buy a home in Seattle now, either. Most of my friends who have attempted to buy in Seattle in the last few years have either bought in Georgetown, South Park, Beacon Hill, Burien, or in Bremerton, Federal Way and Tacoma. Yes, it sucks. But you shouldn’t take the “No HALA” signs personally. This is still your neighborhood, I think (unless the “displacement” you spoke of means you had to move out of Wallingford?). Preserving the traits that made you want to rent here in the first place (also the reasons why many people chose to buy here) is what many of us are concerned with. And if that makes me a NIMBY, I will wear that acronym proudly in this case.
But the policies advocated by the no HALA group ARE the ones that would keep pushing people out. Keep saying that’s not the intention doesn’t change a thing for people being impacted.
Maybe you can think from this point of view: what are the policies that would make Wallingford affordable for you TODAY, as opposed to zillion years ago? I think it’s very easy for you to see the only chance for many that bought into Wallingford 20 years ago, or even 5 years ago, to be able to do the same thing today would have been more built up.
Also what does “preserving the traits” mean? It’s not like everybody bought into this neighborhood for the same reason. I bought into this neighborhood because of its location. I see increasing density as making this neighborhood more livable, not less.
Renters get displaced when the rent is raised an astronomical amount over a relatively short period of time without a concurrent raise in our incomes. This forces people to move when they don’t want to. It pushes people out of their homes. That’s displacement.
This is happening all over Seattle. Not all of us have a well-paying tech job, or a spouse with a well-paying tech job. Not all of us were able to buy a decade ago (or ever.)
Also, yes, I love the neighborhood for many reasons, but a big one is location and proximity to transit, so that I can get to work without spending 2 hours of my day commuting, which is a big quality of life issue for me and many others. And frankly, I deserve to be here just as much as any homeowner who was lucky enough to buy years ago.
When you lose your home, and fear losing your home again, it gets personal pretty fast. Renters are people, not just statistics.
“I love the neighborhood for many reasons, but a big one is location and proximity to transit,…”
Upzone Aurora to Neighborhood Commercial. You could step outside your door and be on a Bus Rapid Transit Line to downtown in mere minutes.
So your solution, Hayduke, is to put all the Renter’s on Aurora? That sounds rather exclusionary to me.
Especially if people are worried about parking. You want pedestrians to move in and Aurora is the LEAST pedestrian-friendly of any part of Wallingford. The goal is to have people live within a walk-able distance to amenities, such as the 24hr QFC, the restaurants on 45th and on Stone, the Farmer’s Market.
You want to up-zone Aurora because I assume that you find Aurora undesirable and wouldn’t mind if it changed. However, you do not see that it is exclusionary zoning and is unwelcoming to think that renters deserve to live in undesirable places.
jaws, where do you get this entitlement mentality from? You don’t “deserve” squat. And neither do I. We can argue whether housing is a “human right.” But you don’t “deserve” to live in Wallingford, just because you say so. And, you have no need to live here, either. You may WANT to live here, and I understand that. But you don’t “need” to live here. Just like I might want a beach house on Maui, but I don’t deserve it or need it.
People already live on or just off of Aurora, and if living there makes it affordable enough to live in the city and close to downtown with access to BRT, great! People all over our country live in far worse environments than Aurora, When I first moved here, I lived in a crappy run down rooming house in the U-District with twelve other people. I didn’t whine and bellyache about what I “deserved,” so what makes you so special?
And by the way, renters in naturally affordable housing will be the first to suffer under HALA. Many of them understand that, which is why they don’t buy into the BS that HALA is about helping them. In fact, at tonight’s WCC meeting, we had a very good question from a long-term renter who lives in an older building with nine other relatively affordable units. She pointed out that under HALA, if her building is torn down to make way for luxury apartments, as it likely will be, MAYBE if you replace it with ten new units, ONE might be “affordable.” Meanwhile, where are she and the people who currently live in the relatively affordable units supposed to go? Same goes for the father of my daughter’s best friend. He recently learned he and another couple are being kicked out of their relatively affordable home to make way for a bunch of new $700K townhomes.
So you can prattle on all you want about where you “deserve” to live, or how maybe, eventually, prices will start to come down if we just eliminate all zoning and build up everywhere. But in the meantime, real people are will be facing real consequences if HALA is enacted.
Phil — if you and I don’t “deserve squat” then we also don’t deserve to keep our privileged status quo just because we already have it.
Second, there is no such thing as “naturally affordable housing”, as if cheap homes sprang from the earth like weeds after a spring rain. Housing that the owners rent at a reduced price exists because the landlord is generous, or prizes tenant longevity, or doesn’t like to spend much on maintenance, etc.
Third, it is a leap to think that because HALA exists all these lower-rent buildings will automatically be redeveloped. There’s a ton of factors that weigh into any particular case. More likely than redevelopment (unless the building is poorly maintained) is that the landlord will raise rents over time to move closer to the median or that the landlord will sell and the new owner will jack the rents to cover the purchase price.
Fourth, as we’ve discussed before, the father of your daughter’s friend is being booted by the *existing* market dynamics! Without changing those market dynamics by increasing supply to meet the insanely high demand and without generating through some method or other more affordable housing, there will be many more people like this father.
Fifth, the renter at WCC tonight. After the meeting she learned that there are a number of complementary programs to HALA that aim at addressing the goal of preserving lower-rent buildings. It is an issue the City recognizes, and is taking action on. It isn’t an either-or.
I’m of the “build it and they will come” mindset. Upzoning Aurora is a fabulous idea. If developers started building more housing there, whatever shopping/coffee shop/services you think don’t exist there now, would likely be part of the development, thus creating a fully serviced neighborhood. It would also get rid of the undesirable elements (those motels the police are always having issues with, for one) and Aurora is already a major transportation corridor. Win-win!!
KD, you said “DESERVE”. That should never be in anyone’s vocabulary, and is a false argument.
Do you “Deserve” a new car every two years, or “Deserve” to drive a Mercedes?
Do you “Deserve” to have a certain sized house/apartment with certain amenities?
I didn’t “Deserve” to live here, but I choose to work hard, save, and live in a 600ft apartment with my family of FOUR so that someday (hopefully) I can move into an actual finished home.
Such a spoiled, entitled society we are inhabiting these days I fear……..
LOL “Deserve.” I never got that memo. I had to live in poor neighborhoods when I got my first job. Then I saved, worked hard and was able to move to better and better neighborhoods. Get real.
KD- you CAN use the word deserve! Housing is a Human Right. You are no less-worthy because you are a renter.
jaws:” Housing is a Human Right.” Not in the United States I’m afraid. Can you point me to any law or ordinance, federal, state, or local that states that?
So again I ask you, what exactly does your comment about being “displaced” mean? Do you no longer iive in Wallingford?
KD, come by 1306 N 48th st to see what it takes to live here. You CAN if you want it badly enough!
Here’s how we made it happen:
1. We purchased a crappy place in Shoreline and lived there for 7 years, building equity, while commuting into the city.
2. We saved every penny we could, and I work 60-80/week in my small business
3. We bought the UGLIEST house on the block off of Stone Way, at a bank sale, and it took a year to close
4. We are putting more debt AND every penny of money into this house, as we can afford it.
5. Our family of FOUR lives upstairs in a 600ft apartment. Let me repeat, FOUR OF US in 600ft. We’ve been here 2.5 years during the remodel. My wife and I sleep in the living room, on a futon. it SUCKS.
6. No TV, No Netflix, No Cable, No movies. We lead a VERY spartan life (but I do drink wine, a LOT due to living in 600ft 🙂
If the city followed my advice above, and lots of families built ADU’s and DADU’s, you’d definitely be able to continue to live here. You are definitely NOT going to afford to live in the fancy new highrise buildings that HALA will produce, like Smith and Burns on 45th however!
We’re not rich tech, and don’t have family money. We’re just a hard working family making the sacrifices needed because we WANT to live here. We DON’T DESERVE to live here.
Jeffery, thanks for all the condescending advice that I didn’t know I needed. You don’t know me, you don’t know my life, and yes you DO deserve to live here too. Because no neighborhood should have anyone who “doesn’t deserve” to live there.
I don’t want a high rise fancy condo. I agree with you completely about ADUs and DADUs being the ideal solution for Wallingford. In fact, I’m currently living in an adu situadion, which probably isn’t legal, but it’s all I can afford. It’s the size of a shoebox and I have to heat the whole place with space heaters, in some ways it sounds like we have similar living situations (although yours is more stable in the long term and you will eventually be able to improve it because it belongs to you.)
That said, I don’t want opponents of HALA to make “perfect” the enemy of “good.” Which a lot of people are, and which renters have every reason to be insulted by.
If you don’t want a fancy high rise that is going to be un-affordable, ask the city to do what I suggest, which is empower homeowners to create more infill of ADU’s and DADU’s. Sounds like you prefer one of those since you live in one already.
I think that most of us can agree that a neighborhood is a nicer place to live than a condo.
Empower residents, NOT large construction/development firms.
We BOTH want the same thing, but HALA won’t get us there.
KD, I keep asking you about your comment about being displaced and so I’m not sure if this place you are describing is still in Wallingford or not. Did you get displaced from another rental here to this one? It sounds very similar to a lot of other places people are living in that allows them to live in the neighborhoods that want to live in if they can’t afford to buy there. No one is forcing you to live there, right? And Jeffrey’s post didn’t sound condescending to me, but more descriptive of how he and his family have worked hard and compromised in order to live here. It’s similar to how I came to live in Wallingford, too 🙂 A lot of people don’t understand what it takes to achieve a goal sometimes. And, no, I don’t agree that anyone “deserves” to live just anywhere.
And this is precisely what the affordability problem is. Your (bad) experience is why we need a solution to the affordability crisis. We’d love for you to join us to work positively with the city on creating a welcoming neighborhood and city that doesn’t require a 10 year arduous process that enables only the super-rich or the extraordinarily disciplined to live in our great city.
Jeffery- Thank you for sharing your very real experience on how your family is making Wallingford “work” for them. I appreciate your perspective and it is always great to hear how people have formed their lives. However, your invitation for KD to come visit you is not neighborly, it’s condescending.
What works for you, won’t work for other people. That’s why I advocate for housing options. I live near Woodland Park. I’m luck to be in one of the few apartments that are scattered around. Woodland Park needs more apartment options, not just ADU’s and DADUs. One of the best ways to support young families is to provide them with 2 bedroom apartments. Young families, single-parents, would benefit GREATLY by having an affordable 2 bedroom apartment.
It sounds to me like KD enjoys Wallingford so much that she is willing to sacrifice the comfort of most living situations just to be a part of this neighborhood. Does that make her undeserving?
jaws: “One of the best ways to support young families is to provide them with 2
bedroom apartments. Young families, single-parents, would benefit
GREATLY by having an affordable 2 bedroom apartment.” Problem is those are the types of units that developers cannot make money on, at least on expensive land like around Woodland Park. So don’t expect a change any time soon.
Good for you Jeffrey. I’m sure many of us could tell stories about how long we sacrificed and how little we could spend on things other than housing in order to finally afford one.
KD, I have an “Anti-Grand Bargain” Sign (not anti-Hala) in my yard. I would qualify for the 50% of average mean income, which is why I object to HALA subsidy qualifications at 60% and more. Then I would be paying property taxes to support people making more than me. I already pay 1/4 of my income for property taxes. I’m not and have never been wealthy.
I proudly display my anti-HALA sign because HALA doesn’t require any affordable housing to be located in Wallingford.
I was a long time renter on Capitol Hill (ten years) and finally saved enough to buy a house here in Wallingford. I will say, changing from renter to homeowner certainly changes your perspective. Save your pennies and you too will own a home someday and think differently.
Thanks for this eloquent rebuttal of all that we’ve heard from those who oppose HALA.
The main opposition to HALA seems to fall into two camps. One camp is blatantly anti-development, feeling that it would be better to keep things as they are no matter the consequences for renters, commuters or the city. The other camp claims to support development, just not in the way that HALA does. They make valid points about the details of HALA, but insist that nothing be done until everything is perfect.
Both arguments have merit: the city is lovely as-is and growth always creates problems. However, both ignore a huge downside risk, which is the transformation of Seattle into another San Francisco with too little housing and massive wealth iniquity.
That’s a really inaccurate summary. While there is a range of opinions about growth, there are no two camps. There is no one insisting that nothing be done. The principle point of opposition is that the MHA upzones are not going to do what you or we want. They’re going to increase rents, they’re going to decrease economic diversity. Seattle is adding record amounts of housing, under the existing zoning, and there’s no reason to think zoning is suddenly going to become an issue that prevents this, rather the MHA program will add add developer costs that aren’t worth the benefits.
I’m actually curious – what are you suggesting be done, and how does it affect the basic calculus around jobs added vs housing added?
Speaking only for myself, number one is to make an honest effort to manage growth within levels we can support. That’s the main reason I oppose the U district upzone, but that isn’t the end of it. Seattle doesn’t have to be, and can’t be, the destination for everything in the world. That’s the part that needs to be addressed to make your basic calculus work out, and there’s no way around it. With improvement there, the existing record-breaking pace of housing development will be enough – it has to be enough, because it’s about all we’re going to get, upzones or no upzones.
From there, we need to go back to honest urban design that works with reality on the ground and not broad-swath, wholesale policy changes driven from computer map software in city hall.
Interesting, so your proposal is to find ways to limit the number of good jobs added to Seattle?
You bet. You set up the equation yourself – “jobs added vs housing added”. If you want it to work, you either have to commit to unlimited growth in housing, or limited growth in jobs, one or the other must hold. For many of us, if we want to hang on to the things we like about Seattle, we can’t support unlimited housing growth even to the extent it’s technically feasible, but the thing is, we’re about at that point anyway. The record-breaking rate of housing growth today may be about highest we’ll ever see, for reasons that have nothing to do with zoning.
Increase unemployment to keep things the way I like them.
And I thought the signs were cruel!
See my comment above. This is not a logical solution.
Don- that is not a logical solution. You are going to put “caps” on the number of employees that a business can have? You are going to limit a businesses growth? All because you don’t want your city to change?
Seattle is built upon innovation and businesses that started from nothing and have pulled the city up to the economic power that it is (ie: Starbucks, Microsoft, Adobe). When the nation goes through a repression, Seattle feels it less because it has such a robust economy.
San Francisco didn’t like having a bunch of people moving to their city for job opportunities. What did we learn from them? Well, the employers paid VERY well, so people still moved to San Francisco. And San Francisco got expensive, so they got more restrictive, and the new people just started buying in the areas around San Francisco. Prices went up, and up, and up, and people didn’t stop moving to the area for jobs. They were paid well. The only people hurt were those that had already called San Francisco home, including the Single Family Homeowners.
Growth doesn’t come here like the weather. City hall exerts itself in various ways to promote the growth that is making it impossible for anyone but the rich to live here. The University District high rise office building upzone is a prime example – they’ll tell you it’s about housing choices, and there’s a remote possibility of a high rise luxury residential building, but they know – it’s public record from city council meetings – residential is not really feasible, and the point of the high rises at this time, is office buildings. It isn’t what their propaganda talks about, but it’s no secret. These office buildings are for more tech bros, with $1M signing bonuses who can compete in the housing market, while the rest of you go to live in Everett.
Another prime example was a big tax break for Russell Capital, to move their employees here, where there’s no room for them, from Tacoma. There is undoubtedly plenty more of that going on, but it’s hidden, as the Russell Capital deal was.
Seattle will grow anyway, without this pumping, but we need to recognize that our capacity for growth is not unlimited, this isn’t some kind of fantasy game but a real city that’s already past the reasonable limits of its infrastructure.
Excellent points Donn. The University is pulling another of its “alternative fact” jobs. I’ve seen it several times before when they tried to “clean up” the Ave. And no University employee, and I was one and know what they get paid — much less than a city or county employee, — except for maybe a medical school administrator, is going to be able to afford a high rise apartment. They do want to make the district an adjunct to South Lake Union, where they and other biotech and tech companies already have research facilities. The UW has a long and glorious history of hypocrisy.
So of course the UW and city hall get along quite well, probably the UW didn’t even need to hire former council member Sally Clark. The real outrage is Murray and Johnson, though. Murray’s speech last summer at University Heights was the height of hypocrisy, going on about the homeless and the housing crisis while putting everything he’s got into making it worse.
Donn, Did you notice how all 3 local channels were not paying any attention to his bragging about homeless reduction achievements. The only people they wanted to interview were the opposition whom they featured on the news.
Exactly, so Amazon should never have been lured here in the first place, shutting down SLU and creating this mass of high paid workers killing the rental market for everyone else. It’s the greed of city hall that is responsible for creating a big part of this problem. The numbers of people involved and real estate required to house the business to say nothing of the rental units needed to house them, was clearly not thought through and I’m wondering if there is any report that shows the costs to us for just the additional infrastructure expansion so far… This is reminding me of an old Star Trek episode, “The Trouble With Tribbles”.
Jaws: “The only people hurt were those that had already called San Francisco home, including the Single Family Homeowners.” What about the low income people who lived around Market Street and the Tenderloin for decades? How did you forget about the people you’re advocating for? I don’t get it.
I agree that I’m simplifying the anti-HALA arguments somewhat, but reading your comments below it sounds like you fall pretty solidly into group #1. When you say “Seattle doesn’t have to be, and can’t be, the destination for everything in the world,” what I hear is “we shouldn’t grow so much.” I disagree with the sentiment but, more to the point, it’s impossible to restrict growth in the way that you’d like.
Upzoning will enable more development, which will create more housing. More housing results in downward pressure on housing costs. You say “upzones… are going to increase rents and decrease economic diversity.” The former statement flies in the face of basic economic theory and the latter statement is debatable at best.
Thank you, I will be happy to explain why the MHA upzones are going to increase rents and decrease economic diversity. To start with, again it’s important to recognize that we are right now seeing extraordinary growth in housing units – 2017 will be nearly double the previous record, and there’s more on the way. Developers who build this housing are actually not so excited about the MHA upzones as you might imagine (in fact some of them promise to challenge them in court) – they don’t look forward to paying the costs, and as we can see, they don’t need the upzones. See Bertolet articles in Sightline for analysis of the costs. In this situation, developers argue, development will slow down, particularly in lower demand areas, and become more expensive in higher demand areas. This can affect rents in only one way.
Meanwhile, along with the new post-MHA housing that’s affordable only to the tech bros, there’s supposed to be affordable housing, but the very few units actually created will invariably not be on site, but rather built by low income housing non-profits using the in-lieu fee money. The city touts their wonderful record at spreading that stuff around, but the reality today is that real estate in Wallingford is not going to be available cheap, and it would be idiotic for them to build here. Good-bye, whatever economic diversity we had with the existing market rate old stock.
Sad truth is that whatever economic diversity we have today is a holdover from baby boomers who bought into the neighborhood 20-40 years ago and are now sitting pretty in $750,000 and higher homes, many with enough deferred maintenance as to necessitate a tear down and replaced with a mcmansion that will shade the neighbor’s tomatoes.
The sad truth is that we have no idea what we have here, the city has no data on housing affordability outside of the few units that are subject to rent restrictions. All we know is that we have neighbors who are not affluent and are still here. There may be lots of them, but no one knows. The two families that lived next to me are gone, now LR1 townhomes; the house they lived in wasn’t the nicest on the block, but structurally it looked pretty sweet to me just prowling around in the basement prior to teardown. The couple around the corner is still there, but SF and not in the UV, lucky for them.
Paul, More generalizations. Did you ever think about the fact that we happy homeowners are paying increasingly high taxes every time another McMansion is built. Do you think we can actually profit from this gentrification? I pay 25% of my income for property taxes. And when the house is sold, if I am not already dead, I will most likely need to use all the proceeds for some kind of assisted living. The only people who can afford not being warehoused in their old age are those who use the proceeds from their house. Otherwise, you go on welfare or ask your grown kids for money. You or your parents will be there sooner than you think.
theguy, You don’t seem to know much about the cost of building tall buildings. They cannot be built of wood, only concrete and steel which raises their cost considerably. That’s why no South Lake Union developer would participate in MHA, unless they substituted for offsite units, not over 4 stories.
the guy,
You need to check your gross generalizations. They are entirely unconvincing.
Seattle Fair Growth just sent out a call to action to fill out the HALA survey on the city’s HALA.Consider.It site. According to Seattle Fair Growth pro-upzoning is dominating the survey.
Good article, thank you. There are details about HALA that I don’t know too much about, but I know it was a well thought out plan by the city. That is why it always bothered me when people claimed they opposed it because Ed Murray was in the pockets of Real Estate Developers.
So you’re okay with only 45-74 affordable units in Wallingford? I’m all about the affordability and diversity and this does not seem like a well thought out plan to me. They will knock down possibly many times more than that of naturally affordable units. Just that teeny tiny number of 45-74 alone makes me wonder if the city is in the pockets of Real Estate Developers. I want a diverse and growing neighborhood, not a district of luxury high rises.
I think the actual displacement analysis that goes into the final planning has so far showed that ratio “naturally affordable” (aka junky, barely livable) units removed to affordable units added has been so heavily weighted towards units added that it’s almost a complete non-issue.
I’d also point out that everyone who moves into a luxury high rise is someone who isn’t displacing a current resident of existing housing. Beyond that, the luxury part is only temporary. Given 10-20 years, that luxury highrise will be an affordable highrise.
Oh, and if you think 45-74 units is too small a number, please show up and advocate for a higher upzone than 1 story! The % of units required to be affordable is directly tied to how big the upzone is. If we decide that say, Stone Way wouldn’t be much different with 6 stories than it will be with 4-5, we get more affordable units!
The bigger the upzone, the less displacement!
I’m not sure where you are getting the 1 upzone from. The maps the city showed at the design workshop were more often 2, 3 and 4 upzones.
Here’s the map: http://seattlecitygis.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=6aafeae86b1f4392965531c376489676
It obviously depends on which part of the map you look at, but mostly I think it’s going from 40 feet to 55 feet in the most dense areas. That 15 feet is roughly 1 story, maybe 2 if you squeeze the lower floors.
In the yellow/orangeish areas it’s actually downzoning from 40 feet to 30 feet and allowing smaller lot sizes. I think that’s a largely forgotten part of the zoning change – no more towering boxes. I’d like to hear more about this zoning, and its affect on property values etc. It’s an interesting set of trade-offs I haven’t thought through.
If you mean Residential Small Lot – all of the RSL area is upzoned from single family. I don’t think there’s any 40 foot single family. The 30 foot height is nominally the same as SF, but if it follows the same rectangular roof deck style as current LR1 construction, as it very likely will to maximize floor space, it will be boxes with minimal setbacks, and indeed it will tower over adjacent residential even at the same nominal height. RSL is essentially a new thing and will have new building standards that haven’t been adopted yet, so technically there’s hope that it will resemble the cottage-like pictures they show, but that’s a pretty slim hope unless there’s a big surge of popular opinion on this very obscure matter.
You’re right, I got my numbers wrong. It looks like Single Family can do 30 feet + 5 for roof pitch, while RSL can do 25′ +5′ for 1 house, 18′ for the variants. http://www.seattle.gov/dpd/cs/groups/pan/@pan/documents/web_informational/dpds021570.pdf
So in height, if I’m reading this right, it’s a little lower, but in terms of density, it’s trying to add more, smaller units.
Seems like it, or some variant of it would make sense and match the existing character of a lot of parts of Wallingford while reducing some of the looming you get when narrow SF lots get rebuilt in the current zoning.
The number of units doesn’t have to do with Real Estate Developers. It represents a 2-7% stock in the number of units (45-47 in Wallingford and 3700 in the City over 10 years). If the City wants to increase the number then they will have to come up with more subsidies or let developers go taller. Maybe you are right that the number should be bigger, but everyone would have to share in the cost. If a developer won’t make money on the deal then they will just pull out and go somewhere else. The City has to make sure to include affordable housing and also make sure that projects pencil out. If projects don’t pencil out then no more buildings will be constructed and that is no solution.
AMEN Becky.
I’m curious: what is a “naturally” affordable unit? Given that we have a free-ish housing market, rents will rise according to demand. Enabling massively more housing to be built, everywhere, will do much more to solve the crisis than building some fixed number of affordable units.
That said, I’m all for having many more than 74 affordable units. However, I feel that arguments of the type you’re making obscure the fact that adopting a good solution now is much better than spending years or decades more to arrive at a “perfect” solution. The real danger is not that we will do something that’s only a partial fix but that we will do nothing at all.
There is such a thing as a “Naturally Occurring Affordable Unit.” So, apartments can only charge so much based upon their location, the market of their location, the age of the building and the amenities that they offer. In order to explain the concept of “Naturally Occurring Affordable Units”, I’m going to have to get wordy.
Newer buildings that rent really high are built different that the older units. New units comes with dishwashers, stainless steel appliances, washer/dryer in-unit, and usually better sound insulation than the older apartment units. In some cases, they have roof-top gardens, fire pits, dog runs, etc.
In addition to the amenities that are built into the unit/building, there are customer service amenities that newer buildings offer in order to stay competitive. These amenities can include: 24hr emergency maintenance, package concierge, email/text notification systems, secure entry, covered parking, secure bike storage, on-site staff or even a person in the office every day that they can talk to.
Older buildings are often limited by their construction. Think of any apartments built between 1950’s-1980’s. These buildings often don’t offer dishwasher or washer/dryers, but also other small considerations such as garbage disposals, the windows may not be double-paned, you can hear your upstairs neighbors every time they use the bathroom. Most of these older buildings do not have every-day on-site staff. They don’t package concierge.
Apartments and apartment management companies perform Market Survey’s monthly. They call their competitors and base their rent upon what the comparable neighbors in their market are able to get for rent. If Fancy New Building A does not have a fire pit and a dog run, they may not be able to charge as much as Fancy New Building B does. These market surveys sent the rental amounts.
Older buildings can increase their rent, just based solely on how popular the neighborhood is to rent in. However, if they do not offer dishwashers or any of the above mentioned amenities, then they can only raise their rent so high. If they offer no amenities other than the fact that they are vintage, they cannot push rent above what the other older units around them are. This is how a building becomes “Naturally Occurring Affordable Housing.”
Do older buildings go through upgrades to be Market Comparable? Some do. I’m sure many people remember what happened with Lock Haven in Ballard (they have since changed their name). But most older buildings are more likely to be spending money on maintaining their buildings instead of upgrading their buildings. When a building remains vintage they can be grandfathered into outdated building policies. When a vintage building decides to upgrade, they need to look at asbestos abatement, lead, adding ADA features, updated fire prevention such as sprinkler systems. Most cannot add dishwashers and washer/dryers without investing in re-piping a whole building. ALL of this is at HUGE expense and that expense is expressed in the new rents.
And just like how homeowners don’t want to sell and enjoy being a part of a neighborhood, many owners of “Naturally Occurring Affordable Apartments” aren’t interested in selling. They will all have their own reasons, whether they like the legacy of having an apartment building in their family for years, they aren’t interested in the hassle of upgrades, it’s their retirement and is treating them well enough they’d rather keep it as it is… etc.
Brady, when you say, “That is why it always bothered me when people claimed they opposed it because Ed Murray was in the pockets of Real Estate Developers,” maybe you should take a look at Paul’s list HALA’s “28-member advisory committee representing a diverse range of interests.” It’s filled with developers. And of course, plenty of urbanist activists and foundation types. Oddly, no neighborhood reps are on it, I wonder why?
There has to be developers involved. I will tell you why. There is a narrow diference between feasibility and lack of feasibility. There has to be an intricate knowledge of cost of construction, expected profits, and expected revenue in order to determine what affordable housing can be included that still results in new development. If too much is expected then private investment will just go away. The Mayor needs to know what he can create that keeps private investment interested. For example, if he said 50% of all new units will be affordable housing units with no reimbursement to the developer the the developer will just go to Bellevue or Shoreline or Portland or Bothell where they can make the numbers work.
Of course it should have some developers on it. But wouldn’t you agree there should have been some neighborhood reps too?
Maybe. i don’t know the mix.
Here you go, Brady:
Committee Members
David Wertheimer – Co-Chair; Citizen, Philanthropic Sector
Faith Li Pettis – Co-Chair; Partner, Pacifica Law Group
Alan Durning; Executive Director, Sightline Institute
Betsy Braun; Administrative Director of Facilities Management, Virginia Mason
Bill Rumpf; President, Mercy Housing Northwest
Catherine Benotto; Vice Chair, Seattle Planning Commission
Cindi Barker; City Neighborhood Council
David Moseley; 40 year administrator for Washington State
David Neiman; Principal, Neiman Taber Architects
Don Mar; Owner, Marpac Construction
Estela Ortega; Executive Director, El Centro de la Raza
Gabe Grant; Vice President, HAL Real Estate Development
Hal Ferris; Principal, Spectrum Development
Jon Scholes; Vice President, Downtown Seattle Association
Jonathan Grant; Executive Director, Tenants Union
Kristin Ryan; Director, Seattle Office, Jonathan Rose Companies
Lisa Picard; Executive Vice President, Skanska
MA Leonard; Vice President, Enterprise Community Partners
Maiko Winkler-Chin; Executive Director, SCIDpda
Maria Barrientos; Owner, Barrientos
Marty Kooistra; Executive Director, Housing Development Consortium
Merf Ehman; Attorney, Columbia Legal Services
Mitch Brown; ASUW Representative
Monty Anderson, Seattle Building Trades & Construction Trades Council
Paul Lambros; Executive Director, Plymouth Housing Group
Sean Flynn; Board Vice President, Rental Housing Association
Sylvester Cann IV; Advocacy Lead, the Road Map Project, CCER
Ubax Gardheere; Lead Coalition Organizer, Puget Sound Sage
Ah there they are – and how many of those esteemed citizens live in areas that will be in any way impacted by the upzones? How many of them stand to benefit directly from increased profits resulting from the upzones?
Thanks for that list. Very telling…..
Thank you for that hayduke. I have been wondering who exactly was there. Have your read this?
GRAND BARGAIN & SEATTLE FOR EVERYONE
http://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/dont-change-housing-grand-bargain-industry-coalition-warns-city-council/
There were. And also, most of the people on the committee also live in houses. And in Seattle.
Or are you asking that the committee include neighborhood reps who want no change?
I posted the list above in response to Brady. Kindly point out for me all the neighborhood reps on it.
What is a neighbourhood rep? Don’t we all live in neighbourhoods? Groups like the WCC are great, but you have to remember that it requires a lot of time and effort to engage with such a group and make it to its leadership. The types of people who both have the time, the ability and inclination to do that aren’t necessarily representative of all our neighbours.
Certainly people who don’t want to take the time and make the effort to at least inform themselves and show up are not the type of people who make good representatives.
I am asking, or rather hoping that this year will mark the end for a while of a series of Seattle administrations starting with Nickels, dedicated to an oppositional approach to the neighborhood organizations and superficial public support that depends on paid cheering squads. The Murray administration has gone over the top on that, and it’s time for it to end.
You don’t think people who live in the affected neighborhoods should have a voice on the committee?
Paul does believe that people who live in the neighborhood should also have a voice. Just so long as they share his views.
Brady,
Here is a link to a Seattle Times article published last August 1. Maybe it will help you understand.
http://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/dont-change-housing-grand-bargain-industry-coalition-warns-city-council/
Here are the highlights of the article:
“A Seattle City Council committee is hearing from many parties before an expected vote on housing legislation, including from real-estate-industry players who’ve been bankrolling political campaigns. Real-estate-industry players who struck a so-called “grand bargain” on affordable housing with Seattle Mayor Ed Murray last year are now warning the City Council against making changes they say would break the agreement.
And as they oppose the changes that would require more from developers, they’re reminding the council they’ve been bankrolling efforts to sell the public on the mayor’s affordable-housing agenda — including the campaign for the $290 million new housing levy on Tuesday’s ballot. In a letter last week, the prominent lawyer who helped negotiate the grand bargain on behalf of the industry players sent a message about who holds the purse strings when it comes to getting the political results Murray and the council want. Jack McCullough addressed the letter to Councilmember Rob Johnson, who chairs the land-use committee, which is scheduled to vote Tuesday on legislation related to the bargain.
“The Coalition for Housing Solutions has maintained its commitments through the grand bargain,” McCullough wrote. “We have provided financial support measured in six figures to the Seattle Housing Levy campaign and to the operations of Seattle for Everyone.”
The coalition represents developers such as Paul Allen’s Vulcan, along with architects, land-use attorneys, business groups such as the Downtown Seattle Association and Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce, and
trade groups such as the Rental Housing Association and the Building Owners and Managers Association.
The coalition has made no direct contributions to Yes for Homes, the campaign pushing for voter approval of the housing levy, according to campaign-finance records. But Vulcan alone has contributed $25,000 of the campaign’s more than $300,000.
Seattle for Everyone is an organization launched last year to rally Seattle residents around the mayor’s Housing Affordability and Livability
Agenda (HALA), the centerpiece of which is the grand bargain.
Backers include companies, such as Vulcan, along with low-income-housing developers, labor unions and advocacy nonprofits. McCullough is co-chair. Contributions to the organization aren’t listed on its website and aren’t tracked by the Seattle Ethics and Elections committee, like contributions to ballot-measure campaigns.”
Been thinking more about this article. I have actually never heard anyone say they are against affordability, diversity, and increased density. Everyone, all sides, seem to agree on these points. The disagreement is in the details. But this article downplays the fact of the details. We should be coming together as a neighborhood community and I believe we would find that we agree on more than we think. If those in this new group all truly believe that capitalism trickle down economics, with a pittance of affordable units, is going to get us to economic and racial diversity, well then you agree with the Republican likes of Trump, Reagan, and Bush. Most progressives have watched throughout their lives these policies fail. The issue is not the goals here, most folks agree on those, but those devilish details. Instead of formally dividing, we should all go to the Wallingford Community Council and help define those details.
Thanks for your thoughts Becky – I agree – everyone who feels comfortable should go to tonight’s WCC! A lot of neighbours have been made to feel uncomfortable by the WCC, so I think we should also encourage attendance at city sponsored events like the one on the 17th and upcoming council and committee meetings.
I don’t think the Trump-ism name calling is very helpful (and would point out that NIMBY-ism has much more in common with “build the wall” and anti-immigrant stances than pro-housing stances do). Some level of basic common sense regarding why housing costs go up is a necessary part of this conversation too, which I don’t think is trickle-down-ism at all. Rich people are going to be rich and buy what they want/need isn’t really a controversial stance.
Why in the world would you assume i’m a nimbly? If you read any of my other posts, you will see I’m all about affordability, growth, and diversity. Please be careful. Further, I’m not calling anybody any names. I’m pointing out policies that the city is adopting here are heavily dependent on supply and demand and those are policies typically espoused by the Republican party. Just a statement of fact. 45-47 affordable units planned for Wallingford is heavy dependence on supply and demand. There should be more affordable units provided.
Sounds great! Glad you’re pro-growth. What mechanism do you propose for adding more units? An easy one would be a 2 story upzone instead of a 1 story.
At the city’s design workshop at Hamilton they showed up to 4 upzones. Very few locations were just 1. And that’s in exchange for 45-74 affordable units. That’s just simple supply-side economics which, as I said, I haven’t seen work. I agree there has to be increased supply but there has to be much much higher requirements of percentages of affordable units. What’s the percentage of 45-74 affordable units to the thousands of market-rate units expected to be built. No, giving developers more floors doesn’t appear to be getting us much. I’d be happy to go up just one floor and get some real numbers for affordable units from developers. At the current exchange rate, we’re just being robbed.
I think you may have been mislead assuming you’re talking about 4 story upzones. I don’t think there are any of those on the map that I see. The vast majority of the upzones in Wallingford are roughly 1 story. We could get way more affordable housing with more than that since the % required is related to how big the upzone is.
The current zoning allows growth and plenty of new construction – as you can see by walking around Wallingford. Casting the issues as growth/no growth is misleading, maybe even qualifies as “alternate facts.”
The current zoning allows for some growth, but with no units dedicated to affordable housing. It also means that far more lots would need to be redeveloped to see the same amount of extra housing.
There are posts on this thread about how a single house occupied by two families got torn down to be replaced by only two new townhomes. Clearly that’s not desirable. If the zoning had been there, instead of just two new homes, we could have gotten (maybe) more market rate units *and* (definitely) some money dedicated to affordable housing.
The trickle-down ideas that began the decline in US prosperity in the Reagan years also seemed like “common sense” to a lot of people. Let’s get a little more serious about what’s going on.
Sounds good – what are some ideas that would improve on the status quo? Matching housing increases to job increases seems natural – after all, if more people work here, it seems like we should make sure they can live here. I haven’t heard anything so far that would attempt increase housing development other than MHA/HALA proposals. Should we reduce planning and design requirements instead?
MHA isn’t going to increase housing development. There have been a couple of articles in Sightline by a developer advocate, outlining the economic impact of MHA in terms that should be pretty sobering to supporters. It will slow development in high demand areas (north end), and stop it in the south, is how I would summarize his conclusion. Empirically, there has been some speculation that recent spectacular surge in permitted developments may be developers trying to get in under the MHA wire – they don’t need the upzones, and they don’t want to pay for them. That’s certainly the position of the group that intends to challenge MHA in court.
Meanwhile, yes, there has been spectacular growth in residential building. So it’s sort of a mystery why we must do something to change course, if what you want is what we’re getting.
That growth is why we aren’t in a San Francisco situation where a 600 sq ft apartment rents for roughly $3500 and instead are only seeing pricing increases at comprehensible rates rather than mind-numbing ones. We need to keep that up, and amplify it if we can, while making accommodations so that the truly vulnerable have some options (the limited # of units produced by the mandatory affordability) rather than none.
That said, I’d totally support a market-oriented stipulation to the % of housing that must be affordable – for areas that aren’t meeting projected or desired development, lower the requirement, for those that are exceeding it, increase the % required.
I actually agree with your here, Ben. But we are in a similar situation as San Francisco with limited building space and a lot of high income residents. It’s largely because of those wealthy Californicators, as we used to call them, that prices in Seattle have sky-rocketed. It’s so much cheaper here than in SF and if you can get a good paying job here, if you can take the rain, why not move? This to me seems like “common sense,” at least in economic terms.
Ben: ” A lot of neighbours have been made to feel uncomfortable by the WCC” What is a lot — you and a few of your friends? Let’s get real here and not always talk about ourselves but about the issues. Building more apartments according to your supply and demand theory should bring down rents. But in fact in the last few years they have only gone up. So what gives? It’s obviously due to the high incomes that some people are willing to spend to be in the central part of city. There have always been expensive neighborhoods in Seattle which most Seattleites can’t afford, Seattle for Everyone puppets seem to think that the realities of capitalist finance should not apply here. I would be all for building a skyscraper in the City hole in the ground and make it for the homeless only. That could be an alternative for HALA and would certainly put Chairman Murray on the map as the man who eliminated homelessness.
I’m one of the signatories so obviously I agree with the sentiments in the piece. It’s great when people can come together over the basic values here, like affordability, diversity, and increased density. The environment is another critical component. Adding market rate units in Wallingford means that a new renter is less likely to live in Lynnwood or White Center. They are also less likely to need or use a car. And regardless of HALA, Wallingford is changing. The status quo means more and more tear downs over time as lots become increasingly expensive. We see it on our street. But I think there’s room to grow while retaining the character of the place. I plan to be at the WCC meeting tonight, but I think this is all part of a healthy debate. I don’t find the Trump accusation of much use: I’ve met long-standing progressives on both sides of this issue.
As I mentioned above, it’s not an accusation. It’s an observation. We see in our society that such heavy dependence on supply-side economics tends to align with the platform of the Republican party than that of progressives. Just like with the Affordable Care Act, government has to make requirements of the private sector, and that is their sacrifice, and residents, in the form of taxes and increased density which is their sacrifice, and provide subsidies because there are some things the private sector just by definition will never do on it’s own.
qmmayer: “Adding market rate units in Wallingford means that a new renter is less
likely to live in Lynnwood or White Center. They are also less likely
to need or use a car.” So are you saying that market rate units in Wallingford are cheaper than market rate in Lynwood and White Center? BTW, professional transportation studies show that since people use their cars less than 50% of the time for commuting and more than 50% for errands, driving kids around etc. the number of cars may be reduced somewhat. But most households still have two cars when there are two income earners. Fewer people in the Puget Sound area use carpools than 35 years ago and most commuters still drive in single occupant cars. Twenty years ago it was expected that at least 50% of professional workers would “telecommute.” Today in the region only 10% actually do. Unless you live in Manhattan, these kinds of trends are likely to continue.
Totally agree that we need to work together to improve the proposals. So far much of the effort has been on blocking any changes. So, we’d love for you to be involved with us in advocating for changes that out-HALA the city’s plan!
Well put, Becky. What we supposed “anti-Hala” people object to is the waste of city funds going to developers that might go instead to build more AFFORDABLE housing, not just more expensive housing.
I appreciate any arguments on the best way forward, but Not In My Backyard is not a valid argument.
I agree with you, and Not In My Back Yard is not my argument. If you read my other posts, you’ll see that my argument is for more affordable units and a better exchange rate between the 1-4 level upzones shown on the proposed maps and the number of affordable units required.
Others in this post seem to be questioning whether development will even happen at the current affordability requirement rates – Donn for example is suggesting that by requiring even the small amount proposed developers won’t find it economically feasible to build and therefore will build less than before.
I think it’s a hard balance – more housing means cheaper housing, regardless of affordability requirements, but for those with very low incomes, that housing won’t come on line soon enough. MHA tries to strike that balance, with an eye to update mandatory affordability percentages over time, but it seems like adding language to adjust the percent based on the excess or lack of current growth makes sense.
Ben: “more housing means cheaper housing.” Not so. One of the greatest myths is that you can build to the point where prices will go down. That’s not how housing finance works. Let’s say 50,000 units are built in Seattle in order to lower prices. As prices start declining, interest rates might rise to cool the market, making it more expensive for investors to borrow money. When investors cannot forecast a sufficient profit, banks will be inclined to stop lending because they don’t want to invest in a sinking market. Investors may still buy sites, but will sit on the property until prices start going up again.
Because it takes three to five years to bring a project to completion, housing development is very risky. All the money invested is based on forecasts
of what buyers or renters will be willing to pay when the building is finished. If the tech industry slows, building owners might reduce some rents, but would more likely offer incentives, like not charging first and last months’ rent up front. If the market takes a real dive, developers are not going to reduce rents to a level that a working class or even professional person can afford for that would mean they would lose money. They would be better off trying to sell the building at a fire sale price or declaring bankruptcy. As in the recent foreclosure crisis, banks aren’t going to allow developers to pay them back less than they borrowed, especially when there’s not a demand for expensive apartments.
Moreover, density does not by itself produce affordability, neither do prices always go up in desirable areas. Manhattan is a good example. Recently housing prices in Manhattan have gone down as many in the financial sector there suffered the consequences of the Great Recession. Lower salaries, lower rents. Supply and demand had nothing to do with that.
I think you’ll find that if you give it some thought, your examples are literally describing supply/demand (lower salaries reducing demand for high rent properties, demand for housing triggering building sprees etc). When developer estimates of future demand are wrong, they either underbuild causing a lack of supply compared to demand jacking prices, leading to extra building, when they over-estimate, they overbuild lowering prices (to the break even point, and then further once the developer goes bankrupt). At the micro level this was really easy to see in downtown/SLU through the housing bubble.
The interesting part with housing is the lag in development time leading to risk calculations being a bigger component in the equation. The less lag time, the more efficiently the market responds, which is why big, liberal cities with lots of zoning restrictions and things like environmental reviews, design reviews, community input tend to fail their most vulnerable residents when it comes to housing. As with everything there’s a balance of course as there’s definitely value to ensuring good design, ensuring infrastructure keeps up and avoiding negative environmental consequences.
Oh right, we fail our most vulnerable residents by getting in the way of developers. Pie in the sky, baby. Overheated economic growth like Seattle’s, and the gold rush market development that follows it, is always going to run low and moderate income residents out of town, that’s a given. Developers will point to things that inconvenience them (“duh” as you put it), but it’s really about financing and forecasting, the market isn’t there to solve social economic problems and it won’t.
I’m sorry, Donn, as much as you’d like to be right, and therefore justified in arguing that nothing needs to change, or that us young folks should all lose our jobs and move away as the only solution, or that Seattle should try to suppress its vibrant economy, the data doesn’t back you up. Cities with fewer restrictions on housing and fewer zoning restrictions absorb economic booms with less displacement and slower growth in housing costs. You can read the academic research or simply note the relative cost of hot markets based on housing production restrictions and actual housing production (San Francisco vs Seattle vs Austin etc).
Here are a few of many, many, many studies and non-academic explainers (note that they come from both liberal and conservative or libertarian publications and researchers):
http://www.nber.org/papers/w8835
http://www.vox.com/2014/8/28/6063679/the-biggest-thing-the-blue-states-are-screwing-up
http://www.vox.com/cards/affordable-housing-explained/supply-side-of-affordable-housing-matters-most
https://www.mercatus.org/publication/how-land-use-regulation-undermines-affordable-housing
http://www.usnews.com/opinion/economic-intelligence/articles/2015-12-16/bring-down-zoning-costs-to-make-housing-affordable
http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/12/10/housing_costs_it_s_the_zoning_stupid.html
https://www.amazon.com/Zoning-Rules-Economics-Land-Regulation/dp/155844288X
http://www.forbes.com/sites/scottbeyer/2016/09/30/the-verdict-is-in-land-use-regulations-increase-housing-costs/#4dea1b866112
http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/economy-budget/317140-zoning-reform-needed-to-halt-skyrocketing-housing-prices
http://www.econw.com/case-studies/economics-of-zoning-land-use-regulation-and-housing
I suspect mere facts won’t change your already made up mind, but just know that change doesn’t have to be bad, and it’s definitely going to happen – we can work to make it better, or we can bury our heads in the sand and insist that it should be someone else’s problem while we watch it quickly become our problem anyway.
Ben, My sources are academic, peer-reviewed and not libertarian or conservative. You must know that the city got conned by developers who knowing that MHA was coming started overbuilding a few years ago, in every inexpensive neighborhood they could, starting with Ballard and now the U. District, so that they could cash in before they had to abide by the city’s pathetically small set asides. Why wouldn’t they? They are in business to make as much money as they can. But none of us can control international financial markets which, with the latest iteration of global financial practices, puts many international companies out of reach of any one country’s laws.
I have been shocked that the city has been so naive in its administration of projects like the City Hall hole in the ground and the bike rental companies, both of which are embarrassing fiascos. Sometimes “best practices” just don’t apply. Why would Seattleites want to bike downtown with the elevation from 1st to 6th Ave, and hills like Queen Anne and how many Seattleites enjoy biking in the rain? There’s a big difference between a flat city in Arizona and here.
Also, I have been wondering why urbanites and neoliberals (neocons in American political terms) like you seem to be, are so concerned about poor people. Were a lot of you social workers who are so dedicated to the cause you would put their interests before yours? I have never experienced this type of empathy and self-sacrifice in my lifetime and I did work for 10 years in social services and still work in higher education.
“Also, I have been wondering why urbanites and neoliberals (neocons in American political terms) like you seem to be, are so concerned about poor people. ”
Because I remember what it felt like to be poor, and know what it feels like to be rich.
First, in the future please be a little more selective in the material you expect people to read. Two or three of your list are research type material that are potentially interesting, if they don’t really live up to your billing as “facts”, but the majority (“non-academic explainers”) are propaganda puff pieces that are an offensive waste of time.
To get to the more factually oriented stuff, let’s start with the Harvard study that your ECONorthwest page is taking credit for. As we start into their executive summary at the top:
Do you see a parallel with Seattle here? I don’t. We’re in the middle of gigantic housing unit boom. Of course there’s a fact that you might just weigh against the whole line you’re pushing – what does supply restriction exactly refer to, at a time when new production is twice the previous record?
OK, the Glaeser/Gyourko study. We see enough references to it in your the other links, that it would appear to be the mainstay of academic backing for this argument. I’m not going to get very far into this 37 page thing here, but what I don’t see here is adequate consideration of what I’m sure you would agree is the single key driving factor, the rate of economic growth. In their data, Seattle for example is nothing special, rather average, because their data is old; same zoning etc, but now I’m sure we’d be in a different place in the chart. Without a solid way to account for this key factor – the rate of employee growth by income level – all their formulae and regressions seem a little suspect. (Particularly given the arbitrary location of the high tech industries that drive that growth – why does everyone want to locate in Seattle, or San Francisco – could it be, that they’re more desirable precisely because they’re more careful with development? We’re comparing ourselves with Austin?)
Finally I have to point out that your Ikeda Mercatus paper mentions, among four categories of evil land use regulations:
That would MHA, for us. Fact? or do we have to exercise a little more critical thinking when we come to the parts that speak against the city hall program?
It’s super straightforward to account for ” what I’m sure you would agree is the single key driving factor, the rate of economic growth” — here it is.
It’s super straightforward to account for ” what I’m sure you would agree is the single key driving factor, the rate of economic growth” — here it is.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/68517054ff58ad4ff1324b868d1714bc243aba9d8b49aa89f9057761eb546472.jpg
If you say so, but don’t tell me. Tell Glaeser et al so they can factor this critical information into their analysis of the effect of regulations.
Oh those guys are all over that stuff. May not be in the links above but they have tons of work on that.
Ben: “I think you’ll find that if you give it some thought” — that’s really a patronizing statement. If you want to reduce everything to supply and demand, you miss how the supposed supply and demand of whatever you’re counting is produced. Housing whether apartments or SF homes are not purchased like apples and cookies. We are just coming out of a recession that was produced by unscrupulous financial institutions that would use such a simplistic type of reasoning to con low-income, financially ignorant buyers.
Besides it’s not like builders are working together to cause an over- or under-supply of housing. Remember financing housing is the critical issue and no one can accurately forecast the future. With the Trump administration calling the shots, housing market uncertainties could become even greater. It appears that central Seattle has already reached the point where developers are starting to offer sweeteners to their leases. But they won’t be able to write off their loans when they can no longer pay them back. The country’s experience with the fallout from the manufactured mortgage “crisis” showed that. Even the many government programs could or would not help the millions who lost their homes to foreclosure.
“Supply and demand” can not begin to explain the complexity of derivatives and mortgage bundling.
Nobody that I know of is saying NIMBY. What I hear is let’s do it BETTER than is currently proposed by HALA in my backyard.
BTHIMBY = Better Than HALA In My BackYard
Sounds good! Given your support for ADUs, I hope you attend some Queen Anne Community Council meetings and speak out against their current efforts to block them.
I look forward to seeing more proposals, and hope everyone understands that no proposal will be exactly what each individual wants since different people have different opinions. We shouldn’t let that keep us from doing anything at all :).
Misinformation Ben: Queen Anne CC is not trying to block ADU’s. They want a real EIS done on the proposed changes to the existing law. No one is trying to eliminate ADU’s.
… and the proposed changes are nothing like what has been proposed here. Find out what O’Brien was trying to do, before you take Ben’s suggestion and walk into a Queen Anne meeting and make a fool of yourself. The decision is interesting reading.
I’m amazed that anyone can’t see the difference between questionable changes to an existing law that allows ADU’s and blocking ADU’s. Ben needs to do more research. He could build an ADU right now.
“Ben needs to do more research.” He certainly does. Also, if he knew anything about the several surveys the city has done among neighbors in different parts of the city, he would know that most homeowners can’t afford to build them and when they can they usually want to use them for their relatives or AirBnB rentals.
This is their page on the suit: https://queenanneappeal.org/ You tell me whether they want to block ADUs or not.
The mechanism they used was to sue for a larger environmental impact study, which incidentally is the time honored mechanism used to slow down development long enough to try to kill it by other means.
They can’t block ADUs in this way, because they’re already legal and don’t depend on O’Brien’s legislation. The two principal parts of that bill they opposed (in my view), and that are the basis for the decision that an EIS would be required, were 1) virtual elimination of owner occupancy requirement, and 2) an extra unit, that had never come up as an issue in the DPD review of backyard cottages. For a total of 3 units on a lot, with none of them occupied by an owner. These are far from the incentives Mr Lindstrom is talking about, and far from the needs of any normal homeowner considering an accessory unit.
Love it! Totally agree! Let’s shift the Wallingford neighborhood discussion from “NO To HALA” to “Better than HALA”!
+1!
+2
Actually Not In My Backyard and Not In My Front Yard is my line of thinking when it comes to the horror of imagining a multistory apodment on my street.
Brady, You should avoid gross generalizations. Take the new transfer station on prime Wallingford property, which neighbors welcomed and participated in making it the extraordinary multi-purpose facility that it is. That’s why, if there were NIMBYs, they lost.
An additional great outcome of this discussion! I’ve never been to a Community Council meeting, just attended about 6 city HALA events and 2 community council presentations, and someone posted here that there is a Community Council meeting tonight!
Yep – here’s the meeting: http://www.wallingfordcc.org/2017/01/26/monthly-meeting-on-wednesday-february-1-7pm/
Keep in mind that the current makeup of the WCC is fairly anti-HALA and expect some very one-sided (and many would say questionable) presentation of information!
There may be some confusion here. Among the various items on the agenda, only one item is HALA-related, a Q&A with Geoff Wentlandt. He’s the city’s lead planner on the MHA upzones. It’s sure worth coming by if you’re interested in city hall’s account of what they’re doing; there isn’t going to be any WCC HALA presentation.
Thanks, the Q&A should be interesting! I didn’t mean to suggest the rest of the meeting was going to be about HALA, just wanted to make sure newcomers to the issue knew the WCC has a pretty strong position regarding HALA & MHA already so they’d be aware of existing biases.
And going to some O’Brien/Johnson/urbanist meeting wouldn’t come packed with bias, as well?
Of course it would – it’s good to be aware of bias in any source of information, especially the motivations and priorities that drive that source.
Ben, I’m sure the newcomers will be very grateful you’re so objective.
I don’t know, I saw a presentation a couple of weeks ago and there they said that they supported affordability, diversity, growth and increased density. They just seemed to call into question the need for so much upzoning. I think they support multi-family and detached units. Not sure how they feel about a 1-level upzone.
The thing is, it’s horrible to say that you are against Affordability, Growth, Diversity…
but if people don’t like HALA and aren’t offering other options, then their negation of ideas does halt those exact things: Affordability, Growth, Diversity.. because inaction is a bad option when considering Seattle’s Housing Affordability Crisis.
That’s not true about the Community Council. It’s unfair to label those residents who have problems with HALA as Anti-HALA.
Many of us want something better, that adds to neighborhoods, not to developer pocketbooks.
In fact there’s plenty to like in HALA – say for example home ownership proposals, section H in the report. If you oppose the MHA program, though, you’re anti-HALA and opposed to change, rhetorically speaking.
And how many WCC meetings have you been to, Ben? Not good to engage in “alternative facts.”
Welcoming Wallingford: You say that “We worry about our kids, and our neighbors’ kids.” Well, I do too, and this is why I do not support HALA. To focus only on creating more housing, as I believe HALA does, is being short-sighted and does not contribute to the livability of Seattle. I believe that planning for schools and the education of our kids is a critical part of planning our city’s growth. This is not happening. HALA does nothing to provide space and resources for new schools that will be needed if the proposed upzones take place across the city. I have asked our city council members and HALA representatives how HALA provides for schools, and they have no answers. In the recent Q and A with Rob Johnson on Wallyhood, council member Johnson had no responses to any questions about schools. If Welcoming Wallingford folks are aware of any way that HALA helps provide for new schools, please share.
SPS has a department responsible for planning for growth as the population distribution and amount changes: https://www.seattleschools.org/cms/One.aspx?portalId=627&pageId=17293 They plan both the boundaries for existing schools and determine where to build new schools and additions and improvements to old schools.
Our property taxes fund this growth, and as part of an upzone, you get a corresponding increase in property taxes.
In the case of the U-District upzone, which is I think the next major one planned, the city is investigating giving a developer an incentive in exchange for building a school (section VII): https://www.scribd.com/document/336234258/City-of-Seattle-Central-Staff-Memo-With-Potential-Amendments-1-19-17#from_embed
And also notes that the school district can impose an impact fee on development in the U-District to get additional revenue in order to build schools.
Ben Thank you for pointing out that U Dist document-I had not seen that. Is it telling, perhaps, that addressing schools is so far down the list in that document? Maybe I am missing something here, but everything you mention above puts most if not all the burden on the schools. The SCHOOLS are the ones who will have to plan for population growth and shuffle kids around when certain areas grow. The SCHOOLS will have to hope school levies get passed to get funding. And, from the document you provide above, it’s the SCHOOLS who will have to collect impact fees. Until the HALA program provides some strong evidence that there will be substantial, concurrent support for schools to help handle our city’s growth, I will not be supporting the upzones.
HALA is one aspect of a multi-faceting approach the city is taking on a network of issues. They have unfortunately done a poor job of explaining and connecting in the public’s understanding this multi-prong approach.
Schools are covered under items like school levies.
At the WCC meeting tonight we heard of another way: impact fees. While Seattle doesn’t charge impact fees today, advocating for them is another way we can create financial support for schools.
And, if I may say so, this move by WCC to propose impact fees (which I do support) is the first *positive* proposal to address the affordability crisis made to date by the WCC.
It’s a good start to taking a Yes, AND! approach versus the Heck NO! approach used so far.
Saying that schools are “covered” under school levies is not really correct, given the large deficit SPS is facing next year. I am very much in favor of impact fees. The problem is, whenever I have asked HALA representatives whether and how they plan to use impact fees, I again have gotten no response. I would encourage Welcoming Wallingford to work with WCC to help push for impact fees, as well as more transparency from HALA.
So could impact fees be assessed developers in order to pay for the increased infrastructure their developments would require so the rest of us don’t get stuck paying for that, too? P.S. This is a different “Lisa” from the one just above my comment.
(This was in a city FAQ)
The city does not charge impact fees because, unlike in suburbs and rural, a new building doesn’t itself have an “impact.”
In an un- or uderdeveloped area, you may have to lay new roads, extend sewer lines stand up new power lines, etc etc in order for a new building to be “turned on.”
In the city the building itself has no impact. (It could itself have an impact on permeable surfaces and drainage but preventing that is built into the building code.)
Humans starting to live or work in buildings (and send their kids to school, drive etc) have an impact.
Personally, if people wanted to advocate for an impact fee that every family (whether already living here or a newcomer) has to pay for each child newly reaching school age or driving age , I wouldn’t think it was good idea but I’d concede that it would at least be fair.
I believe that sort of fee, Mr. Kirschner, is what is called private school. Is that what Welcoming Wallingford is proposing as fair to families?
No I don’t endorse the idea of fees at all – I’m just saying that a fair “impact fee” that’s based on the impact of human beings would apply to current residents as well as newcomers:
every human that poops, whether a newborn to a family that who lives here already or a new person who moving lin
every child of school age, whether that’s a kid in family who lives here turning 5 or a kid moving in with a new family
etc
Bryan: “In the city the building itself has no impact.” Did you just return from the twilight zone, Bryan? This statement contradicts your post below. Why would buildings be built if they were not used?
The humans who use them have an impact.
Paul: “And, if I may say so, this move by WCC to propose impact fees (which I
do support) is the first *positive* proposal to address the
affordability crisis made to date by the WCC.” Then I think you haven’t been listening or reading much, Paul.
Hey Paul – thank you for being transparent and inclusive of the community to your group. I’ll check it out! Happy February,
Miranda.