Micro apartment buildings throughout the Wallingford Urban Village? It’s possible under new zoning recommendations recently released by the City. Even though Mayor Ed Murray has left office, his Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda or HALA lives on. The HALA upzones (known as Mandatory Housing Affordability or MHA) are being championed by our own District four City Council member Rob Johnson, who is chair of the City Council’s Planning, Land Use and Zoning committee.
A key part of this housing agenda is zoning changes to allow for larger, denser developments throughout the City. In exchange for allowing developers to build more lucrative buildings, the City is requiring developers to pay into an affordable housing fund or build affordable units on site. (My guess it that developers will all choose the in lieu fee option and close to none of the affordable units will actually be built on site.) The in lieu fee option will result in several years delay until the new affordable units are built while our older, more affordable housing stock is being torn down to build luxury units.
Last year, the City released its first draft zoning maps for the urban villages affected by the upzones. The Wallingford Urban Village saw significant changes in its zoning, which currently includes a large amount of single family zones, but under last year’s proposed changes would have gone to Residential Small Lot up to Low Rise 3 (five stories with mico apartment buildings possible). And, of course, no parking.
Since that initial draft zoning map release, the City has released its Final Environmental Impact Study (FEIS) to look at the impacts of its proposed zoning changes. The Environmental Impact Study compared different scenarios:
Alternative 1 – No change in zoning.
Alternative 2 – Mandatory Housing Affordability or MHA (the upzones straight up). These are the first draft zoning maps that were released in 2016.
Alternative 3 – MHA upzones with a twist – less density in areas with affordable / cheap housing but MORE density in areas like Wallingford with more expensive housing, or as the City likes to say “high access to opportunity / low displacement.”
Preferred Alternative – Somewhere in between 2 and 3.
The Environmental Impact Study is supposed to study alternatives to evaluate which one will accomplish the City’s goal with the least impact. But despite there being countless ways to address our housing affordability crisis, the City chose to only study upzone “alternatives” as if upzones are the only option available.
Deep in the Appendix of the Environmental Impact Study, after scrolling past pages and pages of how good their outreach (*cough* propaganda) has been, you can find the new zoning changes for Wallingford on page 136 out of 406 as your computer counts it (or page 62 as written in the text of the document). To save you the trouble of finding this yourself, I have “un-buried” the documents for you here (if you are confused by what you see on the maps, there is further explanation as you scroll down):
In Appendix H, are the “clean” zoning maps, this is the one for the Preferred Alternative:
The City is proposing to remove all Single Family zoning inside the Urban Village boundaries. In the “Preferred Alternative” Maps, the smallest jump up in zoning from Single Family to Residential Small lot has been removed. Most of the Single Family Zones would increase to Low Rise 1, 2 or 3. What do all of those designations mean? To see the City’s explanation, click on this link, and scroll down to “MHA Development Examples.” But the quick and dirty explanation is this:
Single Family (SF): A Single Family house, one accessory dwelling unit allowed
Residential Small Lot (RSL): Splitting up lots, cottages, etc.
Low Rise 1 (LR1): Three story apartment buildings, row houses
Low Rise 2 (LR2): Four story apartment buildings, townhouses
Low Rise 3 (LR3): Five story apartment buildings, row houses
When reading the zoning maps above, the zoning designation on the left is the current zone and on the right is the proposed upzone, i.e. “SF / LR2” means your zone is currently Single Family and the City wants to change it to Low Rise 2. Now if your property is down hill from the new development, the wall next to your house might be higher than what is listed above. And flat roofs, which are common now, make the property feel higher than a slanted roof. As far as I can tell, micro apartments would be allowed in any of the Low Rise zones. And no parking is required inside the urban village boundaries.
Unfortunately, the different alternatives pit one area against another or one neighborhood against another. In the Preferred Alternative, some of the area between Stone Way and Aurora justly gets some relief from the massive zoning increases seen in Alternative 2. But on the other hand, the Preferred Alternative removes all Residential Small Lot zoning in favor of more significant increases.
Proposed zoning changes are most dramatic inside the Wallingford Urban Village, but areas outside of the Urban Village are not off scot-free. With the exception of Single Family and Low Rise 1, every other zone (Low Rise 2, 3 commercial…) will see at least an additional one story of allowable height. In the case of Low Rise 1 the height is remaining the same but increased density (more, smaller units) will be allowed. Look for the shaded areas on the last map above to see if you are in or near one of these zones. The same is true if you’re inside the Urban Village but your zone is staying the same. It’s actually not, it’s rising to allow for an additional floor.
Confused yet? I know my head’s spinning just trying to get this right to explain it to you. I’m not an expert, I just spend way too much time reading about this stuff (ask my husband).
Edited: Some changes are a slight improvement over what was initially recommended. In Low Rise 1, developers can build apartments as small as 220 square feet, but new recommendations state every fifth one must be a “family-sized” unit of at least 850 square feet and two bedrooms. A slight improvement over previous recommendations that would have allowed all 220 square foot studios, but still not something that integrates well into a single family zone.
Two bedrooms is not ideal for a medium or large family, but this is a slight improvement and will allow for more options for small families or roommates to split costs. Ideally Low Rise 1 would be all family sized housing and greater than 850 square feet to accommodate larger families. Currently Low Rise 1 usually results in townhomes and does not allow for micro apartments.
My commentary? As I’ve said before, there are no reports out there that justify Seattle needs these massive citywide zoning changes to accommodate our population growth. These upzones allow the City to charge developers fees to build affordable housing, but it also incentives tearing down our most affordable housing stock at an increased rate. The City has failed to show us that the end result will be a net increase in affordability.
Mayor Ed Murray persistently dismantled the authority of everyday residents to have any meaningful say in how our neighborhoods grew while replacing it with endless meetings that gave citizens no real power. If the City were to work with the neighborhoods in true neighborhood planning efforts, such as we had in the 1990s, I’m confident that we could accommodate growth without neighborhood character being sacrificed at an urbanist alter. This current development boom is making corporate developers very wealthy while the rest of us look around at our city and wonder what the hell happened? It doesn’t have to be this way.
Additional Information:
- The final decision on these zoning recommendation will be made by the City Council. Email all of the City Council members at [email protected] and let them hear your voice.
- Land Use Bulletin for the release of the Final Environmental Impact Study (FEIS)
- City of Seattle HALA information. Sign up for HALA newsletter to stay informed.
- City of Seattle City Council website. Sign up for agendas from the Land Use, Planning and Zoning Committee. Contact City Council members and read their blogs (Council member Lisa Herbold’s blog is particularly informative).
- Wallingford Community Council provides a different perspective to counter the City’s pro-HALA stance. Sign up for email notices regarding land use issues, attend meetings or become a member.
- Land Use lesson for the day: “Micro Apartments” and “Apodments” do not appear to be defined in the land use code as far as I can tell. The technical term is Small Efficiency Dwelling Units, or SEDUs, which are legal in all Low Rise (LR) and Neighborhood Commercial (NC) zones and are a minimum of 220 square feet.
- Want background on HALA? Read this blog post I wrote last year to explain what the heck is going on.
In before Bryan and TJ! 🙂
This looks great, can’t wait to welcome newcomers to the neighborhood! Too bad they won’t remove height restrictions altogether.
I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic. You don’t think zoning should include restrictions on building height?
I agree, in an ideal world we would have only “residential”, “commercial”, and “industrial” zoning, property taxes high enough to ensure efficient use of our limited land, and plenty of public green space rather than parking lots.
“The HALA upzones (known as Mandatory Housing Affordability or MHA) are being championed by our own District four City Council member Rob Johnson.”
I wonder what Urban Village slated for upzones Rob “Encourage More Turnover” Johnson lives in? Hmmm…..
I’m surprised the city included the “What we heard from the community” section. The heading should read “What we heard from the community but decided…nah!” This section really illustrates how meaningless the community input and engagement was.
Yeah, my voice of up-zoning east Wallingford and Lake Union waterfront is never heard!
Aww, it didn’t even make the list 🙁 Maybe you could put a call in to Vulcan/Seattle For Everyone or whatever they’re calling themselves these days. It couldn’t hurt to throw a little money Rob Johnson’s way, too.
So when your ideas are not adopted, it’s because the city don’t listen. When my ideas are not adopted, it’s because I didn’t throw money.
The fact is that there are wide variety of opinions, and it’s the norm to not have one’s idea adopted. Quite often nobody’s idea is fully adopted, and all decisions are compromises. I would doubt that you are so privileged that you can’t realze that.
Of course there are a wide variety of opinions. In this case, the city has published the opinions they gathered from the community (and sort of watered them down based on what I’ve been hearing at city hosted community events), and then created a plan that doesn’t reflect, address or even respond to most of those concerns.
This isn’t really about your opinion or my opinion, and I don’t literally think *you* should/could “throw money” and get your way. I do, however, believe that large corporations and their financial interests now have the political influence to suppress community input. They have no interest in making Wallingford or any other neighborhood livable – and why should they? But, it’s a little scary how they’ve been able to cloak themselves as grassroots organizations and duped people into believing they’re mission is one of virtue.
I’m not sure what you are saying about my privilege. Maria of Romania, can you please add “privilege” to your list?
Why do you think these ideas aren’t grass root and aren’t of virtue. I think higher density makes the city more livable, not less, and it’s a good thing that people are living closer together as opposed to spread out. What’s the virtue in single-family-house, a wasteful way of living? Why is it more livable? I see the low density zoning rules as ways for home owners to enrich themselves. I know for my own financial interest I should join the anti-HALA folks also, and I am advocating ideas that’s against my financial interest.
I guess I don’t think of groups run by lobbyists and paid for by billionaire developers as grassroots. I also don’t think Vulcan is in the business of helping communities. They’re in the business of making money. That said, I don’t discount that some of the people involved in the “YIMBY” movement or whatever are driven by virtue. TJ, I’m sure you are sincere in your beliefs and that you genuinely believe MHA will help people.
I’m glad you mentioned financial interests. I’ve never understood this position, so maybe you can explain it to me. MHA will cause the value of properties in Wallingford to increase. A rezone makes the land more valuable because of its development potential and creates a scarcity in SF, which makes SF more valuable. It could be argued that SF home owners in Wallingford who support MHA are trying to enrich themselves. I’m not an economist or a real estate expert, but this is the logical conclusion I’ve come to. Can you help me understand where you and others are coming from when you say this?
It’s not that complicated: studies have found that zoning and housing restrictions are the main reason some cities in the US are way more expensive than others, and the main reason for wealth segregation. San Francisco would not have the housing issue if the whole city is six-story-high condos, and Seattle wouldn’t have the housing issue if most places got row houses. Wallingford is fully of one-hundred-year-old million dollar houses not because these old houses are more livable, but because the regulations severely suppressed the housing stock.
People who insist on Wallingford being single family house neighborhood and insist on all kind of restrictions on development, including a high burden on what new buildings must be like, are essentially insisting on restricting supply, therefore ensuring not just high property price in Wallingford, but also preventing anybody poorer to move in. That also ensures the local public schools to be better. None of these are exotic practices. The same thing is happening everywhere in the US, therefore the wealth segregation has been so severe.
Thanks, TJ. I understand the argument on sort of the macro level, that overall, the idea is that housing would be more affordable if there was more housing stock (I don’t necessarily agree with it, but I understand). I still don’t understand the argument on an individual level, like when you say it’s against your financial interest to support HALA and that those who are against HALA are enriching themselves. Do you think someone who currently owns a SF home in a SF neighborhood in Wallingford will see a loss of value in their home because of the increased stock of apartments and townhouses (aka HALA)? Or that a home that is currently SF and is rezoned to LR2 will become less valuable?
Could very well be. The proponents of these upzones seem to envision it leading to a fantastic surge of development, far above the already record pace of today, and in that environment, LR2 zoning could make it more valuable. But if development will really continue at about the same pace, which is very likely, then the wider spread of LR2 development on neighboring lots will erode the SF quality of the neighborhood without much added LR2 value. I don’t think either way it’s predictable or profound enough to be much of a motivating factor though. A few people think may think they’re going to cash in big time on their rezoned properties, but I can’t imagine many do.
Hey TJ. In what way will higher zoning contribute to our public schools? State sales tax funds public education. Seattle, unlike neighboring cities, does not charge school impact fees.
It might make some Wallingford properties more valuable in the short term, because they’re upzoned for higher development potential (but bear in mind that if you see an “M1” or “M2” after your upzone, those come with extra affordable housing fees that will come out of your land value.) The long term effect has more to do with how these areas age, after this gold rush burst of quick development, and the general quality of the neighborhood. Will Wallingford be a more desirable neighborhood to live in, say 20 years from now, or less?
Thanks, Donn. It’s interesting to think about how those factors would impact property value. I can’t imagine TJ means he supports HALA because it will make the neighborhood crappier and therefore cause his house to be worth less, but then again he has said his motives are selfless…
His motives are clueless. I’m sorry, but every one of these discussions is filled with lengthy discussions going round and round with TJ and someone who can’t leave it alone. People can read for themselves and draw their own conclusions.
“Clueless” is not a nice word to use.
I support not just HALA, but even more zone up so we can have many $200k~$600k houses in the neighborhood. I want people with low paying jobs in the neighborhood can live in the neighborhood. And I know if that happens, my current million dollar house would not be million dollar house anymore. I would think the idea itself is pretty selfless.
TJ,
And how will incentivizing production of unlimited-density apartment projects that keep folks tied to the endless cycle of paying rent to a remote, corporate real estate investment firm create any affordable ownership units?
It appears that you are drawing conclusions that are not supported by the policy being proposed. What IS being proposed will “goose” construction of tiny rental units and tear down the smallest, most affordable existing ownership units… all while telling people that they are only proposing “duplexes and triplexes”.
The manner in which the information is being presented is disingenuous and a sham. Unless you dig deep and try to understand, you will not know what the City is proposing. Your statement indicates that you do not understand. The City is NOT explaining the impacts of the proposal at all. You’ve got to do it.
Kaydee,
I do not believe that the City has analyzed the financial impacts (don’t ask the question when you don’t want to hear the answer). My guess is that the upzones will completely DESTROY the marketability of my home as a SF home, for who would want to live next door to a 45-foot tall, 40-unit SEDU towering over their yard and turning your street into parking hell.
I suspect that the value of my property to a developer, however, might increase the value as a site for an ultra-dense micro-apt LR2 building for singles.
This is one aspect of Rob Johnson’s goal to incentivize turnover of existing homeowners from SF to LR. He has also suggested an interest in taxing properties at their development POTENTIAL rather than what is actually built. In other words, my SF parcel would be taxed at its maximum potential of an 18-unit apartment building instead of the modest home that currently exists there.
I do not think that the City really cares about improving affordability. The upzones are just some raw meat tossed to real estate investment firms to get them to not sue over the MHA (at least most, but not all, will probably not sue).
I think you just made a great case for having a 18-unit apartment rather than your single family house. It’d house more people, provide more tax revenue, while each unit would be cheaper than your current house. How is that not better for the greater good?
Ha ha, Why would each unit be cheaper? SEDU is THE most expensive housing being built in the city. It also generates the highest rent per sq ft of any other form. A group of four folks sharing a SF home as a rental would pay around $600 to $700 per month rent. Those same folks would pay $900 to $1100 per month to rent a 220 sq ft SEDU… and talking only about rents ignores that Seattle is actually short of ownership units, not rental units (of which there is a glut).
Your argument also appears to conflate SF housing (an ownership opportunity for families or for sharing) with an SEDU, which is a corporate-owned rental unit that has as its sole function a tiny abode for one person. An SF home can be shared or used by families. A SEDU is rental for one person forevermore.
Your analysis also does not account for the intangibles of livability, yards, trees, walkable neighborhood, gardens, birds, privacy, etc.
Talk about a waste of resources and energy! SEDUs are not better for the greater good because it is more expensive in materials, more expensive in rent, more expensive tax-wise for adjacent property owners, lower quality of life, and has but a single function – housing for one individual for a short period of time, or at least until that person meets someone and decides to move on… probably to seek a SF home.
It hasn’t been just suggested that properties be taxed on maximum potential; it is already law and referred to as “best use” tax. If a single family house is rezoned to LR, it will (eventually) be assessed with properties that are similarly zoned LR. Taxes will absolutely go up & either cause displacement or be passed on to renters.
You said it twice and that’s not nice! LOL Yes, it is added and TJ has an additional demerit.
TJ, what are you complaining about? You urbanists have the entire political machine of the the City of Seattle using our taxdollars to advocate for your density-at-any-cost ideology, from the mayor on down to the dog catcher. Department after department is doing everything they can to shove HALA upzones down our throats.
I agree that the affordable housing requirements are pathetic. I agree that the developers will pay in to the fund which will help city bureaucracy but not the individuals who need affordable housing now. I think they should require affordable units and not a fee.
I am for requirements that don’t have grandfather clauses for existing properties. If we want to require things like affordable units and parking, we should make existing home-owners contribute also, as opposed to put the burden only on new buildings. For example, asking all existing homes to provide bedrooms that can be rented out cheap or pay a fee, if we want to ask all new developments to do the same.
And this week’s edition of “Ask a Marxist” is brought to you by TJ! Come on everybody, you owe it to the less fortunate to build an addition them or give away part your house.
You mean ideas similar to progressive tax? And how is it fair to ask new comers to give away part of their house while not doing the same yourself? Why should the cost of providing affordable units only be on the new buildings?
TJ, you do understand what the “Grand Bargain” of HALA was about, right? They can’t legally require ANY affordable units to be built without giving something in return, so in exchange for upzoning places they’ve always wanted to get their hands on, they made a deal to let developers either build 5-11% “affordable units under MHA, or pay an in lieu of fee to the city. Which, of course, they will all choose to do wrt desirable neighborhoods like Wallingford and build market rate here instead.
Your friends at Vulcan made the deal behind closed doors with housing activists, while deliberately keeping neighborhood groups out of the loop. This is the deal THEY wanted, not us.
Indeed, if it had just been good urban planning to do this, they couldn’t have sold it to developers in exchange for MHA fees. You can’t sell someone something for real money, that they would have gotten for free anyway. The city traded neighborhood quality for MHA fees.
In downtown/SLU the affordable housing set aside requirements are as low as 2% in some areas. Guess who owns most of SLU? Paul Allen. Guess who founded Vulcan? Paul Allen. Paul Allen / Vulcan (and others like him) get the sweetest deal in this whole HALA Grand Bargain and are pushing the burden onto everyone else, including the mom and pop developers who have to pay larger percentages towards affordable housing requirements. Vulcan is also a supporter of the pro-HALA “grassroots” mouth piece Seattle For Everyone.
That’s a really good point. LOTS of service employees work downtown, yet how much affordable housing is there downtown? I’d say almost zero. We should be forcing developers to build affordable housing for all those service employees downtown so that they too can live close to work!
Downtown has by far the largest concentration of affordable housing in the city – maps:
http://www.smartgrowthseattle.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Seattle-Subsidized-Housing-by-Housing-Density.pdf
http://public.tableau.com/static/images/Ho/HowSeattlesAffordableHousingProgramsStackUp/MobileFriendlyDashboard/1_rss.png
You know, Susanna, that I don’t put most of the blame on Paul Allen himself, because originally he was going to give most of the land he owned there to the city for a park. A park which voters turned down. ( I could be wrong but I also think that his sister manages Vulcan and the family’s real estate holdings.) The biggest hypocrisy to me was the City/UW deal for upgrading the U. District. The high rises there were alleged to be for at least in part for UW workers. My eye! Do you know what an average UW staff person of even faculty makes? I’m willing to bet that most of the apts will be affordable only for the tech employees they plan hiring for their new Tech Extravaganza. And if a few UW employees or students qualify for subsidized units, you know they won’t be anymore than a few. Another example here of the UW’s long tradition of letting the neighborhood get trashed while they get piles of money from the legislature for their building projects.
I owe nobody nothing. Who’s paying my increased costs of living here TJ? Dip wipe
Have they factored in current traffic congestion impact in their proposal?
With parking on both sides of the street that leaves one lane down the middle for two way traffic in some of these areas.
Indeed, parking does tend to take up space that could be used for traffic. I’d be all in favor of eliminating parking in favor of bus lanes on any street where buses tend to get stuck in traffic. How about it?
What the city has done on nearby streets is to make them “one way” to allow for parking. This, no doubt raises other issues.
People do drive way to fast on one-way Thackeray / Latona.
Not a bus lane… streetcar!
Uh, you actually would prefer a streetcar? Am I reading that right?
Maybe KatCat7 is Tennessee Williams.
A bus lane can be implemented with a can of paint. A streetcar is significantly more expensive. Let’s blanket the city with bus lanes. Tomorrow. From there, if there are places where a streetcar would be a significant mobility improvement, we can think about it.
Just here to say that reading this blog post representing HALA and MHA with the tone used above and assuming that tone reflects everyone who lives in the Wallingford Urban Village embarrasses me. I’d love it if this forum made a greater effort to frame our concerns within a citywide context, and acknowledge and promote the many different views we Wallingford residents hold.
This is a blog. If you have a different point of view, put a piece together and submit it. There have been plenty of postings that have a different take on HALA and MHA, and I have found many of them offensive and dishonest. I didn’t have the right to censor them or demand that they be rewritten to be more representative of the opinions of everyone who lives in Wallingford. Why are you embarrassed by differing opinions?
You’d make a great contribution, like Susanna does, If you’d do that Emily.
Susanna , Thanks so much for pulling all of this together and as you say a LOT to digest . Sorry to be self interested here but we live on Thackeray just off 45th and It looks like we may be impacted personally in SOME way. What’s the best way to now proceed to understood the impact on us specifically (and yes I am also interested/concerned about the impact on a neighborhood we love :-))
I don’t see any change for you.
It looks like the buildings that line 45th are going from a height of 40ft to 55ft. At Thackeray, if you are not on 45th then I believe your zoning will stay the same, but you could be next to a larger property if you abut the buildings on 45th.
Also, I urge you to contact the City Council (who will make the final decisions) and express your concerns / comments. You can reach the entire City Council at [email protected] . Or if you would like to just reach our district council member you can email [email protected]
I would love to read a comprehensive, informed, and well-written post like Susanna’s by a HALA proponent in the neighborhood.
I am a little confused Susanna, you said micro apartments would be allowed in the LR1 zone, but there is still a density max of 1 unit per 2,000 SF of land area right? That would mean a typical lot of 4,000 SF could only be permitted for two units on the site.
It’s tricky because not only are they changing the zoning, but they are changing the definitions of the zones. So Single Family goes to LR1 and then what is allowed in LR1 is more dense.
For current LR1, yes there is a max density of 1 per 2,000 SF.
They are proposing to change this, so it would allow no density limit of apartments in LR1. So you could have micro apartments 220-400 sq feet, for every 3 micros you would have to have 1 “family-sized” unit of at least 800 sq feet and two bedrooms.
OR you could have an apartment building full of 401 sq foot apartments and no family-sized unit requirement. If the developer buys more than one lot then that’s a lot more units than were previously there.
The developer could still build townhomes if they chose, it will likely depend on whatever they feel will be the most profitable.
The other big difference neighbors will feel is that LR1 allows a lot more lot coverage and less set backs compared to single family zones. So houses may get “walled in” so to speak.
Click on this link and scroll down to where it says “MHA Development Examples”: http://www.seattle.gov/hala/focus-groups
I question how anyone could call an 800 sq ft two bedroom apartment “family-sized” living arrangements. Or is this to accompany the coming 1 child policy?
A very small minority of Seattle households have more than three people. At least half the residential land in Seattle is zoned exclusively for houses designed to best fit these larger households. Given that most of the households in Seattle are 1 or 2 people, would it be such a bad thing to have a few more areas where it’s legal to construct a building designed only for them?
Most of the housing being built, in the current record housing development boom, is one bedroom or none. About 1 in 6 units have two bedrooms, compared to 1 in 4 in Portland, and Portland is below average. We’re way below average – dead last, in fact. Only 1 in 100 units has three bedrooms. These numbers are since 2012, and it wouldn’t be surprising if apartment sizes have dwindled since then. It isn’t about “right sizing” apartments, it’s about money: the more units you can squeeze into a building, the more money you make. If only a small minority of Seattle households are larger than 2, it’s because we’re drivng families out.
Yes, and is it any surprise that there are fewer families in Seattle when there is so little family housing? Why do folks think that the price of SF homes are so incredibly high if there are no families seeking to buy them, as is claimed?
As more and more SF homes are gobbled up by real estate investors seeking to maximize profit (beginning with all the smaller, most affordable older homes), the supply of family homes will only become more constrained and more expensive.
Oh, but we will have a huge supply of one-person 220 sq ft micro-units. Let’s just plan that those folks never get old or decide to reproduce. It is truly baffling. Makes one feel that there has to be something else driving the policy (money, connections, propaganda?) because the policies seem so obviously short-sighted, poorly considered, and ultimately doomed to fail.
As of 2016, 37.5% of Seattle’s housing units had three or more bedrooms. Meanwhile, only 25.6% of Seattle’s households had three or more people.
Seems like there is a pretty large imbalance between the size of our homes and the size of our households. It should therefore be no surprise that builders are currently finding smaller homes to be more profitable in the areas where they are permitted. We already have more than enough big ones.
I feel like creating an us vs them mentality with developers may fire up the base, but it misguided. The City of Seattle is trying to solve a housing problem. Not enough housing to satisfy demand and not enough affordable housing. How we get there is up for debate, but I don’t see any villains here.
Naturally the city doesn’t tell their story in a way that makes them look like villains. The author here doesn’t devote much space to debunking them, but let’s say the city has found it very convenient to be directed by pro-development ideology while ignoring people like the Displacement Coalition.
Does the city’s EIS discuss transit improvements? Because increasing density without increasing public transit capacity is a fool’s errand.
This is the main reason I think it’s east Wallingford that needs to zone up first: walking distance from the most significant public transit upgrade that’d come close to Wallingford: the U District light rail station. Stone Way did already have a lot of buses that take people to downtown for work, with lots of condo already built along the way. However, the capacity of those aren’t going to be easy to increase.
Another idea would be North Lake watefront high rise condos plus water taxi to South Lake Union.
The city didn’t look outside urban villages because that would have generated another Westneat article. Scoping to urban villages expediently communicated to the vast majority of single family home owners that they could ignore HALA. Never mind that urban villages were defined before light rail was even started on, or the irony that they were defined for the neighborhood planning the city just threw out. They were an expedient target.
That’s the political calculus that “moderates” like Murray, Durkan, and Rob Johnson exploit- they get their vote majorities from rich, low density neighborhoods, then focus all their social engineering and liberal bonafides on the neighborhoods that didn’t vote for them. Look at land east of the U-District, where Rob Johnson’s majority came from (he got less than 40% in Wallingford). Do you see homeless encampments? Upzones? Any changes at all? Of course not. You see private country clubs and expansive mansions frozen in amber as the bungalows of Wallingford are targeted for demolition.
…and you see Rob Johnson living in a SF home about one block outside of the expanded Roosevelt urban village boundary.
Based on my experience at meetings, I suspect that the majority of the promoters of these proposals do not live in the affected areas, for if they did, they would likely be lobbying for density without adverse impacts. There are already hundreds of parcels where SEDU projects can be built – along arterials, near transit centers and light-rail, in the transition zone between arterials and SF zones – we do not need to incentivize making even MORE 220 sq ft SEDU projects in the SF areas of our urban villages.
Keep the density limits that encourage 800 sq ft and 1000 sq ft ownership units that can be used by small families. Whatever happened to “two-flats” and “three flats” the City was promoting? Bait and switch?
Allow no upzone higher than LR1 (with density limits) in the SF zone and match existing height, bulk, mass, setbacks and lot coverage as adjacent SF property… make it blend in. Keep the FAMILY in single-family…
One of the topics that commonly gets railroaded by the city those who just accept “conventional (city) wisdom” is whether we really do have a housing shortage. Here is an article posted by Phil Cochran on Nextdoor written by a couple of Canadian researchers using Vancouver as an example of the “housing supply myth.” Since they are academics and not interested in promoting city housing policy or backed by real estate investors, I think it is a worthwhile source. The fact that the impending (or actual) implementation of HALA has encouraged developers to get in under the wire and that the now apparently adequate number of apartments (if “for rent” signs are an indication) has not reduced rents are surely facts that need to be considered in the housing supply myth. Yet HALA has no credible studies based on actual housing units available, that I’ve seen at least, that proves we need more now. Rather the city relies on prognostications that may or may not develop. It makes hypothetical claims and the Seattle Times repeats them because it is a good story for generating revenue. We need a study like this one, an actual measurement, before drinking the lemonade.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/real-estate/vancouver/academic-takes-on-vancouvers-housing-supply-myth/article37015584/
It’s pretty easy to see how this study is wrong. He’s using census data as a measure of demand. That is NOT the right way to measure demand in Vancouver. It’s also not about speculators. A huge part of Vancouver demand is by many people that’d not show in in census data. Vancouver downtown high rises are often owned by wealthy people around the world wanting a summer house there. The units are occupied one month a year. Then there are also other foreign owners that just want a place to park their money and probably get a Canadian passport. Their criteria for buying the houses are not that different from summer house owners.
And when a study is using census data to gauge demand, of course it’d be missing the point completely, and the specific agenda of the author is to ban foreign ownership, which he’s talked about. By that, I think the author know fully that he’s not painting the demand picture correctly, and he’s intentionally trying to advocate for a solution that’d “correct” the demand picture to be the same as the one he’s trying to paint.
Careful, Gen. You’re challenging the core of YIMBYism 101 with that article, they won’t take it sitting down. Expose their dogma as a lie and a fool’s errand and the whole thing might come crashing down on them…
I hope so.
Did you read the article and my response to it? It should be obvious that I got it right. You can research the topic and the author and you’ll see.
Sorry TJ, but I put more stock in Dr. Rose and Dr. Gordon’s than I do in an acolyte of Dr. Karl Marx’s. And both of them address speculation and foreign investment.
Gen McCoy is a doctor, too. She understands research.
And once again, the city lists the neighborhood’s concerns about infrastructure but there is not one iota of time, energy, or money going to address those issues. Right smack dab in the middle of all that density are 2 schools (Lincoln and Hamilton) that will serve 3000 kids who will be coming in and out of the neighborhood every day (and not via light rail – via car and bus from as far away as magnolia). They and the rest of the UV’s kids (and seniors and adults) have limited services in the area – no community center, no athletic fields, tiny library. There has also been zero acknowledgement , let alone a feasibility study on the impact to transit. The EIS is a joke on all of these infrastructure topics, schools especially. Where will all the new kids who move here go to elementary school? To me this is a vital piece of the puzzle and I don’t get how Wallingford actually has the capacity to manage this growth. Those who love this new plan, how do you envision all of these new folks being served by existing infrastructure and/or where do you see infrastructure being built to serve the density?
So what places in the whole area are better prepared? That’s the biggest problem. Yes, there is not sufficient infrastructure in Wallingford, but the deficiency is everywhere. School overcrowding isn’t a Seattle thing but a regional thing. The answer isn’t going to be better by not having Wallingford taking in more people.
School issues are actually relatively easy to fix for this neighborhood. As of today all schools within Wallingford take lots of kids from outside the neighborhood. Changing that and then you resolve both the school allocation issue and the school transportation issue. Having Lincoln High revived wouldn’t just mean our streets are more clogged. It also means we have a local high school and we are not clogging the streets around other high schools with our cars.
To your first point, I think places like Montlake and Laurelhurst are better positioned than Wallingford to manage growth – close to light rail, have community centers, libraries, easy access to parks and playfields, etc… even, as you point out, east Wallingford makes more sense because of proximity to light rail. At least spread the density out to more of the places.
On the Lincoln issue – do you really believe that 3,000 students coming and going from an urban village is feasible given the current and planned transit infrastructure? And you think that 500-700 kids being transported around the city to use playfields for sports is feasible? Isn’t just adding to the transit issues we are trying to solve by creating UVs in the first place. Have you been around a high school when it lets out? Especially one where the neighborhood itself has no community support services for students? There will be no teen community center. There will be no after school tutoring at the library. All those kids have to go (drive, bus) elsewhere for those things. I’m not arguing against Lincoln or against a UV. I’m arguing for someone to plan for how all of those pieces are going to fit together without pretending that our current infrastructure can manage it.
As for converting McDonald and Stanford to neighborhood schools, that seems reasonable from a population growth perspective but when a whole curricular pipeline has been built on the backs of bilingual schools it’s going to be much harder than it would seem on paper. And, again, no one is talking about it or signaling that some proactive planning might avoid some major problems down the road.
The Lack of planning is how we got into this dire situation in the first place.
So much arguing and speculation and unpleasantness. Yet, when you look at the maps there is very little change.
Tell that to the blocks of residents being upzoned from SF to 40 and 50 foot apartments. Without any real say in where and how much density should be changed. Remember, MHA is explicitly NOT intended to increase capacity—although it certainly does that—but to generate revenue to build subsidized housing. Somewhere else.
Such up-zoning occurs in areas that were zoned single family but already are a mix of houses, medium sized apartment buildings and commercial, educational, and religious buildings.
That’s not accurate; I have walked a number of SF zoned blocks slated for significant MHA up zones that do not have such existing different scales (or uses). Furthermore, in many of the areas that do have such a mix, the existing scales and quality are *not* what will be recreated. This is a lot of what we’ll get: https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/5e478e45b09bbf76e05ab8f31635ffec0da388e149987196a36a38054093a04a.gif
Looks good.
You may not like the aesthetic. I do. But this is not about aesthetic, its about scale, and number of occupants. Those buildings are not huge apartment buildings and will fit in with houses.
I disagree. The one on the right has c. 30 units of under 300 sq. ft. I can’t recall if the one on the left does as well, but there are three in this row, and two of them are like that (30 tiny units). This is on a former heavily treed block that was zoned L-1 until the 2010 up zones, and each lot had 2 to 3 units in old houses, and there’s a larger footprint 80s or early 90s building across the street that didn’t cause nearly as much disruption to the existing housing and tree canopy. In short, IMO, these buildings do not “fit in with houses.”
But these looks nicer than many existing single family houses though. Also to require houses to look nice is effectively a requirement for houses to be more expensive. The key to be able to have a mixed-income neighborhood is to allow some level of uglier houses.
And don’t we already have that?
The problem is that we need a lot more houses. Right now there are too few, therefore even the ugly ones are still very expensive.
Yes, lets’ all get on board with making our neighborhood uglier. Because that will magically create many $200k~$600k houses in the neighborhood.” Oh, and every child gets a pony, too. Sheesh.
Pony and beautiful houses are luxuries. What I want would be fulfilling basic needs for everybody at the cost of some rich kids not having ponies.
“fulfilling basic needs for everybody”
Can’t/Won’t happen while inequity worsens.
KatCat7, You’re right that scale may be more important. But can you imagine what these “houses” will look like even in 10 years? With flat roofs and moss growing all over them? They are not built to last even 30 years. By then they will qualify for little more than slum dwellings, in my view. Look at some of them that were built just 10 years ago. There are several examples in the U district.
People did have an opportunity to have a say and the city heard them. For example, the city document above says “Feedback that changes from single-family to LR3 were too intensive. In response to this concern, we changed several single-family blocks proposed for LR3 (M2) and LR2 (M1) to LR1 (M1). This provides more consistent zoning for the single-family blocks on either side of Stone Way. We also changed the single-family area proposed for LR3 RC to LR1 (M1) along Green a Lake Way.”
Point taken. The City has softened the up zones in some areas. They did not reduce the up zones in East Fremon/West Wallingford. The City has very selective ‘hearing.’
I was reading the wrong map; the EF/WW zoning has been backed off on some blocks in the preferred alternative. My mistake.
They knew already. The day they had the bizarre idea to put LR3 on those blocks, they knew how the neighborhood would react, the only question was how effectively they could make trouble. Congratulations to a couple of you over there, you know who you are.
We have capacity for 220,000 new housing units under existing zoning. HALA is projected to create 80,000 more, or 300,000 housing units total. Projected growth is 70,000 units by 2035. Can anyone tell me why there is a need for any upzones?
Understand that there is a very significant “cost” associated with up zoning SF from one, eight-person dwelling unit to UNLIMITED SEDU, 220 sq ft, one-person dwelling units. Plopping a massive, 45-foot-tall, SEDU project (with zero parking) next to a modest SF home is simply not nice. It would be different if there was any real need… but there is no need.
We can realize very real density simply by 1) requiring similar bulk, mass, height, setbacks as existing SF parcels (make it blend in); 2) allow a maximum up zone of LR1 only, which is actually an up zone of two steps because the City is simultaneously redefining LR1 to be closer to what we currently call LR2; 3) maintain density limits on the LR1 located in the SF zones in order to create more FAMILY housing in the SF zones.
We are severely short of affordable, family ownership units, but the current proposals focus on incentivizing creation of large SEDU projects (18-unit on a single 4000 sq ft parcel, 40-units on a double lot). The adverse impacts of unlimited density are huge and there is no mitigation in the proposals. Density increase does NOT have to be as painful as possible.
There is a lot of information in the OP’s article. It is presented much more clearly than you will get from the City… why is that? Why isn’t the City contacting the owners of the parcels that will be affected in the urban village to explain their plan? It makes one skeptical when one is not being accurately informed.
REMEMBER – Wallingford is a RESIDENTIAL Urban Village, which is different than Ballard, and is different than Fremont, is different than the U-District. By definition, Wallingford has a very large segment of SF parcels in the urban village, larger than pretty much any other urban village in the city. We also, by definition, do not have a business core that is self-sustaining. Yet the City is treating all the urban villages the same. One size fits all simply does not work.
Bring on the new residents, density, and enlivening of our neighborhood!
Great point. We get caught up in talking about the buildings and forget the people. The apartments which will be build will bring in a lot of young people from all over the world who will add a lot of vitality to the neighborhood.