A few weeks ago, I reported on amendments our own Councilmember Rob Johnson was bringing forth to soften upzones around the edges of the Wallingford urban village. On limited blocks, amendments 4-14, 4-15 and 4-17 would have limited the upzone to Residential Small Lot (RSL) zoning, creating a step down effect between the higher density areas inside the urban village and lower density areas outside of the urban village.
Personally, I was surprised that density-loving Johnson was even considering this, and I was just about to write an email to thank him for bringing forward these amendments. Unfortunately, that smidge of gratitude only lasted a short minute because I soon found out these amendments are no longer being considered. According to an email from Noah An, who clerks the Select Committee on MHA, this is why:
Councilmember Johnson did not move Amendments 4-14, 4-15, and 4-17 at last week’s Select Committee meeting, both because we heard more opposition than support from community, and because similar amendments did not have sufficient support from the rest of the Council.
At-large City Councilmembers Teresa Mosqueda and Lorena Gonzalez were strongly opposed to any amendments that would have decreased the upzones, and not having their votes is definitely part of why these amendments were dropped. I have written the City Council to ask them to put amendments 4-14, 4-15 and 4-17 back in, but as of today I have failed to convince the entire City Council to do my bidding (maybe a thousand of us writing
That means that almost all of the current Single Family zones inside of the urban village will be upzoned to some version of Low Rise zoning, which allows for apartment buildings. For more information on what will be allowed on your block, see this post. The only changes currently being considered are Amendments 4-16a & b, which passed out of committee and are expected to pass at the final vote on March 18. Once again, according to city staffer Noah An:
The Select Committee did pass Amendments 4-16a and 4-16b, sponsored by Councilmember Johnson, which we were happy to work collaboratively with the community to advance. These amendments reduce the proposal on some blocks between Stone Way and Aurora Ave, while providing an increase in the proposal on other blocks in that area.
Amendment 4-16a would increase the upzone from Low Rise 1 (LR1) to Low Rise 2 (LR2). Amendment 4-16b would decrease the upzone from Low Rise 1 to Residential Small Lot (RSL). Taken together, this should result in no loss of zoning capacity.
I’m more than disappointed that the City Council seems determined to move forward with the upzones. There is currently a glut of luxury apartments sitting empty (which has only resulted in a slight decrease in rent prices at the top of the market but has not made a dent in the lack of truly affordable housing). And even though 1 in 10 apartments in Seattle is empty and the current zoning is more than sufficient to handle our growth, the Council is deciding to upzone to allow for even more luxury apartments.
As the most affordable housing is torn down to make way for more luxury accommodations, displacement is a real concern. A recent study of the U District upzone that was passed in 2017, showed a much greater loss of affordable housing than the city originally estimated. And studies have shown that increasing density does not magically create a decrease in rent prices.
The final vote on the upzones happens on March 18, 2:00 pm at the City Council chambers in City Hall, 600 4th Avenue.
As always, I encourage you to share your opinions with the City Council and Mayor….
Mayor Jenny Durkan: [email protected]
An email to [email protected] will reach all of the City Councilmembers.
Or to email the Councilmembers individually:
[email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected];
[email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]
If you want to do your own research, the most up-to-date city documents regarding the upzones can be found here.
Single-family houses in Wallingford start at more than half a million for a tiny shack that’s falling down. Such homes, when sold, tend to be torn down more often than they are occupied by their new owners. Perhaps some neighborhoods have legitimate concerns about affordable housing being lost as a result of these upzones, but Wallingford is not among them.
Cannot agree with you on that one. There are Sears Crafsman bungalows all over Wallingford. They are not torn down. They are cherished, loved, remodeled, enlarged sometimes. The housing market will change, the prices will go down. It is cyclical. But much will be lost with this cycle if HALA AND MHA succeed. Since the council and mayor have close relationships with the developers on this one. I expect the opposition for a more rational approach will be squished. I’d like to see the amendments considered, ALL of them. Lisa Herbold had good idea.
I’m not saying that Wallingford lacks beautiful old homes that are well cared for. It clearly does not. What I am saying is that there really is no such thing as “affordable housing” in Wallingford single-family homes anymore.
You know what comes up when you search for single-family home sales in Wallingford in the past year for $600k or less? A whopping ten homes, out of 173 total when you remove the price filter.
Many of these are in such poor shape that the real estate listing didn’t even bother to include photographs of the inside. There’s the hoarder house that sold for $530k with a “considerable amount of personal property inside.” There’s the 750 square foot home along 50th Ave, sold for $600k, plans already filed with the city for a 3,320 square foot replacement.
So when someone like Susanna says that we shouldn’t change the zoning because doing so could endanger affordable housing, I ask for evidence. Where is this affordable housing in our neighborhood, that would face increased danger of demolition when the MHA upzones are passed? Show it to me. Because from what I see, even the cheapest houses seem out of reach to anyone making less than six figures, and such houses get demolished all the time even under the current single-family zoning.
If a house is going to be torn down anyway, allowing it to be replaced by a set of four $700k townhomes is clearly better for neighborhood affordability than the status quo where the only thing built is a 3,000 square foot mini-mansion selling for $1.5 million or more.
You and Herbold have something in common here, in that you’re both interested in affordable ownership – I forget the status, but she was out to get some of the subsidies dedicated to that purpose. I agree it’s important, because ownership is one of the key ways people can move up the economic ladder, for them and their descendants.
But the bulk of what we’re talking about with rock bottom affordability is renting, not buying, and Wallingford has lots of rental housing in SF. Big old houses with a bunch of students sharing the rent, etc. Statistically, rentals account for about a quarter of SF, and I’d think it’s a good deal more common here than in the average SF area. We’ll never know how much affordable housing it accounts for, though, because the city resolutely refuses to collect that information – doesn’t serve their purposes to know.
Living in a high access to opportunity neighborhood (like Wallingford) is also one of the key ways people can move up the economic ladder.
For many, the ladder has been pulled up in Wallingford. About the same time as an old 1,000SF single family house on a 2,500SF lot sold nearby for $775k, there was a 2BR 900SF apartment listed at the Mari-Don apartments a few blocks away for just over $2K a month.
For the large number of people for whom a 3/4 of a million house isn’t an option, we need more options like the latter in Wallingford. LR1 probably doesn’t go far enough, but it is better than RSL to that end and light years ahead of Single Family 5,000 (which was in point of fact a downzone rather than the neighborhood’s original character).
“ownership is one of the key ways people can move up the economic ladder, for them and their descendants….Wallingford has lots of rental housing in SF. Big old houses with a bunch of students sharing the rent, etc.”
btw if this is OK with you why don’t you support allowing people to subdivide and condo-ize units within large homes? Then you have several households achieving ownership by sharing the burden of the land cost and common infrastructure.
You confuse zoning with reality several times here.
– By Wallingford’s “original character” I assume you mean its present character. The current zoning preserves that character, where MHA’s upzones will erode it within the urban village boundaries and in existing LR blocks, where it will go the way of Ballard.
– But the current zoning doesn’t preserve it by preventing further development. While I doubt that new construction is going to give anyone options like they have with Mari-Don and other existing MF here, there is a lot of capacity in Wallingford under current zoning. Only a fraction of N 45th is developed anywhere near its zoned height.
And that was a good urban planning design, to concentrate higher density multifamily residential along core infrastructure, while leaving adjacent single family areas alone. Single family zoning doesn’t cause the housing shortage problem, that’s a result of unsustainable 4% annual growth rates. There’s a lot to like about single family zoning the way it is, and Wallingford the way it is. If that meant no further development could occur, then it would be worth considering whether some change was necessary, but it really doesn’t mean that. The upzones are forced on us for developer profit only, in exchange for a trivially small amount of subsidized housing.
“The current zoning preserves that character,”
And it’s the current zoning that makes Wallingford a desirable place to live in the first place. Whenever I meet people and we talk about where we live, they say, “Oh, I love Wallingford!” And guess what, they’re not talking about all the boxy new Borg cubes on the arterials.
“The current zoning preserves that character,”
And it’s the current zoning that makes Wallingford a desirable place to live in the first place. Whenever I meet people and we talk about where we live, they say, “Oh, I love Wallingford!” And guess what, they’re not talking about all the boxy new Borg cubes on the arterials.
What makes Wallingford desirable is its location. If you put all these same houses in Tacoma it’d be half the price. Obviously the boxy big buildings in Belltown and Capital Hill are even more desirable, which is reflected in price. It’s really not the zoning that makes Wallingford popular.
Wallingford’s original character was small lots and multi-family homes cheek by jowl with single family houses- and a hodge-podge of architectural styles as folks built what they preferred and tastes changed over the decades. (Do I need to post photos?)
No more photos, please! It’s fairly clear that you don’t mean the same thing by “original” as I do, if it’s still “original” while it “changed over decades”. When approximately did it cease to have what you call its original character?
I’d phrase it this way:
If you wanted Wallingford to be a place that a typical person with no prior knowledge would describe as “Single-family houses of exclusively craftsman design on 5,000 square foot or larger lots” you’d have to take the build scary black and orange devildozer to hundreds of buildings.
If you wanted Wallingford to be a place that a typical person with no prior knowledge would describe as “a mix of lot sizes home types and styles that obviously reflect the decade in which they were built” you’d have to change…nothing.
Actually home ownership is the negative force for people moving up the economic ladder. Home ownership rate has direct contribution to joblessness, since it anchors people from moving to better opportunities elsewhere.
The ideal usage of neighborhood like Wallingford is actually making it mostly a rental neighborhood with high density. People who just moved to Seattle for advanced degree in UW or starting a new job in downtown can live here, and move elsewhere later if they want bigger houses. This neighborhood is in the right location for people starting out in the big city.
They are not torn down due to the regulation making that hard, not because they are loved. This whole “beautiful house” argument is what created the San Fransisco situation and obviously no cycle there had cured the problem and it has only gotten worse and worse.
Interesting choice to select a source that explicitly says it doesn’t prove what you are trying to use it to prove:
The article says that Chicago’s upzones didn’t have any measurable affect on construction. You can’t conclude from it that density does not decrease rent, because density was not increased.
Meanwhile, your other source says that the U District upzone might result in more construction than expected. So what are we meant to conclude from your sources: that upzoning in Wallingford will cause too much construction, or too little? You can’t have it both ways.
The way I read it, your criticisms are somewhat beside the point. The University District study showed that when the city estimated the loss of affordable housing from development, they were way off – the rate of loss for the coming 2 years will be over 3 times what they thought for “full build-out”. Whether upzones caused that or not, is another issue. The point is that development has serious consequences for affordability, and hence displacement – and unfortunately not just in the very limited areas that would be protected by Herbold’s measure.
As for whether density magically causes a decrease in rents, I haven’t read the Chicago story, but you don’t need to, to know the answer to that one. There’s good reason to doubt that anything causes rents to go down, short of a general collapse. They sure haven’t here, over the past 20 years, even through the severe downturn in real estate around 2009. “Stabilize” is the term they like to use, when supply exceeds demand.
I also don’t buy the argument that upzones will lead to displacement. It seems like the majority (or all) of the anti-upzoners are worried about more foot traffic, less parking, and more new homes that go against their personal aesthetic. As a reminder, no one will force you to sell your cottage to housing developers, but if you do, housing availability will only improve or at worst, stay the same. Your real concern is with general growth of the city, which is driving up costs of living and attracting job seekers to the city. King county was recently ranked as one of the least tolerant counties in the country. We can fight that by allowing for greater density and diversity into our neighborhoods. Don’t be afraid.
My main worry is how MHA and upzones have been misrepresented to constituents as guaranteed to bring down costs and that our elected officials demonstrate little interest in considering how the policies will be abused by some “bad actor” development interests. I choose to live in the city, so more people does not bother me. I feel strongly that MHA should have favored ownership opportunity rather than incentivizing massive growth in tiny rental units at the sacrifice of older starter homes. Where will Seattle families live?
I am so happy that they will keep pushing for upzone. One in ten apartment being empty triggering a bit of price dropping is showing how the strategy would work. There is no lack of people who want to move into Seattle, just that the price drop isn’t enough for them to afford. We need more houses built so more people can move back in. Luxury apartment seeing 10% unoccupied rate isn’t an index for sufficient housing. The craft makers who moved to Marysville, the song writers who moved to Olympia, and the African American families who moved to Kent all moving back to the city would be the sign that we have affordable housing.
How about this index: a school teacher used to be able to afford buying an average house in Wallingford. If Wallingford price can be like that again, then we know it’s back to what Wallingford was.
lol, yep the developers will make everyone happy! yay!
It’s not developers that would be the key force in it, and it will not make everyone happy. The main factor would be reduction in regulations. Some homeowners obviously would be unhappy because this would mean less growth for their property value. It would still be growth, just wouldn’t be as high as it could have been if the supply can stay suppressed as it was.
The upzones would actually increase my property value. I get offers all the time confirming that. But as i like to say, I didn’t buy here as an investment, I bought here to live in this neighborhood and raise a family here. Conversely, the upzones would decrease the desirability of my block.
You could’ve done all that while renting. People buy to build wealth.
That is because the upzone is still too limited. If we upzone more across the board, then the offer you got would get worse. Right now we upzone so little, so the places they can build and what they can build is still so limited.
The “reduction in desirability” is exactly the point. When there are more units around, the desirability for any specific individual unit would go down, therefore the house would become cheaper and more affordable.
That would be a great campaign slogan for your movement. “Urbanism: For LESS desirable neighborhoods!”
More desirable, less expensive.
More apartments around here, IMO, make it a better place to raise a family than one in which approximately everyone becomes rich as previous generations age out and homes keep getting more expensive. (Your opinion may vary.)
In the same way that grocers make me happy when they have enough food and I don’t have to bid for my dinner, yes.
Thank you ,Susanna. You have contributed so much time and knowledge to provide us with factual information. The city council members supporting HALA and MHA will be gone, and in ten years or less, it will be evident at what a mistake it was.
Anti-density people are who contributed to the current crisis. We don’t need to wait ten years to see the mistake, because we are already suffering.
Nope, the only crime we committed was to buy a home and we paid a premium to live in this neighborhood. We didn’t take anything away from anyone, nor do we owe them anything.
Of course you owe the society for the property value gain. You didn’t create that wealth. If you didn’t buy your house recently, you know what you paid for originally plus interest wouldn’t get the same house in today’s market.
If you’re going to argue that I owe society for any gains (disregarding my role in my property value going up,) then it follows that society owes me for any drop in my property value.
Of course the society owes you for the drop too. I wouldn’t mind coming up with ways to use the gain in places like Seattle to help those suffering from drops in Detroit to move out of Detroit to places with more growth and more jobs.
So it’s not enough to support people in Seattle.
Now I have to give money to people in Detroit as well?
Hey, it’s everyone’s money! Comrade tj has great plans for it.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/985181eb3d79601aa1aa4fbd45d989f19994689cab064e204bb76315f1bcb09d.jpg
Socialism and communism are about means of production, and what I said isn’t about that. I think you need to learn the terminologies better.
Socialism means social control on the mean of production. Zoning regulation is a good example of it.
I wouldn’t even mind supporting an even wider group. What’s so special about you that I’d want to have a system that favors you over somebody in Somalia?
Thanks for the article. In the end, I support the upzone.
“1,000SF single family house on a 2,500SF lot sold nearby for $775k, there was a 2BR 900SF apartment listed at the Mari-Don apartments a few blocks away for just over $2K a month.”
MHA intends to build corporate and speculative rental housing, lately extremely high-profit SEDU projects which offer tiny dorm-style units of 240 sq ft that rent for $1000/month, or $50/sq ft/yr, or about $50/sq ft/pp/yr… $25/sq ft/pp/yr if you squeeze a couple into the dorm room.
Compare this to that 1000 sq ft home, that likely rented for about $1800/mo, or about $21/sq ft/mo, and could house a family of four, or about $5/sq ft/pp/yr. MHA upzones, as currently written without density limits, will incentivize replacing the few remaining affordable ownership housing with new SEDU, because corporate landlords are only about the bottom line. The supply of available SF homes will be greatly reduced and only increase in price further.
Johnson and Council are blindly catering to corporate development. Citizen’s need to think about the future of what they wish Seattle to become – a corporate-owned rental-only community or allowing access to starter ownership opportunity in the City. MHA will gut the latter.
Johnson gave away the waiver of parking in the urban villages for NOTHING in return. According to urbanists, waiving parking for a 30-unit apartment project would save a developer $1.8 million. Imagine if Seattle had offered to split the savings in exchange for affordable units. This choice by Johnson alone appears to reveal where his allegiances lie. What a gift to developers!
Guess that I strongly support legislation to create $400k, 1200 sq ft ownership opportunity, that puts that $2k payment into equity that helps young people get off the hamster wheel of paying rent down the drain. MHA, as written, does none of this. Corporate developers like Vulcan have organized a huge disinformation campaign to make younger residents believe that they will be helped by MHA, when they are actually signing away their future prospect of ever owning a home and putting that rent toward equity instead.
The YIYBY support for MHA has been trumped up using marketing misinformation gleaned from those “focus groups”. Citizens were duped. Think about who is pushing MHA and follow the money.
Market rent on that house is $2,8000 – $3,200/month per Zillow (NB if a 900SF 2BR at the Mari Don rents for $2,195 there’s no way a whole house a few blocks away is renting for $400 less at market rents)
A $15 minimum wage worker who (say) works here making our lives better right here in the n’hood at local shops/restaurants/salons etc can afford $1,000/month. It would be good if they have the option to be our neighbors (and walk to work).
Bryan, I was using your figure of $2k per month for the Mari-Don apt. The market rate for a spiffy market rate home might be $2,800, but I thought we are talking about the fixer that will be incentivized out of existence by MHA, which would rent to closer to $2k per month 900 sq ft.
We are seeing plenty of SEDU renting at $1000 for a 240 sq ft dorm room, which is fine if you want to live alone. Or you could house share, as many of us did well through our thirties by picking up a housemate or two, or two couples in a two-bedroom, and share the rent for out-of-pocket of $500 to $700 per month.
Ten percent of apt are empty city-wide. Twenty percent downtown. If rents are not falling yet, how will building even more make a difference? Truth is that developers stop speculating when rents begin to flatten.
Sucking real estate capital away from the areas already zoned to accommodate what you speak of into the high-profit SF upzone areas seems ill-advised because it is unlikely to create affordable housing other than SEDU. Trickle down will take 20 years.
tj, I disagree. We need more affordable ownership opportunity so that young people have someplace to move when they tire of living in a dorm SEDU (or grow a family). MHA will cannibalize what few smaller starter homes that remain. The homes that you see today took hours of sweat equity and dollars at least equivalent to the purchase price over thirty years.
As far as parking, Johnson was an idiot for giving the waiver away for NOTHING. Portland traded the savings of waiving parking for more affordable housing. Johnson was funded by developer groups during the election. He has been very, very cozy with Vulcan and Vulcan’s “Seattle for Everyone” lobbying group. It seems obvious from his actions where his allegiances lie. The process was corrupted essentially from the get-go with half-truth and innuendo.
The market rent for the house is for that house per Zillow’s algorithm. It takes into account age and condition.
Rents are falling — see the Seattle Times.
“two couples in a two-bedroom, and share the rent for out-of-pocket of $500 to $700 per month.”
Great. And since many couples might like their own kitchens and private entrances, all the more reason to (re)legalize duplexes everywhere. While we’re at it, ‘plexes of any type so 3 or 4 couples have the same option.
The key for having affordable housing is to build enough new apartments. It doesn’t matter if those apartments started out expensive. Majority of the affordable city housing around the world are old apartments, most of them started out expensive when first built. If you don’t start building more apartments, there will never be enough old apartments around to be affordable. Single family houses will never be cheap in growing big cities.
The problem today is caused by not zoning up twenty years ago. Seattle area was growing like how California used to grow: instead of building up, we push growth out to places like Kenmore and maintain low density in the city. If we have had built up back then, we would have more cheap housing readily-available in the city. Yes, if we had built apartments 20 years ago they would have become old and not THAT desirable now, but that’d be exactly the point.
Thank you. You nailed it!!
I came here 15 years ago fleeing a region that did not build enough to meet demand (SF Bay Area). I grew up there but could not afford to raise a family there. What I have seen here since I moved here is a city not afraid to build, but even then we’re not building enough. The apartments in the urban core are fine – if you want a 1 room apartment. Families living in this city are going to need some options in between the 1 bedroom high rise and the million dollar bungalow. I hope the up zones lead to more multi-plexes, townhomes, and condos. That type of development is really missing now. I hope my kids have the option of buying into Seattle when they grow up, and not being forced to flee because of a housing availability crisis. The whole 10% empty figure that anti-builders tout doesn’t mean we should stop building, it means we should stop building 1-bedrooms.
The picture you have of builders and anti-builders is completely false. “We” don’t build housing, and none of us are anti-building either. (Well, let’s say not many.) Builders (and their financial backers) build what makes money, they stop building when they foresee a bust. Buildings go condo when that makes financial sense (not when rents are skyrocketing.)
So will MHA cause builders to build more? I.e., make more money? Listen to this podcast discussion between a builder representative, Roger Valdez, and Rob Johnson. https://www.kuow.org/stories/but-does-it-spark-joy (look for “Mandatory Housing Affordability”)
Ask yourself while listening if Johnson ever says this is going to give us anything but some subsidized housing, and ask yourself if he ever really contradicts Valdez’s assertion that MHA makes building less profitable. Johnson doesn’t believe in market rate affordability, he believes in the rapid economic growth that guarantees it’s a thing of the past, so it’s no skin off his nose if MHA dampens development some. The only place where he’s sort of lying is where he says something about this making it possible for our little ones to be able to afford to live in the Seattle of the future: that’s only if they’re below median income households who win a subsidized housing lottery. The future he’s talking about is a stark division between a few subsidized have-nots and the rest of us, the economic elite. He has no plan for anything else.
And the reason they only build multi-million unit in San Francisco and only high rent apartments in Seattle is due to the very strict building and zoning regulations, limiting what can make money.
Let’s say we allow those new buildings along Stone Way to be 24-stories, there would have been a lot more larger units.
“Let’s say we allow those new buildings along Stone Way to be 24-stories, there would have been a lot more larger units.”
I am always amazed that folks buy what the City and Vulcan tells them. Builders build to maximize profit. These are not mom-and-pop developers. It is corporate development investments firms that are concerned about bottom line.
The most profitable units are SEDU, returning about $50/sq ft/yr, which is why about 1/3 of what is being built are the tiny 240 sq ft SEDU projects. Compare this to older existing single family homes, which run about $20/sq ft/yr and drops to $5/sq ft/yr/pp for a family of four (as opposed to $25 to $50/sq ft/yr/pp for an SEDU. New will never be more affordable than existing unless subsidized.
In order to “encourage” larger units, the number of units allowed on a parcel actually needs to be capped by including density limits. The developer is free to mix and match what they build, but the goal should be to create family-size ownership and rental units, not one-person dorm that MHA incentivizes. Without a density limit, that 24-story building would be primarily tiny studio and SEDU.
I don’t know what the city or Vulcan have said about this though. I am basing my argument on studies around the world, and the real life examples.
You can even read your argument and realize where your logic got wrong and not matching reality. If you truly believe that SEDU is the most profitable, then you should realize that’s exactly the problem right now. We are allowing too few units to be built, therefore only the most profitable ones are being built. It’s the same as what’s happening with restaurant price in Seattle: the cheap ones got squeezed out and mostly replaced by expensive hipster restaurants due to higher margin.
So the solution is to allow more supply to come in through reducing zoning regulations. If you are allowed to build a lot more, then you’ll have something other than the most profitable being built.
Even just allowing lots of small units being built will results in more family units in the future by people buying up neighboring units and merging them, as long as we don’t have yet more regulation to limit that.
Just look at what works in Tokyo and you’ll see. Tokyo had lots of growth, yet its housing price has been steady or going a bit downwards in the past 20 years. And then you can look at San Francisco, which is basically where anti-density people won, and realize the affordability crisis is a result of restrictions and regulations.
Good discussion. Re: a few points by tj and nobody:
Yes, gross rent differs from return, but this is also true of rent for a home, where you also have maintenance and taxes, but possibly less in cost of construction. Yes, you could rent four SEDU and merge them to accommodate a family, but you would be paying four times the rent and the cost per sq ft/yr/pp would remain the same… and some would say that the quality of life would be less than that in a home with a yard.
If you track the projects in the land use information from the City, you will see that there are a large number of SEDU being built. Some months, they make up nearly half of the proposed projects! They usually go in on smaller lots, displacing older SF homes, where I would rather see family-friendly 3-flats go in, but MHA disincentives those by catering to maximum profit to drive construction.
Sometimes regulation is needed to encourage development that makes better sense in the long term and possibly less so in terms of immediate profit.
For example, one can fit some really nice flats inside a traditional four-square, save the environmental and dollar costs of demolition, and create essentially zero adverse impacts to adjacent properties. MHA does the opposite, striving to incentivize turnover of existing homes via escalation of land value until folks are either taxed out or can’t resist the offers or find the towering new project shading their veggies or solar panels. Either way, the escalation in price will be passed on to the new resident, renter or owner, and will always be more expensive than existing.
“For example, one can fit some really nice flats inside a traditional four-square, save the environmental and dollar costs of demolition, and create essentially zero adverse impacts to adjacent properties.”
+1
Absolutely why single family zoning has to go
A few things:
1) Gross rent is different from profit. SEDUs rent for more per square foot, but they also cost more to build and maintain due to the higher number of plumbing and electrical fixtures per square foot. Meanwhile profit is the difference between rent and cost. If SEDUs were clearly the hands-down winner in profitability, they would be literally the only thing constructed anywhere they were allowed. This is not the case. Many builders still decide to build larger units, which implies that they think these provide similar if not greater opportunities for profit.
2) Your math dividing the per-square-foot cost by four for a family seems…not very useful. If I rented out four adjacent SEDUs for my family, would the cost per square foot per person then be $12.50, or less than a single person would pay to rent basically anything?
3) We already have density limits on the vast majority of our residential land. We should not make these universal. We’re seeing predominantly one-bedroom and studio homes built in the few places without density limits because we’ve basically made these homes illegal everywhere else. 38% of households in the city are single people, with a further 16% being multi-person “nonfamily households” (i.e. roommates). Together these add up to 54% of the city’s households. I don’t mind allowing someone to build a whole building designed only for these households and not for families like mine.
4) I’m not worried about SEDUs completely filling up the landscape. If we did have a 24-story building full of SEDUs, that building would likely have a density of over a thousand people per acre. A few such buildings would completely saturate the market for SEDUs.