A couple of weeks ago Smart Growth Seattle board member Erich Armbruster and I met Marty Kooistra Executive Director of the Housing Development Consortium and Doug Ito, a member of the HDC board of directors. We had a great conversation. Marty and I set up the lunch because in spite of our profound and deep disagreement on linkage fees, incentive zoning, inclusionary zoning, we think we have a lot of things we can do, together, to make it easier to build housing in Seattle. This is a post lunch letter that includes ideas to include the Rental Housing Association in collaborative efforts to lower construction costs, support renters and landlords with increased operating costs, and just overall finding ways to work together. Appropriately enough we sat at the Urban Visions table at the Met; Urban Visions is a Smart Growth Seattle sponsor. 

Hello Marty and Doug,

Erich and I appreciate you taking the time to have lunch with us to have an open-ended discussion on ways we might work together. I have widened the circle a bit here by including Bill Hinkle and Sean Martin from the Rental Housing Association and Shannon Affholter who leads MBA. Bill and Shannon I’m sure will have thoughts on how to weave a partnership together.

But here’s what I took from our time together.

First, we face many if not all of the same challenges to get a housing project entitled, permitted, and leased up. In many cases, affordable projects face even more challenges because of an additional layer of requirements and limitations imposed by funders at the federal, state, and local level.

I see this as a great opportunity to work together as we troubleshoot on a regular basis with City departments at our every-other-month managers meeting. Most of what we talk about at these meetings isn’t high flying policy issues, but trying to get to the bottom of glitches in the system that add costs and delays to projects. I believe that having both for and non-profit developers communicating, together, helps make a broader case for regulatory reform that would benefit us all by reducing the cost of bringing more new housing on line.

Second, landlord tenant relations, and in particular the sale of down market or affordable projects at the end of their covenants, hurts poor people but it also poisons the narrative, attributing greed to developers and landlords when the story is much more complicated. 

I’d like to see us work together to push the City to better track and intervene with troubled properties with low rents or controlled rents before they have to be sold to a private buyer. It is simply unconscionable to have buildings like the Theodora simply collapse under the weight of deferred maintenance and then, upon sale, blame the buyer of the building for raising rents.

I also think we could collaborate with each other in better utilizing rent relocation assistance and the Landlord Liaison project. As you know, there are many hardworking people who can pay market rents who have criminal records or bad credit that face a steep climb finding housing. This problem can be fixed. Additionally, many private landlords do end up being case managers for tenants in their buildings; this needs to be acknowledged and somehow better leveraged by the community with training and a better referral network.

Lastly, we are all negatively impacted by efforts of local neighbors to stop or slow the development of new housing in our densest neighborhoods. This is especially the case in our low-rise zones over which the Council is preparing to impose a significant downzone. We are appealing the Determination of Non-Significance in hopes of getting the City to reconsider. Your help in explaining that the lost housing capacity affects your members as well would be of inestimable help in persuading the Council that this is not about profit, but about fewer choices for people looking for housing in Seattle.

I’d suggest that perhaps we get together again in the coming months and plot a course that could, in spite of the things we disagree about, allow us to collaborate effectively on the many more things we have in common as builders and managers of housing in Seattle. I am putting this work in my 2015 work plan.

Thank you again,

Roger
Director
Smart Growth Seattle