Shannon Affholter, the Executive Director of the Master Builders Association had an important opinion piece in the print edition of the Seattle Times. In it, he makes the point that we’ve all been making over and over again: when anti-growth and opponents of growth succeed in slowing down housing supply, prices go up. 

Having Affholter’s regional perspective is helpful, because, often, where Seattle goes so does the region. Damaging linkage fees, if they aren’t ruled illegal first, might be used by other cities in King County and other parts of the region that are growing too. It’s difficult to explain and even harder for people worried about growth that developers use other people’s money–investors or depositors–to build housing. When Councilmember O’Brien messes with a project’s financing by adding costs, either renters pay or the investment goes elsewhere. 

Local resistance to growth presents itself in planning commissions as well as city and county councils all the time, often by small but vocal groups. These anti-growth sentiments can push local decision-making in favor of measures designed to slow, limit or outright stop new home construction altogether.
In Seattle, anti-density sentiments helped spur costly regulations on micro-housing as well as proposed rules to restrict housing in the city’s low-rise zones.

Collectively, these decisions can undermine our region’s ability to direct housing toward urban areas and create much needed “infill” development. This ultimately prices working families out of the market and leads to sprawl, which is exactly what the state’s Growth Management Act is designed to contain.

And that’s frustrating: seeing Seattle’s leaders in kayaks one day protesting Shell Oil, and then the next day raising housing prices and promoting climate changing sprawl the next. 

Here is a link to the full article.