City Builder: Mark Huber Volunteers to Build a Local Family a New Home
Earlier this year we featured Mark Huber, a local Seattle builder.
But Mark Huber isn’t your typical business-owner; in fact, you could say he lives a double life. Most know him as a good family man and successful contractor. But Huber also raises funds and recruits people to help build homes for families in need in Honduras—and he started doing this in the midst of the Great Recession.
That post featured Huber’s work in Central America and now he’s bringing the same compassion to a local family. From the KIRO feature story:
Mark Huber didn’t know Judith Hart or her family, but he has a plan to build them a new house.
“It was a need, it was a pure need, they needed a house.” Huber said. “I understand what it’s like to have your house destroyed by a fire. It happened to me as a young kid.”
Huber is used to building homes for families in need. He travels to countries like Honduras and Uruguay several times a year for the builds.
“I take different groups down to Honduras to build homes to show them what it’s like,” said Huber.
Over the past 30 years, his company has also built and sold hundreds of homes in the Seattle area.
But this is his first volunteer project in this country.
Huber is a great example of a local business owner who builds housing in our community but also gives to the community when every he can. The City Builder series is something we’ll be expanding next year to counter the misimpression that most builders and developers are corporations. That just isn’t true. They are mostly the people you stand in line with at the grocery store, attend local sports events with, or meet at parent meetings as schools. The sooner that people in Seattle realize that, the sooner we’ll resolve the pointless efforts to punish builders for doing a good thing, building housing.
Economics 101: The Importance of Productivity
If you can find 30 minutes of free time I recommend you watch the video featured above, a tutorial on basic economics. If you have any stake in the housing discussion going on in this city, it’s worth getting a grounding in simple economics. The thing I like most about this video is that the creator, Ray Dalio and investor and businessman worth billions, points out that the economy is all about cycles. It’s hard for us, and for Councilmembers especially, to understand that things will change with the economy. Whether the economy is doing well or doing poorly, however we measure that, it will get better or worse. But we’re on that line on the graph that’s moving up and down, so we forget that.
Mike Scott sounded the first note of what might become a longer song about the peak of the housing market in Seattle. In a post earlier this week he pointed out,
Rents are cyclical. Sometimes investors forget that. They shouldn’t. Since 2000, rents have gone up, down, and flattened out, resulting in an increase of just 2.8% compounded annually, excluding the distortion caused by new construction.
I actually e-mailed Sanjay Bhatt to complain about the fact that the Seattle Times chose bury the news about Dupree + Scott’s report about slowing rent to the business section. Had Scott announced rents were higher, that would be front page news.
Hi Sanjay,Love how this story, Rent increases slowing for older Seattle apartments, is buried in the business section. I know that had the numbers been the other way it would have been front page news.
Please, report the slowing and lowering of rents with the same fanfare as the increases. If rents going up is front page news, why on earth is the opposite trend not news?
Rent Control: Are You Sure?
The Seattle City Council, in its wisdom, has validated the discussion of “rent control.” It is asking the State Legislature to allow local governments the option to enact rent control, which as of now is prohibited by State law.
As in everything in life–sorry folks–it’s not that simple. What to discuss? Right now “rent control” is a political slogan, a dog whistle to attract voters just as “gun rights” or “anti-abortion” is used by conservatives. In leftist terms, “rent control” is an organizing tool to focus the masses on political action, of any type. It doesn’t matter so long as people get involved. Therefore appeals for rent control are independent of the proposals in HALA.
But “rent control” is not a self-defining term. Arguments for rent control in Seattle, in light of the widespread failure of rent control in the USA, almost all state that “Seattle rent control will be different, and better.” So what is this “rent control” which we ask the State Legislature to allow us to enact? It’s not at all clear.
The discussion will be an interesting one at a number of political and policy levels and here are just some of the aspects.
Politics:
“Local option” has historically been a conservative position to allow exemption from State or Federal mandates. The “solid south” (once Democratic and now all Republican) would like nothing better than to exempt Federal rules on desegregation and other civil rights laws. Will (or more likely, how) will Washington State conservatives attempt to seize the opportunity to rid itself of various Washington State mandates? Will Seattle socialists be willing to make common cause with conservatives to gain local options? Will conservatives of all stripe take this opportunity to unroll a host of other State mandates? See below.
Policy:
Single family housing
The City Council has asked the State legislature to local government to allow “rent control”. But what kind? Should single family houses be included in any rent control regime? It would seem that it should. Seattle has a considerable number (how many?) single family are rented. Since the goal is to protect affordable housing and since many detached houses are rented by single adults to share costs, thus bringing the per room monthly rental to “affordable” levels, all single family dwellings should be part of the overall program as they are with other City of Seattle Housing regulations.
However, the politics are difficult. Voters love to tell other people what to do but are reluctant to allow themselves to be policed. And the more people impacted by a law, the more people get involved, which could cut against popular support — such as it may be — for rent control. So the unprincipled but expedient approach would be to try to exempt single family houses as well as perhaps small multiple family structures such as duplex/triplex/fourplex.
Growth Management Act (GMA)
A core element of the GMA is to ensure adequate affordable housing. So merely considering local option for rent control must be considered in light of GMA requirements. Many economists believe that rent control hinders the production of housing. So, will rent control impact existing GMA goals? And on a piece meal basis (say, Seattle only) in which some localities adopt rent control and others don’t? If so, then local option for rent control conflicts directly with GMA. How do Sierra Clubbers et al feel about that?
In addition, once there is a cry for local option for rent control, the natural policy (and certainly political) corollary will be “local option for GMA” i.e. some jurisdictions should be allowed to exempt themselves from the entire Growth Management Act which of course would destroy the GMA. Many Republicans (though not all) will like that one.
So unleashing this request by Seattle liberal establishment will surely raise a host of issues it may prefer not to have raised. But having raised them, it’s a bit late.
David Sucher is the author of City Comforts: How to Build an Urban Village
Dupree + Scott: Rent Increases Down, Operating Costs Go Up
Both Mike Scott, one of the region’s best experts on rental housing prices, and I often share a frustration about how rent increases and decreases get reported. Usually, when rents go up over a short period of time, the headlines blare about “skyrocketing” rents on the front page. When they go down, or flatten, that news usually ends up buried in the real estate pages or unreported. After all, when rents go down, housing isn’t an issue anymore, what everyone including politicians care about are jobs, jobs, jobs. But Dupree + Scott’s latest report on rental housing prices, The Apartment Vacancy Report, shows we we’ve discussed many, many times: rents go up and down. And, as I pointed out to blunt denials by Councilmember Licata, operating costs are going up. That makes rent control a disasterous policy even if the City could enact it. The bottom line is that we’re not is a housing crises as characterized by many at City Hall.
Here are three key paragraphs in the Dupree + Scott report. First, new construction skews prices higher. When accounting for the “skew toward the new,” prices aren’t going up that fast.
If you look at the in-city Seattle market where a lot of the new units are happening, between the stadiums, Ship Canal, Lake Washington, and Puget Sound, the impact of new construction on rents is even more obvious. Adjusting for new construction, rents went up just 3.9% in the past twelve months. That’s down from 8.4% a year earlier. We expect the rate of rent increases to slow further as more new units open over the next few years.
And what’s coming up with prices? Will they be “skyrocketing” in the near future? Probably not.
And survey respondents agree. Last fall 72% of the survey respondents told us they planned to increase rents in the next six months by an average of 2.9%. They were close. Rents rose 2.6% between last fall and this spring. Now only 32% say they expect to raise rents by next March. As a result, we expect rents to increase about 1.5% by spring.
And the stubborn fingers-in-my-ears-nyah-nyah-nyah resistance to the idea that operating costs are going up faster than rents?
As you can see from the chart on page 1, rents are cyclical. Sometimes investors forget that. They shouldn’t. Since 2000, rents have gone up, down, and flattened out, resulting in an increase of just 2.8% compounded annually, excluding the distortion caused by new construction. By comparison, real estate taxes and utilities increased 5.4% compounded annually over the same period
The truth is that rental housing prices in Seattle have never been, quantitatively all that bad. Over time they’ve gone up — but they’ve also gone down. Overall, Seattle has been doing a relatively and comparatively good job dealing with growth, producing housing that’s almost keeping up with supply. What is worrisome are the inflationary measures the Council is always proposing in outright denial of Dupree + Scotts numbers; things like rent control, impact fees, linkage taxes, and inclusionary zoning.
And in an email Mike Scott made this great set of additional points:
I was also trying to point out that (1) the rate of rent increase in Seattle is already slowing – so where’s the crisis, and (2) rents went up more in the rest of the Puget Sound region than they did in Seattle – so what makes Seattle so special it needs the state to change the law [for rent comtrol?]
What can we do to prevent a trend of “skyrocketing” rents? We can build more new housing that will become the affordable housing of tomorrow, and we can stop considering destructive interventions that will make things worse like rent control, when they aren’t really that bad right now.
You can read the executive summary for yourself here at this link: Fall2015RentalMarketTrends
Sawant Leads, Burgess Follows
We’re still absorbing the irony over here in the real world: Supposed arch conservative Councilmember and Council President Tim Burgess, without warning, today offered and introduced a resolution committing the City to repeal the State preemption on rent control, a move championed by Socialist Councilmember Kshama Sawant. The vote? 8 to 1, with the lone vote coming from Councilmember David Okamoto, the chair of the Committee responsible for housing policy. According to accounts from people inside the process Okamoto didn’t even know this was going to happen.
What’s the effect of the resolution? Not much other than to expose the political and intellectual weakness of the Council and its leadership. Two of the members, Rasmussen and Godden, who voted yes on today’s resolution vote, spoke earlier about how this was a bad idea and about how we should be focused on things we could do now, not throwing rocks at the legislature for an intervention with bad outcome. Talk about a flip flop.
Burgess himself sat in his office and told me, face to face, that he didn’t think rent control worked and that the evidence was overwhelming against it. Councilmember Bagshaw was so angry about Councilmember Sawant’s big rent control rally at City Hall over the summer, she filed an ethics complaint against her colleague for campaigning on City property. She voted yes.
There’s a name for leadership and vision in Seattle City politics, and that name is Kshama Sawant. While her lumpenmob of supporters doesn’t sound very astute when it assaults the gates of the Council chambers, she uses them to great effect. Her colleagues, some of whom have expressed an almost visceral dislike of Sawant, gave into her anyway. She’s persistent.
But most of all she actually believes in something, a mental state that is completely alien to her colleagues who have no ideas, are largely led by Central and Executive staff, and who remain thin skinned over criticism of their often inconsistent and contradictory views.
As I’ve pointed out, many of these Councilmembers are the ones who will have to keep the City’s side of the Grand Bargain and vote for substantial upzones. As I wrote recently, some Councilmembers still seemed vague on Growth Management Act (GMA) basics like growth targets.
Councilmember Burgess holds the title of Council President, but anyone who’s been paying attention knows who runs the show. She sits on the farthest side of the Council dais and her name is Kshama Sawant. She has shown once again, that in an institution with no ideas, a bad idea wins.
