Council to Hear Public Comments on HALA Recommendations Tonight
Tonight at City Hall, the City Council’s Select Committee on Housing will hear public comments on recommendations of the Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda (HALA) Committee. Here’s the details:
Wednesday, September 9,
5:30 p.m. (Public Hearing),
Council Chambers
There are 65 recommendations in the HALA document, many of which are great ideas. However, the one that has captured the most attention is the so called “Grand Bargain.” I’ve already given my thoughts about why the Bargain may not be much of a bargain for renters, homebuyers, or builders after all.
Attend the hearing and see and hear for yourself what everyone else is thinking about the Grand Bargain and all the other recommendations.
What the HALA?: Cassandra and Pollyanna Edition
There’s something I need to point out about the so called “Grand Bargain” struck between some people in the business and development community and non-profit housing community as a result of the Mayor’s Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda (HALA) Committee. I’ll keep doing this even though, I think, my point is mostly being ignored by some who are cheerleading for the Bargain. Let’s start with two images. You can see the details of the bargain in the final framework document.
Here’s the first one, a depiction of how the HALA Grand Bargain would work in a low-rise zone:
Now here is a depiction of what the City Council did in low-rise zones recently over our strenuous objection including a SEPA appeal, a 16 foot set back to the top floor of buildings in the LR 3 zones:
Doesn’t anyone notice this? Sometimes I feel like I’m taking crazy pills!
The same brains that devised a 16 foot set-back to ameliorate the visual impact of “East Block” buildings on the sensibilities of angry neighbors now must go back to that same zone, with the same neighbors, and say, “we’re adding another floor!” Keep in mind that the housing and buildings the Council damaged with their code changes were having zero negative effect on the neighbors other than added needed housing units, increasing supply and thus positively impacting price.
Now the Council has demonstrated a prodigious capacity to hold completely contradictory ideas in their collective brains, like “let’s make housing more affordable by adding additional costs to its production!” But I find it hard to imagine that the same Council that fell all over itself to appease the angry neighbors will suddenly tell those same neighbors, “remember that thing we did to those big, ugly buildings you hate so much? Well we’re not only going to undo that, but we’re going to add another floor! You’re welcome.”
Add to this the fact that from I hear from people who actually build housing in the low-rise zones, adding an additional floor doesn’t add much value to offset locking in the affordable rents that will be required by the bargain. What’s pretty clear in all this is that our efforts to fend off a linkage tax worked, but has yielded a scheme that
- is built on the assumption that new housing and density is still a bad thing needing to be offset with some kind of penalty;
- is tone deaf to the deep hostility and anger boiling in the neighborhoods toward any additional density;
- is inflationary by its very nature, increasing rents in non-rent restricted units to subsidize the inclusionary units;
- is contingent on the City Council going into the neighborhoods to process the bargain; and
- may not add very much additional value or housing.
As I’ve pointed out before, the Bargain has accomplished the feat of pulling the neighbors and non-profit housing advocates apart from one other. However, nobody seems to be acknowledging the gross inconsistency between the trend of Council actions on land use and housing over the last two years and what the Bargain will require. Will the Council now impose these new requirements over what will surely be the objection of neighbors in order to squeeze out a few rent restricted units? Will builders back away from deals in the low-rise zones and elsewhere when the market starts to cool if the changes pass? And if they do build, how much will rents rise across the city to pay for the subsidy? And when it does, will the Council have the intellectual capacity to see that those increases are attributable to the Bargain and resist the urge to regulate, fee, and tax housing yet again?
I guess it depends on who you listen to, Cassandra or Pollyanna.
From the Archives: The Economic, Political, and Moral Dimensions of Density
A few years back, in 2012, I spent some time at the beach at La Push where you can find the huge drift wood tree that is the featured image above. I spent some time trying to collect my thoughts on why this whole effort around housing mattered so much to me. Why was I so committed to land use policy in our city? What is my motivation? In light of the many, many frustrations day to day and week to week struggling with a City bureaucracy and elected leadership that has such a deaf ear to our consistent pleas to let us build more housing, I need, from time to time ask those questions again. Hopefully others will find these reflections useful too.
What are the values that support living in the city? What, besides the many environmental reasons, makes density something we need to press for whenever we can? Is the only reason density advocates urge more people in a smaller space because of climate change? The overwhelming quantitative facts supporting dense cities as being more sustainable should be enough, but even so, there are other important principles the support density.
For me, the discussion of whether density and cities are better for water and air quality, for energy efficiency, and for reducing carbon emissions was over a long time ago. I’m not the only one. That’s why, these days, in Seattle, everyone is for density. You’ll read it over and over again in comment sections all over town. “I support density, just not that kind of density.”
Opponents of change and growth will always preface their argument against change by affirming they whole-heartedly support change itself, and then go on to criticize a specific change as economically unfair, infringing on their rights, or that it is somehow immoral.
Why go on and on arguing about the environmental benefits of growth with people who already claim they agree? How do we shift the discussion to the economic, social, and moral benefits of density over sprawl and NIMBYism? On a recent beach retreat I tried to put together my thoughts on these questions. Density advocates, myself included, are just repeating the same things over and over. It’s time for something new.
The roots of the problem: Sometimes data is not enough.
I’ve written three essays take a step in that direction. The first essay offers a view of land use economics that some might call laissez faire or even Hayekian. We need to rethink our tendency, in Seattle anyway, to always try to solve problems with more rules and process.
The second essay is an effort to look at why we need to wrest control of the debate about land use away from people who abuse and misunderstand the idea of “rights.” We are a country deeply soaked in Natural Rights language, but the idea that we have certain rights has become corrupted and confounded so that now our daily conveniences and comforts are wrongly associated with basic rights. We need to shift our thinking away from American individualism and toward an American communitarianism.
The third essay attempts to give density a moral footing. I am not averse to saying that urban living is better if not the best way to live. I might be wrong and there are other points of view. But we ought to at least try to make the argument that cities afford far more opportunities to live moral lives than any other arrangement by exposing us to the adversity we find in other people in the same way frontier living exposed the first pioneers to the adversity of the natural world.
Lastly, and in conclusion, I revisit some practical solutions that I have offered before. I plan to post these periodically over the next week or so.
Many will find these essays discursive and boring. Others will find contradictions between what appears to be Christian Socialism on the one hand and Hayekian individualism on the other. Perhaps my thinking is muddled. Or maybe our frameworks for looking at problems related to land use need a reset.
Some other readers will find a conflict with my support of the profit motive fulfilling the public good and my interest in locating power in the community, government, and faith over the supposed rights of the individual. I’ll admit that I am still working through the synthesis of my embrace of government mandates and, at the same time, the idea of spontaneous order created when people are allowed to pursue their selfish interests.
Regardless of how that all turns out, my hope is to get Urbanists and supporters of growth, change, and density talking not just about the numbers and data but also about the basic principles the are the foundation of why we support what we do.
Register Today for 2015 Housing Summit
This is a reminder about next month’s housing summit. We really would benefit from having lots of builders from Seattle attend, especially at this time when our city is the focus of a great deal of attention around the region. Will Seattle grow sensibly? Will we continue to have a housing market in Seattle, or will City planners increasingly control and ration housing? Will the City squander billions of dollars spent for light rail infrastructure by not allowing us to build more around transit? We need your participation in this year’s summit! Please consider attending. You can RSVP below.
You are invited to the Master Builders Association of King and Snohomish Counties 2015 Housing Summit.
This year’s them is Transportation and Land Supply including outstanding speakers followed by an engaging panel discussion.
Speakers include:
Dow Constantine
King County Executive
Josh Brown
Puget Sound Regional Council
Matthew Gardner
Windermere Chief Economist
Date: Tuesday, September 15th
Time: 8:00 a.m. to 11:30 a.m.
Where: Meydenbauer Center, Bellevue, WA
Cost: FREE
To R.S.V.P. for this event please call (425) 451-7920 or visit 2015 MBA Housing Summit
Seattle Times: Dumb Growth Seattle?
At the Seattle Times yesterday columnist Jon Talton posted a very simple poll question. Is Seattle growing too fast, dumb, or just right?
I answered “Just right” almost reflexively because I know that there is a lot behind the ideas of growth being “too fast” or “too dumb.” Obviously, we’re growth champions. But when I reflect on the actions of the City Council over the last year and a half, I’d change my vote to “too dumb,” not because I don’t want growth, but that the City Council doesn’t seem to know what it’s doing.
Erica Barnett wrote a great post exposing Councilmember Mike O’Brien’s NIMBYism in pushing a horrible change to design review on behalf of a few of his angry neighbors. Sadly, her post comes too late to fix the damage or stop it, but at least the Seattle Transit Blog is allowing open criticism by name. When I wrote a similar post four years ago, I was put on probation; all my posts had to have at least one person read them. Seriously.
The fact that Barnett’s post has garnered more nods of recognition of O’Brien’s loss of his anchor to sustainability than howls of sympathy for him is, well, progress? Recognizing that the Seattle City Council is presiding, through O’Brien, over an era of dumb growth is a first step, but when are we going to do something about it? One important first step is making the Councilmembers feel uncomfortable with their bad decisions by telling them. This isn’t pleasant, but it’s what the angry neighbors do all the time. We should too.
