The Latest on HALA: Too Early to be Worried?

I’m worried about where the Seattle City Council seems to be going with the recommendations of the Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda (HALA) Committee recommendations. Maybe it’s because just before yesterday’s HALA select committee meeting they voted down, 7 to 2, a sensible amendment to back off a legally dubious requirement for a project not subject to design review to go through it anyway because it is next to another recently built project. But what I heard at the HALA committee meeting wasn’t just procedural throat clearing; it sounded an awful lot like the City Council that has been making housing problems worse for the better part of the last decade, bathing themselves in process and half steps rather than bold moves to allow the building of more housing.

Here’s what concerned me. While Councilmember Tom Rasmussen won’t be around much longer, he still asked the typical and befuddled questions he’s known for. When upzones in exchange for mandatory inclusion of affordable housing came up, Rasmussen asked about growth targets. Amazingly he and some of his colleagues don’t seem to understand that the growth targets are not maximums but just a benchmark for new people moving into neighborhoods. This is after years and years and countless briefings on th subject. After reminding him of this, Rasmussen wanted to know about “infrastructure” for all the new people that would be aded to neighborhoods because of the upzones. No problem, Rich Feldstein from the Mayor’s office assured him, “we’re looking at impact fees.”

Councilmember Sally Bagshaw raised more questions from her “inner Tom Rasmussen” about infrastructure and transportation and process. What followed was a sustained discussion about community process. Of course upzones won’t just happen, everyone agreed, there will be lots and lots of process. Everyone will be asked what they think. Hmmmm. I thought we had a deal? A “Grand Bargain? Apparently, that deal is up for negotiation with 30 plus neighborhoods that will weigh in on the complex language agreed to by members of the HALA Committee.

Here’s how John V. Fox described the typical City process around upzones:

After establishing these immutable ground rules, the facilitator intones that together in this very room, we’ll all work toward “innovative solutions” to “ensure that the rich cultural fabric and heritage of the city will be maintained and enhanced.” You’re told, “The ideas we generate will only be limited by our potential to imagine them.”

Next, you’re broken up into “visioning” groups, usually by topic such as housing, transportation, public safety or open space, each led by a planner who writes down your ideas on butcher paper. Then everyone reconvenes and is asked to put green, yellow or red sticky notes next to the good, so-so or bad ideas for your neighborhood. A photographer documents all this.

You know. He’s right. Except that it’s usually the upzones that suffer from the process, not the other way around. Instead of big bold changes, this kind of process ends up producing a weak broth of indecision. Add to that the fact the Councilmember O’Brien has presided over non-stop attenuation of housing supply through over regulation during his tenure. There hasn’t been a single thing he had done in his time as Chair of the Planning, Land Use, and Sustainability (PLUS) Committee to add housing. It’s all been take aways, starting with small-lot and microhousing all the way to yesterday’s pointless effort to force design review on more housing projects, something that builders will avoid by building bigger, more expensive units.

This is the group, O’Brien, this Council, and staff, that will be leading the way to what the HALA has proposed as some of the most complicated legislation and financing the City has ever tried to produce and pass. Not even professionals have quite figured out exactly how or if the “Grand Bargain” will really work to produce more housing or more affordability. The City Councilmembers don’t even seem to understand how growth targets work. And yet the dog walking neighbor that demanded downzones to the low-rise zones a mile away from her own house will be able to weigh in on the details of the agreement.

I’m trying to be optimistic. Really. I’m trying.

 

Every Home Matters 

About a week ago I saw the car in the featured picture above parked feet from my apartment. It was an incredibly frustrating find because it was so clear what was going on here: this is somebody’s home, and some Parking Enforcement Officer (PEO) slapped a boot on it because it was illegally parked and had multiple tickets. The scene is what’s emblematic about the systematic failure of Seattle as a City government of addressing the broader housing issue. There are solutions to help this household, but the City just plods along with plans and procedures while real humans get crushed between the gears. In Ballard, for example, neighbors are rallying to keep those families out. What happens in Ballard and with broader policy discussions will decide whether every home matters in the city, and whether the City Council really will carry out a course reversal and upzone the city.

I’m no expert, but the car I spotted was clearly being lived in. Yes, it was parked illegally, but kind of askew, like it ran out of fuel or something else stranded the car in just that spot. The boot was slapped on under Seattle’s scofflaw ordinance intended on cracking down on people who have a lot of traffic tickets. Before the scofflaw ordinance the car was simply towed, picked up by the offender, and driven off. The idea behind the ordinance was to save the towing fee and force the person to pay the tickets.

But anyone with common sense could have seen that this vehicle wasn’t just a car parked drunkenly by someone with a lot of tickets. The PEO should have confirmed with the people in the car that indeed this was their home, found out what the issue was, and made whatever calls for assistance that made sense. Obviously the goal of the PEO would be to get the car moved, but there are a few steps that make sense before slapping a boot on the car. Clearly, the couple living in the car can’t pay the tickets because they’re in a bad spot. What made the PEO think that they’d come up with the cash? And based on what is obvious to any onlooker, the car was now really stranded there with the boot.

I did a Facebook post on the situation. A Facebook friend and local activist (and frequent critic of my work) saw the situation and contacted me. Bill Kirlin-Hackett works with the Interfaith Task Force on Homelessness (IFTH) and knows this problem well. He got to work making calls and visiting with the couple who called the car home. Turns out the key to the vehicle was lost, and since this was a weekend nobody was available to replace it. They also didn’t have the more than $300 to get a new key. Add that problem to the previous tickets that lead to the boot (tickets likely issued because the couple was using the car as their home) and these people were facing losing their home to the tow yard.

Kirlin-Hackett was able to persuade the City to take off the boot, found money to replace the key, and thankfully the couple was able to move their home to another location. 

But City policy churning along would have ended up seizing this couples home and putting them, literally, on the street with all their possessions; they’d have their possessions if they were lucky enough to be there when the vehicle was towed. A couple making due living in their car would now be outside and looking for shelter, maybe even at the proposed homeless encampment in Ballard. Kirlin-Hackett tells me that this happens all the time.

The solution is pretty simple. The PEO should never have put a boot on someone’s home, period. He or she should have called an organization like IFTH, worked with their outreach people, and figured out how to move the vehicle as quickly and as humanely as possible. It’s not like this happens hundreds of times every day in our city; it’s perfectly within the job requirements of anyone working for the City to solve a problem. And this problem was solvable.

I say this case is emblematic because I want this city to be a place where this couple, in time, can get rid of this car, move into a apartment where they can affordably live and use transit to get to work and wherever else they need to go. As a city, that is possible. We can do that. The problem is that we’ve spent so much time arguing over how to tax new development and growth to try and channel money to government agencies, to put out requests for proposals to non-profit agencies so that they can build very expensive housing units that, in the end, will have a waiting list anyway. Meanwhile, real people are having their houses towed away right now.

The solution for this problem also teaches a lesson. Bill and I have got at it with each other on Facebook for a long time, and we’ve been pretty hard on each other. He thinks I’m a lobbyist for housing developers that only care about profit. I get frustrated with his radical priest persona that seems to focus more on who’s profiting rather than the bigger picture. But when there was a problem right in front of us, we collaborated and the problem got solved. I really didn’t do much other than ask for his help, but he gave it. As a city, all sides need to see housing, broadly, in the same way. Let’s together, no matter what our ideological views, open the doors to people that need a place to stay or help and figure out how to create more options for everyone who wants to live here. That’s the kind of city I want to live in.

Upzoning Seattle’s Comfort Zone 

I have a guest editorial at Publicola that builds on some of my other commentary on how zoning in Seattle tends to reinforce segregation of people and family by race and class. I think the post is a bit challenging because it keeps pushing the wedge between the crowd in Seattle that tends to be he loudest about opposing innovative changes to land use and zoning, white, progressive, single-family homeowners and people genuinely concerned about poverty. This is risky, raising race in the context of housing. But it is important because 

In the end, whether Seattle can make big changes to its liberal status quo—like the startling single family zoning amendments originally proposed by the mayor’s HALA committee to rebalance housing options in Seattle so that zoning rules jibe with growth and diversity rather than exclusion—depends on new voices barging onto the stage, and even being “obnoxious.”

Still Making it Worse?: A Year Later

About a year ago we put together a video to call out the City Council’s woeful record on housing policy. The point of the video was to draw attention to the need for a plan. Well, now we have one. The Mayor’s Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda (HALA) Committee has produced what we asked for, a plan with an actual quantitative proposal for more housing.  Now the proposal, upzones with mandatory inclusion of rent restricted units in exchange, isn’t the best way to solve the problem as I’ve pointed out. But it is better than a linkage tax.

It’s interesting to watch the video and reflect back on how much has happened since then. It seems like we won the argument about incentive zoning — it’s not an incentive — but ended up with a linkage tax proposal. Then there was HALA and it’s recommendations that we all welcomed as, finally, a rational approach to the stated problem of housing not being affordable. We still have a long way to go, but, in many ways, we’re better off than we were a year ago. It looks like, with the HALA report, we at least have something to work from that isn’t just about adding more rules, fees, and taxes to build expensive subsidized units.

Seattle Times Story: “I Am Not a Lobbyist!”

A liberal arts education is a terrible things to waste, so I was happy with the title of a profile on my work for Smart Growth Seattle headlined, Sharp Tongued Philosopher a Provocateur for Urban Density. But if you read through the piece you’d come away either with the impression that I am a lobbyist or that at least the major issue in my work is who pays my wages. This has always been an annoying distraction to what I do, even more than criticism about the way I do it. So I figured I would take this issue on here for the record: I am not a lobbyist! What am I? For the sake of anyone interested, I consider myself to be an advocate for the idea of more housing supply, choice and opportunity for people who want to live in our city, regardless of their income and the people who share and live that idea. And I defend builders and developers from unfair and unwarranted characterization and criticism. It doesn’t fit cozily onto a business card but that’s what I do.

Why is this an issue? Well, there are two reasons the “lobbyist” moniker is problematic and incorrect. Right away I should say there is nothing wrong or immoral about being a lobbyist. Lobbying comes from the lobby, essentially waiting around outside where decision makers are making a decision and hoping to get in to see those people to persuade them on a vote or decision they might be taking on a key issue.  There are lobbyists that represent giant oil companies and little old ladies, corporations and small non-profit agencies serving the poor, and railroads that want to transport oil and environmental groups that oppose them. Lobbying is simply a term of art that means, essentially, making the case that one decision is better than another. That’s it.

I worked as a lobbyist in Olympia of a quasi-state agency called the Washington State School Directors Association in the 1990s. My work entailed spending lots of time during legislative sessions traking bills, talking with fellow lobbyists, going to hearings, testifying, writing letters, taking calls from school board members across the state, and sometimes meeting with state legislators, yes, in the lobby of the House or the Senate. I remember those days fondly. 

Some people do that kind of work then open up their own business that operate by charging clients an hourly fee for this kind of work. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this, since, as I pointed out, it is essentially a skill that can be developed and sold for a price. I suppose that there are for hire lobbyists out in the world that, like defense attorneys, will take any client with the belief that anyone or any group—even something like an oil company—deserves due process; no matter how “good” or “bad” a cause or interest might be it should have a shot at the process and to rise and fall on its merits.

Some have broadly take the mistaken view that a lobbyist is a person who, by definition, represents interests that have no popular support and are immoral and therefore nobody would advocate for unless they were paid; hence the sobriquet often attached to me, prostitute or whore. I take money, they say, for what Keynes called marginal disutility, the discomfort of being intimate with someone who has more money than affection. 

However, I am sure the same was said of John Adams when he represented the soldiers who fired on the crowd at the Boston Massacre; Adams felt that as a matter of legal and moral principle, even British soldiers firing on a crowd needed a good lawyer. But even that sense of being a principled participant in the process is denyed the “lobbyist” who does what he does for only one reason: compensation. 

I suppose there are people like that. In my almost 25 years working in government at various levels I have yet to meet a person that didn’t have some valance or general orientation about their clients or the agency they worked for. Everyone who is an advocate, say for a membership organization, sometimes has an eye roll or two over some issue that the membership deems important. Sometimes there are differences in strategy or emphasis, but I’ve never met a lobbyist who simply has no emotional or principled relationship to who or what they are advocating for.

Having said all that in defense of lobbyists—sadly the term is being abused by my opponents—why would I say I am not among their numbers? Well, much of what I do every day and each week is what could be called, in the best sense, lobbying. I do meet with Councilmembers and others who are making critical decisions trying to change their minds or trying to persuade them to keep doing the right thing.

But I don’t charge by the hour. And I represent an organization that was formed to represent an idea, not a client for pay. The idea I represent each and every day is that if we are worried about how to handle increased population growth, the best thing we can do is create more jobs and more housing for new people, whether they are being born or moving into our city. Policies that reflect that idea are more “right” than “wrong” for me and for people and organizations that support Smart Growth Seattle. I also look out for the interests of the hard working people who make housing happen. 

So I do everything I can every day to advance that idea and defend those people, in interviews with media, in discussions with people I meet, in communications with members and staff of our funding organizations, on social media, with friends, and everywhere and anytime I have the opportunity. I do what I do because I love to do it and because I believe in it and the people who build our housing. The fact that I earn money doing it is a blessing. And, by the way, the money that I do earn I raise from people and organizations that share my big idea. 

Some have called me an evangelist. I suppose I like that the best. The term refers back to a Greek word that describes, as Merriam-Webster defines the word, “a person and especially a preacher who tries to convince people to become Christian: someone who talks about something with great enthusiasm.” That’s what I do; try to convince people, including decision makers, that our idea is the best idea for dealing with growth. And I think I do it with great enthusiasm.

I find the characterization of what I do as “lobbying” or representing “monied interests” dismissive of the idea many of us who share the big idea and personally insulting especially because I believe so deeply in that idea. As I pointed out to Bob Young who wrote the Seattle Times story (well written, researched, fair, and balanced), I don’t so much mind when this is used by opponents of the big idea and the people who share it; after all they don’t like us or the idea. But when supposed allies wave their hands at me and dismiss me because of who pays my salary that is annoying and frustrating. They’d rather invest in broad based community efforts, whatever that is. 

It feels good to get this all out, but I realize simply explaining all this won’t really make much of a difference. What will make the difference is when our idea, that we need more housing and to welcome everyone and anyone who wants to join us in our prospering and beautiful city, is the one that orients policy and attitudes in our city. That day will come. Until then, we’ll keep doing what we’re doing, enthusiastically promoting, defending, and advancing our good idea and the people that believe it and live it each and every day.