Small-Lot Legislation: What Some Neighbors are Saying

I was forwarded an e-mail template being circulated among neighbors aimed at City Councilmembers who will be considering amendments to small-lot legislation on Tuesday. We’re still reviewing the legislation and will likely post comments tomorrow. But I thought it important to respond to the neighbors template here before the hearing at 2pm on Tuesday at City Hall in Council Chambers. So I quote their letter and include a response to each of their points in bold below. We think the amendments and the legislation reflect an honest effort by Councilmember O’Brien to find a solution that addresses real neighborhood concerns and also ensures the future of Seattle’s single-family neighborhoods as a viable place for new people and families to live.

Suggested template:

Dear Members of City Council’s Planning, Land Use and Sustainability Committee:

I appreciate your consideration of the backyard/sideyard house issue that surfaced in 2012. This is a critical issue for Seattle residents.

We agree, it is a critical issue for Seattle residents living here today and those who want to live here tomorrow.

While a good step in the right direction, DPD’s current recommendations need improving to successfully address the problems these structures create in neighborhoods across the city.

The double speak is brilliant: these aren’t structures; they are homes where people live. And they have zero quantifiable impact, at least none opponents have been able to demonstrate. 

Here are a few of the items that should be considered:

1–Create a record of all the existing, historic lots:  All substandard, secret lots should be made visible to more than just developers.  Seattle residents need to be informed.

Passage of the 80 percent rule or a variant of this would make this happen. Any neighbor capable of basic mathematics and with access to the Internet could see what was buildable on their block. All they would have to do is look at King County property records on line, add up the total square footage of the lots and divide by the number of lots. Then the neighbor would multiply that number by .80 to determine whether a lot would be buildable. Only lots at least 80 percent of the average block face would be buildable.

2–Require the use of standard setback regulations everywhere:  If developers try to reconfigure a lot into something it was never meant to be, they should be required to use standard setbacks.

It is hard to understand what neighbors mean here by “something it was never meant to be.” This is not only legally challenging but strains the limits of epistemology. 

I feel a little like Banquo in MacBeth who asked the witches in one of the opening scenes of the play, 

“If you can look into the seeds of time, 
and say which grain will grow and which will not, speak then to me, who neither beg nor fear your favours nor your hate.”

If neighbors know what “was never meant to be” they have a powerful investment tool that will solve all our problems.

3–Do not allow lot boundary adjustments on historic lots:  If a lot isn’t already formatted to allow development, it was never meant to be developed. Allowing lot boundary adjustments creates too much uncertainty for those living in nearby homes.

Again, I don’t know what the neighbors mean by “never meant to be developed.” Such a designation defies the logic behind land use law. I read this as, shouldn’t be buildable “unless I think it should.” As David Neiman asked in his post here, “when you take the sum total of all of the “thou shalt not” clauses in this [underlying] legislation, what is left over for people to build?” The amendments are an effort to define that. 

4–Notify the current property owner regarding opinion letters:  This notification would help homeowners get the hidden value that developers have taken advantage of for years.

This is sort of like real estate nonsense. The truth is that real estate sellers are not just morally but legally bound to truthfully report the value of what they are selling. It’s hard to see what this requirement would do but give neighbors with lots of time on their hands a way to preemptively file frivolous appeals against new housing.

In addition, please consider the following as you review the recommendations as presented by DPD:

1–Do not implement the 100 Percent Rule: Do not let developers bypass the minimum lot size standards.

The 100 percent rule is actually a compromise from the 80 percent rule and will open up a significant number of lots for new housing; just as importantly it creates certainty for everyone including neighbors who can know what is developable and what is not.

2–Establish an 18-foot maximum height (with 5 feet for pitched roof): Anything taller blocks sunlight and views, robs neighbors of privacy and harms nearby property values.

There isn’t anyone bargaining on this issue in good faith that doesn’t agree that 22 feet is a good compromise, especially since current zoning allows for 37 feet in most single-family zones. 

3–Apply the rules uniformly to all undersized lots:  The issues these backyard and sideyard homes create are consistent no matter what size the undersized lot.

Agreed. That’s what we’ve agreed to since day one. Our proposal has always included setbacks and height limits that apply to any other single-fajmily lot.

Please protect the interests of all Seattle citizens who live in single-family neighborhoods, not just the interests of developers.

The legislation you are considering will shape Seattle’s future.  Please bring consistency and transparency to homeowners in neighborhoods across the city.

It is true. This legislation will shape Seattle’s future, but not just for existing homeowners or developers. More importantly, it sets the stage for the city to grow in a sustainable, predictable way consistent with existing neighborhood character. 

Thanks for considering my comments.

Sincerely,

Southwest Design Review Board: “Banal, amateurish, agenda driven and ignorant.”

West Seattle Blog has a post that is a couple of weeks old now, but is a great case study in why the City’s design review process is a complete and total failure. I’m going to quote extensively from Tracy Record’s amazingly detailed coverage of the proceedings. First the history of the project:

3824 California has never had it easy before the Southwest Design Review Board.

Seven years ago, when a standalone Petco store was proposed on the site, the project died after its first two Early Design Guidance proposals were shot down, and the Charlestown Café stayed open three more years before closing in 2011.

Now, the first post-café development proposal for 3824 California SW – a ~30-townhome/live-work-unit project – has been ordered to come back for a third round of Early Design Guidance, meaning it will appear before the board at least four times before, if, it gains approval to move ahead.

Here we have a proposal for more housing in a great neighborhood at a site where nothing is happening. Yet it is running the gauntlet yet again with the persnickety Southwest Design Review Board. Part of what Record reports is that the board itself didn’t have a clue what it was supposed to do. There was an extended discussion of what authority the board actually has. After arguing about it:

They plunged back into the 9 pages of guidelines they are supposed to review for each project. “Better quality spaces … with decent solar access, large enough for usable open space” would be important, McNamara noted. A weather-protection canopy should be required to help affirm the commercial intent of the ground-floor units, they agreed.

I am sure being at the meeting was far more painful than reading about it, but here’s how the meeting concluded:

So they’re asking for one more Early Design Guidance meeting, a fairly unusual step. No date yet – that will eventually appear on the city’s website, and as always, we’ll publish an update as soon as we hear about it. Once the project gets out of Early Design Guidance, it then will have at least one meeting for recommendations on a final proposed design.

As Record pointed out at the outset, the project was already killed in the design review process years ago. Now the board is, once again, in the process of bleeding a perfectly good project dry. Instead of housing for families who want it, the neighborhood will be left with an empty building. This is a bad outcome all by itself, but it will further validate the junta that board has clearly become. Apparently the City and the Department of Planning and Development have no control over the board or the process. This group has, de facto, become a land use control board dictating what gets built and what doesn’t.

This is why we can’t have design review imposed on microhousing projects. Design review is a great way to simply make it more difficult to create a product that many people in Seattle want. The longer the process takes, the more provincial and obscure the demands, the more costs and rents will go up.

Here’s a comment left by David Foster a West Seattle architect that pretty well sums the frustration both builders and neighborhoods feel about design review when it runs amuck.

As a former DRB member and practicing architect, I have to say that I left last night’s meeting ashamed and disgusted. Design Review, when it works, is a process that benefits the city by challenging designers to do better. When it fails, like it did last night, it is a disaster because it makes projects worse.

The board bullied the applicant in a most inappropriate and unprofessional way. Perhaps worse, it betrayed its lack of design expertise throughout the deliberations – to the point that I am embarrassed by the process. It’s so easy to make pseudo-informed pronouncements about design – “the units need to have varying heights” -”the facade needs to step in and out” – “garbage should be in one area not two” – “too much parking in the alley” – “the parking should be under the building.” Such statements are banal, amateurish, agenda driven and ignorant.

Requiring a THIRD Early Design Guidance meeting is a travesty. This board does not understand the

protocol of Design Review, which is to identify the design guidelines that have highest priority in the first meeting, and then get out of the way so the applicant can respond with a well worked-out proposal. Like all bullies, this board doesn’t know when to stop.

In this sad case, we would get a better project if we just cancelled Design Review and let the architect do his work. Alas, this won’t happen. But I do plan to get in touch with people I know at DPD to tell them what I think. Disgusting.

 

Smart Growth Seattle Turns 100!

Yesterday’s post on Nick Licata making our point about what I call “disincentive zoning” marks a milestone for Smart Growth Seattle: it is our 100th post. Mr. Sousa? Are you ready? Let’s review some statistics.

Over the course of the 100 posts our top referrers have been Facebook, Reddit, the Seattle Transit Blog, Twitter, Publicola, Sightline, and, ironically, the One Home Per Lot website (from a page called “The Problem.”) And it probably shouldn’t be a surprise that the biggest clicks on our site are mostly the same sites.

The most read post of all time was “The Rents They Are a Changing,” with 4783 hits and that post, not surprisingly, is our number one post. Here are the rest in order:

1. The Rents They Are a Changing
2. This is Where I Live: What’s Not to Love?
3. Think housing is expensive? Just wait until it’s affordable
4. DPD Recommendations on Microhousing: Why Subject a Good Thing to a Bad Process?
5. More Evidence: Increased Housing Supply Leads to Lower Prices
6. “You May Not Like My House, But I love It!”
7. Look! It’s Still Happening! NIMBY Intolerance
8. You’ve Heard of Backlash. Ready for Frontlash?
9. Other People’s Housing: Seattle’s Debate Continues
10. The Inconvenient Truth About Workforce Housing

What I like about what we’ve done on the blog since I started full time is that we’ve had (or tried to have) at least one new post a day. There have been days, like yesterday, when we’ve had as many as three. My hope is to continue to keep the site active and interesting.

More importantly that posting every day, we’ve had great guest posts, some of which are in the top ten. I’m especially fond of “You May Not Like My House, But I Love It!” and “This is Where I Live: What’s Not to Love” genuine statements of pride from small-lot owners who put up with angry neighbors before finally being accepted for who they are and their fantastic houses.

Also we’ve tried to add strong data into sometimes truly ugly debates and arguments with very unhappy and angry people about how our city is changing. “The Inconvenient Truth About Workforce Housing” by Dan Bertolet is an important document in the long argument about what problem we think we’re solving when we tax something we say we want more of, housing. My incessant posts about supply and demand might annoy those of you who get it, but it’s a point that has to be made again and again with numbers; more housing means lower prices.

We’ve also pushed forward our views from people actually build things about why policy proposals work or don’t work. In the microhousing debate, this blog is where you will find the best information about why the efforts by the Department of Planning and Development are going to make things worse for tenants, not better. We’ve pointed out how design review just adds costs and meaningless process to a good thing, microhousing.

And we’ve held elected officials accountable for what they say and what they do. This will continue to be a space where people who say they want the best for the City will have to stand up to scrutiny. Are they using logic, data, and good policy tools or are they trying to please what one guest poster called, “the pitchfork mob.”

So here’s to another 100 posts!

Licata: Making Our Point on Disincentive Zoning

Councilmember Nick Licata has an editorial in the pages of the Daily Journal of Commerce that is a response to a March 27 op-ed on incentive zoning by Ada Healey, vice-president of Vulcan Real Estate writing about incentive zoning. In trying to refute Healy, though, Licata ends up making the point that dense, high rise development is risky. What he doesn’t seem to grasp is that adding more costs to that doesn’t make it less risky. The City’s incentive zoning program is really disincentive zoning. Here’s a breakdown of the key points.

First of all, Licata’s entire article is fundamentally flawed because it leaves out the most basic truth about new housing: more is a good all by itself. When we advocate for more density it isn’t because we want bigger buildings, but because there is widespread agreement that more housing in urban centers is a fundamental ingredient of sustainable development.  And granting up zones allows more people access to all the benefits of living in our city.

But reading Councilmember Licata’s article one would think that additional density and housing is an impact that needs to be offset. When one reads Licata’s article with this in mind his arguments just don’t add up.

Licata suggests that it isn’t the extra fee and process that accounts for the fact that only a third of eligible projects participated in the incentive program, but other “factors that influence the decision whether or not to build 240-foot towers.”

For starters, the development standards for some of the lots in the SLU rezone area simply preclude tower development. For instance, one property is in the zone for high-rise development, but the small size of the lot and meeting the requirements for maximum tower floor plate size means a similar amount of floor area could be developed in a midrise product.

This one is simple; change the development standards to allow development on smaller lots. It’s good that Licata sees the design standards as a problem, but unfortunately he fails to acknowledge that eliminating or revising them to solve this problem would actually be the most beneficial solution. Current zoning isn’t working to create more housing, even with additional density purchased through the incentive zoning program.

Licata cites another reason why projects eligible for a height bonus didn’t take it: risk.

Further review of permitting for several of the properties in question, reveals that some of the developers are midrise developers with no high-rise development in their portfolio. Midrise development is less risky given that it’s less expensive to build and the construction period is shorter.

Again, it’s encouraging that Licata and his staff appreciate this point, even though they misapply it when considering the bigger picture. Reducing risk and cost is the point of an incentive program. To suggest that midrise developers didn’t go high rise because of additional costs and risk makes our point perfectly. If the program was a true incentive it would have changed the risk

profile and costs so that those risk averse developers and investors would have opted for more height. But they didn’t, because what the current program does is add cost and risk that fails to be offset by the value of additional development capacity.

Licata then suggests that even though the percentage is small, lots of housing is getting built anyway and he cites numbers from New York.

But what, if anything, does that mean? In New York City, the utilization rate of the program is 10 percent (ours is 38 percent) yet it has resulted in 13 percent of all new multifamily units in the targeted zones being affordable units. In other words, fewer development projects eligible for their bonus program have elected to take the bonus, but their program still produces more affordable housing than ours.

The reference is a bit of a non sequitur since we have local data on how much housing has been created by the incentive program, and Licata cites that data himself later in his article. We know that the program only created 616 units of affordable housing over the last decade. That’s compared to over 6,000 units created by the Multi-Family Tax Exemption (MFTE) program, and more than 3,000 units created by the City’s housing levy over roughly the same period.

Licata again makes our argument for us in later paragraphs:

Here are two key factors driving the delivery of high-rise projects in SLU:

1. Supply of sites available for high-rise development, given the potential for alternative development of those sites with offices and biotechnology research and development laboratories.

2. Risk associated with high-rise residential development, recognizing that demand is limited because the ability to command higher rents needs to be proven by the market to finance construction and there is competition from development in other areas that also allow high-rise development.

In pointing out the “other reasons” why the incentive program isn’t working, Licata perfectly makes the case that to actually incentivize denser, high-rise development the Council should be fixing regulations to reduce costs and risks. The current incentive program, by Licata’s own argument, does none of these things.

Why are so many proponents of growth and density also opposing incentive zoning when their support for it could in fact address many of the concerns people in Seattle have about growth?

Clearly Licata and his staff didn’t listen as to why we are opposed to this way of addressing the challenges of housing more new people in the city. So here it is again.

There is no workforce housing “crisis.” We know that there is actually a surplus of housing for people who earn 60 percent of Area Median Income (AMI) and above. So the tool of incentive zoning is being used to solve a problem that we don’t have.

Second, that tool acts as a disincentive with fees that are too high, adding more costs and risk to building more density, truths that Licata uses to make his own case. And this leads to underdeveloped sites, an outcome in conflict with the City’s own goals for sustainable development.

Third, current zoning and process make the program a challenge to feasibly implement, something Licata also agrees with.

Fourth, the program doesn’t create much affordable housing compared to other programs and it never will, because increasing the fee will only lead to decreased participation.

And lastly, and most importantly, the idea of new development paying for affordable housing is a good one, but that would require adding value not siphoning it off with a tax that adds costs and more risks. Remember that simply allowing development to the maximum feasible levels would create more housing, additional sales tax revenue, and jobs without any fees and taxes. New development already creates lots of public benefits and the incentive program is actually inhibiting these benefits, not creating them. And it seems strange that Licata is so suspicious of MFTE a program he admits creates lots of affordable housing with a fair distribution across the city, including single-famly home owners who disproportionately occupy land in the city. Shouldn’t everyone contribute to welcoming new people our city?

We’ve proposed some ideas that the Council should review as part of an overall comprehensive housing strategy, something the consultants hired by the City have said we don’t have. Having a plan would help the Council develop some tools that, when used together, could act as real incentives to what we need and want, more housing.

 

 

 

 

100,000 Units: Will We Learn From San Francisco

While putting together links for my last post I stumbled on this video clip. There’s nothing special about the image of a wordy Power Point presentation. But it’s worth listening to what the City of San Francisco’s Chief Economist Ted Egan says about housing supply and demand in the city. His analysis is what was the hook for this story in the San Francisco Examiner.

When asked recently about his 2012 testimony, Egan said, “I think what I said was that building 100,000 units would have a comparable impact on prices to a down-payment subsidy that would cost several billion dollars just to cover the entire low-income — 50 to 80 percent of the area media income — population in The City. Whether such a level of construction would ‘really impact’ prices is a matter of opinion.”

That opinion seemed to be his in 2012: “In order to have an appreciative effect on diminishing housing prices in San Francisco,” he told the committee, The City would have to build 100,000 units.

The question for Seattle is will we learn from San Francisco and make building easier now, or will we listen to NIMBYs who want to stop building new housing now?