This morning the consultants the the City Council hired to work through workforce housing issues earlier this year will deliver a report to a joint meeting of the Planning, Land Use, and Sustainability (PLUS) Committee, and the Housing Committee. They will present a report which is rather extensive. The problem with the report is that it is all about a problem that we already have pointed out doesn’t really exist, a crisis in “workforce” housing; housing that is priced so that a person earning 60 to 80 percent of Area Median Income (AMI) can spend 30 percent or less on that housing.

The idea that there are people earning 80 percent of AMI searching desperately for housing and not finding any has been largely discredited by the data and by anecdotal evidence. Yet the City Council continues to ask how much more can we tax new growth to subsidize those very people who have options, while poorer people at 50, 40 and 30 percent of AMI can’t find a place to live. The good news, however, is that the report points out that the City Council doesn’t even have a plan for how many units we need of new housing at any price. Here’s the first recommendation:

Articulate a More Specific Workforce Housing Policy

The City of Seattle should set a quantitative Workforce Housing Goal in the planned 2015 Major Update of the Comprehensive Plan and periodically measure City progress towards the goal in the context of the Comprehensive Plan.

City debate will likely be pushed by Councilmember Licata and his staff and will center on how much to increase incentive fees. Notwithstanding the fact that Licata’s desire to impose punitive measures against doing a good thing–building housing–make no sense and will further drive up prices, neither he nor anyone else on Council have even the vaguest notion of how many of these rent controlled units should be created.

We’ll be watching to see whether Council asks the question, “how many units of housing do we need for coming growth,” or whether they will ask, “how much can we increase feea, taxes, and regulations on efforts to build new housing?” The consultants agree that the Council has yet to come up with any numbers or a plan to create those units of housing. And they have already confirmed that when fees go up, people won’t pay them, choosing less density or not building at all; something we’ve confirmed with data.

If the Council does what’s best for the community, the principles of the Growth Management Act, and it’s own Comprehensive Plan, it would ask first whether workforce housing is the problem. Then it would decide what kind of housing and how much is needed most to accommodate coming growth and then develop a plan to supply coming demand (120,000 people over coming decades). That would mean allowing more housing, not limiting it with roll backs and downzones. The consultants are advising Council to ask, “how many homes,” not “how many fees.” If they don’t listen to the consultants maybe they’ll listen to Paul Simon; there are way more than 50 ways to improve Seattle’s housing future.