Street and alley vacations can be a fraught affair these days. A vacation is when a private developer purchases public right of way to build on, under, or over. A parking lot under an alley way, for example, is a subterranean vacation. But it’s not just a sale because there has to be “public benefit.” The problem is that various groups, especially labor unions, are starting to hold up projects claiming that their interests are the same as the public interests. The problem is not that labor is trying to make this argument, but that the City, once again, is responding to the loudest voices right in front of their faces without thinking about the broader implications for land use and housing policy in the city.

Here’s the process from the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) website:

Street vacation decisions are City Council actions as provided by State statute. There is no right under the zoning code or elsewhere to vacate or to develop public right-of-way. In order to do so, a discretionary legislative approval must be obtained from the City Council and, under law, the Council may not vacate right-of-way unless it determines that to do so is in the public interest. Part of that determination is to insure that potential development and use of the vacated right-of-way would be in the public interest. This determination may be guided by established land use policies and standards as called for by the street vacation policies, but the Council is not bound by land use policies and codes in making street vacation decisions and may condition or deny vacations as necessary to protect the public interest.

Two alley vacations have attracted some attention over the last year. In West Seattle Mayor McGinn played election year politics with a vacation for a development with a Whole Foods in it. The Mayor said that,

We have a strong commitment to social and economic justice at the City of Seattle. One of our core economic development goals is to provide fair and livable wages and benefits for our residents.

Earlier this week the Seattle City Council approved, fortunately, the West Seattle alley vacation anyway. Here’s the coverage from the West Seattle Blog:

Rollcall vote: 6 yes, 3 no. The alley vacation petition is approved. Rasmussen offers closing words that the development will upgrade what is currently a “bleak” site. He also thanks everyone for public involvement in the extensive process. The “no” votes are Mike O’Brien, Nick Licata, and Kshama Sawant; the “yes” votes are Tom Rasmussen, Sally Bagshaw, Tim Burgess, Bruce Harrell, Sally Clark, Jean Godden.

The “no” votes said it was about various reasons like truck access and the negative impact on pedestrians. But it’s hard to take that seriously when the union was out in force talking about wages and the United Food and Commercial Workers gave McGinn $50,000 in campaign contributions. In my view, the neighborhood concerns were of the standard red herring variety. But the union was clearly out to either unionize the Whole Foods or keep competition out of the neighborhood.

Across town, labor has also been flexing it’s muscles in another dispute over an alley vacation. This time they seem to have stymied the developer. Because of pressure from labor over the vacation over the same wage and organizing issues, the developer is skipping the vacation. Without it, the project will be smaller and have no affordable housing.

Under the new proposal, the hotel would have 1,280 rooms and take up only three-quarters of the block between Howell andStewart streets and Eighth and Ninth avenues. Hedreen would prefer to build a 1,685-room project on the entire block. The smaller project lacks many of the amenities of the larger development. It would not have 156 units of onsite affordable housing, and there’s no public park along the length of Ninth Avenue.

The labor advocates said this about the project and the jobs it would create:

The project will employ over 1,000 workers (over 700 will work in the hotel). However, the jobs will likely be low-wage, no benefit jobs with unsafe working conditions.

Clearly when labor talks about benefits they mean wages and benefits for their workers. With the long drawn out process created by controversy over public benefits the safest thing to do for the developer was to make the project smaller. So there will be fewer amenities and no affordable housing. A project that would have actually created affordable units on site now will have none. How’s that for public benefit.

I have no problem with unions trying to use the public benefit process to make the case for increases in wages or even the number of members in their union. That’s what unions do. But because of the amount of money they spend on political campaigns and worry over reelection, politicians have a tendency to do exactly what the vacation process intends to avoid: holding projects hostage to every single claim made by specific interest groups claiming public benefit. Why doesn’t the City show leadership and facilitate a discussion between labor and proponents of proposed projects to find mutually beneficial solutions rather than hiding the real issues, wages and benefits, behind design committees and NIMBY red herrings?

The two parties that need to negotiate over wages and union membership are employers and unions, not developers and the City, especially when there is additional housing supply at stake. Turning the street and alley vacation process into a labor negotiation doesn’t make any sense, especially when builders don’t have control over the wages paid by tenants of the their buildings. And even if they did, the City should not be holding up vacations while that gets worked out, especially when it adds additional costs to housing or worse still, reduces the number of units that get created. But the City could discuss wages and benefits in a more appropriate forum.

Don’t we have enough efforts underway to tax, regulated, and limit housing? Unions perform an important function, especially when they represent lower wage workers. But allowing unions to start using the vacation process to try to get higher wages will result in developers avoiding the process which will take away any leverage the City has to create public benefits (which should be for the widest possible number of people) in exchange for the right of way it’s giving up. This is a bad precedent that the Council should not set. They did the right thing in West Seattle but their lack of movement on the Hedreen has cost the city affordable housing.