Some Seattle City staff and Councilmembers might be skeptical of our request that we not subject microhousing to design review until the design review process gets fixed. As I pointed out last week, the process is already bogged down with confusion, inept review, and subjective and speculative process that would add costs to rent. What would happen if microhousing was put through the same process? Here’s a glimpse: the appeal filed by the Eastlake Community Council against a microhousing project. The appeal has almost no actual facts but half a dozen or more claims the support the Eastlake Community Council’s pique at the project being given a Determination of Non Significance. Here’s sample of the ways in which the microhousing project “would directly and adversely affect the lives, livelihoods, and properties of ECC’s members.”

• “exacerbating traffic and parking congestion and creating unmitigated population pressures upon local transit, area parks, and other public facilities;”
• dangers include “public health, fire, and explosion risk” because each living area only has one sink;
• “Public safety and neighborhood impacts from the transient nature of many of the proposed building’s residents. The City has erroneously accepted the proponents’ claim that all residents would be “non-transient;”and
• “Fails to analyze the negative impacts of locating the mail box lobby at the proposed building’s alley entrance, instead of taking the design review board’s recommendation that the mail box lobby be located at its Eastlake Avenue entrance.“

Oh, and the neighbors claim that the City got the number of rooms wrong: there are actually 115, not 113. That’s right, if they were right, the basis of the appeal is a difference of two rooms in the project.

The first point, parking, is irrelevant since no parking is required and again and again lease information from real tenants of microhousing show that two-thirds to three-quarters of residents don’t even own a car. And common sense would tell you that if a product doesn’t have parking it won’t attract buyers who own cars; they’d rent somewhere else.

The exploding sink canard is one that Councilmember Tom Rasmussen perpetuated in his microhousing memo last summer. As Scott Schapiro pointed out in his letter to Council, many living facilities already have only one sink; it’s a common practice all over the Earth and all over the city.

Criticism of code words and language publicly here and by Dominic Holden at The Stranger hasn’t stopped Chris Leman from making a bigoted and ugly characterization of future residents. Microhousing tenants generally stay in their homes for about 14 months, and that is data collected from real tenants. Besides, what difference does it make. The supposition that Leman makes in his letter is that because some one is “transient” they will commit senseless crimes and unleash havoc on the unsuspecting neighbors. Using this objection is more about stoking fear among residents than making any substantiated point against microhouisng.

And then there is the mail box lobby location. How anyone could argue that the location of the mail boxes will “adversely affect the lives, and livelihoods” of Eastlake residents is completely a mystery since there is not substantiation for what this means and why this “issue” should trigger a full environmental review. Leman’s appeal is mostly propaganda to stoke fear and anger among neighbors using a bogus appeal which will almost certainly fail. The only thing required to file such an appeal is a key board and a heart full of malice.

And speaking of malice, here’s a segment of an e-mail sent to Councilmember Sally Clark about a different microhousing project. It reads, in part:

Now imagine LeRoy and Chris and other bitter, bigoted, angry neighbors unleashed on an extended design review process, larding up their comments and appeals with red herrings and code words about who got here first. That nobody has called these people out on their language is stunning. Their comments about crime and property values have no place in any City process, and harken back to the racist rhetoric used to keep people of color out of white neighborhoods. Yet the Council is considering giving these people the ability to stall projects for no good reason other than killing them. Leroy, you and your neighbors have been “fully heard” and what we hear is scary and sad.