Harrell Tosses in the Towel on Housing
A 20 year Plan to Make Housing Prices Higher and Homelessness Worse.
The Main Thing You Need to Know
Mayor Bruce Harrell released a 20 year plan to give up on the housing crisis. The administration plans a big slow down in housing production, and over the course of 20 years, actually aims to make the housing deficit deeper.
This is a stunning surrender from someone who promised he would not play “small ball” and said he wants to embrace “Space Needle Thinking.” Unfortunately, the way state law and the process works, we will be stuck with his feeble framework for quite some time.
Right now, we are tens of thousands of housing units behind, and this plan will take twenty years to make it at least 12,000 units worse, and possibly much more so. It doesn’t improve the housing deficit, and it doesn’t even tread water.
It is literally a plan to fail.
(This post is also available on Publicola. Publicola has some of the best in-depth reporting and analysis around. I strongly suggest you subscribe!)
What Is A Comprehensive Plan and Why Have One?
State law requires cities and counties to release a 20 year “comprehensive plan” for how they are going to handle their growth. This includes how much growth, and where it goes. After it gets an extensive environmental review, it is much harder to challenge. This makes it expensive, time consuming, and sometimes legally risky to try to change course after the plan is approved. In other words, these plans are hard to unstick.
So the plan to fail will be with us for a while.
The Impact
Failing at housing means prices will climb higher and faster. So unless you have a few million to loan your kids before you die, or a very roomy basement, there is little chance they will be able to afford to live in Seattle. And unless you made around $400,000 a year in your twenties and thirties, people like you will not be able to start a career or raise a family in Seattle.
According to experts, higher housing prices also increase homelessness. This is because when people experience an economic or behavioral crisis in a city with affordable rent, they usually manage to stay housed. But expensive markets like Seattle’s are far less forgiving, so when someone gets into a bad situation, they are far more likely to end up without a roof over their head.
If this all sounds a bit like a certain city by the bay, that’s because it is. San Francisco’s refusal to keep up with housing demand has resulted in $3,200 median rents and people pooping on the sidewalk.
I don’t know about you, but I aspire for more in 2044.
Want to take action? See, “How To Help” at the bottom of this article!
The Numbers, if That’s Your Thing
For those who want to understand the numbers: The slowdown in housing growth relative to population growth over the last few decades created a massive housing debt. Most of the best figures are regional, and address the overall gaps in housing production, production relative to growth (page 20), gaps in affordable housing, even a growing mismatch in the number of jobs to homes by one online commentator. However you slice the data, the Seattle deficit is tens of thousands of homes, and the regional gap is much larger.
Bruce’s Bizarre Plan To Slow Down Construction
Because of high land prices and stringent zoning and other rules, our ability to add housing is dropping fast. We have built nearly 10,000 units per year in the last five years, but permitting is cratering. If we do nothing, housing production is going to fall off a cliff, to 4000 units per year for the next 20 years.
So the Harrell administration spent a year of staff time and millions of dollars and ignored the overwhelming documented supermajority of feedback they received, and only planned for a little life support to bring it just up to 5,000 units per year. That’s right–we’re going to reach for a sky that is half as high as where we are now.
This plan is likely to yield about 100,000 homes over 20 years, even though King County says Seattle needs 112,000 units just to keep up. The 112,000 unit number comes from the fact that an average rental household in Seattle has 1.85 people, including single family home rentals. Since most of this growth will be apartments, the number of people per unit will be just a bit lower (1.78), which leads to the need for 112,000 homes
In other words, we are planning to fall behind by at least 12,000 homes.
Lest you think no one has thought about sending folks to nearby cities–that’s already baked in. The plan suggests Seattle will add 159,000 jobs, which will support far more than 200,000 people. In other words, the 200,000 person growth target already assumes tens of thousands more commuters from out of town, choking our roads with traffic and paying property taxes somewhere else.
Growth Projection Question
The city says that in the next 20 years, the Seattle population will grow by at least 200,000 people. But if we simply match the growth rates of 2000-2020, we’d grow by 240,000. If we grow at the rate of the 2010s, it will be 363,000 new people. So when they say, “at least” they really mean at least. Those higher rates would increase the housing hole by up to an additional 22,000 to 91,000 units!
The plan manages to do all this in especially damaging and clumsy ways.
Racial Inequality
The plan shoehorns a lot of the growth into small areas of the city, an approach they have long called the “urban village” strategy.
And yet the very office responsible for this document called the basic structure of their longstanding urban village strategy racist just a couple years ago. This plan pulls heavily from the same pernicious playbook.
Notably, the plan concentrates poverty, and pushes multifamily housing near large, dangerous, polluted roads. All the while, it shields Bruce Harrell’s neighborhood and other rich neighborhoods with water views, like Laurelhurst and Magnolia, from any real change. And the restricted growth everywhere means higher prices everywhere, which means more displacement for underprivileged populations.
In other words, the city is planning to perpetuate much of the pattern of our openly racist housing history.
Sending Families Somewhere Else
The Harrell administration’s plan is hostile to families.
One of the reasons that family housing is so expensive is our housing deficit, but another is our infinitesimal growth in larger units. Harrell doubles down on this foolish approach, making family housing much less likely. For some reason, Seattle seems determined to prevent people from raising kids here.
The State’s “missing middle housing” bill requires cities like Seattle to allow four to six units on normal residential lots. But the plan makes this functionally impossible, especially for family-sized units. If we followed the state’s model code, we could build four 2000 square foot homes or six 1333 square foot homes on a standard lot.
But Seattle cut the square footage allowed by almost 40%! Forget decent sized homes. In fact, this also makes it so many more projects won’t pencil out.
In other words, the design is deliberately set up so that that missing middle housing won’t get built at scale, and where it does, the units will be too small for families but still spread around the lot enough to cut down lots of trees.
If you think the schools can’t get enough enrollment to stay funded and open now, imagine a future where ever fewer families can live here.
Transit, Affordable Housing
The Harrell plan treats taxpayer money with very little respect—notably generating a mere 2,700 units near two new light rail stations, frittering away a billion dollars in taxpayer investment in our regional transit system. It also ignores the overwhelming feedback favoring social housing, as well as the significant margin the social housing initiative passed with. Overall, it fails to tackle the even larger housing gap when it comes to affordable housing of all types.
It plans for less growth than much-smaller Bellevue, much weaker middle housing than Spokane and, and is so bad that state legislators are calling out the BS.
The legislator who led the effort to pass the missing middle housing bill noted that “it barely goes above what new housing production would have been if they did nothing.”
Harrell Gives Up
This is an absurd failure of leadership. Up until now, I’ve wanted to give the mayor the benefit of the doubt. He’s well meaning, and although we disagree about a great deal, he’s not a true conservative like Sara Nelson. He’s just afraid of big business.
But Bruce has lost his touch. Centrist leaders get this. President Joe Biden gets it. Governor Jay Inslee gets it. King County Executive Dow Constantine gets it. Thousands of Seattle residents get it.
Bruce does not.
This article is also available on Publicola.
How to help.
The most important thing you can do is tell everyone you can, face to face, that the city has decided to drastically slow down construction, make the housing deficit deeper, and that this will drive up prices and homelessness.
This is the key takeaway for the voting public, who aren’t generally interested in the intricacies of city planning, and probably aren’t following yours or my posts about local politics online!
Write to your city councilor. Here is how to identify yours, and how to contact them. Make sure you do the one for your district, and both at large members, Sara Nelson and Tanya Woo. You can write to the whole council.
Feel free to do this even if you live in a neighboring city–this plan displaces people around the region, and it will mean more traffic everywhere too!
Contact Bruce Harrell’s office. Also, Deputy Mayor Adiam Emery is in charge of the office that put out this plan, and COO Marco Lowe is very pro-housing. Deputy Mayor Tim Burgess is widely seen by political insiders as the one running the city. It is worth at least emailing them.
The city has offered opportunities for feedback, in person (all the “One Seattle” events), and online. I think the best thing you can do at these events is find your city council member and tell them how important this is to you.
You can email your feedback directly or if you want to be more technical and address specific sections, go to the online hub.
In terms of the formal feedback mechanisms here, I am not sanguine. They have ignored overwhelming feedback in the past on this topic. But I think being firmly on the record is good, and swamping them with feedback has some value–just do not let that be an excuse to avoid talking to your neighbors and friends!