Harrell's Halfhearted Housing Plan
Harrell's Halfhearted Housing Plan
Coalition Cajoles Him Into Cautious Steps
I wrote earlier this year that Bruce Harrell had given up on the housing crisis. His own twenty year plan openly embraced making the housing shortage worse. The plan was panned by advocates, experts, his own planning commission, and leaders from around the state.
Along with poor progress on gun violence and murder and staggering increases homelessness, (a 23% increase since he came into office, an all time high) Harrell seemed set to move backward on all three big three issues that Seattle voters say they care most about–public safety, homelessness and housing costs.
But a broad spectrum of stakeholders came together to push Harrell to do better on housing. This includes genuinely lefty environmental groups, labor, architects, affordable housing developers, disability advocates, urban vitality activists, land use organizations and conservative groups like the Chamber, big developers, and King County Realtors.
To their great credit, this broad array of organizations set aside its significant political differences for the larger goal of addressing a crisis that Harrell seemed to find completely uninteresting.
The coalition came together to let the Mayor know that the problem is too acute, the solutions too obvious, and the public too hungry for change, for Seattle to fail to act.
So when the administration released its updated draft of the comp plan, which is more or less a binding long term blueprint, many wondered–would Harrell hear them and how would he respond?
Some Progress
I am pleased to report that the coalition’s efforts have borne some real fruit. Huge kudos to the thousands of citizens around the city and dozens of groups who have been pushing the administration.
Unfortunately, Harrell does seem determined to do as little as he can get away with politically. His concessions will not actually address the coalition’s core goals of a vibrant, green, affordable city that avoids reinforcing our ugly history of segregating people with less money into our most dangerous, polluted areas.
But there is still time to improve it.
The Good
The Mayor increased the capacity of missing middle housing substantially!
Now, we will actually be able to build fourplexes with more square footage to share among the four of them than the square footage allotted to one single family home. And instead of his previous position taking advantage of a state-allowed carve-out for missing middle housing in some portion of the city, Harrell expanded missing middle options to the whole city.
And, one of my favorite parts, he even offers a small square footage bonus for stacked flats, which have real potential for creating lots of (accessible, good for aging in place) homes while preserving trees. These increases make it genuinely more feasible to build family sized homes and stacked flats.
This is by far the best part of the plan.
Thank you to the activists, coalition, and Mayor Harrell. Thank you very much to the stage legislature and the commerce department, whose legislation and guidelines were the key hooks this activism was built upon.
The new rules meet the state standard, and even go a bit farther for stacked flats. They fall a bit short of Spokane’s standards, which allow 7350 square feet of missing middle housing on a standard Seattle lot, 22.5% more than the 6000 square feet Seattle plans for. The gap widens a bit further to 25% when bonuses for affordable housing are figured in (although Spokane’s primary building square footage requirements would force this into separate structures and are a bit confusing). I’ll also note that Spokane gets to some of these higher square footages through allowing buildings to cover a higher percentage of the piece of proprety, which is often at odds with tree preservation (I’d opt for more floors instead).
Still, since Seattle is the biggest job center for nearly a thousand miles in every direction, it seems obvious to me that we should do more than Spokane or the suggestions of a state agency. We got to quite good, but I’d love to even see great.
The plan also adds a bit of space for more apartments. This includes four more neighborhood centers, small areas of concentrated growth, usually near some small scale retail. These areas allow for modest apartment buildings. Harrell also includes more housing along what his administration likes to call “corridors.” While I’ll discuss their problematic placement below, I’m pleased that there is more capacity overall.
In fact, this brings the total zoned capacity up a good bit.
However, after the city was previously slammed for planning to fall short on housing growth per year relative to the need, the administration didn’t bother this time to estimate how much housing will actually be built. So it is hard to know if the increase in zoning capacity is sufficient.
In addition, researchers have indicated that past affordability was accompanied by much larger zoning buffers and that only a broad and substantial buffer can avoid driving up land costs. So the capacity increases are a bit more meh than good. But they are still much better than the last draft.
The Bad
Unfortunately, that is where the good news ends.
Not Many Neighborhood Centers
While I guess I am pleased to see a few more neighborhood centers, it’s very little improvement. The city’s planners proposed 50 of these pocket main streets, and studied 46 in their environmental review. But the Mayor killed roughly half of what remained, seemingly aiming to lock apartments and small scale retail out of mostly wealthier neighborhoods, including his own. After a lot of pushing from the community, Harrell increased the number by just five (to 29), and I’ve seen no indication that their footprints will expand.
There need to be many more neighborhood centers added in high opportunity, low-displacement risk neighborhoods, ideally with larger footprints if most people in Seattle are to be able to meet their needs within walking distance.
Corner Store Take-Backsies
While the plan formally legalizes corner stores (pg., 8-9), it does so in a way that would only impress a literalist like Amelia Bedelia
Beloved corner stores like Seven Coffee Roasters in my own neighborhood would still be illegal to build, because they aren’t literally on a corner. Somewhat insultingly, they still dared to use Seven’s picture in their documents.
And in fact, building even literally-on-a-corner corner stores would remain functionally illegal, because the city still absurdly requires suburban style off-street parking, which means curb cuts and more dangerous sidewalks, as well as the uglification of neighborhoods and/or the nonviability of most such businesses.
In fact, Volunteer Park Cafe (pictured above) is also pictured in Harrell’s slides and would be illegal under the plan. Volunteer Park Cafe doesn’t meet the parking requirements (and neither does Seven).
In other words, this is really just a plan to pretend to legalize them and show us pretty pictures of things that aren’t allowed.
Neighborhood retail stores should be allowed everywhere, and there should be no off-street parking quotas–which is how actual corner stores work.
Time for real relegalization of corner stores.
Parking
Mandated off-street car-storage quotas, known as parking minimums, are well understood by wonks to produce way more parking than people want or need, even when that parking is offered on demand for free. These quotas have been called a fertility drug for driving, making main streets impossible to build, small scale retail rarely viable, and sidewalks much more dangerous.
They create sprawl, substantially increase the cost of building housing and other buildings we want (daycare anyone?), increase pollution and runoff, and are a huge reason why we have too few trees in too many neighborhoods. They also force our elders, people with disabilities, and people with less money–the people who are less likely to drive–to subsidize everyone else, because the price of all that mandated parking gets baked into rent and groceries and everything else when “free” parking is forced into the bundle by bureaucratic fiat.
Thousands of cities have made significant strides in reducing parking minimums, including mid-sized Spokane and little Port Townsend, which have embarrassed Seattle by being first and second in the state to legalize parking flexibility. Nearly a hundred other North American cities and towns have joined them (most of which have less transit than Seattle!). Oregon towns include Beaverton, Bend, Tigard, Tualatin, Milwaukie, Millersburg, Corvallis, Eugene, Albany, Salem, Springfield and Portland. Yes, many of which are way more car dependent than Seattle. Even sprawling, car-oriented big cities like San Jose and Austin aren’t showing Harrell’s indolence on this issue.
Where Seattle once led, we don’t even follow. Harrell made a few minimal changes to comply with state law, with an additional very modest reduction for missing middle housing and the elimination of some “parking overlay districts” (which are juiced up quotas). While reductions are technically “good” – falling behind small towns and suburbs on such an obvious no-brainer certainly qualifies as “bad.”
The Ugly
It gets even worse. The “good” of more capacity for apartments is largely wrecked by the obvious disdain shown for the human beings who actually live in them.
The “corridors” for what feels like “those people in apartments” are really just sited in our busiest, most dangerous, most polluted parts of the city. They reinforce the ugly segregationist and environmental injustice patterns of the past, and don’t offer the kind of entry level housing people need in neighborhoods with safe streets, schools, and trees–not even short walks from transit into such neighborhoods.
Ironically, as the Urbanist reports, the city’s own planning commission already warned Harrell of the danger of this very issue and the ways in which concentrating housing on noisy and polluted highways will reinforce injustice and inequality.
Sustainable development expert and author Mike Eliason also noted online that the Mayor’s earlier public illustrations for the corridor plan were overtly misleading, in what he called “a bait and switch.” Note the lavender areas on the left were put out by the city and supposed to represent the corridor housing option, but it turns out that the red areas on the right are the actual plan.
Ryan Packer poignantly called this “traffic-oriented development.”
This approach under-delivers on promised transit-oriented development and doubles down on environmental injustice. Let’s build more homes within walking distance of transit.
Social Housing
Seattle voters overwhelmingly authorized the city to create a housing development agency focused on stable, modestly subsidized mixed and middle income housing, the kind that can house firefighters and nurses, as well as baristas. They call it “social housing.”
65% of high propensity Seattle voters support legalizing 4-6 story apartment buildings for subsidized middle income or “social housing” everywhere.
But the conservatives on the council (or center-rightist council-members, or whatever you want to call them), have shown open animus toward the social housing developer, as have some of the (actual) moderates. It seems Harrell shares their distaste. There is not a single mention of social housing–indicating that he has no plans to make the efforts by the city to build this housing any cheaper or more effective.
Social housing should join affordable housing for any concessions or bonuses or help offered by the plan. Whether one supports the tax for funding social housing or not, the notion that we would try to increase government cost and reduce production of middle income housing through zoning restrictions is a just bonkers. This needs to be fixed.
What Comes Next
Legislators legislated, the state provided model code, planners have pushed, advocates have whispered, yelled, cajoled, negotiated, and advised, and thousands of citizens have weighed in. It is clear what people want and what is good policy.
The comp plan needs, at a minimum
Apartments within the entire walking distance of transit, not just on dangerous, busy, polluted roads.
Many more neighborhood centers, in high opportunity, low displacement risk areas.
Legalization of corner stores (anywhere on a street, no off street parking requirements)
The elimination of costly off-street car storage quotas
Provisions for making it easier and cheaper to build social housing and affordable housing anywhere in the city
Send in your comments or attend an open house and deliver them in person! The process runs through December 20th.
Thank you!
A special thanks to Ryan Packer at the Urbanist, whose excellent reporting on the Comprehensive Plan provided most of the factual information I needed for analysis. I cited him multiple times above, but feel he needed even more credit.
On Comp Plans:
A quick reminder, the comprehensive plan is a state mandated, once-a-decade chance to make Seattle a city that works for everyone: equitable, affordable, livable, vibrant, and green. It is basically a binding blueprint for the growth of our city–and we need a blueprint that includes homes for everyone. Past plans have not offered the flexibility to keep up with demand and have shoehorned growth into small spots around the city, while everyone else has been exempt. Shoving all the growth into small spots puts pressure on the neighborhood, and the change has meant a lot of displacement for those who have lacked a voice.
Let’s embrace Kamala Harris’ campaign theme when it comes to our city plan–we are not going back. Let’s go forward into a green, clean, vibrant, affordable and safe future.