Editorial: HALA Process Ignored by City Council

We have an opinion post up at Publicola that is worth reading if you’re concerned about the future of housing in the City. Unfortunately the process the Mayor started–his Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda (HALA) Committee–might be falling apart. City Councilmembers are grandstanding in a political year to people who are dead set against growth.

We’re tracking two items that will harm housing supply and choice in the City and both are authored by Councilmember Sally Clark and supported by Councilmember Mike O’Brien. The first is the low-rise legislation that would profoundly impact neighborhoods best suited for growth in Seattle and the second changes the Multifamily Tax Exemption (MFTE) requirements for what used to be called microhousing, now called Small Efficiency Dwelling Units or SEDUs.

We’ve extensively talked about the low-rise issue and we’ll continue to give the facts: if this legislation passed it will hurt housing for people who want to live in Seattle’s densest and most transit friendly neighborhoods.

But we’re only just starting to assess the damage that would be done by Councilmember Clark’s changes to Area Median Income (AMI) requirements to the MFTE program for SEDUs. We’ve asked the Chair of the Committee, Faith Pettis (an attorney for a law firm that serves as bond counsel to the Washington State Housing Finance Commission which manages millions of subsidies for non-profit developers of affordable housing) to ask the Council to stop pushing significant housing legislation while the Council considers broader housing policy.

So far Pettis doesn’t seem to agree that the process is being HALA Committee is being undermined by Councilmembers; she says the HALA has “a collaborative working relationship with Clark.” The future of housing hangs in the balance. Please comment at Publicola and let the Chair of the HALA Committee know what you think.

faith.pettis@pacificalawgroup.com

Forest for the Trees: Seattle Neighborhoods and Canopy Grow

The Department of Planning and Development commissioned a study of urban villages. I won’t go into the whole report, but one of the indicators of the success of growth happening in urban villages–the 37 neighborhood areas target for growth in the City’s Comprehensive Plan–is tree canopy. It’s important to note that one of the chief complaints of neighborhood activists opposing growth is that we’re losing tree coverage.

Here’s what one group, Friends of Urban Forests, declares on its website.

With increased development and population growth, Seattle is losing its trees. While other cities around the Northwest, like Portland, Oregon and Lake Forest Park, WA have recently strengthened their tree ordinances, Seattle has actually proposed legislation to significantly decrease protections for trees. Rather than an open process involving the public to draft new legislation, the Seattle City Council has asked the Department of Planning and Development (DPD) to draft new legislation. Unfortunately they have a conflict of interest in their mission which is to help people build and develop, not protect trees.

Hmmm. That’s not what the report says. And the report was managed by none other than Peter Steinbrueck, hardly a developer advocate. The report found that:

Canopy cover has increased within all urban villages in the study except Lake City, which has seen a small decrease. Ballard leads tree canopy coverage improvements with an increase of about 7% over the last 20 years.

Here’s a table with the data.

So that well worn trope that new growth is destroying our tree canopy is false. Just ask builders who have to bend their projects around trees, replace and maintain trees, and face with delays by neighbors fighting their projects in the name of trees. The truth is that the new rules are often a hassle, but maybe they are working. Builders and developers don’t hate trees. And DPD pays close attention to tree preservation and replacement.

The lesson in all this is that when we pay attention to data and the facts we learn something. Maybe City Councilmembers will point out the facts when they are asked to pass growth killing legislation in the name of saving trees. We are growing trees AND we’re growing neighborhoods. Let’s keep doing both.

Running Scared: Clark Pushes Low-Rise Legislation

The campaign season has begun, and it should be no surprise that housing is already featuring in one of the contests. Noted growth and microhousing opponent Bill Bradburd has announced he’s running against Councilmember Sally Clark. Clark, not particularly a friend of microhousing or growth either, has filed to run for one of the two citywide council seats. It’s also rumored that Clark wants off the Council, but hasn’t been able to find an alternative job or appointment.

Still, she seems highly motivated to keep the job she has. In fact, she and Councilmember O’Brien are pushing to bring back low-rise legislation which we appealed last year. Wouldn’t it be better to have the low-rise proposal with it’s significant reduction of housing capacity in the low-rise zone be considered by the Mayor’s Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda (HALA) Committee? We think so. But clearly Clark thinks Bradburd would be able to use the Council’s not passing the legislation in the campaign. Here’s the e-mail we sent out last night urging people to contact the Mayor’s office to not forward the low-rise legislation to Council.

Clark and O’Brien should know that this is too important for politics. The Mayor’s Committee needs a chance to factor in the destructive legislation in its deliberations about overall housing need in Seattle. The City itself has said the legislation reduces density and housing in the low-rise zone; is that a good idea at a time of increasing demand for housing throughout the city? And should job security for incumbent Councilmembers trump new housing and the benefits of growth for big parts of the city?

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Hello,

Bay Area Courage: “Build as Fast as People Move Here.”

It’s all set. I’m going to San Francisco to be part of a panel on housing. I’m not sure I will wear any flowers in my hair, but I will for sure be ready to tell stories about how things are going here is Seattle. And I am looking forward to learning from members of the San Francisco Bay Area Renters Federation, which has the best acronym ever, SFBARF. SFBARF is led by Sonja Trauss who you can watch in the featured video above courageously standing up for common sense and increasing housing supply. As she is taunted from the gallery behind (including about what she’s wearing) her, she makes the clarion statement we’ve made many times here. Build more housing. The meeting is about a plan for more development in West Oakland. She starts with a brilliant analogy; does the rain cause umbrellas, or do umbrellas cause the rain? (Traids starts at about 1:48:00. I’m working on an edit of the video)

Do new houses cause rents to rise? [CROWD: Yes!] No!  . . . We can look at an experiment. In San Francisco we effectively did not build. We have not been building to keep up with population. Have rents been steady in San Francisco. No! No, they have not, they have risen. So when you don’t build enough, it’s reasonable to expect rents to rise. People are going to move to West Oakland, because the Bay Area is a great place to live [Crowd: It was before you got here!]  I don’t want to repeat San Francisco’s experiment here. I want to build as fast as people move here . . . then we’ll have enough housing for all of the people that move here . . . [CROWD: Affordable housing is what we need!] And we will have affordable housing if there is enough housing!

San Francisco now has the dubious distinction of being America’s most expensive city thanks to a spiral of outcry about rents, followed by supply killing regulation leading to higher prices, and more outcry. I called it the San Francisco Death Spiral, a ride our City Council seems determined to take.

Trauss is courageous, standing up against a wave of vitriol and bad economics. She does so with confidence, a sense of humor, and because it what she believes is right. The only thing I can compare Trauss’ political and principled performance is Margaret Thatcher pushing back on socialists in the House of Commons when she said, “You’d rather the poor be poorer, provided the rich were less rich!” a stunning rebuke of what often masquerades as progressive politics, that somehow what makes social justice is making sure nobody gets too far ahead of anyone else, regardless of how much better everyone is doing. But we know that if we build more as Trauss suggests we can avoid the “San Francisco experiment” that has lead to higher housing costs.

You can read more about Trauss and what she calls her “club of weirdos” in an article in the San Francisco Examiner. I am looking forward to meeting other weirdos from San Francisco and the Bay Area who are weird enough to believe that supply and demand applies to the housing economy.

City Builder: An Immigrant’s Values and the American Dream

When Tien Ha’s family moved to Washington state, he was 13 years old. His father Chu had been a lieutenant in the U.S.-backed South Vietnamese army and then imprisoned as a P.O.W. for seven years. An agreement with the U.S. government granted Chu and his family the right to immigrate legally to the United States.

The family almost didn’t make the move. After being freed, Chu Ha resumed his life. He rose up through the ranks at a corporation in Vietnam that had construction holdings. He learned as much as he could, then went on to own his own thriving design-build firm in Vietnam. But, above all, Chu Ha was a realist. He knew that in a country like Vietnam, his kids wouldn’t have the opportunities he wanted for them. He wanted freedom—for himself, his wife and his brood of six. So with the money he had made in construction, he made the move to the U.S.

HACT Construction Company Founded: 2004 Employees: 25 + General Contractors Development Type(s): Apartments, Office Buildings, Hotels and Religious Facilities Number of Projects per Year: 6

Throughout Tien’s childhood in Lynnwood, Washington, and all the way through high school, he and his siblings helped his parents make ends meet. His parents worked janitorial jobs, while his siblings toiled at McDonald’s, but everyone worked, even 13 year old Tien helped out. After years of scraping by, his father not only managed to buy a house for the family, but started a new business as a remodeler and handyman for small residential projects with Tien and his brother tagging along to learn the ropes. The die was cast: both brothers went on to attend WSU for construction management.

Right before graduating in 2004 on a visit home, Tien saw an apartment complex with a poorly executed siding job. The next thing he knew, he had talked the project manager into hiring him and his dad, under the auspices of a company they formed on the fly called HACT Construction (Ha, their last name and C and T for their first names Chu and Tien).