Paul Schell’s mayoral victory on a platform of building new in-city housing marks a significant change in public attitudes toward development and density. Environmentalists, once opponents of development, now rally around the state’s Growth Management Act. The unofficial green policy is to encourage infill development in cities at ever-increasing densities, thus protecting undeveloped rural lands and slowing urban sprawl.
But, even while Seattle officials tout the pro-housing tone of the Seattle Comprehensive Plan, the city is slipping below projections in producing new housing. In its report, “King County’s Housing Supply Crisis,” the SeattleKing County Association of Realtors provides a scorecard rating how well local municipalities are keeping up with their own new housing projections. Using 1994 King County projections, the report argues that Seattle is one of the half-dozen worst performers (along with Auburn, Federal Way, Renton, Seatac, and Tukwila).
In fact, officials of the mayor’s Office of Management and Planning (OMP) and the Association of Realtors engaged in a war of words over the report’s conclusions. In an October 15 letter, OMP assistant director Nancy Ousley disputed the association’s claims that Seattle’s new housing recordkeeping is inadequate and countered that Seattle projects future housing units by a more complex system than that used by the association, which simply divides 20-year goals by 20. She’s right, sort of. Seattle’s own official projections call for low growth in the early years of the comprehensive plan (approved in 1995), rising from 900 new housing units in 1995 to 2,200 in 2000, with faster growth expected in later years. The city doesn’t, however, explain how or why the rate of development would thus more than double in five years. Also, even with these diminished expectations, the city itself estimated that it would fall short of new-housing goals in both 1995 and 1996.
One obvious effect of the city’s skewed projections is to assign new mayor Schell the job of revving up the city’s slow housing development market. Deputy Mayor Tom Byers says Schell has accepted the challenge. Plans for a January housing summit have been set aside, however. “There wasn’t any interest in coming up with yet another task force report,” notes Byers, who cites recent studies by the Seattle Chamber of Commerce, King County Housing Partnership, and University of Washington. “We weren’t interested in appointing a select group of people to sit down and behave as if that work hadn’t been done.” Instead, the two-month task for the mayor’s office is to examine these reports, create recommendations, and fashion an action agenda for housing policy changes, says Byers. These recommendations will be reviewed by the public through a round of neighborhood forums, then a citywide housing conference tentatively scheduled for March.
The three new City Council members—Peter Steinbrueck, Richard Conlin, and Nick Licata—were all elected on platforms stressing the creation of affordable housing. Last week’s council committee assignments reflect this focus: Steinbrueck will chair the Housing, Human Services, and Civil Rights Committee; Conlin and Licata are chair and vice chair of the Neighborhoods, Growth Planning, and Civic Engagement Committee. “I think there’s plenty the city can do” about increasing housing availability, says Steinbrueck. His prescription: Break down the various housing problems, starting with homelessness and continuing with examinations of housing types, financing, and permitting.
The mayor’s office promotes a similar plan, and in addition calls for pilot projects for new housing types and modified regulations, based on neighborhood planning efforts in individual areas of the city. “We want to get away from the idea that one size fits all,” says Byers. “Paul’s feeling is if you have a neighborhood that wants to try something, let them be a pilot project and let them test it.”
BE FOREWARNED: Cities aren’t always rewarded for their success in encouraging development. Take Kirkland, one of two major success stories cited in the Association of Realtors’ report (the other is Issaquah). Downtown Kirkland absorbed so much new development, citizens demanded zoning changes; last month, the Kirkland City Council approved a code rewrite limiting the number of floors in buildings (in addition to the usual height limits). In most of downtown, planners had envisioned four-story buildings, but developers could fit five under the 52-foot height limit; the rewrite imposes a strict four-story limit (with as few as two stories permitted in some
areas, including historic Lake Street).
The revised code also limits the height of the hillside condominiums whose rapid construction prompted the uproar. Kirkland city planning director Eric Shields notes that Kirkland’s downtown has already absorbed more units than were predicted for the next 20 years. “I think [the changes are] an attempt to bring the scale of development back to a level that the community as a whole is more comfortable with,” says Shields. “We’re very confident that we are not violating the spirit nor the specifics of the comprehensive plan.”
The association report cites the Kirkland code changes as a example of anti-growth backlash. But the association isn’t shy about suggesting its preferred solutions to the housing “crisis.” Each of the seven position papers in its report ends with the same pagelong conclusion: The housing supply can only be boosted by increasing the size, density, or numbers of designated urban centers, or extending the boundaries of King County’s Urban Growth Area (“busting the green line,” in bureaucratspeak).
But in the end, success or failure in meeting the region’s housing needs lies in the numbers. The realtors’ report gives municipalities fair warning that, at least in housing, they have fallen behind. But do they really want to catch up?
