While Mayor Ed Murray’s Housing Affordability and Livability Advisory committee mulls over how to make housing more affordable for the thousands of Seattle residents who are being priced out of the city, the city is aiming to ensure that whatever new development gets built, it will not only look pleasing to the neighbors but it will also come at the expense of single-family homes.
The city’s Office of Housing and the Department of Planning and Development are considering charging developers of single-family homes a varying “linkage fee,” based on a neighborhood’s popularity. The proposed fee would cost developers up to $28 per square foot for all new residential developments, including single-family homes, to help pay for affordable housing units elsewhere. That would amount up to an additional $112,000 for a 4,000-square-foot home, according to Erica C. Barnett’s The C is for Crank blog, the first to report the proposal. The only way for developers to not pay such a fee would be to dedicate more square footage for affordable housing, which can’t be done with single-family homes.
This actually incentivizes developers to build even more multifamily developments — to get more bang for their buck — especially since single-family homebuyers will be reluctant to pay that much more on top of the skyrocketing home prices in a seller’s market.
This proposal clearly is aimed to take the “house” out of “affordable housing.”
With fewer single-family homes, neighborhoods that longtime residents cherish and many families aspire to live in will cease to exist. Residents already complain about the changing streetscapes of Ballard and South Lake Union: the sidewalk-to-sky towers that block sunlight from reaching the ground. One lobbyist is even advocating for 100-story apartment buildings in residential neighborhoods to accommodate the anticipated influx of people moving to Seattle for tech jobs, according to a KIRO Radio report — imagine that homogeneity throughout the city.
And it’s difficult to know one’s neighbors as it is; if more people live in hotel-like environments, there will certainly be no communal feel of living in a community.
Seattle would no longer have the distinctive neighborhoods it takes prides in. But at least there will be room for all those people they expect to make their home here.