District 3 candidates talk HALA

Despite the typical political friction accompanying local primaries, there’s something all five District 3 candidates can agree on: the city’s hunger for affordable housing.

Analysis from Durpe+Scott Apartment Advisors indicated an 8.3-percent increase in average rent costs throughout the city for last year alone; factoring out rents from new construction units, that figure remained alarming high at 7.5 percent. In developing Capitol Hill, rent prices rose by 12 percent between 2013 and 2014, according to KUOW’s comprehensive analysis of neighborhood housing data.

To launch the crusade against steepening rents and the affordable housing shortage, Mayor Ed Murray and the Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda (HALA) advisory committee released a proposed action plan on July 13. With 65 specific recommendations, the action plan details requirements for mandatory inclusionary housing, taller height restrictions and a commercial linkage fee.

Mandatory inclusionary housing requires developers of multifamily buildings to reserve 5 to 7 percent of units to renters with incomes up to 60 percent of King County’s area median income (AMI). Together with the suggested commercial linkage fee, ranging from $5 to $14 per square foot and phased in over three years, this requirement should lead to the construction of 6,000 affordable units within the next 10 years, per the mayor’s proposal.

The consensus-driven brainchild of 28 committee members, including developers, affordable housing advocates and community members, the proposal also suggests expansion of tenant protections. It further recommends doubling the $145 million Seattle Housing Levy and expanding the Multifamily Property Tax Exemption (MFTE), two programs with looming expiration dates. HALA is Murray’s roadmap to building 20,000 new affordable homes by 2025.

The action plan’s staggered timeline, outlining 15 specific steps, calls for many of the recommendations to be initiated by the last quarter of this year and the first few months of 2016. With all nine Seattle City Council seats subject to rearrangement in 2016, this timeline grants District 3 hopefuls room to consider how they’d weigh in. 

A balancing act

“I think there’s two values we’re trying to play out here,” began Rod Hearne, endorsed by the King County Democrats. “One is sustainability, in both a civic and environmental sense; the other is fairness.”

The fourth-generation Seattleite believes that the city should grow fairly, with all neighborhoods sharing the weight and impact of expansion. Per the HALA recommendations, single-family neighborhoods remain largely untouched, following the trend that continues to concentrate growth in the city’s densest areas.

While the action plan concedes “the exclusivity of single-family zones limits the type of housing available, the presence of smaller format housing and access for those with lower incomes,” it does little to make single-family zones more accessible.

“If we take ourselves seriously as environmentalists, then we should do everything we can to make it possible to live in the city,” Hearne said. “A lot of our single-family neighborhoods are actually less dense than they were 100 years ago.”

Only 4 of the 65 percent of Seattle land reserved for single-family homes would be subject to upzoning if the HALA plan unfolds in its current form. Targeting areas near established urban villages, transit hubs and the borders of multifamily zones, the zoning change would enable new construction to rise 10 feet higher for buildings in affected single-family zones. 

“The choice isn’t, as a region, whether we grow or not. The choice is whether we grow in a way that reduces our carbon footprint by urbanizing, or in a way that increases it by sprawling,” Hearne said.

As an advocate, Hearne sees potential in HALA’s recommendation to expand MFTE.  Purposed to incentivize developers to build affordable units, MFTE grants tax exemptions to buildings where 20 percent of units are set aside for renters with incomes between 65 and 85 percent of the AMI.

Still, he asserts that income inequality is the key driver of the affordable housing crisis.  In conjunction with former redlining practices, income inequality not only fuels housing inaccessibility but the loss of racial diversity in Seattle neighborhoods, he suggested. A map from the Department of Planning and Development shows that single-family zones are overwhelmingly white. For Hearne, the solution to these disparities lies with reinstating the tax schemes of the 1950s: higher taxes for the super-wealthy.

A renter’s perspective

Nonprofit worker and renter Morgan Beach, endorsed by the National Women’s Political Caucus of Washington, also wishes that the HALA recommendations specified more upzoning. Though she considers the recommendations to be a good start, Beach worries that limiting expansion of upzones into single-family zones will disproportionally affect District 3 neighborhoods like Capitol Hill.

“We’re going to keep building new buildings just to knock them down again,” said Beach, who is tired of exclusive, not-in-my-backyard rhetoric.

Beach’s biggest concern, from a social justice perspective, is the size of units. With only hopeful provisions for incentivizing the construction of family-sized units, HALA will continue to hollow out Capitol Hill for families, she fears. Though it is absent from the mayor’s proposal, Beach would include a provision to build a certain number of two- or three-bedroom, income-restricted units. For developers, building a studio or one-bedroom unit at the required AMI range is much cheaper than a two- or three-bedroom one.

While HALA suggests numerous recommendations to provide housing for moderate-income individuals, Beach suggested that it does not sufficiently expand options available to those earning at or less than 30 percent of the AMI — $18,850 for individuals.  She’d like to see more guaranteed units for households at 0 to 30 percent of the AMI.

Priced off of Capitol Hill, Beach knows firsthand the struggles renters face trying to make ends meet.

“I’m out of money at the end of every single month,” she said. “It’s getting harder and harder, and there’s no one on the council dealing with that right now.”

Beach also asserts that the city can’t truly provide a comprehensive and just housing plan until it tackles the issue of differentiated income levels. With a median wage gap of $16,000 a year, housing will remain permanently less affordable for half of the population unless the wage gap between men and women is closed. That $16,000 would cover more than a year’s worth of housing costs at the area median rent.

A good first step

For Urban League president Pamela Banks, the HALA plan — especially its emphasis on increasing density around transit hubs — represents a good first step toward providing more affordable housing in the city. The mayor’s proposal succeeds in putting forth a model where development pays for development; leveraging upzoning for increased distribution of affordable units within new buildings is a good compromise, she suggested. 

Still, Banks would push for further action to address gentrification-driven displacement and work to provide safeguards for long-term residents, especially low-income seniors.

“The broader goal, of course, is to grow and maintain vibrant, economically and culturally diverse neighborhoods throughout District 3 and Seattle,” she wrote in an email. Bringing back diversity to neighborhoods like Capitol Hill, however, requires more than just housing policy, she continued.

For Banks, HALA’s recommendations for expanding tenant protections — removing barriers for renters with criminal histories, preventing discrimination based on source of income and developing Muslim-friendly homeownership tools — are long overdue. Banks specifically supports eliminating “black box” barriers on rental and employment applications, especially for nonviolent and youth offenders, and has worked on programs at the Urban League that rehabilitate men of color after incarceration.

When it comes to upzoning on Capitol Hill, Banks is hopeful that the zoning changes in the central Pike-Pine corridor will contribute to diversifying the community and addressing safety concerns.

“To truly make upzones work for all, however, we need to expand the conversation to more than just housing policy,” she wrote. “We need to look at transit and traffic, at small businesses, at parks and greenspaces, access to schools, and create an integrated plan for development that creates community.”

A counter-proposal

Socialist Alternative City Councilmember Kshama Sawant has expressed concern that the voices of developers dominated the HALA committee. An advocate for rent control, Sawant, alongside City Councilmember Nick Licata, openly supported candidate Jon Grant’s counter-proposal, which calls for 9,000 affordable units at the 0 to 30 percent AMI level and includes a rent stabilization ordinance. Grant’s proposal emphasizes development without displacement.

“We need a comprehensive housing program,” she said after a rent control debate last week. “I support the HALA recommendations, but I don’t think they go far enough.” She believes that the HALA committee failed to include rent control on its agenda because the group was entirely polarized, with overtly competing interests.

To begin addressing the housing crisis in District 3, Sawant has called on big developers to use the city’s excess bonding capacity and pay robust linkage fees — more than HALA stipulates.

“Supply-and-demand alone do not explain why we have skyrocketing rent,” she said. “Increased supply and upzones by themselves will not solve these problems. We need rent regulation and a further expansion of tenants’ rights.”

Unlike Sawant, Hearne, Beach and Banks don’t see viability in rent control as a long-term solution. Rent control is a nice talking point, Banks said, but it doesn’t address or solve the root causes of the housing problem.

Though retired journalist and public media consultant Lee Carter was not available for an interview, his plans to address affordable housing include lifting the ban on rent control. According to Capitol Hill Seattle Blog, his first piece of legislation “would be to place a moratorium on new development in the city until the new district-based council members had time to settle in.” 

To comment on this story, write to editor@capitolhilltimes.com.