Post navigation

Prev: (09/20/21) | Next: (09/20/21)

420 Boylston Ave E: Backdrop for Seattle’s push for more affordable housing and ‘permanent homes for individuals experiencing homelessness’

Architectural rendering for 420 Boylston Ave E

Monday morning, Mayor Jenny Durkan and City Councilmember Andrew Lewis, chair of the council’s Committee on Homelessness Strategies and Investments, are scheduled to hold a press conference in front of a Capitol Hill development project to announce “$50 million in new state and local investments to provide permanent homes for individuals experiencing homelessness.”

The location happens to be one of the few locations in the city where Seattle’s Mandatory Housing Affordability program created affordable units at the site of a new project funding the program. Turns out, Seattle developers would rather pay than build affordable housing units.

The city adopted MHA to force developers to help contribute to affordable housing. Under the program, new projects would either need to provide some affordable housing units on site (typically between 2% and 11% of the total project units) or pay a fee.

The fee seems to be the overwhelmingly more popular choice. Out of 224 projects, only five built the units on site.

The rest paid the fee. While the lump sum of cash doesn’t generate the units in each building, it can still lead to lots of affordable housing.

Location of MHA Performance Option Projects

The MHA program took its present shape starting in 2017 when zoning ordinance updates started to roll in. A report released last April lays out just what the city has received from the program.

In the Performance Option, when a developer actually builds a unit, those units must be recorded in the deed, and the unit must protected as low income for 75 years. Also, it must be affirmatively marketed to people who might not otherwise live there.

In 2020, Seattle saw a total of 21 affordable housing units built under the performance option open in five, market-rate projects across the city. One of those was here in the Greater Capitol Hill Area, a Central District project at 2202 E. Union St. which opened in 2018 with 144 total units, four of which were MHA.

An additional 83 units have been committed by the developers, but the buildings had not yet opened. Two of those are in the Central District, and will create 45 affordable units.

More are in the pipeline. The city has a commitment from developers of nine more projects citywide that are at some point in their development stage but have not yet opened. These will generate 852 units, including 53 MHA units.

But there were 224 projects subject to the MHA requirements, so 219 chose to pay instead. Many of these buyouts were expected. For example, a townhouse project building five houses is probably going to pay, rather than have one unit (20% of the project) be set aside for affordable housing.

Those 219 projects paid the city $68.3 million. The city typically leverages these dollars with other funding sources to help build affordable housing projects, and the city estimates about $80,000 of city funding is needed to build one unit, so last year’s money could generate 853 units.

At 420 Boylston Ave E, the site of the mayor’s planned Monday morning press conference, the news will bring a new spin for the project. CHS reported here in 2019 on the design review process for the planned 60 units of microhousing. Developers Johnson & Carr and architects at SHW planned a seven-story building with 60 small efficiency dwelling units  to replace the early 1900s Boylston Ave E house most recently used as an office building. Developers acquired the property in August of 2018 for $2.35 million.

According to county records, the property is now subject to a “Housing Bonus Covenant,” the instrument used to secure the two units the project was to maintain as affordable under the MHA program.

With Durkan and Lewis’s press conference Monday morning, the 420 Boylston Ave E project is now lined up to be part of the city’s response to its ongoing homelessness crisis. “In June, the City announced funding to rapidly acquire buildings that can quickly be repurposed for shelter and permanent affordable housing,” the city says in its announcement of the media session. “These investments have the added benefit of improving throughput in our shelter system to bring more individuals off the streets and into safer spaces.”

Officials from Low Income Housing Institute and YouthCare will also be at the announcement. The YouthCare nonprofit already has major plans in the neighborhood where it is partnering with Community Roots Housing on an eight-story affordable housing, and homeless youth “education and employment academy” project at Broadway and Pine. Former mayoral candidate Colleen Echohawk, meanwhile, has stepped in as interim CEO of the nonprofit.

Seattle’s MHA has become a balancing act seen across the country in cities with similar programs that allow developers to buy their way out of affordable housing requirements. City leaders typically want to spread lower-income units around the city. However, it’s often more cost effective to build in parts of town with lower land costs, where they can create more units per dollar spent. The tension is whether it is better to build a few units in Magnolia, since mixed-income neighborhoods can help contribute to a vibrant city, or for the same money build a few dozen units in the South End, and get more people into housing.

As an additional complication, housing nonprofits can often build projects that cater to lower-income residents. This again, presents the question of whether it’s better to build more units, or to build fewer but better spread them around the city.

Back to the money. Much of the money collected has already been sent back out. The city in 2020 doled out $53.2 million of the funds collected under the MHA to eight projects, and the report says it will lead to construction of 712 affordable units. Three of the projects are local recipients. The senior housing project on 19th near Madison received $6.4 million in MHA funds (61 units). Good Shepherd Housing got $3 million from MHA (it’s also getting levy funding, and is expected to build 102 units) and the 410 condominiums got $1 million in MHA money (14 units).

Overall, spending-wise, the area called “12th Avenue, Capitol Hill, Eastlake, First Hill” has paid in $890,000, but gotten back $6.69 million in spending. The “23rd& Union-Jackson, Madison Miller” has paid in $3.22 million and gotten $9.49 million.

The imbalance? Money coming from other parts of town. For example, projects in Queen Anne, Ravenna, the U District and South Lake Union have contributed a combined $49.85 million, but the city has spent zero dollars in any of those areas. On the opposite side, there is the “Columbia City, Mount Baker, North Beacon Hill, Othello, Rainier Beach” area which has seen developers put $1.93 million in to the system, while the city has spent $28.11 million in that area, and Northgate, which has put in $570,000, but received $12.8 million in spending.

 

PLEASE HELP KEEP CHS PAYWALL-FREE!
Subscribe to CHS to help us pay writers and photographers to cover the neighborhood. CHS is a pay what you can community news site with no required sign-in or paywall. Become a subscriber to help us cover the neighborhood for as little as $5 a month.

 

 
Subscribe and support CHS Contributors -- $1/$5/$10 per month

3 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
Nandor
Nandor
2 years ago

Told you so…… I remember going to all of those community meetings before MHA and listening to all of those very earnest young people who were studying to get their MA in Urban Planning tell us all about how this would bring more affordable units into our community and about how we all told them that they were dreaming…. the developers would nearly always choose to pay rather than build them…. Surprise (not).

I’m guessing this has probably destroyed more of the less expensive apartments that were around here than it’s brought in, as only the largest apartment building developments have chosen to add any – and only a few. Many of the other projects have torn down older houses that used to be split into duplexes or multiple apartments that likely rented for under top dollar, due to their not being exactly the most luxurious or up to date units available and replaced them with $800,000+ townhouses…..

No, I’m not at all surprised.

Brian Gix
Brian Gix
2 years ago
Reply to  Nandor

It’s not all so gloomy.. With the MHA money paid, the city is acquiring 3 brand new buildings. With planned fall openings, City of Seattle acquiring three Capitol Hill developments for homelessness housing | CHS Capitol Hill Seattle

Nandor
Nandor
2 years ago
Reply to  Brian Gix

No…. the money for those 3 buildings is coming 1/2 from federal COVID relief funds and the other 1/2 from the state Department of Commerce – nothing to do with MHA. Not to mention that the only reason that the city is even able to acquire them at all is that COVID changed the economic picture here enough that the developers are finding it much more favorable to dispose of these particular buildings quickly than to try to make them profitable by renting them out themselves… None of it is a success of MHA, it’s just a happy accident.