Earlier this week, CHS reported that the mayor’s Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda Committee was finalizing its recommendations for creating 20,000 income restricted units in Seattle in the next decade. As you may have seen, a draft of the recommendations leaked by the Seattle Times has inspired a nearly perfect backlash from slow growth and community groups around the city. The Seattle Times headline — Get rid of single-family zoning? — helped spread the concern as have shallow echo pieces like this from broadcast media. More sensible examination, of course, hasn’t received the same attention.
There will be more to report when the final recommendations are released but, for now, we’re sharing portions of Page 8. The page about how to “increase opportunities for multifamily housing” is what inspired the Seattle Times headline and appears to be a core plank to the recommendations.
“Opportunities to create new housing to help meet Seattle’s growing population and corresponding demand for housing are limited by the relatively small portion of Seattle’s land zoned for multifamily housing,” the section is introduced in the draft. “In addition, only about 10% of the parcel land area is zoned for Lowrise (LR), Midrise (MR) or Highrise (HR) multifamily housing. In areas of the city where new multifamily development is feasible and where demand is highest (i.e. where people want to live, based on access to amenities, transit and other livability factors), development sites are in short supply.”
The recommended solutions banged out by the committee — at least in this eighth draft — don’t call for the end of single-family zone in Seattle but, instead, allowing small forms of multifamily housing in single-family zones within the city’s Urban Village borders — you can see the Capitol Hill Urban Village borders in the map at the top of this post. The farthest east it currently stretches is around 17th Ave, the farthest north, Aloha. Millionaire’s Row, for now, you’re safe from townhouses.
“In order to increase the range of housing options and encourage the addition of new housing in appropriate locations, the City should convert land within Urban Villages zoned primarily for detached single-family development to the City’s existing Residential Small Lot (RSL) zone, a new ‘Low Density Residential Zone’ as proposed below, or Lowrise multifamily zones,” the draft recommendation concludes.
The draft also recommends expanding the Urban Village boundaries for Capitol Hill and beyond but how those change will be determined by rational assessments of resources including transit and services:
So, there’s what Seattle’s single-family home boogeyman looks like. Just wait until you get a look at the parking boogey! And, if you want to see something really scary, check out the incredible disappearing affordable housing in San Francisco.
The full draft document of the HALA recommendations, is below.
Glad that FirstHill is all HR zoned … 170′ to 320′ in most places
It’s entirely reasonable. Of course it sparked outrage.
Very little of that map is zoned single family right now. What blocks would have their zoning changed and what would the change be?
For parts that are zoned LR3 right now, what would the change be if the zone was changed to low rise multifamily?
I’m confused by this too. The draft calls for converting single-family zoning in urban villages into some form of multifamily zoning…..but isn’t all (or almost all) of the urban village zoned that way already?
I appreciate this article and agree that the hype is entirely overblown, but I think you might be confusing the recommendations on page 8 (which you discuss above) with the recommendations on pages 10-13 (which is what led to the Seattle Times articles and subsequent outcry). As you note, the recommendations on page 8 are limited to Urban Villages, but the later recommendations recommend replacing the “single-family zone” citywide with a new “low density residential zone” that would allow “more variety of housing in these areas,” “such as small lot dwellings, cottages or courtyard housing, duplexes and triplexes” (p. 12). So I think the recommendations that have people (irrationally) up in arms are broader than you suggest.
That said, the report also contemplates testing these zones in certain parts of the city (e.g., “single family areas that are within walking distance to an urban village or commercial area, or places close to frequent transit service”) in a pilot phase before implementing them citywide. So even though they are suggesting eventual citywide changes, it would still be a gradual, rational process.
Yeah a gradual change that would potentially affect the house I just moved to, to get myself out of an Urban Village area. NO WAY WOULD I SUPPORT THIS!
The members of the committee are predominately developers and housing zealots. Single family neighborhoods were not represented. Also the racism angle in the report is despicable and insulting. I know many people of color who love and cherish their single family neighborhood in many different parts of the city. As for the parking, it’s going to become a crisis like SF and Boston. People still want/need cars to go all the places transit won’t.
I agree. Based on the preliminary (draft) recommendations, it really seems like the committee is heavily weighted in terms of pro-development people. Mayor Murray, who formed this committee, should be asked about this discrepancy.
Great article! Thanks!
Haha Alex Jones is on it:
Is Seattle Doing Away with Single-family Homes?
The city needs to move away from the idea that all families can live in their own home on a piece of land, according to a draft letter from a Seattle advisory committee
http://www.infowars.com/is-seattle-doing-away-with-single-family-homes/
If you want a single family home, move to the suburbs. It is entirely unreasonable to expect to get to live a major (and rapidly growing) City like Seattle (which has a population larger than Boston) and get to like in Mayberry at the same time.
You have to choose – do you want to live in the City (with easy access to all of the services, transit, entertainment, etc.) or do you want to live in Mayberry with single family homes and white picket fences? You can do one or the other. You don’t get to do both.
You seem to want to write off existing neighborhood dynamics and character. For what purpose? So everyone can live in an overpriced high rise surrounded at ground level by 60 bars, a couple of dry cleaners, and no parking? London, for example, kept its 19th century row houses in the city core and was smart to do so.
Change is coming whether you like it or not, because people are moving to Seattle lickety-split and will continue doing so for years to come. We can either accept this and make room for them, or we can do nothing, watch rent and housing prices skyrocket, and accept the fact that everyone who’s not rich is going to be kicked out. And in that case, who cares about “existing neighborhood dynamics and character?” Certainly not the people who live there and participate in those neighborhoods now, because they’re all about to be priced out.
We have to accept higher density because the population is going up and there is no more land to annex and build on. Nor would it be a good idea to expand the city limits anyway, since that just ratchets up the amount of money we would have to spend on transit and other infrastructure.
Two-thirds of Seattle’s land is zoned for low-density development. The easiest, gentlest, lowest-impact way to increase density is to spread it out far and wide, so that each neighborhood changes only a small amount at a time. If we loosen the zoning rules, making it easier to convert existing houses into duplexes or triplexes, making it easier to build backyard cottages and basement apartments, then ordinary homeowners will take advantage and density will increase in gentle, progressive ways that don’t involve demolishing blocks of houses and replacing them with big new developments.
exactly, thank you.
We certainly can do both. Your dream of eliminating all single-family homes is really quite laughable. Not going to happen, ever. Even cities much larger than Seattle have single-family neighborhoods.
There’s all this hooplah about greedy developers ruining neighborhoods but why isn’t anyone talking about greedy sfh owners — owners, not residents mind you, since if we’re going to be intellectually honest instead we should acknowledge that a lot of sfh owners rent their units out — are sitting back watching their net worth skyrocket?
Yes, “developing” a sfh neighborhood by adding a f’ing mother in law apartment would cause their inflated real estate bubble to deflate a little but if they already own this property they’re PROBABLY going to be financially fine. Meanwhile when’s the last time you met a service worker that lives near where they work?
All this talk about environmental concerns and poor designs by development seems INCREDIBLY duplicitous. Such things can still be addressed and CURIOUSLY are never the central talking point from anti-density folks, it’s always the character of neighborhoods. It’s almost as if they’re digging up excuses since they know no one gives a flip about the character of a part of the city that we’ll never be able to live in in a million years.
A pretty obtuse response you put out there.
This IS about greedy developers, who do not care that they are ruining Seattle with their two-bit, low budget, cheaply build, crap excuse for a structure. They don’t care because they don’t live here. Wonder how loud they’d scream if I tried to build the crap they build five feet from their home. No parking needed, they can park right in front of the developers home, might even block his driveway. But just a bit, not entirely.
Its time to wake up and realize there are some people in life that want to live in a SFH in a SF neighborhood.
Yet there are other people that say, “..while you’ve worked your entire life to be able to attain your dream – we’re gonna take it away from you, because some other people that haven’t planned for the future deserve to receive something for little or nothing.”
Of course there are some people who want to live in a SFH in a SF neighborhood. More power to them. Lucky for them there are huge swaths of the metro area where this is possible. But, as cities grow (as they tend to do!) the closest-in SF neighborhoods to the urban center get converted into multifamily neighborhoods; they always have and they always will. Over the last century and a half, it happened to the various parts of what we now call downtown (which yes, were once all single-family areas on the city’s outskirts at different times); it happened to First Hill; it happened to Lower Capitol Hill. Nobody gets to draw a line in the sand and say: this is it – this is where the urban core must stop growing forever. You chose to prioritize proximity to the urban core in your residential decision-making; the trade off is a high chance that it would some day be converted. Anyone with a passing knowledge of urban history should know that. If your life dream includes living right on the edge of an urban core that never expands, then I’m sorry you worked so hard for it, because it’s an inherently unrealistic (and some might say selfish) dream.
And yes, I live in a single-family home in the area. With only street parking.
@DTC: exactly right!
DTC, well said!
Our neighborhood is littered (emphasis on littered) with fliers for the Socialist running in the upcoming election (“tax the rich,” “rent is too high”). I realize we are seen in the neighborhood as “rich” because we have a SFH on Capitol Hill but the folks screaming this don’t seem to realize we are already being taxed, heavily and honestly to an extent, happily: our property taxes support the schools, parks, libraries, buses that make up our “village”. I don’t see how losing more SFH will bring the city / county / state more or even equal taxes if there are multiple townhouses or god forbid apodments built in place of our house. They’ll be getting more corporate owned (tax-deferred/reduced beneficiaries often) dormitories that likely won’t be kept up as well as my SFH. They’ll be getting more people taxing the lightly renewed bus service.
The “multi-family” is a misnomer as well. Apodments don’t have room for more than a single person, certainly not a family. The modern, one on top of another townhouses aren’t much more “family” friendly either. Replacing SFH with “multi-family” dwellings is going to be swapping actual families for swinging singles and more double-income, no kids who can help push rents and restaurant bills higher.
As for community responsibility / involvement: as one of the few SFH left on our block, we take pride in our neighborhood: we try to meet our neighbors since we have long term plans to be where we our. We are organizing the neighborhood night out, we offer our parking spot (SFH but no car) to neighbors who have family visiting from out of town or who, we provide a responsible and caring presence for the block – not the transient “don’t care because I won’t be here in 6 mos, a year” that many renters on the Hill seem to have. Perhaps a solution for the “devil may care” or total apathetic attitude of many renters is the issue we should find before we go building more transient-lifestyle encouraging dwellings. More apathy does not an “urban village” make.
An increased percentage of Seattleites and Hill-dwellers who rent is inevitable. There will always be a number of them who are the demonized class ArcenSeattle mentions above, but there are a great many renters who would love to be a part of a stable neighborhood. There’s a HUGE gap between apodments and SFHs–a more sensible solution for 2015 and beyond would be to build more adult couple- and family-friendly apartments of a reasonable size, in quieter parts of the Hill. To me, that’s the point of HALA–to adapt to the inevitable in the best way possible.
First they took away our right to straight marriage, now they take away our right to a single-family home!
Brilliant :-)
You are incorrect to suggest that many SFH rent out their homes. It is not a good economic decision. One is much better of selling a SFH and investing it than renting it out. If I owned an SFH worth 500K, it would need about 5K in monthly rent to justify renting it. That would generate 60K in rent and I would be lucky to have 50K left after taxes, insurance and maintenance. How many 500k homes would actually generate 5K in rent per month. Likely none. At best 3K. So one would have 36K in rent, and about 26K left after expenses and taxes. The 500K invested passively in the stock market would generate about 35-40K over time, and not require any work. The only reason to justify renting out a SFH is that you are banking on the value going up significantly. Over time housing inflation has been far less than now, and there are downturns just like the market.
In any event, forget about my theory. Walk down the streets of our town and tell me how many SFH’s are actually being rented out.
I mean yeah that doesn’t make sense if you make the patently false assumption that you would need to rent them out for 5k a month. Please cite where the cost of upkeep + property taxes exceed 5k a month.
Also comparing 500k put into the stock market is such a blatantly wrong comparison that I have no question that you’re just making up things in lieu of having any substantive argument. The average home value has appreciated 10% over the last year in seattle, while the S&P500 has gone up 6%. 10% if you just sit on it, if you’re renting it out you’re making even more money. Obviously I’m not telling you this since you certainly already know this, I’m telling any other reader who might be mislead by this nonsense.
Homes in Seattle are worth, on average, less today than they were in 2007. Yes, they have appreciated rapidly in the last two years , but go further back and the rate of return diminishes rapidly.
I have owned my home on Cap Hill since 2000 and it has appreciated about 75% since then, an average appreciation annually of just over 4%. of course that includes the additional value of a renovation project. Bottom line, it is great to own your own home but it is not a cash machine. Those who think it is usually dont own their home for long.
And good luck making a killing renting your sf home. Yes, it can be done profitably, but it is the least profitable of all rental real estate options. Multi-family rentals are a much better option for making money. For that reason the practice is not that widespread, constituting perhaps ten percent of sf homes at most.
The minor detail you forget about when you point out upkeep and taxes not costing $5k/mo is the mortgage. Not many people, even if the home is rented out, have no mortgage on it. There’s $2000/mo (or lots more), easily.
@GetReal….I agree. It is a small minority of single-family homes that are rented out. It’s usually pretty easy to spot them, because they are often un-cared for. The tenants don’t do any basic maintenance because they expect the landlord to do so, and many landlords (certainly not all) don’t do it because all they care about is collecting the monthly check.
It appears that Murray is turning quickly into McSchwinn II. As for those who claim other major cities do not have single family designations…….I say nonsense. Even NYC, the densest city in the country, has its coveted single family neighborhoods.
The density is planned to support the light rail routes is driven by developers and does not sufficiently, or at least does not concurrently factor economic development as a pre-requisite to building higher density.
The traffic flows are not fully rationalized nor are the impacts on schools, hospitals, etc. Housing development should be tightly integrated with explicitly planned business hubs, with explicit economic development planned within the framework of the Urban Centers.. and also within surrounding smaller arterial communities. The economic development and density considerations seem to be factored as an after-thought to the housing solution. Seems backwards. The economic development should drive the housing development/re-envisioning. Right now, the City has a theoretical Economic Plan, but not a detailed Economic Plan that rationalizes how they are now re-envisioning the communities of the City. This seems to be due to the fact that the solution is developer driven and our City leaders have tunnel vision on rationalizing the Light Rail first, economy of Seattle…we’ll get around to that.
The housing is being tackled first b/c it is the most lucrative / compelling for developers. If the City does not *in parallel,* build up the economic sectors (to explicitly factor in the creation of new jobs with explicit employment sectors/anchors), the developers get off with funding sufficient impact fees. There would also be a huge imbalance in the tax revenue structure for the City and people will still need to commute to Bellevue/Redmond for work.
Read the City’s Economic Plan (20 yrs out) and found to be skimpy and light on details for what you have in mind for the re-envisioned plan for housing. Totally supportive of healthy growth, just want it to be holistically thoughtful and successful.
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