Campaign casts Seattle’s middle class as ‘housing poor’

Former mayor stumps for families with $61-$122K annual incomes.

By CYDNEY GILLIS, Staff Reporter

Former mayor Charlie Royer is leading the Middle Income Housing Alliance, a coalition focusing on in-city homeownership for those making 80 to 150 percent of median income. Photo by Cydney Gillis

A firefighter starting out in Seattle today, he says, can’t afford to buy half the house he could when Royer was mayor. And major employers such as hospitals have a hard time recruiting nurses and other staff who can’t afford the prices. There’s also the global warming that he says the firefighters and nurses contribute to each day commuting into the city from somewhere cheaper.

So, about a year ago, Royer says, he got together with a few folks knowledgeable in development — including Lyn Tangen of billionaire Paul Allen’s real estate firm, Vulcan Inc. — to kick around what to do. The result is the Middle Income Housing Alliance, a lobbying group that Royer has formed to promote city regulation changes that will make it easier for developers to build more in-city housing for the middle class.

Royer, head of a nonprofit consultancy he founded called the Institute for Community Change, says there’s a significant housing gap that the market alone isn’t going to address for the city’s firefighters and nurses — an argument that Mayor Greg Nickels has used to encourage the City Council to pass developer tax breaks and incentives this year aimed at people with incomes at 80 to 100 percent of area median income, or $61,500 to $81,400 for a family of four, according to HUD’s latest data for 2008.

The Middle Income Housing Alliance, whose early advisors included Tangen, developer Bruce Lorig, Seattle Housing Authority director Tom Tierney and others, is focusing on a higher range of 80 to 150 percent of median income, about $61,500 to $122,100 a year for a family of four — a demographic Royer is calling the “housing poor.”

“Anything below 80 percent of [area median income] is going to have a public subsidy of some sort in this market, ” he says. And “market-rate developers aren’t going to do that unless they’re forced to by regulation or unless they have very heavy incentives.”

The group is specifically targeting six urban centers, as opposed to single-family neighborhoods, that Royer says have failed to grow as planners intended, including the downtown area, Capitol Hill, lower Queen Anne, Northgate, the University District and South Lake Union, where Vulcan is well under way with many high-rises.

Concentrating on the urban centers “limits the number of oxen who are going to get gored somewhat, but probably not to the extent that it’s going to be easy to make these changes,” says Royer.

The work started in earnest March 6 at a workshop held at the Washington Athletic Club. Royer says the event, which was paid for by Seattle and King County, drew more than 100 non- and for-profit developers, architects, and urban planners who started work on the set of recommendations that the alliance will lobby for later this year.

Participants worked in two tracks — one devoted to employer-assisted housing programs, which are used in other cities to provide new recruits with down payment assistance. Other attendees focused on regulatory and policy proposals in the areas of building codes, density, zoning, and permitting.

Royer chuckles that he ran for mayor, in part, on a platform of streamlining permitting, but says that every cost lifted from the developer is a cost lifted from The Middle Income Housing Alliance wants more growth in urban areas that developers say haven’t met their potential. Excluding single-family neighborhoods “limits the number of oxen who are going to get gored somewhat,” says Royer.the home buyer — changes that will benefit everyone in the housing spectrum, from low-income up.

“I don’t think the market can solve [the problem] alone,” says Sarah Lewontin, a workshop participant and executive director of the Housing Resources Group, a Seattle nonprofit developer. But, “If you remove as many regulatory barriers as possible, the market will produce housing and prices and rents will even out.”

Architect and former City Councilmember Peter Steinbrueck, who spent years advocating for the homeless and low-income housing, agrees that few developers will risk the low profits of building affordable housing without incentives. But he insists Royer’s group is targeting the wrong end of the housing pyramid — with ideas that won’t work.

“The public should not be subsidizing housing at that level. The needs [below 80 percent of area median] are too great,” Steinbrueck says. And, “We’re never really going to significantly increase supply and lower prices through deregulation. It just won’t happen. Politically, it’s a nonstarter.”