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The public forum on affordable housing that Tom Rasmussen and Sally Clark called in Ballard last fall didn’t go too well: Try as they might, the two — then chair and vice chair of the Seattle City Council’s Housing Committee — just couldn’t seem to get across that giving developers a tax break to build more densely will ease housing prices.
Many of the Ballard residents in the room that night were openly skeptical of the idea. So is David Miller, a Maple Leaf resident who is part of the newly formed Livable Seattle Movement.
With a bevy of housing and zoning issues coming before the council this year — including changes to the city’s multifamily housing code, the State Environmental Policy Act, and height limits at South Lake Union and south of downtown — the group is currently culling data that it hopes will bring city officials back down to Earth on the issue of development.
For instance, it’s not a given, says Miller, a neighborhood activist who has tried to save trees in the redevelopment of Maple Leaf’s old Waldo Hospital, that building more densely makes housing more affordable or helps the environment. Those are two arguments often put forward by city housing and planning officials, most recently in an Affordable Housing Action Agenda released in February by the Seattle Planning Commission.
At one point in that document, the commissioners “essentially say that the lock that’s currently on single-family zoning must be reassessed,” he says. “They drive this predetermined assumption that density increases affordability, but people who live in neighborhoods where density is occurring see that probably isn’t correct.”
That’s because the older, “fixer” homes that young and lower-income families once bought are being torn down for condo fourplexes that, foot by foot, are more expensive. “You’ve replaced one affordable unit with four unaffordable units,” Miller says.
The group also plans to challenge the idea that density in and of itself is green. “Most people who live in our neighborhood can see from the seat of their car that, when they pass a lot under development, there’s trees when they drive by on the way to work and when they drive back, there’s no trees, [or that] permeable surfaces have been covered with impermeable surfaces,” he says.
The group, which is being spearheaded in part by architect Anna Nissan, John Barber of Parks and Open Space Advocates and Kent Kammerer of the Seattle Neighborhood Coalition, came together in January after seeing the mayor’s proposed changes to the city’s multifamily code. Many Livable Seattle members, Miller says, have been around long enough to know that what the mayor calls “technical updates” are much more.
“It’s a substantial change that would increase heights and lot coverage and alter the form of the kind of buildings that would go in the [low-rise] zones, which are generally adjacent to single-family neighborhoods,” he says.
But the group isn’t about resisting development, he says; it’s about gathering data for much-needed dialogue with city officials about what really works to achieve affordable housing and protect the environment. The group is starting by compiling housing sale price data in some Seattle neighborhoods.
“The Livable Seattle Movement is not the group that says ‘no.’ We’re a group that says, ‘Let’s talk about this armed with the facts,” Miller says. “The worst thing that could happen is if we just let this conclusion that increased density inherently increases affordable housing stock go without any investigation.”
“What happens if we’re wrong?” he asks. “We’re going to waste some number of years doing exactly the wrong thing instead of concentrating on the kinds of public subsidies and other strategies that we know can create affordable housing.”
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