Seattle looks to rein in state policy used to push back on big projects | Hacker News Reader

Seattle looks to rein in state policy used to push back on big projects

capitolhillseattle.com

122 pointsaaronbrethorst150 comments

If Seattle is not careful they’re going to end up on the same situation as the Bay Area: extremely expensive building projects due to red tape that take forever to complete and only house the rich.

Yeah you can build here, but have you completed all your environment impact studies? And posted notice of tree removal with requisite public comment period? And have you set aside 30% of the units for low income and raised the price on the rest of the the units to make up for it? And are you ready to comply with rent control laws? And are you supplying 2 parking spaces per tenant as required by law? And is your business chartered in CA with requisite taxes and fees? Did your bidding process include businesses owned by historically underrepresented groups? Have you kissed the ring of your local union leaders? Did you make sure your exterior design complies with neighborhood matching decor laws? Oh my god you're not going to cut down that 50-year-old redwood are you??

Wait why aren’t we building more apartments again?

Pretty much every city in North America is like this to varying degrees.

I've always wondered how Toronto manages to build a hundred giant buildings while most cities only have a few going at a time, with a few exceptions (note NYC has 3x the population of Toronto): https://www.remonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Diagram...

I'd imagine if there wasn't this sort of arrangement basically every growing city would be developing 10x more buildings than they currently are (at least).

If that chart is accurate it seems that Canadian cities across the board are building more high-rises. I wonder why.

For whatever reason, Canadians seem to be more open to multifamily high-rise living. As a child in the 1970s it always seemed off to me when we'd visit relatives in smallish towns in Canada which had midrise buildings while in the southern US where we lived much larger cities had few recent buildings of similar heights. This is simply my recollection of things but it seemed like even a small town of 20,000 in Ontario had good odds of having a residential building at least ten stories tall. Perhaps it was a difference in government policy in how it built social housing?

Reduced heating costs perhaps? Heating from -40 to room temp is much, much more expensive than, say, air conditioning in the southern US. If you are not averse to sharing some walls, it makes sense.

Personally, I don't think I could go back to apartment living, but I will also readily admit that I am not a good candidate for "normal" in most regards.

While Seattle still has a ton of work to do, is much more progressive on these issues than they Bay Area, and it’s getting better, not worse.

I would not call getting rid of these regulations as progressive. They exist to protect the environment and enrich the lives of the residents. We just need better, cheaper solutions to construction even if it's something as far fetched as robot labor.

> enrich the lives of the residents

Mostly, it’s retaining residents’ property values. By not building any new housing.

That's literally Elizabeth Campbell's entire motivation. She doesn't want to have to look at the poors in her neighborhood.

It sounds good in theory that "They exist to protect the environment and enrich the lives of the residents". Then I'm reminded that environment protection laws have been used to build larger freeways (because we don't want to have cars idling too long!)

WA still has a libertarian bent that despises red tape. We have no state income tax due to that.

As a former resident, I hope you can see the tides are shifting rapidly. How long can you keep things that way? Didn’t Seattle elect a socialist? Their policies are the opposite of libertarian.

Councilwoman Sawant is a single city councilperson; she isn't a majority of city government (who are mostly pro-business) and definitely isn't representative of the state as a whole, which is pretty purple. Outside of Seattle, especially on the east side of the state but also in some of the smaller metro areas, folks tend to be extremely libertarian. (Not to say there aren't libertarians in Seattle as well, it just skews left of the state average.)

The Seattle metro is a weird microcosm of the state in that it's so vastly bigger than any other metro in the state. Seattle and surrounding metro have about 4 million of the state's 7.5 million residents. So yes, Seattle has a big influence, but it's far from the only voice in Washington.

> progressive

I really don't want to get deep into this topic on HN of all places, but limiting the government's ability to interfere with new construction is not progressive.

And in before someone says that the opposite is "conservative" because "NIMBYs" want to "conserve" the status quo, such a transparent abuse of language. People figured out that supply/demand applies to housing too and now want to pretend that allowing markets to lower the price is somehow progressive because progressive means good.

It's almost bordering on "Orwellian", where a word can become nearly meaningless, you can just start calling anything progressive to justify the policy rather than thinking about the functional principle of what is being done--limiting the government's interference in the market, in this case, and that's not to say that is always a good thing.

However you want to define progressive, its certainly not progressive to have skyrocketing 4k+ USD a month rents and groups making it essentially impossible to build more housing.

I think you're replacing "progressive" with "good" again.

'progressive' usually is the opposite of enriching wealthy entrenched interests, to the detriment of basically everyone else.

> Yeah you can build here, but have you completed all your environment impact studies? And posted notice of tree removal with requisite public comment period?

This stuff really matters in the entire region because nearly everything is a landslide hazard.

This comment is completely non-responsive to the article. The article describes a move in the opposite direction from increased regulation and red tape.

Meanwhile, Seattle has already been vastly better than SF at building new housing units over the last decade. SEPAs have existed during that entire period and are used by NIMBY groups to attempt to slow down growth, but ultimately they have not succeeded at stifling development the way SF's NIMBYs have.

The heart of their effort is lowering the amount of time for certain appeals. It's not about addressing the real concern (the onerous regulation and red tape that allows everybody to slow down building unless it satisfies their particular social justice issue, whether that's environmental, aesthetic, cost, etc).

Cities and state governments want this regulation. They crave it and create it endlessly because it forces developers to come to them for permission.

Or it's because those with money to build property are inherently exploitative of those living there.

If using money to buy property is "exploitative", you've redefined that word into meaninglessness.

It’s better that chunk of land stays an empty lot and we all pay more and more for rent. Otherwise we’d be getting exploited!

And the best way to fuel that exploitation is to give the existing set of landowners an effective monopoly by disallowing new construction. If we instead encouraged new construction (via less red tape and other means) we should expect rents to go down as the supply expands - or at least for them to rise less.

>Wait why aren’t we building more apartments again?

Have you seen the Seattle skyline in the last 4 years? Lol.

I feel like this is a canned rant of yours that doesn't necessarily have a basis in this actual situation.

While you raise a fair point, the fact that Seattle is building a lot doesn't mean that Seattle is building enough. IIRC the net inflow is ~50 people/day. Seattle would need something like a new apartment building every week to break even.

That doesn't sound bad at all. Someone with the millions of dollars it takes to build apartment blocks isn't going to be held up with those minor issues.

All those things sound completely reasonable.

See also: Burke Gilman Missing Link, an extension to fill a 1.4 mile gap in Seattle's most popular bike trail, halted very much the same way by a concrete company who has used environmental laws to argue that its business would be impacted because its drivers can't be trusted to drive trucks near people biking.

To weaken their argument further, there are already a ton of people biking on that street already without good, safe infrastructure.

For those not in the know, it is quite literally a "missing link" between two ends of an otherwise pretty great separated bike path.

The one that gets me is Warren Aakervik - he retired long ago, but still comes into the office of Ballard Oil for the sole purpose of delaying the Missing Link. It's a poor legacy to work so hard for, in a city packed with inspiring examples (e.g. Myrtle Edwards).

https://www.kuow.org/stories/bike-trail-critics-see-opportun...

He would be far from the first Ballardite to work hard to fight progress. IIRC there is a whole exhibit at the Ballard Locks on people who moved to Ballard and Fremont to "escape the city", under the premise that 45th would never be electrified in their lifetimes.

For most of this group, they were in for a rude awakening when City Light built out Fremont and Ballard.

"[Ryan Vancil] argued that the SEPA delays on Mandatory Housing Affordability, the Burke Gilman Trail, and Fort Lawton were due more to his office’s unusually high caseload."

- Yes, that explains the 20 year delay on the BGT Missing Link. Just high caseload folks. Not continuous lawsuits invoking SEPA from a handful of selfish business owners.

Salmon Bay Sand & Gravel has done everything they can to block the missing link from being built.

I just want a usable bike trail to Golden Gardens, rather than the fragmented mess that is bike lanes in Ballard currently :c

Lanes are actually under construction now from around the locks (where the west half of the burke terminated for 20 years) to 24th ave. (To be clear, I am in full agreement with you.)

SDOT is trying to build it, did the recent injunction a few weeks ago get cleared?

Ah, you're right, I forgot about that. Meanwhile, the road is half torn up :-/.

The city and state have permitted environmental protection laws to be used and abused by those with the funds to hire a lawyer, to the point that one angry person has successfully stopped redevelopment of the military base at Fort Lawton: https://www.reddit.com/r/SeattleWA/comments/cbmeye/fort_lawt...

When I was a kid, half my class was kids from Fort Lawton. They were kind, compassionate, and fun to hang out with after school, despite the limited means of most of the households that were in Fort Lawton.

Many of the people that live (under the radar) in the park surrounding Fort Lawton would lead much better lives if we redeveloped this into affordable apartments. The area already has reliable bus service (with dedicated lanes to downtown) and dedicated bike trails and lanes, its one of the few candidates for adding significant housing at a low cost inside Seattle.

Edit: A word

>Redeveloping Magnolia’s Fort Lawton was first floated in 2005 and the possibility remained a tension point in the community for over a decade as the Seattle City Council voted unanimously to move forward on a major affordable housing project at the old Army Reserve Center site earlier this year.

I live two blocks from this area. The concern many in the neighborhood have goes something like this. The city is viewed to be deep in the pockets of developers, who cash in on valuable public lands but put no effort towards supporting new or improved infrastructure.

So, a new housing project will be built into Magnolia. There are currently only 3 bridges that connect Magnolia to the city. One of those bridges - The Magnolia Bridge - is falling apart and the city says they don't have the funds to repair it. This would lead many to assume it will be demolished at some stage in the near future (hopefully they aren't waiting for tragedy to strike first). Even without the new housing project, squeezing the population from 3 bridges down to two would be a nightmare. Add hundreds of families into an already crowded peninsula and the lack of that 3rd bridge is hard to fathom.

Not to mention Magnolia was bypassed for easy access to the future light rail, too (which we also pay for).

So yes, build more housing even if that means Discovery Park, one of the crown jewels of Seattle, will get filled with more humanity. But at least invest in the infrastructure and schools in a more balanced way to support all of those new folks and the ones who live here.

You can probably imagine why tempers are rising.

This is NIMBYism trying to conceal itself with faux-progressivism ("but big developers! infrastructure!").

The more requirements you tack on to any kind of housing development, the more expensive it becomes to build housing, and so projects on the margin get killed and rents go ever-higher. That's not acceptable.

If Magnolia needs new infrastructure, that should be handled by the city government, and funding for it should come from city-wide property taxes or municipal bonds. Tying infrastructure funding to individual housing projects is silly, and if I'm being cynically honest, I have a feeling it's a fig leaf to mask that the real goal is to just kill the project entirely.

One of the reasons why suburbs are so attractive is because other taxpayers subsidize their existence. New developments shouldn't get the same free ride regardless of density. Ideally what should happen is the city should plan the infrastructure, and the development should be forced to pay in their percentage of estimated load capacity into the building of it.

But I don't know how realistic that is or isn't. Maybe it's more feasible to have a temporary special tax assessment on the property to help pay for their share of it.

I mean, it’s realistic enough considering we used to build infrastructure and buildings. Only relatively recently did this become an issue.

Is it possible that a larger portion of government expenses goes towards debt service such as debt for infrastructure built years ago and pension payments? This would leave fewer resources to invest in the future.

I think thats a big part of it. Strong Towns blog aruges that suburbs are a growth ponzi scheme.

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2011/6/16/the-growth-pon...

From part 4: talking about the 70s when infrastructure maintanence and replacement bills started coming due "The critical insight today is to understand how we reacted to the end of the first life cycle of suburban development, when those maintenance costs started to come due and cut into our growth-generated wealth. This time there was no spatial shift as seen in the other large, economic corrections. Instead, we made a choice to double down on the suburban experiment by taking on debt.

We used debt to drive additional growth and sustain the unsustainable development pattern for a while longer. A lot of this debt was public debt, but we facilitated mechanisms for increases in private debt as well (for example, Fannie and Freddie early on and then subprime mortgages and securitization later). Here is a graph showing our public and private debt levels since the beginning of the suburban experiment. I have noted roughly the first and second life cycles of those initial investments."

Indeed, it reeks of NIMBY stonewalling; yet another reason not to build along the litany of reasons not to build. The Party of No has had decades upon decades to fix bridges and infrastructure with their sprawl and their cars, and what has that gotten us? Sorry, but that bridge didn’t start crumbling yesterday, and preventing new buildings won’t help it.

> The more requirements you tack on to any kind of housing development, the more expensive it becomes to build housing, and so projects on the margin get killed and rents go ever-higher. That's not acceptable.

That’s not faux progressivism. That’s real progressivism, just applied to an area some progressives want to see flourish rather than be killed.

Exactly what Minneapolis is seeing right now with it's 2040 plan that requires upzoning basically everything to allow at least duplexes in interior neighborhoods, and more dense allow corridor routes, etc. The main arguments are "It will destroy the character of our neighborhoods", "It's just a boondoggle for developers", and "The current infrastructure can't handle the increased density". Really it's people who have their comfortable little neighborhoods and don't want those filthy renters coming in.

I am now homeless because of this development. I moved to the seattle area to be closer to my family (who all moved out here from the east coast). Making it easier for developers to do this sort of thing only adds to the problem. I've been homeless in seattle for 8 months now and have been working full time in the industry I went to school for. I sincerely regret coming to this part of the country. Never thought I would see gentrification as bad as it is here.

> I am now homeless because of this development.

No, you aren't.

You are right.

The reality is that the parent poster is homeless because of people like us, who moved to Seattle, to work for 5x the prevailing wage, and have pulled up the cost of housing across the board.

No, that's still wrong. There is nothing ethically problematic about "accepting a job", and it's entirely possible to have a hot job market but not leave people homeless. The parent poster is homeless because Seattle isn't building enough housing to accommodate all the new residents, and that is what drives rents up. That, in turn, is driven by NIMBY opposition and bad policy.

I think both of you are right. The Venn diagram of "people who moved to Seattle to take a job paying 5x the prevailing wage" and "people who think Seattle was perfect and should never change from the state it was in the day after they arrived" seems, in my experience, to be almost completely overlapping. The voice of "build absolutely nothing anywhere near anybody" often originates from locals but is amplified by the people who newly-arrived and who can afford a $900,000 single-family residence in a "bucolic neighborhood" and now live in mortal terror that four-floors-and-corner-stores will be built nearby.

And then they have kids so everything turns into "that will severely impact my family and my children" so the rest of us are monsters for proposing such a thing.

Sorry for being hyperbolic; this raises my hackles a bit.

This isn't a problem that exists alone in Seattle.

Tour elementary schools across the nation, and you'll encounter lines of cars waiting to pickup/dropoff children. This is emblematic of the shift that has occurred in pockets of American society--the needs of the individual over the good of society.

Seattle just has unique geographical constraints that exacerbate the issue of individualistic thinking.

They have this because people don't trust their kids to walk home or be unsupervised any more, not because of individualistic thinking. And to be blunt, they are not entirely wrong; a dirty little secret of the old days is how much bullying or worse happened among unsupervised kids.

> And to be blunt, they are not entirely wrong

Actually they are. Humans are notoriously bad for understanding risk.

The rise in helicopter parenting DESPITE the fact that in no time in American history have children been more safe [1] is due to the fact that we (parents) have access to more information and news, and stories of children being harmed are sensational.

Our children would be fine riding the bus and waiting for the bus stop like we did as kids, but the fact that it's MY child means that I must do everything I can to protect them, regardless of the rationality of it. It is very much about individualistic thinking.

1: https://www.childtrends.org/indicators/infant-child-and-teen...

> No, that's still wrong. There is nothing ethically problematic about "accepting a job", and it's entirely possible to have a hot job market but not leave people homeless.

Much like communism, this is theoretically possible, but is not practically possible in most US cities, in the year 2019. Certainly not in the ones that are actually undergoing tech booms.

Given the constraints and social norms that our society operates under, a hot job market = misery for a lot of people.

Note that a sufficiently cold job market, and the urban decay associated with a shrinking population also leads to misery for a lot of people.

I'm not even convinced the person is homeless. The story doesn't pass the smell test. I have friends who work dishwasher jobs in Seattle but can still afford to live here, albeit with roommates. Someone who is educated, working full time in their desired career, and has been homeless for 8 months? Bullshit.

And even if that were true, the development isn't what made him homeless, and neither is the high wage growth. Seattle chose to not accommodate new residents with additional housing...the displacement at the hands of high(er) income newcomers is the direct result of that decision. Building more is the solution to this problem, not the cause of it.

Have you seen Dice's latest billboard advertisement recently?

It says "Who can afford to live in Seattle? Programmers!". For most of Seattle proper, its a sad but accurate statement.

If you look at other big cities though, Seattle's rent isn't that much worse. The big difference is how many programmers there are here, versus other high paying jobs. I'm hoping to see Seattle catch up there, bring in some lawyers, bankers, doctors, etc.

I mean, look here: https://www.apartmentlist.com/rentonomics/rental-data/ it doesn't even make the top 100 for median 1br rent prices in US.

Those numbers look very inaccurate. A 1 bedroom in Kenmore, WA for $1700 is the median? I find that really hard to believe, unless that is the median price for a unit built in the last 5 years in Kenmore. Ditto for the Puyallup, WA median 1BR price listed.

The data surprised me a whole lot as well. I can't speak to its accuracy, but it's the best I've found so far.

Where are they gathering it from? Seems overpriced for reality compared to census data and friends that have recently leased in both areas.

Seattle definitely is more expensive for a 1BR than either ex-urb: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/data/seattle-now-m...

Hum.. interesting. The article does explain that census data is quite different, includes utilities (now I'm curious if utilities are more expensive in Seattle), and the data is gathered by survey. So I'm guessing randomly asking people how much they pay.

Now from reading the methodology of my link: https://www.apartmentlist.com/rentonomics/rent-report-method...

They say they also use census data. So the numbers shouldn't be this off. But one difference is that my link doesn't count all census data:

> Our rent estimates do not include rent-controlled units, rental units considered substandard in quality, seasonal rentals, or public housing units.

Where as the Seattle time article explicitly said they do, and that's why you see New York for example having a much lower median than Seattle.

It's still surprising that would account for bumping down Seattle by more than 150 in rank. Another thing they mention is their data is adjusted more frequently for market trends by combining it with active appartment listings. So maybe Seattle only recently improved dramatically, I did.notice a surge in new listings due to a lot of new appartment units being built.

I don't know, nothing very conclusive, seems like it's hard to even get the numbers right.

No, you're homeless because there isn't enough housing to make it affordable at the market rate. Assuming you're actually homeless.

Why are developers expected to solve these problems? With more people living there, there will be a larger tax base to support services and infrastructure in the area. The city is the entity that should be building bridges and the residents (present and future) are the ones who should be funding it. By all means, the developers should pay market value for the land, but expecting them to fund bridge maintenance nearby just doesn't make sense to me.

This sort of quid pro quo on infrastructure funding is not uncommon and big developers are familiar with it as a concept.

The city where I live made re-development of an old railyard contingent on funding a new bridge over the tracks that were still active. It worked out great for everyone; now there's a nice new neighborhood and fewer accidents on the new bridge, which is wider and straighter.

While I understand your point, those new residents don't generate new taxes instantly. Development itself takes time - residents trickle in. And one years worth of taxes likely isn't enough to fund infrastructure.

So, if there's no kick-in from the developer, it could be years or decades before funding is in place.

I agree that it's not (directly) the developer's problem to solve. But, to the extend it might make their development faster or possible, they should have an interest in kicking in funds. And communities should rightly ask for that money.

Isn't this the problem that municipal bonds are supposed to solve?

Sure, but that costs more than getting the developer to foot the bill.

The developer will pass those costs along to the buyers of the new housing. Which means you effectively want those people to subsidize the existing residents.

Besides that, making new development extremely expensive with all this haggling is one of the major reasons for the housing crisis.

Just think, if Fort Lawton had been developed twenty years ago, perhaps the decisions about where to bother spending transit money would have been made differently. (It's not like anyone had any idea about that bridge having issues twenty years ago either - so it's a bit of a post-hoc explanation for all that NIMBY-ism)

I live in Magnolia (Briarcliff), and the claim that this is about bridge capacity is nonsense. It's about poor people being in a wealthy neighborhood, nothing less and nothing more.

It would added 200 households, who would live primarily in townhomes and apartments, into an area that has roughly 9,500 households, the majority of whom live in single family residences. This is not going to make a noticeable change to our commutes.

I agree we need to invest in infrastructure for Magnolia, but that problem is orthogonal to this development.

I don't mean to come across as argumentative, but as someone who's lived in not-Magnolia-Seattle for a long time, a lot of the points made by that neighborhood come across as intentionally contradictory. Magnolia residents have, for as long as I can remember, pushed for density to be somewhere else on the basis that "Magnolia's infrastructure just can't handle it" or some other variation on the theme of "density is great just not here why don't you try building in Ballard instead."

To wit, the Magnolia Community Council, as early as the mid-2000s, was pushing against a western light rail extension (as in, west of 15th) because it would bring more people to the neighborhood. They've also argued against trying to make a Sounder stop in Ballard, just across the Locks, because people could walk there from upper Magnolia (or Metro might make good on its "threat," in some people's words, to run a commute route on Commodore Way) and, thus, increase the number of people living in Magnolia.

The arguments have always been that more people can't possibly fit there so, well, how about Ballard?

Converting parks to more housing isn't really a density issue, it's more like does Seattle want parks or not?

Imagine converting Central Park in NYC to more housing.

The discussion is not converting Discovery Park to housing. That is a myth pushed by the Magnolia Community Council to raise people's hackles as "the Council is in the pocket of big developers to steal your parkland."

The discussion is to convert the old Fort Lawton along Texas Way W to housing (and adding a portion of it as public land to Discovery Park).

Yes, why wouldn't residents of Magnolia want the same violent, unpoliced drug addicts now inhabiting the streets of Ballard and West Seattle in their neighborhood too? In other countries with dense development, those are often nice places, but in Seattle we don't lock up repeated criminals.

https://www.myballard.com/2018/11/03/man-stabbed-after-chasi...

https://q13fox.com/2017/10/13/west-seattle-mom-walking-infan...

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/homeless/from-home...

That was helpful ... because while the (blog) article gave a prominent place to an activist's opposition, it didn't explain the motives for opposition.

(Helps explain why Bullitt isn't so easy to visit. Also helps to explain why the 2001-quake-damaged bridge is still standing!)

Magnolia residents love to argue in bad faith, anything to not straight up admit they don’t want to see poor people.

They’ll tell you they can’t pay more taxes because they never get anything out of it, then shoot down every proposal to build more transportation infrastructure in their area because it will bring in people, and use that as an excuse for why they can’t build more buildings. And then complain about how it’s the city’s fault.

The idea that a U.S. city in 2019 would just let a bridge fall down and not replace it, is absurd--especially in the context of a new development. "This would lead many to assume" is doing a ton of work here to make this seem like a reasonable concern.

Your optimism is nice, but unfounded. South park (South of Seattle) was left with one bridge for four years: https://www.historylink.org/File/10808

In Michigan, they've resorted to making some bridges single lane after they were rated too old for two cars at a time.

https://www.wxyz.com/news/getting-around/heavy-vehicles-usin...

https://www.freep.com/in-depth/news/investigations/2019/05/1...

The north part of West Seattle also basically has the one bridge. And WA did have an I-5 bridge collapse a few years back, although IIRC it was collision-induced structural damage:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-5_Skagit_River_Bridge_collap...

I live in West Seattle, and there are technically two - there's also a drawbridge for pedestrians/cyclists/two lanes of traffic. Both are pretty new, and work well; the Magnolia situation, on the other hand, is a lot tougher. The residents of Magnolia are also known to really fear additional connectivity (especially public transit) in part due to an unfounded fear of crime.

https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2018/07/02/28583329/magnoli... (title sarcastic)

They did replace the South park bridge, so my optimism seems pretty founded?

Michigan is not willing to leave bridges down; they lack money. Not an issue in a wealthy suburb of Seattle.

I would add that overreach is a thing and it alienates many of us who are not fundamentally against greater density. Perfect example: the developer is planning a seven story structure to replace the current Albertsons property across from the pool. That's seven stories from the alley at the back of the inclined lot which means more like eight or nine from the sidewalk. And it will occupy the entire space, shoe-horning itself up against the relatively affordable three story apartment buildings on either side. At the first public meeting when asked why they were going so big their exact words were "because we can". So, yeah: even reasonable, progressive people get bent out of shape.

At the grocery store I pay for 8 apples.

"Why are you taking 8 apples?"

"Because I can."

I can see why people would get bent out of shape.

why do you think this is a problem?

That's my point developers have absolutely no interest in chipping in to improve transportation infrastructure to support their developments. They are trying to skate by pirating off the already existing ones.

Worse it sounds like in Seattle they're trying appropriate precious public space as well.

Does Seattle not have TIF bonds? The primary purpose of them is to pay for infrastructure upgrades needed for new development and then use the rise in property tax revenues on the new development to pay off the bonds.

If only there were some way for people to band together to pay for infrastructure which helps all of them

Exactly. Magnolia provides a significant source of property tax revenue, yet is constantly ignored when it comes to infrastructure upgrades. It almost makes me want to move out.

Seems like a positive move to limit the tools of NIMBYs to stymie well-intended development.

I always puzzle over headlines like this. So they're reining in the quashing, OK I think that adds up to being pro-development.

It's worse when the appellate court reverses the lower court's denial of the motion to suppress the debunking of the rebuttal.

As a California resident, this is all very familiar, except our equivalent NIMBY-enabling law is called CEQA.

Can someone knowledgeable about CEQA/SEPA compare and contrast the two?

> Campbell is opposed to the reform that would restrict her ability to utilize SEPA appeals in the future.

I suspect a lot of supporters of this change would be willing to drop it in exchange for somehow banning her personally from having anything to do with any future appeals.

Seattle practically invented NIMBY lawsuits, and their backwards laws have always enabled it. A lawyer friend of mine was making money on one side or the other of these lawsuits in Seattle back in the late 80s when we were both still young. He's rich from them now.

I'd like to see zones where citizens can opt out of regulations in order to receive cheaper products. Think "opportunity zones" for deregulation.

Those zones are called cities, which pass laws for themselves. A state has a wide range of cities.

Cities can't opt out of state and federal regulation. Well, I guess they can ( marijuana )... but it's kind of a gray area.

For instance... a city can't say murder is legal on a certain day (like a purge city). That would be heinous.

They can't say that the FDA need not inspect things in a certain city, so long as they are bought and consumed within said city(this is my main point).

Like raw milk

The magnitude of negative impact that NIMBYs have on our economy is mind blowing. So much income is sucked up by insane housing costs, income that could otherwise be utilized on things that aren't rent seeking landlords hoarding money.

This is a huge step back for the environment. People who are not familiar with construction and development don’t know just how much waste and garbage and pollution is generated by real estate development.

What do you propose as an alternative to real estate development to build housing?

Move to Detroit, they're literally giving away houses /s

So true! If you don't build denser housing in urban areas, the people just disappear and cause zero environmental impact living further out in suburban sprawl where they drive everywhere.

There will always be more people. There is only one environment.

I think you completely missed the point of that comment.

Not really. Housing should be more expensive than is is now, both in cities as well as in suburbs. We don’t want growth, we want less growth. High prices will slow growth which is a good thing for the environment.

> There will always be more people

What are you picturing, government enforced house sharing?

I don’t think anything would have to be enforced. Look at San Francisco or NYC. Most people wouldn’t want to have a family of 3 kids there because it’s too expensive.

No - they live in the suburbs of new developments and drive in to work there. Massively, unarguably a worse impact on the environment than building some condos downtown. It's like you think people will say oh well, can't afford San Francisco, I'll move to Detroit!

That’s true, good point. Then the prices of suburbs and new developments should be raised so high that they’re not worth building or moving to.

Byyyyy.......government enforcement or something?

So you are anti people, not anti housing.

Anti growth is actually pro people

You have to think about complexity rather than just construction impact. Taking this argument leads one down a problematic 'Tragedy of the commons' path. As someone else said, not building may just create more sprawl somewhere else and increase vehicle miles travelled. You're also ignoring some historical covenants that might have excluded race from certain neighborhoods.

References: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1102604887223750657 on 'tragedy of the commons'

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1141456562512207872 work done on historical racial restrictive covenants.

The racial covenants (and blockbusting and redlining) need to get mentioned more to refute the bogus pseudo-nativist argument that whoever moved to town first has the right to control housing policy.

I think you may not have read the article.

i disagree with the general sentiment: "build more dense housing". Yeah, what we need is more condos with 1k HOA fees for housing affordability...

We need more single family housing. There is plenty of space, just that all the commercial buildings are so squat. Furthermore, the lack of subways means half the city is paved roads

I've downvoted this because it contains no sort of reasoning. It's essentially "I feel".

Obviously a restricted supply of housing with reasonable commute times via public transit affects the middle class in Seattle. There's a supply/demand problem created by people fighting for zoning regulations in areas like Queen Anne that are actively hostile to anyone who doesn't live there already.

Wanting to live in single family housing near the city and enforcing it legally is exactly why public transit projects like subways become impossible. You need to have critical pockets of density before it becomes a sensible investment.

yes, that's very useful for discussions. down vote people for saying what they feel. this isn't a research paper.

> "Wanting to live in single family housing near the city and enforcing it legally is exactly why public transit projects like subways become impossible. You need to have critical pockets of density before it becomes a sensible investment."

Also, Philadelphia has a ton of single family homes, and one of the best subways in the country. You are just simply wrong.

The thing is that your feelings are completely unmoored from reality add contribute nothing to the conversation. If you backed any of your statements up with some sort of thought it might be useful, but there's just nothing.

Going off of this comment it might be a trend.

If you'd like to discuss any of the actual arguments I'd be happy to. I had a lot of time to reflect on it while I lived in a 2br house with a garden a mile from 4th and pike!

Edit to address your edit:

Philly is an aberration. Obviously when presenting why to build a subway you have to present data to make your case. When an entire block has the housing density of a single apartment is a harder case.

I don't feel you are wrong, you just are. I already cited a city with twice the population of Seattle that has ample amounts of single family use and a great subway system.

Philadelphia is nearly twice as dense as Seattle, and the subway only serves the densest parts of Philadelphia, and it was built when the city was much denser than it is today. Philadelphia's single family zoning is effectively as dense as Seattle's LR3 zoning: 38 ft height limits, no front setbacks, no parking requirements, and townhouse widths. Your assertion isnt just wrong, it is wackadoodle territory.

I'm a SFH owner in Capitol Hill, and I have 3-4 bus routes options that get me to downtown in ~30 minutes. Subways are cool(!), but not always necessary.

I think there's a balance to be had with high density versus SFH neighborhoods. One example I think is worth considering, do we want to be knocking down turn-of-the-century craftsman and tudor homes? They can bring a ton of character to a neighborhood. In cases where that happens, the 3-story cookie cutter townhomnes or cheap construction material apartments take their place and look outdated in less than a decade.

Cap Hill is 30 minutes walk from downtown.

Situational depending from where on the hill.

As someone that lives in Cap Hill:

Yes. Houses aren't works of art. They are meant to house people.

The city isn't the same a decade ago, or a century ago or when Capital Hill was called Renton Hill.

It is depressing that only new construction/condo to purchase in Capital hill costs 450k+ (e.g. 750 on the hill as an example.) because SFH are 750k+. IF they go for sale, and then there's a race of people who actively overpay for a property.

Also, I can walk to downtown in <30 mins, taking a bus is a pain, and the Link station is kinda convenient but not so convient (e.g. nothing near Volunteer Park because everything there is $1,000,000+)

Just because it's old doesn't mean it's good and whomever owns the property should feel fit to change it from SFH to MFH and the city should encourage MFH developments otherwise you have small houses on oversized lots and a poor use of space.

Give people that want to sell and people that want to buy the ability to rezone and allow construction - and density will solve itself.

Otherwise you're going to have people in decades old apartment buildings fight to fill it in, while the owner has no real incentive to upkeep property because they believe it's valuable and know it's a rotating door.

Density is solving itself. If you live on the hill then you must have noticed the incredible explosion of massive apartment buildings and condos going up across the city. Note how it's concentrated in centers of commerce, and that's totally great. It reduces your (burdensome? I guess?) 30 minute walk, makes housing cheaper, and doesn't impede on those with the means to afford a century old work of art; they absolutely can be and to deny so is delusional, go walk east of Volunteer Park and see for yourself.

A diverse spectrum of zoning is important, but we also have a diverse free market that doesn't all want high-rise condos and apartments absolutely everywhere. Some people want a beautiful neighborhood, lots of space, privacy, proximity to the city, and have the means to get that, so that's what they will pursue. You should be okay with that because it's part of the same system that allows high-rise condos along the city's arteries.

My only point of contention against the apartments/condos themselves is the incredibly cheap materials and trendy designs that will look terrible in a decade's time. Look back on other periods of housing like the 70's Brady Bunch-style ranch houses to see how other trendy houses have aged.

> Capital Hill

With an "o", not an "a".

> A diverse spectrum of zoning is important, but we also have a diverse free market that doesn't all want high-rise condos and apartments absolutely everywhere.

If you're using zoning to accomplish that, you don't have a free market.

Having limited SFH zones does not prohibit a person from pursuing any number of housing option that works best for them.

Actually, yes, it does. That's exactly what it does.

Zoning explicitly allows you to have undervalued property. A sfh in the center of an economically bustling city is substantially more valuable than you suggest. You should expect to pay the price of housing multiple people, because that's the potential value of the property.

Density isn't solving itself! People worked for years to get those commercial centers upzoned. And there's still plenty of million dollar houses sitting two blocks from Broadway and John, which are definitely impeding on those who want to live near that light rail station and walk.

And those century old houses would be a lot safer if they could be turned into multiple units, which can be done without demolition. The smaller old houses get knocked down to build a huge new house, which is made of the same materials and designs as those condos and apartments.

Houses absolutely can be a work of art - and some should be preserved.

Capitol Hill also has one of the busiest Link stations in the system. Depending on where you are on the hill it's quite a hike, but to say that Capitol Hill lacks a subway is a half-truth. (A light rail is not a subway, but Link is definitely about as far as you can push light rail in the subway direction.)

The main advantage of the Link is the total separation from traffic; even with the bus lanes, the bus on Pike and Pine will get bogged down waiting for poor drivers, pedestrians crossing the street, etc.

Improvements to Link notwithstanding, any of the available bus routes I take typically get me downtown faster.

Link will get better over time of course and I'm happy for that, but I haven't seen any traffic crisis on the hill that's severely affecting peoples lives day-to-day: 30 minute commute is not bad.

It depends where in Capitol Hill where you're trying to get to/from since Capitol Hill is much bigger than the station's walkshed, but definitely during the rush, east-west roads with bus routes are very slow, especially across I-5. I've definitely spent way too much time on the 8 or the 10, but unfortunately the First Hill station was never built due to poor geology.

Definitely much worse if some large event is happening (Seattle Center, Convention Center, even some games at the stadiums can screw up Downtown traffic.)

Link is fast because of the tunnel (which used to be a bus tunnel), not the train. The train is slow.

The train goes at 55mph through parts of the line (though around Convention Place and the turn onto 3rd is quite slow due to the bus tunnel's old curve radius.)

At least between Capitol Hill and Downtown the bus does not get anywhere near those speeds.

I'm not sure that you as a homeowner should have the right to dictate what type of housing nearby property owners are allowed to construct solely based upon your proximity.

> do we want to be knocking down turn-of-the-century craftsman and tudor homes

Yes

> They can bring a ton of character to a neighborhood.

Who gets to decide what constitutes "character"? Who gets to decide that "character" trumps affordability? Who gets to decide when "character" supersedes property rights?

Moreover a lot of these craftsman homes were pretty "cookie cutter" when they were built, and a lot of them were ordered from catalogues. These things change with age as facades are updated, repaired, and replaced. Our cities have been so slavishly devoted to fictionalized imaginings of their own pasts that we are impoverishing real people today.

> I'm not sure that you as a homeowner should have the right to dictate what type of housing nearby property owners are allowed to construct solely based upon your proximity.

So who should get to dictate what gets built? People that don't live there (and therefore don't vote?)

> Who gets to decide when "character" supersedes property rights?

Most cities have a council that decides this, and often with input from the residents who actively live there, and care about their hometown.

> So who should get to dictate what gets built?

Whoever owns the land it's getting built on, and whoever's doing the building.

Seriously...

For a country that supposedly prides itself on its individual freedoms, we have a surprising number of people who think they should get to decide what others do with their homes/land.

All housing construction helps affordability. That person who moves into a luxury condo leaves a vacancy elsewhere in the market.

Well, that's sort of true. I'm about as pro-building as they come, but it's important to keep in mind that housing is a segmented market and that due to preference and affordability, people are only engaging on the demand side across a few segments. A glut of housing at the highest price tier will indeed allow people in the next tier to upgrade, but in the short run the affordability only ends up trickling down a few tiers. However, as housing ages it will filter down to lower segments if there is newer supply.

So it's probably correct to say "All housing construction eventually helps affordability."

If there aren't enough new luxury units to meet demand people will upgrade existing units to luxury status, thereby SHRINKING the supply of affordable housing.

For this reason, building luxury homes is essential for housing the homeless.

I'm not sure. I only think this works if the local economy declines, to where enough people don't want the houses any more and the price naturally reduces. I can fully see Seattle simply charging the same or more rents as housing is added if the economy keeps growing.

NYC and Detroit disagree with you. Housing may increase quality of life or income or total wealth, but it doesn't help affordability if it makes the city more attractive to families and immigrants. Cities have nonlinear dynamics.

It's funny how people who believe that more housing causes more affordability also tend to believe that building more roads doesn't clear congestion.

> [building housing] doesn't help affordability if it makes the city more attractive to families

Your solution to homeless is to make cities so unattractive people flee? I suppose that would reduce rents, in a horrible way.

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