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Comment by legitster | Hacker News Reader

So, I can kind of understand the policy. There's not a lot of land in Seattle to go around - you are lucky enough to have some of it, and you want to build something tiny palpably removes potential units from the market. No one would be happy if you tore down a block of apartments in NY to put up a cute little Craftsman with room for a private dirt bike track. Well, in the same way, leaving these types of properties to grandfather into urban areas also makes no sense.

That said, this also clearly sucks and is not fair. She is at least adding something that wasn't there before. So it makes no sense to pay more in taxes. If anything, it's kind of proving the value of a Land Value Tax.

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This policy is good, and this isn't even an edge case. This is a landlord who is about to spend a million dollars on more rental units and doesn't want to provide affordable units.

So what? She's trying to build an addition and rent it to her kids. Even if she was going to rent to randoms, so what? Is it better she just keeps the property as a single family home?

It's not an addition. It's a totally separate building with four rental units.

Close enough

I mean, this is an owner-occupied property. I can understand not wanting the city to force two random families to live with you.

But in this case the city assessing a luxury tax for such a setup seems pretty reasonable.

She wants to build 4 rental units on a lot in downtown. That's an apartment building. Why should an apartment building with 4 units be exempt from offering affordable housing? She will not be occupying those four units. She will be staying in her fifth unit.

If I paid rent to my parents in college would that make their house a 2-unit rental?

I am okay with a certain amount of gray area in the rental market, especially for informal or family situations. If these units ever hit the general market you can hit them with tighter rules later.

Again, in this case, she would not be exempt, she would pay a one time fee for the housing program.

Did your parents build 2 additional units in a building detached from their house and charge rent, including to people who weren't you from day 1?

If so, then yes. (Assuming it didn't fall under accessory dwelling unit rules.)

… and doesn’t want to work within the regulations her community has to promote affordable housing.

Doesn’t want to pay anything—submit for an exception, or pay the Hollywood price to do what she wants.

I don’t see what’s unfair. It would be unfair if she could only build the larger building, and was required to have affordable units—or do nothing.

What _sucks_ is that while her and her family were dealing with these restrictions, there has been a world pandemic, and the economy took a swing towards inflation and higher interest rates.

The family is in a worse spot than if they had paid the 77k upfront.

I’m wondering why their story is getting amplified. I guess this is a turn against cities trying to create regulations promoting affordable housing.

The policy seems pretty straightforward:

If you want to build a bunch of units on your property:

1. A certain percentage has to be rented at an affordable rate (for 75 years).

2. If they aren't you pay a 'fee' into an affordability fund based on how much you build.

The fact they the owner claims they want to 'rent' to their kids is a red herring IMO. She wants to build 4 market rate units on her property, and not designate any of them as affordable.

Yes this is it. There are good reason for a lot of the 'codes' we have and it costs money to make sure things are cool. That said, I suggest as always there are 'bureaucracy' problems in our governments and processes that are severely limiting to progress. We need to figure out how to streamline and make efficiencies in a lot of these systems if we want to have a future.

>No one would be happy if you tore down a block of apartments in NY to put up a cute little Craftsman with room for a private dirt bike track.

If you own the land you should be able to do what you want with it. If you want a single family home, that is fine. If you want a 10-plex, also fine. Cities are making development and renting as painful as possible then being shocked when people opt out of being landlords. If it is more desirable to have a craftsman and a dirtbike track than a multi unit building then the city's incentives are horribly skewed. One of those effectively prints money so we have to ask why someone isn't opting to do it. At the same time, it is their land and they should be able to use it how they wish.

Yeah, why should we do any planning or zoning at all! Every individual is equipped with all the knowledge and expertise to make good planning decisions that impact their neighborhoods! /s

What is the correct amount of freedom to build? Do we have too much or too little? How do you know if we have the right amount of freedom?

How is the current planning and zoning working out for affordability?

Too soon to say. Seattle just opened up zoning after fighting a bunch of nimby pushback.

Prices seem to have fallen very very recently. Hopefully the upzoning helps more.

King County taxes land value as part of our property taxes. If Seattle up-zoned this property, that component of the owner's taxes would increase to reflect the value of its new highest and best use.

If it includes property value it's not a true Land Value Tax.

The point of a Land Value Tax is that everyone gets taxed purely on the value of the land and none of the improvements. So adding more units would only decrease the per-unit tax you pay.

Seattle here is attempting the same thing in broad strokes by literally taxing underdevelopment - but it's clearly not as elegant of a solution

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