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Lawsuits Block Thousands of Seattle Homes, $39M for Affordable Housing

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Re: Lawsuits Block Thousands of Seattle Homes, $39M for Affordable Housing

#71

Post by legitster »

So, the title here is a bit misleading. It sounds like the particular lawsuits in question are all being flatly thrown out - the delays are normal parts of the design review process or self-imposed.

> He said Mayor Harrell and Councilmember Dan Strauss are awaiting those findings before introducing legislation that would reform the design review process, including exempting design review from affordable housing projects or projects that contribute to the MHA fund

If the point of the design review process is to prevent architectural oversights or zoning mistakes, then surely it wouldn't matter if the building project payed into the city council's pet fund?

They should either admit it's a dumb process that doesn't actually do anything and get rid of it for all projects, or stop having zoning laws all together if following the letter of the law is still going to put you into a 4-year backseat driving session anyway.

Re: Lawsuits Block Thousands of Seattle Homes, $39M for Affordable Housing

#72

Post by eapressoandcats »

noirbot wrote: post #33
jimbob45 wrote: post #18

Affordable housing is little better than the drinking fountains for colored people from years past. You don't build affordable housing. You build housing and then prices decrease from the increase in supply. If you're feeling extra bold, you build dense housing to massively increase the supply.

I'm not sure this is exactly true though. There's plenty of (common) ways to build intentionally expensive housing, whether that's large minimum square footage or fancy shared amenities that up the cost of living there. There's certainly demand for those things, and it's probably more profitable to saturate the most expensive "high rent" portions of the market first, but it's worth having incentives to also build sma…

The economics of this have been well observed in the car industry. Car makers prioritize luxury cars with higher margins when there is a restriction on how many cars they manufacture (due to supply or legal constraints), but if there is abundance, the lower end of the market is well served because there’s just more overall volume there.

Re: Lawsuits Block Thousands of Seattle Homes, $39M for Affordable Housing

#73

Post by eapressoandcats »

cwkoss wrote: post #23
jimbob45 wrote: post #18

Affordable housing is little better than the drinking fountains for colored people from years past. You don't build affordable housing. You build housing and then prices decrease from the increase in supply. If you're feeling extra bold, you build dense housing to massively increase the supply.

I think the idea is that the margins are better on luxury houses/apts/condos (less plumbing per sq ft, etc), so developers are incentivized to build at lower-density than is optimal for alleviating housing supply issues.

For the most part developers focus on luxury because they are limited in how much they can build and there is enough pent up demand willing to pay. Also they have rules like minimum sq ft in cities and minimum acreage in suburbs.

Re: Lawsuits Block Thousands of Seattle Homes, $39M for Affordable Housing

#74

Post by __derek__ »

nerdponx wrote: post #40
__derek__ wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a contradiction in terms, AFAICT. I was excited to find this in the post: > Meanwhile, a bill moving forward in the legislature introduced by Representative Amy Walen (D-48, Bellevue) would ban design review for housing projects statewide. I have this bookmarked to contact my reps and senator to join as co-sponsors.[1] [1]: https://app.leg.wa.gov/billsummary?BillNumber=1026&Year=2023...

Two new apartment buildings recently went up where I live. Both have roughly the same number of units inside, and the units are of similar size. One is ugly, and the other blends nicely into the neighborhood, even incorporating some green space and planted trees. There's no reason why the ugly one couldn't have been nicer looking, other than that the developers didn't bother to make the place look more like the surro…

Can you name a functioning example of design review, though? My experience with them is specific to Seattle, and the program absolutely does not work as your comment hopes.

Re: Lawsuits Block Thousands of Seattle Homes, $39M for Affordable Housing

#75

Post by MrFoof »

sokoloff wrote: post #24
yellow_postit wrote: post #4

Does any city have a well functioning design review process or are they all captured by incumbents to slow down development?

From my limited exposure to Cambridge, MA’s, it seems well balanced to me. As an abutter, I’ve gotten notices of a few different projects nearby and chosen to attend the meeting on each one (mostly to learn in case I wanted to go through the process for our property sometime; in each case, I went having submitted written comments in favor of whatever the neighbors were proposing to do, even in a case where I think wh…

In the case of Cambridge, MA, a reasonable stance is kind of required if the city is going to materially grow further. Without it, Cambridge would stagnate if progress was halted by quagmires of bickering. The only real thing of note is larger apartment buildings are largely put in the SE and NW ends of the city.

For those who've never been, Cambridge is one of the densest cities in the entire US -- ~122,400 people over 6.4 square miles of land -- even though it's predominantly three story tenements throughout, and still maintains a 1950s Americana "Main Street USA" running through the core of the city.

-- -----

Though a fair number of the Boston "suburban cities" (save Brookline) have been re-reviewing their zoning and review processes. They all know they're landlocked and out of room with regulations that prevented further building what was already there. It's been nice to see that become increasingly relaxed to allow things to get done.

Re: Lawsuits Block Thousands of Seattle Homes, $39M for Affordable Housing

#76

Post by eapressoandcats »

tehlike wrote: post #29
jimbob45 wrote: post #18

Affordable housing is little better than the drinking fountains for colored people from years past. You don't build affordable housing. You build housing and then prices decrease from the increase in supply. If you're feeling extra bold, you build dense housing to massively increase the supply.

This is kind of true, but misses an important point. Builders won't increase the supply if unit price is close to unit cost as their profit would be narrowed. This is to say, if materials, labor etc is expensive, affordable housing may not be affordable either.

Generally speaking, you’d expect newer housing to be on the higher end no matter what, because people with less money would tend to buy/rent older housing, in the same way that all but the cheapest new cars are mostly bought by the more well off.

Re: Lawsuits Block Thousands of Seattle Homes, $39M for Affordable Housing

#77

Post by steponlego »

idiotsecant wrote: post #32
steponlego wrote: post #13

Not everybody wants new tenements in their nice neighborhood.

Classy. At some point that 'nice neighborhood' was low-density farmland or widely spaced residential that no doubt didn't want to see new packed urban housing in their nice neighborhood. If you live in a city housing around you will steadily increase in density. You need to live with that, you own your property - you don't own everyone else's.

These lawsuits are an excellent refutation of your premise. I don’t want tenements anywhere near where I live. And I will work as hard as necessary to prevent their installation.

Re: Lawsuits Block Thousands of Seattle Homes, $39M for Affordable Housing

#78

Post by panny »

vel0city wrote: post #67

I'm reminded of a recent housing development that was planned in the city where I live. They wanted to build a few hundred near zero-lot-line single family homes and townhouses. It was on land that was previously zoned industrial, so it required a pretty lengthy approval process. The neighborhood next to it fought the proposed zoning changes. Too many houses near by, increasing traffic, too close to the creek, etc. P…

Low income housing is associated with more crime, but warehouses are not. The residents were probably satisfied with the result.

Re: Lawsuits Block Thousands of Seattle Homes, $39M for Affordable Housing

#79

Post by Dig1t »

GalenErso wrote: post #6

Related article. The build nothing country: https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-build-nothing-country "We no longer have the luxury of giving our people a shadow subsidy by freezing their neighborhoods and cities in amber. Spiraling housing costs in any city with real economic opportunity, a floundering energy transition, and the inexorable migration of manufacturing to more development-friendly countries have beco…

>Every single space on planet Earth is owned by someone.

I mean technically yes, but also not really. There are so many places in the US that are insanely cheap to live. You can buy a whole house in many small American cities and live the dream on a McDonalds wage, you could even pay it off early if you were frugal. I can find you plenty of houses in the US for sale right now for Your argument only applies to fancy coastal cities where there is a large pool of wealthy (most people working in CA are in the top 1-2% income of the world) people competing for the same space. This leads to obvious questions such as: does everyone have a right to live in the same space? Should property rights exist at all in places where many people want to live?

IMO, it's not slavery if people are trying to live in a place by choice.

We should, of course, do everything we can to build more housing and provide space for as many as we can.

Re: Lawsuits Block Thousands of Seattle Homes, $39M for Affordable Housing

#80

Post by mixmastamyk »

steponlego wrote: post #77
idiotsecant wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Classy. At some point that 'nice neighborhood' was low-density farmland or widely spaced residential that no doubt didn't want to see new packed urban housing in their nice neighborhood. If you live in a city housing around you will steadily increase in density. You need to live with that, you own your property - you don't own everyone else's.

These lawsuits are an excellent refutation of your premise. I don’t want tenements anywhere near where I live. And I will work as hard as necessary to prevent their installation.

These are million dollar condos, you insensitive clod.
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