By Dionne Foster
When Puget Sound Sage came together with the Asian Pacific Islander Coalition, Community to Community, Got Green, El Centro De La Raza, Latino Community Fund, One America and Washington Community Action Network to create Front and Centered, we committed ourselves to forwarding the Principles for Climate Justice. Continue reading “Our People, Our Planet, Our Power”
By Afrin Sopariwala
The Puget Sound region has seen unprecedented growth of population in the last few years and this trend is expected to continue. By the year 2040, the population is projected to grow by roughly one million people, with a majority of the growth occurring in cities like Everett and Tacoma. Continue reading “ST3: Ramping up for an equitable, accessible transit future”
A local urbanist, Owen Pickford, in a popular urbanist magazine literally called “The Urbanist,” recently published a call to urbanist action to support linkage fees. His article provides the strongest evidence yet that a linkage fee will build a better Seattle. Pickford methodically unpacks somewhat misleading arguments we’ve heard for a decade and half from big property owners and developers. He then calls on his fellow urbanists to heal their myopia and see the bigger picture:
“(w)e can remain the smallest voice in this debate. We can continue to conflate regulatory costs with housing limits. We can continue to ignore the problem of increasing land values. We can continue advocating only for policies that lead to displacement and segregation. We can expend our energy fighting against regulatory costs when we should be fighting for reduced housing limits. We can continue to use narratives that explain-away evidence rather than seeking to understand. We can continue to give people the perception that we are adversaries of affordable housing and integration by opposing a policy that evidence shows would be beneficial.”
What’s an urbanist?
Urbanism is defined by Miriam Webster as “a) the characteristic way of life of city dwellers, or b) the study of the physical needs of urban societies,” but is often understood as a movement for urban density, walkability, public transportation, and other modern urban “aesthetics.” Much appealing to the urbanist aesthetic is a value known as “vibrancy” which often goes hand-in-hand with the value of diversity, a.k.a. integration. However, the land-use and other policy decisions required to support both racial and economic diversity are often an afterthought, rather than a priority of decision-makers.
In our most recent op-ed, Puget Sound Sage also made the case for inclusionary housing programs by demonstrating a linkage fee will help prevent us from perpetuating land use patterns that perpetuate de facto segregation. De facto segregation is segregation inherited from a time of de jure segregation, like racial covenants or redlining. Linkage fees ask developers to set aside a small portion of new units as affordable or contribute to the city’s affordable housing fund. Because it would be applied broadly across the city, it requires only a modest contribution, but would become one of Seattle’s best tools to create affordable homes for low and moderate wage workers and families, because it would create new affordable housing within city limits, and mitigate the impacts of rising rents. Therefore, a linkage fee helps to prevent displacement, and contribute to the racial and economic diversity that both urbanists and social justice advocates hold dear.
The Growing Together Coalition, co-led by Puget Sound Sage and Housing Development Consortium, represents hundreds of individual signatories and over 50 organizational endorsers, including the some of the largest human service providers, faith, labor, housing, environmental, and social justice organizations in Seattle. All believe that the City of Seattle must pass an inclusionary housing program like the linkage fee, which would enable Seattle’s workers and their families to live near their jobs in the city.The Growing Together Coalition is pro-economic-growth, pro-density, pro-transit, pro-public investment, as well as pro-integration.
Pickford’s urbanism mirrors that of the Growing Together Coalition. Pickford highlights that linkage fee opponents have been detrimental to the plight of urbanists because they conflate height and density limits with regulatory costs like a linkage fee. He says this is a “mistake [that] has been detrimental to urbanists’ goals, creating an adversarial relationship between urbanists and affordable housing advocates. Furthermore, blurring the lines between housing limits and regulatory costs induces urbanists to overlook the most important factor in housing affordability: land values.”
In fact, Pickford’s article (which we will explain in layman’s terms in a separate post): 1) demonstrates that regulations like a linkage fee actually reduce land values, the increase of which contribute to our housing crisis for everyone, not just the extremely low-income; 2) provides evidence that linkage fees do not reduce supply of market-rate housing, but increase affordable housing production; and 3) calls on urbanists and social justice advocates to stand together because they ultimately share the same values.
This concept is not new – urbanists like Mike O’Brien, who sponsored the linkage fee legislation and others have long-supported social justice policies. If a linkage fee is not passed, the city would miss a significant opportunity to create thousands of permanently affordable homes where persons of color and people with lower incomes are experiencing displacement, like Southeast Seattle. This means that Seattle will not be “vibrant” or diverse, values that urbanists hold dear. In fact, demographic changes indicate that Seattle is becoming less diverse.
Last, Mayor Murray’s goals of creating 20,000 new affordable housing units in the next decade cannot be realized without a developer contribution program, even with the much needed renewal of the taxpayer supported Housing Levy. It is time to put to bed how linkage fees will end density as we know it, for good, if we want to live our values as urbanists and support economic growth, density and integration.
If you would like to stand with the 50+ organizational endorsers and individual petition signers in support of a linkage fee, visit our coalition website today!
It is not a coincidence that Southeast Seattle has the greatest incidence of people with low incomes and possesses the highest poverty rate in the city. In Southeast Seattle, affordable housing and quality jobs are increasingly hard to find for low-income people and families, who are disproportionately people of color, immigrants, and refugees as a result of the history of segregation. However, the face of Southeast Seattle, and the country, is changing. As of 2012, a majority of the nation’s infants were people of color, which now puts the white population of the country in the minority.
Currently, Seattle is the fastest growing city in the country – average rents have increased even more dramatically in the past year and the trend does not show signs of slowing. Demographic changes in Southeast Seattle and South King County indicate that people of color have been displaced from their communities as the cost of living in Seattle has become unsustainable for them. As a result, low-income communities and communities of color are relocating to resource-poor suburbs while a largely white and wealthier population remains in Seattle. This segregative effect in major metropolitan areas are deepening racial disparities in this city – disparities we have long sought to change.
However, smart planning, policy and investments in the community can mitigate or even reverse this trend. The opposite of gentrification-fueled displacement is “prospering in place” – where low-income people and families can afford to stay where they are, access the region’s economic opportunities and deepen cultural roots in their existing communities.
Low-income communities and communities of color in Seattle have known this far too long and all too well. This past fall, approximately fifty people participated in a convening and survey through the city-sponsored, community-led equitable-development-focused Community Cornerstones program. Six multi-cultural coalitions, two foundations, four business associations and eight city staff from five departments were convened to share equitable development plans and accomplishments, deepen collaborative relationships and explore opportunities to coordinate ongoing efforts.
Through synthesis of the surveys and convening notes from community coalition participants, several overarching themes emerged that Sage was able to connect to project and policy next steps, in a report informed by community.
Themes:
Across the country, Seattle is well known for its commitment to environmental sustainability. And with the recent passage of a $15 minimum wage, the City of Seattle is poised to become not only a leader in protecting our environment, but also a leader in addressing income inequality. These dual priorities are best intertwined in Mayor Ed Murray’s commitment to prevent displacement of low-income communities and people of color, ensuring that everyone who works in Seattle can also afford to live in Seattle. By building sustainable and dense communities, everyone will have the opportunity to have good jobs and an affordable place to live.
High-density cities contribute less greenhouse-gas emissions per person than other areas of the country, largely because people who live in cities do not need cars to travel to and from work. When low-income people and people of color – who are more likely to be transit reliant – are priced out of cities and become suburban auto users, the environmental gain of building dense neighborhoods is undermined. In fact, higher income households moving to new development near transit are more likely to own a car than lower-income people who are displaced.
Exacerbated by recent bus cuts in the suburbs, displacement could become a driver of increased greenhouse-gas emissions and increased traffic. In light of this, solving the crisis of affordable housing in Seattle may be one of the most effective strategies for reducing our carbon footprint.
To address the need for affordable housing, the Mayor and the City Council is revamping the City’s Comprehensive Plan, a 20-year plan for most of Seattle’s big-picture decisions on how to grow while preserving and improving our neighborhoods. Councilmember O’Brien’s Sustainability Committee is looking to harness this growth to build or preserve affordable housing.
Next month, the City Council will wrap up a year of study and advisory committee meetings on how market-rate developers can contribute to affordable housing. Specifically, the City Council is examining its controversial incentive zoning program, generally criticized by housing proponents as weak and currently being challenged by developers in court.
The current incentive zoning program allows developers to build higher and bigger buildings in exchange for contributing a small number of affordable units or marginal fee to an affordable housing fund. This current policy is considerably weaker than similar policies in other major cities such. The City’s consultants estimate that since 2001, the program has created only 714 affordable units, prompting the City Council to review new options for the program to increase the amount of affordable housing.
As we have mentioned in our previous post, the City’s consultants have recommended two options to strengthen developer contribution to affordable housing. First, the City can increase required units or fees under the existing program, though the consultants caution this will create only a marginal gain due to legal constraints and limited geographic scope. Second, the City could opt for a new strategy that requires developers in most areas of the city to pay a fee for new construction of market-rate real estate.
These two strategies take advantage of the very thing that is causing displacement – rising property values. Commercial property owners across the city are enjoying record land values, due in part to relaxed zoning limits and massive public investment in infrastructure, such as the light rail, a new street grid north of downtown, transformation of the waterfront and new investments in parks. With these benefits, property owners and developers are granted enough economic value that allows them to build densely, contribute a fair share to affordable housing and make a profit.
We need all tools available to ensure affordable housing. Seattle residents have certainly been doing their part – paying for affordability for many years through the Housing Levy. The proposed policies affecting developers won’t single-handedly solve our crisis, but they represent an important piece of a comprehensive housing affordability strategy. With a strategy that does not deter growth, we can achieve both sustainability and equity in a city in which all families can thrive.
