Erica, thank you for the comprehensive summary.

Just one clarifying point. Please don't lump all neighborhood folks together. Pat Murakami, Jeanne Hale, etc speak for themselves. They don't speak for the vast majority of reasonable, progressive folks who live in Seattle's neighborhoods. Change is happening. It just takes a while for the change to be clearly visible.

Great reporting! As we watch the P-I sink, it's reassuring to see such good reporting at the Stranger.

Nice reporting. I used to respect John Fox. Now I think he's gone over to the dark side, with all the no-nothing NIMBY curmudgeons. He sure isn't accomplishing anything for low-income people anymore.

ECB lives in single-family house with a yard in SE Seattle, just like a suburbanite.

Nice article Erica, thanks for covering this. As you correctly note, most of us who work in affordable housing are very supportive of what seems to be a very thoughtful and progressive bill that would do a lot of good. There's a lot of good folks out here who are just baffled by John Fox's recalcitrance. He's been such a vocal supporter of density related goals in the past, it really seems like he has been taken over by aliens. Or something.

A small quibble - while I'm sure LIHI would love to claim Rachael Myers as one of their own, she actually works for the Washington Low Income Housing Alliance.

Funny thing, ECB, that you don't mention that the "neighborhood activists" who were applauding Fox also included just about all of the people of color in the room.

You know, the residents who will be actually affected by gentrification.

Just saying....

Wait until you own a house, ECB. Oh wait, you never will. Rainier Vista's right down the street from me; it's like a ghost town.

Much respect to LaBorde for practicing what he preaches.

IT;s not true that Metro is re-routing buses solely to make them interact better with light rail. They are also removing service from SE Seattle and putting it to other neighborhoods.

You don't read too well, eh Mr. X?

The bill mandates that 25 percent of new housing units are affordable to people making less than 80 percent of the county median income, with 10 percent affordable to people making less than 60 percent of that median. The bill also mandates one-for-one replacement of any housing affordable to people earning 60 percent or less of median income.

If that's gentrification we need a lot more of it.

@10:

Absolutely! And I'm sure there's also a provision in the bill that states that a portion of the affordable housing also needs to be made available to those under the age of 65, so that all of the "low income housing" built will be more than just retirement homes.

Right?

@10,

I know all of that - and think that it's the best part of the bill. One wrinkle that is significant to that, though, is that as I understand it the one-for-one replacement can occur offsite, which doesn't do much for the people being pushed out of the neighborhood.

And, by the way, the 25% units that are called "affordable" to those earning 80% of median are units that the market is already producing - and that most renters would NOT consider affordable.

The point of my post, however, was that ECB - willfully in my view - misstated the nature of the people in the room who were supportive of John Fox in attempt to vilify both him and them.

Ah, and yet another thing - it would be far more accurate to say that "The vast majority of low-income housing developers" support the bill than using the word "advocates", as ECB did (not that I don't love me some low-income housing developers, but there is a real difference between the two).

Erica:

I wasn't at last nights event, so thank you for attending and writing about it. I, unlike some of the other commenters am not impressed by your "reporting." Yes I understand that this is a blog and that gives you license to to take a much more editorial oriented stand in your posts. However with the weak coverage on local issues from our dailies and their impending collapse I would hope that you would be able to fill that void with un-sensationalized coverage focused on the both sides of these complex issues.

I doubt that John Fox despite his outspoken ways reflects the totality of the position taken by those who are in opposition to this bill. While his antics may be fun to cover and make for a more sensationalized post, your reporting and that from everyone else leaves me with a significant number of questions about this bills impacts and of how it will be implemented if passed.

Here are a few questions that it would be interesting to have some "Reporting On" so that I can take a more informed position about this issue as opposed to just gravitating to the position of one of the talking heads.

- What is the dollar amount for an affordable rent for some one earning 80% of median and 60% of median? Also what are you median income numbers based? Will these numbers adjust with our current economy?

- Does the one for one replacement of affordable housing count towards the 25% of new units or is it 25% of those built beyond those replaced?

- What does this do to building heights? Given a certain zoning limitation of a height say 60ft, what is the average square footage per unit that we would be able to build on an acre of land and still meet the 50 unit minimum? How high would buildings have to be for 50% of the units to have 1200sf (big but not huge for a single family with kids).

- How would we have to change the lot coverage to meet this? Would we be going from a Single Family Zone (SF 5200) to a Low Rise 2 Zone or Low Rise Three Zone.

- Will we change the neighborhood plans that the individuals (who you characterize as having a NIMBY response) participated in developing? Will they be changed before this goes in to effect?

-Will we ensure that there is sufficient other civic infrastructure to support the populations that we want to live near these stops? Things such as green space. Will we have a funding mechanism to purchase land for parks or will the developers provide that?

Erica these are just a few of the things that it would be interesting for you to report on. We are craving this type of local coverage so that we the public might have a better picture of what the impacts of this bill are, that is beyond the celebrity coverage of John Fox.

Please help!

@4: in the SF5000 zone, net density is 8.7 DU/acre. guess what? that's fucking amazing for single family detached.

they're here, they're built, they're dense, they're not going away.

@15,

Just not dense enough for ECB and Futurewise!

Great reporting.

I agree with Fnarf @3.

Oh, and by the way, anti-density advocates, under current zoning you're going to still get 4 to 6 stories of building around the light rail stations, but they won't have to build grocery stores, daycares, or other amenities that make it more of a neighborhood.

@17,

Nothing in the bill requires that developers build those things either, Will.

The existing 4-6 story zoning in most Seattle station areas was developed through neighborhood planning efforts, not imposed by Olympia at some interest group's behest.

...and on the topic of "great reporting", I'm pretty sure Mr. LaBorde said he lived near Rainier Vista, not in it.

Now, I could be wrong about that, but I wasn't assigned to cover the event for a publication and wasn't taking notes.

You go, Mr. X!

I'm still waiting to learn how the masterminds expect to forestall the following scenario of one-to-one onsite replacement. Until they do so credibly, I intend to keep forgiving Fox and friends their misgivings, however slapdash.

Green developer: Occupant, you must vacate.

Occupant: I beg pardon. When?

Green developer: Soon, soon, dear lady. We have permits and civic support, so don't bother your councilmembers. You may return just the moment after we have razed your dwelling and conscientiously erected its replacement, assuming we approve your application to rent one of our energy-efficient apartments, or if you can obtain financing to mortgage one of our attractively priced bamboo-floored condos. If you go quietly we will think well of you upon your return, I promise.

Occupant: Where shall I live with my family in the meantime?

Green developer: As you know, affordable housing such as yours has grown so scarce here in Seattle--oh, this is your hometown, how nice!--but take hope. Suburban sprawl has given you many affordable units to choose from no more than an hour's drive from here.

Occupant: We have no car. We fly Metro.

Green developer: Perhaps you could use some of your more-than-one-thousands of dollars in relocation assistance to buy a fine used vehicle. Though you may soon accustom yourself to driving from strip mall to strip mall to provision your family in its new suburban neighborhood, please remember to be green by finding the nearest park and ride to make your way back and forth to your cleaning job at Ross Dress for Less. Oh! My BlackBerry displays an incoming call from a supportive environmentalist. I must take this. Enjoy your last months here, and think how much better the planet will be thanks to me.

@14 I'm sick and tired of trying to answer questions like these, but he's one answer (because it's the easiest to provide): http://www.seattle.gov/housing/developme…

@ECB Thanks for covering this.

@Sally Clark Can you please get a back brace to stiffen your spine?

Everyone else: Most people are stupid and swayed by fear. John Fox is a liar that plays into these peoples' greatest fears about change in their neighborhood. He is a detriment to the low income housing movement, which is precisely why his SDC group isn't a member of Housing Development Consortium, the non-profit group to which every other single entity that has anything to do with actually creating low income housing belongs to.

$1153 for a one bedroom is not low-income housing. that requires about $4000 per month. the term affordable housing is a joke - at whatever price, housing is affordable if you make enough money.

is there any proof that affordable housing is having a positive effect on housing for people making 50% of median which is about $12.50 an hour?

why do home owners not want to increase their homes' value? maybe because they have a place they really like and they want to stay and they want the neighborhood to change slowly. evil

To those afraid of 40 units per acre -

Indeed, if Bell town and C. Hill already exceed the desired density, where is the rub?? John Fox likes the media attention, helps his fund raising too.

An acre is 43,560 square feet === that is 11 site lots on which three story four plexes, one per lot, could easily be built.

So with NO strain we have 44 unite per acre.

Hardly high rise downtown density.

What is the rub? To me, it is lots of bad information.

Go for the density, go for construction soon to fuel jobs, go for affordable formula which will benefit some class of renters. Go for modern building codes, eliminating fire traps and old non seismic bad wiring worn out units.

By the way, it is always interesting when a white guy talks for all the south end minority communities.

Honestly, I think this is not primarily enviros vs. wealthy homeowners, but wealthy developers vs wealthy homeowners.

@15
They might be here, they might be built, but they are not dense, although you are dense.

It's time to demand that ECB live according to her professed standards. She acts like Peter the Petulant Pecksniff, one of her heros, to whom nobody pays attention anymore except her.

By the way, bartender, bring me a snifter of Courvoisier XO. Bring PBR for everybody else. Bring water to ECB and Max Solomon.

@25
Substitute heroes for heros.

Also, bartender, bring me another snifter of Courvoisier XO. Bring a round of PBR to eveyone else, except ECB and Max Solomon, to whom you can bring more water if they desire.

Mr. X @19: I live in Rainier Vista and I love it. It's no ghost town but a lively community with a ton of kids around for my kids to play with, with regular community-wide potlucks and BBQs, parties at a different house every month and a lively central park.

My kids have have become close friends with a Somali family across the street, which has allowed us to become friends with their parents and even allowed us to share a Ramadan feast and a couple birthday parties together. We could use some more retail and services on MLK, but those will come. It's a great community. I'm proud to live here.

"And, by the way, the 25% units that are called "affordable" to those earning 80% of median are units that the market is already producing - and that most renters would NOT consider affordable"

Care to back that with facts?

Props to Sally for setting up the event so people could ask questions.

A couple of notes...

The 1:1 affordable replacement option has a hole big enough to drive a truck through. The $ value for affordability is based upon the price (rent, for example) in place just prior to demolition. The developer can raise the rent to the roof, forcing people to move out because they can no longer afford the rent. When he/she knocks the no-vacant building down, the affordable housing retention requirement is based upon the jacked-up rent. When I asked this question, panelists acknowledged it was a hole worth fixing if possible. I suggested a moving average, but it's a sticky problem. We're also facing this in the upzone north of Northgate proposed to replace the affordable housing there.

Rents based on anything 80% median or above are equivalent to current rents in Seattle. This means calling 80% median housing "affordable" more PR fluff than reality. At some point in the future if rent increases outpace increases in median income, that relationship might change. But anything built in the next several years at 80% is not lower priced than housing you can already find.

The nice examples shown by the architect to show the look & feel of 50 dwelling unit/acre (du/a) were unique for Seattle's housing stock in that they were generally one bedrooms and overall smaller-than-average square feet (30-50% smaller). People who see the presentation should be aware the soothingly small scale of the example buildings is aided by small units inside. I personally don't think this destroys their applicability, and living smaller is one thing we have to do to live greener, but...

Council & Futurewise are generating unit/acre deltas for the zones that are still subject to the 50 du/acre requirements in the bill. They will use Fox's approach of focusing on # of units, and should generate three important numbers: (1) Current dwelling units for each area, (2) Current zoned dwelling unit capacity, (3) number of additional (if any) dwelling units to add through upzones to meet the 50du/acre standard. I think it behooves everyone to hold fire until we get those numbers. These won't be anything close to as dramatic as Fox's numbers, primarily because the areas where Fox calculated his in the panel is no longer subject to the 50du/a requirement.

The change from only requiring 50 du/a to a COMBINATION of 50 du/a and/or 50 jobs per acre (i.e. 30 more jobs/acre + 20 du/a = 50) is a big deal -- perhaps the most important edit to the bill for people interested in creating walkable communities where people might have something worth, you know, walking to.

I've chatted with EDs of Transportation Choices and FutureWise about this bill. I see what they are trying to accomplish and it's a worthwhile goal, particularly in areas outside Seattle that are not contemplating TOD in any meaningful way (Tukwila, as the clear example, though that's 90% Sound Transit's screwup).

The bill as originally introduced was a non-starter even to pro-density neighborhoods like Roosevelt because it ignored the fact people on the ground in those neighborhoods had specific visions of where the TOD density should go (Roosevelt, for instance, as a rounded triangle with the density bulk south of the station instead of the bill's mandatory circle). The proponents recognized this after the fact and made some nice edits, but it would have been nice for them to come and chat with affected neighborhoods or at least read the neighborhood plans first.

Finally, the 'argument' that it's not a requirement but a guideline is dumb. The POINT of the bill is to hope it does get built to that level. So we have to look at the impacts as if the bill is successful in doing 50du or jobs per acre. Telling people not to worry because it will never happen is a silly argument that pisses people off. If it is never going to happen, why bother passing it?

@28
http://www.seattle.gov/housing/developme…
Check the first link and that will show the 80% median rents. ($1,076 to $1,255 for a studio including utilities)

Then go to your favorite rental search site and look up studio apartments. I took the first site that showed up on Google and the vast majority were well under the 80% allowable rents.

Mr. LaBorde -

Thanks for setting me straight on that - even though I think Seattle's Hope VI projects have indeed (and unfortunately) had many of the negative impacts that John Fox and the Displacement Coalition predicted, I applaud your decision to be take a chance and buy a house there.

But while Rainier Vista is certainly not a ghost town, it is indeed in profound financial trouble, and based on what I've read I'm not sure that SHA has even managed to replace the original 481 units for very low income people that were originally on the site, and the production of ownership units is much farther behind (as are the purported revenues that were used as the primary justification for putting for-sale units there in the first place).

That said, though, I do agree that the situation will improve once the light rail system comes on line, and that it may happen rapidly (I hope - really!).

@28, What Mr. Miller said, with a side of "I told you so."

Oh, and for a flash from the past, here's how the Stranger covered Rainier Vista back when social justice figured into their "progressive" calculus....

http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/rippi…

I have worked in all four of the housing projects, and am involved in the prep work for the reconstruction of Park Lake Homes II. From a neighborhood standpoint, I'd say that New Holly and Rainier Vista have been great successes. New Holly in particular has really spurred development, and vastly improved a sketchy and weird part of town, that previously had an abundance of undeveloped land.

There is still a lot of land available around the Othello (Holly Park) station: two completely empty blocks to the south, and two underutilized blocks to the north (the weird Safeway and the old bowling alley)

The Columbia City station also has lots of land, but that is already spoken for as the next part of Rainier Vista.

The jury is still out on High Point and Greenbridge. One is kinda weird, and the other's not even halfway done yet.

@30
well that is not too impressive. The 60% below looks a little more reasonable to me. They need to increase to limit from 10% to 25%.

@31 Hows about a side of go fuck yourself?

@33 - I think we're on the same page there. That's why I get really nervous when electeds pass an 80% program and call it victory for affordable housing.

In 2009, the city will ask voters to approve an absolutely critical affordable housing levy. The rumor mill in politics is the Mayor is seriously considering allowing the levy funds to be used in 80% projects. I find that unacceptable, for reasons I think the tables in that link make obvious.

Unacceptable.

I hope the Mayor's office gets that message loud and clear.

'Homeowners who oppose new apartment buildings in their single-family neighborhoods; and environmentalists who believe that the bill both ensures affordable housing and protects the environment.' Well you are staying right on message saying these are the camps.

Gee -- First, you forgot people horrified that Rainier Vistas, etc., projects in SE that permanently displaced lower income people without full replacement, and that were built to further ghettoize the poor people who remain. Gotta go deeper on the income levels. Better distributed across the region. Gee ST is a huge investment of our sales taxes. We pay for the rise in land value and should recoup that investment for public benefit. Poorer people are paying disproportionally more. Could that be done locally though given the state setting standards on housing equity and providing tools? One of the things Fox is saying is that the housing tock on the ground currently needs to be included in the calculation.

And, second you conveniently ignore actual urban planners and people who have done neighborhood planning who are horrified at the primitive and damaging definition of TOD in this bill.

As long as you rally the troops in this manner, you drive a wedge between people who should be allies. Your actions are creating a larger group that will oppose GMA. The real anti-environmentalists are gaining traction. Is that what you want? True that anyone can write any law. Bring in some nationally credible urban planners with experience writing TOD laws -- PLEASE.

Erica,

Do you like anyone in the neighborhood movement?
Are there any decent 'neighborhood activists'? Or are they all just crazy zealots? You seem to lump everyone in the same pile.

I am an Urban Studies student & truly appreciate The Stranger's coverage of this and other city planning and land use projects. Props to ECB and Dominic for keeping us informed!

@34 And, the real median income in Seattle is lower, all the more reason to preserve that which serves the lower bands.

@33,

Your dignity and grace upon being proved wrong speaks for itself.

@ 21, Erica
John Fox and his organization have never been and never will be a part of the building lobby. I guess in a topsy turvy world it is possible for you to think that the Displacement Coalition is FOR displacement and that an "affordable housing movement" (the rest of Clarks "full spectrum" panel) is AGAINST displacement. Not so.

It helps to think of a city's housing stock and its workforce in terms of a pyramid.
The workforce that keeps a city running is the broad base of the pyramid, similarly their housing needs. If a city is thriving it means these workers and their housing already exist in great numbers. Today's puzzle is no different than it ever was: how to add new people in the most effective, least disruptive manner. The only way that has ever made economic sense is to cherish and pass down the bulk of the best of the oldest housing and build new in places and in a manner that enables it to become as cherished as the old.

New housing comprises the top of the numerical pyramid both in quantity and cost (quality). An established city adds annually well less than 1% to little more than 2% to its housing stock. Conservation and adaptive reuse of the existing stock is ever more important now that money that never existed although many of us bought and sold as though it did, is gone and not coming back anytime soon. That's reason enough.

But if you also believe in human made climate change, there is no rational way you can also believe in displacing the existing workforce and rebuilding their former communities to any imagined liking. Little zingers like the following from a building lobby publication no less should give you pause: Dwell magazine 8/08 p. 164: a low-energy way of making cement would reduce global ghg emissions by 5 billions tons a year, that's double the emissions produced by all forms of U.S. transportation during the same period... the days of "heat, beat, and treat" are over... but at a cost of $100,000 per gram of carbon nanotube, you are not likely to buy anything containing them soon.

So Bill LaBorde lives in Rainier Vista - at 14 units per acre.

Have him and his neighborhood of kids move into an apartment building. With units at 600 sq ft.