Tag Archives: housing

City Council set to buy time while Seattle City Hall debates 2025 updates to Multifamily Property Tax Exemption program

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Tuesday’s vote is expected to extend the “P6” version of MFTE through September while City Hall bangs out the details of the program’s 7th update

The Seattle City Council is prepared to approve legislation extending the city’s current implementation of the Multifamily Property Tax Exemption another six months as City Hall debates larger changes to the program that secures more affordable units in market-rate Seattle housing developments in exchange for significant tax breaks on the properties.

Developers have pushed back on efforts they say will further complicate Seattle’s version of the MFTE and that have driven the Area Median Income requirements for the program that have pushed it from achieving important goals around so-called workforce or middle income housing.

Tuesday, the full council is set to take up legislation approved by its Housing and Human Services Committee in February to buy more time for the debate over MFTE to play out. The full council vote Tuesday is expected to move a new sunset date for the current MFTE program from the end of this month to September. Continue reading →

Hollingsworth will lead Comprehensive Plan committee in 2025 — Check out District 3’s neighborhood by neighborhood proposed zoning and growth changes

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Check out a D3 neighborhood by neighborhood look at the proposed comprehensive plan changes, below

It was only a year ago that Joy Hollingsworth was making the case that issues of development and growth in Seattle showed why the city needs leadership from someone who has lived with those challenges — even if they haven’t been part of shaping policies and government.

“I can speak to real impact,” Hollingsworth told CHS last year during the campaign as The Stranger attacked the candidate for a letter she had written in 2017 opposing a neighboring microhousing development. “The impact it has had on the real communities. That perspective is important.”

Now, as the District 3 representative finishes her first year in office, Hollingsworth will lead the Seattle City Council’s committee dedicated to finalizing the city’s next 20-year plan for zoning, growth, and development.

Councilmember Hollingsworth will lead the council’s select committee on the Comprehensive Plan in 2025.

“Seattle’s comprehensive plan is an opportunity for us to shape what type of city we want to live in for the next twenty years,” Hollingsworth said Monday. Continue reading →

As rising rents erode queer communities across Capitol Hill and the Central District, leaders pin hope on state rent stabilization legislation

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Rep. Nicole Macri at the September affordable housing forum (Image: CHS)

Nobody in Washington rents like the queer communities living across Capitol Hill and the Central District rent. Political and community leaders say there could be new opportunities in Olympia to address the climbing rents in the city’s core causing continued displacement among the city’s LGBTQIA+ population.

Advocates and legislators met in September with the Washington Low Income Housing Alliance to discuss rent stabilization and support, where House Bill 2114— which passed in the House and died in the Senate this past year — took up much of the conversation and was the’ go-to answer when responding to community questions about how they will improve the lives of renters.

A National Low Income Housing Coalition report this summer found that workers in the Seattle and Bellevue areas would need to earn $50.87 per hour to afford a two-bedroom unit.

A recent University of Washington graduate spoke about their experiences with renting in Seattle.

“The lack of stable rents really makes me feel as if Seattle doesn’t want to support young people, especially those who are all about improving their communities and not just making a big salary,” the renter said.

“It’s likely I won’t be able to stay in Capitol Hill at a certain point due to a future rent increase.”

The challenges for renters in Seattle hit the city’s LGBTQIA+ communities especially hard. Continue reading →

Seattle City Council cooks up alternative to new social housing salary tax for February ballot

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The Seattle City Council has been eyeing the city’s pandemic-era JumpStart tax used to pay for services and affordable housing as a possible band-aid to patch up myriad holes from the city’s projected deficit. Now the council is considering a proposal that would raid the funding as an alternative to the upcoming ballot measure to create a new $1 million salary tax to fund social housing.

Seattle City Councilmember Maritza Rivera representing the city’s northeast District 4 has unveiled proposed legislation that would put a competing measure on the February ballot. If passed by the council, the proposal would present voters with an alternative for funding the newly created Seattle Social Housing Developer. Continue reading →

Seattle City Council makes tweaks to $970M housing levy spending plan ‘with focus on homelessness prevention’

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In business wrapped up before the Independence Day holiday, the Seattle City Council heard updates on spending powered by the $970 million voter-approved housing levy and signed-off on adjustments that council members say will increase spending on “homelessness prevention.”

Councilmember Cathy Moore, (District 5, North Seattle) and chair of the House and Human Services Committee, says the changes will allow the city build the 3,000 “desperately-needed affordable homes” initially promised under the 2023 levy, while also growing opportunities for first-time home ownership, and “vastly” expanding rental assistance “to proactively prevent homelessness.” Continue reading →

Audit shows Seattle’s house and small building rental market is dwindling, down 19% in five years

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A report on Seattle’s rental housing shows the city is experiencing consolidation of ownership with larger property owners and a quickly-shaping decline in small rental properties ranging from fourplexes to single family-style homes.

The report from the Department of Construction and Inspections utilizing data from the Rental Registration and Inspection Ordinance Program was presented (PDF) to the Seattle City Council’s Housing & Human Services Committee Wednesday as part of an audit to improve the program.

The registration program has struggled with technical limitations and resources and the audit found oversight of the program requiring landlords to register properties and undergo inspections has weakened, City Auditor David Jones said.

Landlords with smaller holdings including many single-property owners have said it is becoming increasingly difficult to continue renting in the city as regulation requirements have increased making it more likely that the properties would be sold to a smaller and smaller market of larger real estate and development companies. The city has convened a Small Landlord Stakeholder Group to try to stem the tide.

According to the report presented to the council committee Wednesday, early efforts may have slowed the transition but the number of low-unit properties including houses and building with up to four units has plunged 19% in only five years. Meanwhile, even the number of large properties registered under the program has dropped as ownership is consolidated and fewer, larger landlords emerge. Continue reading →

Seattle City Council rejects pilot program that would have boosted ‘community-led’ affordable housing developments

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Changes made during the pandemic to streamline design review and moderate changes in long-term policy to more gradually expand areas of the city open to multifamily housing might have to do. Seattle still has affordable housing crisis. That much hasn’t changed. But what has changed is the Seattle City Council and its willingness to say no to policies that could tip the balance toward more progressive approaches to housing in the city.

The council voted 2-7 Tuesday to reject the Connected Communities pilot program, a pilot program dedicated to creating 35 “community-led” affordable housing developments over the next five years. Only committee chair and bill sponsor Tammy Morales and Ballard rep Dan Strauss voted for the legislation.

CHS reported here in April on the committee’s vote against the plan, unusual both as a vote against affordable housing policy but also for its break from typical votes for the council in recent years that had rarely resulted in the outright rejection of legislation at the scale of the proposed pilot — especially when carried forward by the chair. Continue reading →

With Gage Academy move and new grant, St. Mark’s moves forward on plan to develop ‘multigenerational housing’ on its Capitol Hill campus — UPDATE

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(Image: St. Mark’s)

Gage Academy and Bright Water School are creating new futures off Capitol Hill as St. Mark’s moves closer to creating new, affordable “multigenerational housing” on its 10th Ave campus.

The long-planned development effort is starting to speed up. The Saint Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral announced it has received a $100,000 grant from Trinity Church Wall Street, an organization that helps churches and faith organizations fund feasibility and predevelopment costs. The boost will start new wheels turning on a mission at St. Mark’s to put its northern Capitol Hill land to use helping to address the housing and affordability crisis in the city.

St. Mark’s says the grant will span a six-month period through April 2024 and support the completion of key assessments of the St. Nicholas portion of its campus including financial feasibility, geotechnical surveys, environmental and historic building rehabilitation studies.

CHS reported here in 2020 on the future of the campus’s St. Nicholas building that had been home to Gage Academy and the Bright Water School. The private Waldorf school Bright Water already made its move off the Hill. Now arts academy Gage has its future lined out with an agreement to move into a South Lake Amazon office building where the 35-year-old school will become the ground-floor presence below floors of Amazon workers above next year.

UPDATE: CHS failed to include Amistad School in our initial report. The “two-way (Spanish/English) immersion school serving toddlers, Pre-K through 8th grade” has made the campus its home and remains active on 10th Ave E. We’ll follow up to learn more about the school’s long-term plans.

Continue reading →

Redlining, upzones, and a NIMBY letter — District 3 candidates spar over development and growth

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Hollingsworth and Hudson campaign photos — and the iced E Madison development at the center of questions about Hollingsworth’s NIMBY leanings

Growth and development — and how we talk about it — have become heated issues in the race for the District 3 seat on the Seattle City Council.

Candidate Joy Hollingsworth says the dialogue in Seattle and, in particular, from her challenger, is tone deaf on issues of displacement, equity, and racism.

Her challenger Alex Hudson calling the city’s current housing policies “modern day redlining” at last week’s candidates forum on development and zoning is a prime example, Hollingsworth says.

Hudson is white. Hollingsworth is black. Hudson has presented a crisp, urbanist approach to growth in the city with full support for universal upzoning and housing. Hollingsworth’s approach has been less definite while still supporting blanket, citywide upzoning but with more “maybe” answers as she has spoken about fighting for policies that include exceptions to help slow displacement or combat the effects of gentrification.

“I was really disappointed with the invoking of redlining, a Jim Crow-era law that kept my grandmother from buying a home where she wanted, in an attempt to analogize our current zoning regulations,” Hollingsworth told CHS this week in response to Hudson’s words at last Wednesday’s Complete Communities Coalition forum. “Racist policies decided where minorities could live in Seattle in the 50s, and now these same communities are ignored as their neighborhoods are gentrified today… just sad.”

Hudson, meanwhile, sticks to the comparison and said she does, indeed, see the city’s current debates over housing policies and development as akin to the fight for civil rights. Hudson said Hollingsworth has also made similar comparisons about the impacts of zoning in Seattle while on the campaign trail.

But Hollingsworth said anyone trying to make the kind of connection Hudson is invoking is diminishing the systemic racism her community and others faced while also muddying the water around legitimate concerns of gentrification and displacement in neighborhoods like the Central District.

“Redlining was a covenant that targeted Jews, Blacks, Asians and people of color that they were not allowed to purchase a home in certain neighborhoods, It was racist policies that were systemic,” Hollingsworth said. “It’s not the same and I was very disappointed in hearing that comparison and super uncomfortable as well.” Continue reading →

✔️ $15/HOUR ✔️ TAX THE RICH ✔️ RENT CONTROL — Sawant ready for last push on Seattle rent control legislation

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A Sawant poster from 2019 made her intentions pretty clear

It is time for the last big push of Kshama Sawant’s decade on the Seattle City Council.

Friday, Sawant will introduce her long-promised Seattle rent control legislation at the morning meeting of her renters’ rights committee.

The proposal would bind rent increases for most housing in the city to inflation.

The District 3 representative for Capitol Hill and the Central District is calling for support for the proposal in the face of what the Socialist Alternative leader says will be opposition from her Democratic council counterparts.

“The eight Democrats on the City Council need to know that if they choose to vote against rent control or undermine it from behind the scenes that there will be hell to pay,” a message sent to supporters Wednesday afternoon reads. Continue reading →