Keys to a Housing Crisis

(Neal Peirce is a syndicated columnist who writes about local government issues. His columns do not reflect the opinions of County News or NACo.)

Seattle has assets most cities would kill for. Nature deeded it snow-topped Cascade peaks, great Pacific Northwest forests, a stunning seascape. The capitalist economy awarded it Boeing and Microsoft - megacorporations that symbolize the dazzling opportunities of the globalized economy.

So why were nearly 300 Seattle region leaders, over a glorious late October weekend, cooped up in a Vancouver hotel, arguing about housing, infill development and land use?

A severe housing shortage has hit Seattle and its surrounding counties. When a house goes on the market, there are easily five or six bids by day's end. Some people submit bids with a clause offering a stated amount ($1,700, for example) over anyone else's bid.

Just since 1990, King County's population has swelled by 139,000 people, the suburban counties by another 213,000. Average King County house prices are rising $1,000 a month. The median value is now $186,000, up 7.6 percent from a year ago.

The problem is serious enough for many professionals seeking their first homes. But it's a huge barrier to homeownership for moderate-income people - the region's retail clerks, bank tellers, child care staffers, workers in light manufacturing.

"We have every reason to worry we'll be San Francisco in a week, with fine upper-scale housing, subsidized units for very low-income people, but not much in the middle-income range," says Bob Watt, president of the Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce.

Few regions have Seattle's hourglass geography, its limits of sea and mountains and/or its seven-year-old state Growth Management Act designed to save outlying forest and meadow lands.

But the historic pattern of single family homes on their own lots - 70 percent of Seattle proper is zoned that way - is common enough across U.S. cities and suburbs. So is sometimes fierce homeowners' opposition to apartment houses or other denser housing in their neighborhoods.

Enter the new economy. It has created, as in many regions, a sprinkling of new high-paying service, but vast numbers of lower-paying service and retail jobs (about 200,000 in the Seattle region since 1980). Now the problem: how - and where - to house the service jobholders?

Some developers would blast a hole in the Seattle urban growth boundary and let development sprawl outward.

But most Vancouver conferees rejected that as too environmentally destructive. Instead, they debated a raft of alternatives. For example:

• Chase down, slim down the plethora of building regulations that slow down, and add major cost to, housing development.
• Look abroad - to Hong Kong, for example, where government turns over big land chunks, cost-free, to a semiprivate housing corporation, which has registered profits while building close to $1 million rental and sales units.
• Squeeze more units into existing residential blocks by sweeping away ordinances that forbid an extra apartment in a house, above a garage or in a cottage behind a larger home. Why? To house the elderly, divorced persons, even jobless NIKEs ("no income kids with education").
• Densify by good design. Seattleites relate horror stories of tasteless apartment houses plopped into older neighborhoods without consultation or warning.

Another potential: small but attractively designed "starter" homes on smaller lots.

• Aim for neighborhood buy-in. Residents need to be educated on why regional land restraints require denser housing. But it's imperative they be consulted early, earnestly, about proposed designs. Seattle has started to do that, and with an interesting twist: It's making a couple of disinterested architects or planners available to the neighborhood committees, so they can see more opportunities and get some protection from snow jobs by self interested builders.
• Recycle unused land parcels, in cities and suburbs alike, for housing. And/or - buy out tawdry, low-density commercial strips and turn them into three-to-four story mixed-use apartment-commercial boulevards with parking in the rear.
• Build apartments, town homes on top of commercial parking lots. "God never intended," said one of the Seattle conferees, "for parking lots to have an uninhibited view of the heavens."
• Create real urban centers - housing included - out of suburban town centers. Renton moved its auto dealerships from downtown to a spot by the freeway, then put in housing and stores right beside a farmers' market and transit connections.

The bottom line from the Vancouver sessions: no single silver bullet will solve a housing crisis. But pushing a range of partial solutions could have a major payoff.

(c) 1997, Washington Post Writers Group