I propose that we take the recently popularized tool called “funded inclusionary zoning” and adjust it to allow for funded in-lieu payments to affordable housing developers. Funding inclusionary zoning unlocks the benefits of inclusionary zoning while offsetting the harms of the policy. In short, it’s a path to more market rate housing and more subsidized affordable housing. But funded inclusionary zoning risks creating a dangerous rift in our pro-housing coalition. Amending this policy to allow for funded in-lieu fees will keep affordable housing developers whole, and keep our pro-housing coalition together. 

What is “Inclusionary zoning?”

Inclusionary zoning requires that developers set aside some portion of the new housing they build and provide it to lower income households at affordable prices. Sometimes, builders can opt instead to pay a fee that funds affordable housing development elsewhere, as in Seattle.

The policy has its pros and cons. 

Benefits of inclusionary zoning

There are several good reasons to implement inclusionary zoning. 

• IZ programs are often paired with “upzones,” which allow more housing to be built on the upzoned properties. When the local government upzones in limited areas, this greatly increases the market value of the upzoned land, creating a windfall for the property owner. Inclusionary zoning is an attempt to claw back some of the value on behalf of the public.
• Inclusionary zoning is also a way to tax the rich — at least the portion engaged in urban development. (Generally, the larger scale apartment buildings that are subject to IZ are built by large-scale development firms, some of whom are extremely profitable, and funded by large banks.) 
• The development community also plays an outsized role in politics. They are often worryingly cozy with officials, and sometimes even fund obviously repugnant candidates, if they see it as in their interests. 
• Top it off with the fact that they bring change to neighborhoods and chop down trees, only to put up apartments with rents that feel scandalously high to many observers

There is a reasonable moral attraction to requiring a portion of development to be set aside for affordable housing through inclusionary zoning programs.

Criticisms of inclusionary zoning

Not surprisingly, most developers oppose IZ. But they aren’t the only ones. Lots of housing advocates and policy researchers oppose or at least worry about inclusionary zoning.

Their arguments are:

• IZ can be a poison pill that makes many projects infeasible, reducing overall housing supply. 
• Less housing makes all housing more expensive to rent or buy. Why would we aggressively tax something we desperately want more of? 

Skepticism of IZ has increased in recent years because:

• More and more research has emerged that made IZ look pretty bad, or at best with some mixed results here in Seattle. Seattle saw homebuilding shift away from lowrise zones with IZ to lowrise zones without affordability requirements. 
• Housing shortages have become much more acute. 
• With interest rates and construction costs so high, builders struggle to get their projects off the ground as their profit margins evaporate. As a result, housing starts are slowing down drastically.
• Tacking on builder fees, or IZ requirements is likely to further kneecap homebuilding, which has already fallen to perilously low levels. 

My IZ Journey

I have had my own mixed feelings on the topic, to be frank, and they have changed as I’ve gotten more information.

On the one hand, as a pro-housing advocate, I have always thought the phrase “growth should pay for itself” is nuts when we desperately need more housing growth. I’ve often thought levying big taxes on housing sounds a bit like targeting taxes on farming or scientific research. Also, the housing development market makes too small and variable a tax base to reliably fund affordable housing. 

It seemed to me that a more just approach would be to tax all our rich people quite a bit more. Among other things, this would do far more to fund lots more affordable housing. Taxing wealth rather than homebuilding would also make the tax much harder to avoid. Developers can avoid IZ by simply not building or doing so in other jurisdictions, but wealth cannot stop being wealth. 

Before my change of heart, I believed that, while developers hated the IZ tax, it wasn’t going to stop them from building, because they could still turn a decent profit. Their big-business cousins made the same arguments about jobs flowing out of Seattle, and the research showed that was bunk.

But then interest rates leapt upward with inflation and the cost to build became prohibitive. Inclusionary zoning probably wasn’t a deal-killer on development when things were hot, and probably isn’t the key thing killing development right now. But the collapse in housing production got me more worried about any negative impact. 

Given the fraught nature and contested claims of the space, when I was asked last year to do work on some inclusionary zoning reforms, I decided that I needed to really do my research. It turned out that among the piles of theoretical papers, there were only four good examples focused on real-world measurement and outcomes.  

What did they show? On average, IZ didn’t suppress development much, although there sometimes was a modest impact on multifamily (apartment and condominium) construction. However, it did appear that IZ likely increased the price of surrounding market-rate housing. Depending on the study, the increase was from a modest one-time 2% price spike, to a much more significant compounding 2% to 3% increase, which gets expensive quickly. 

My takeaway was that IZ is probably OK sometimes, but probably more often does more harm than good, and is rarely updated rapidly enough to account for changing market factors that determine its impact.

Advocates have been in search of a policy tool that would retain inclusionary zoning so that we still could get mixed-income neighborhoods, but also mitigate some of the negative impacts described above. Luckily, such a tool exists via funded IZ. This was popularized last year in Washington by Sightline (which is a client of mine – though this oped represents only my own views) with an eye toward the legislative session. 

The politics in Washington State

The issue of inclusionary zoning splits the pro-housing coalition in Olympia. The pro-housing + pro-IZ block is not enough to pass a bill. Neither is the pro-housing + anti-IZ block. So when the question of IZ comes up in a housing bill, housing advocates cringe, because bills get stuck

In fact, the fight over IZ was the source of a multiyear impasse in Olympia over our very important transit-oriented development bill, a bill I had also worked on as a volunteer in my role as a board member at Futurewise. 

Funded IZ

Given this impasse, I was thrilled last Fall when Sightline retained me to do a little work on evangelizing “funded inclusionary zoning” (let’s call it FIZ) which was designed to offset any harms from IZ. Funded inclusionary zoning is Portland, Oregon’s approach. 

FIZ works differently than regular inclusionary zoning. Yes, it still requires the set aside of some number of units at prices that are more affordable. But instead of hoping the developer has a high enough profit margin to pay for these units and will still choose to build the housing project — the community pays for the affordable housing through a tax “abatement” program, which works kind of like a tax writeoff. 

The aim of FIZ is to make it so the amount of money the developer saves from the lower taxes is roughly equal to the lost revenue associated with providing below-market-rate housing. That way the affordability requirements don’t dissuade projects from getting built.

This is great because it means we are more likely to get the market-rate housing we desperately need, and more likely to get the affordable housing we even more desperately need.

It also doesn’t need to cost the government any money. 

This is due to one of the few cool things about the way we fund property taxes in Washington State. We pass our laws and specify a certain amount to be raised – say $1 billion. Then our assessors set property tax rates at a level that ensures we raise that $1 billion.

When an individual property gets a tax exemption, we still raise that billion bucks. The tax exemption just means that the individual property owner doesn’t pay as much. To offset the lost revenue, everyone else’s bill goes up by a few pennies. Since we should pay higher taxes to fund affordable housing, this is a great solution.

On this revenue neutrality point, there is one caveat. According to the Washington State Commerce Department’s guidelines, there is no legal reason for property tax abatement programs like MFTE to cost any money. However, as they note, some county assessors apply the tax-shifting law unevenly. 

Relatedly, for reasons I’ve never seen explained clearly, the City of Seattle does say it has lost $9 million a year on average from its MFTE program, with another $71 million shifted to other taxpayers. The same report acknowledges that “foregone taxes represent lost tax revenue due to the way in which MFTE properties are assessed; fixing the assessment procedures would eliminate foregone taxes.”

In addition, if a funded inclusionary zoning program were to provide the funding through a mechanism other than tax abatement, such as fee waivers, this would actually reduce government revenue. As such, my recommendation is that FIZ be funded through tax abatement and that the law be written clearly to require assessors to provide a tax shift. 

Given the impact on housing and government finance, I vastly prefer this approach over traditional inclusionary zoning. Not because I want to give gifts to developers — they spent hundreds of thousands of dollars keeping me out of office! For inclusionary zoning to really work, homebuilding cannot slow or trickle to a standstill — 10% of nothing is still nothing. 

Pretending this isn’t the case doesn’t help. When we aren’t honest with ourselves about this uncomfortable reality, we usually layer on so many restrictions and fees that we just end up building too little housing.

Washington’s first political foray into this looks promising. Funded IZ was a key ingredient that allowed the transit-oriented development bill to finally pass the state legislature in 2025. Yes, the development community was angry about the bill because it has an allergy to anything called inclusionary zoning, and there are some onerous aspects for them. It’s also not clear whether the tax exemptions fully compensate them for any losses, although in some cases, the exemptions may also more than compensate them – providing a profit.

Nor do the size of the state’s IZ requirements vary by region – and different housing markets will have different needs at different times. The bill can and should be improved along these lines – but even the first round of FIZ is a huge step forward.

A fly in the ointment

Still, one very thorny political problem remains. The transit-oriented-development bill required something called “on-site performance.” This means that when a builder builds a new building, 10% of the units on-site have to be held for lower-income families who will pay lower rents. This means better integrated buildings in better integrated neighborhoods compared to programs like Seattle’s. 

In Seattle’s inclusionary zoning scheme, we allow a developer to decide between providing affordable homes in the new building or instead paying money into a fund to build affordable housing elsewhere (the “in-lieu fee”). The builders pretty much always choose the fee. But this sometimes means shipping all that affordable housing money out of the neighborhood where new housing is getting built and to places where there are lots of affordable housing developments already. This is often in neighborhoods that already experience higher rates of poverty. Reinforcing segregation is not a good policy outcome.

Here is the rub. Funded inclusionary zoning’s requirement that units be on site presents a very big threat to one of our best allies in the housing fight. The nonprofits that build affordable housing, like Habitat for Humanity and Bellwether Housing, rely on Seattle’s in-lieu fees as a major revenue stream for their projects. Since so many builders opt for the in-lieu fee, it has provided hundreds of millions in funding, contributing to the construction of thousands of nonprofit units. From 2020 to 2023, Seattle’s IZ fee revenue averaged nearly $68 million annually, although proceeds have decreased rapidly as development has slowed. 

The affordable housing developers are a big, influential group, and they do enormously important, good work. They have built and continue to manage many many thousands of units that are a lifeline for working families and very low-income households in this region. A policy change that robs nonprofit builders of a major funding stream would be counterproductive — not to mention politically fraught. Much better to find a mutually beneficial solution. 

Now, the affordable housing developers did not oppose funded inclusionary zoning at the legislature last year. But that was tied to a transit-oriented development bill that triggered FIZ only in places facing new zoning increases because of the bill—so FIZ didn’t take away any existing revenue from affordable housing developers. 

But the inclusion of funded IZ raised eyebrows. Given the new precedent set, affordable housing developers must be wondering if the in-lieu fees in Seattle may go away. After all, if “funded-IZ” is popular, and Seattle switches to requiring on-site performance, there is no more opportunity for in-lieu fees–the very fees that keep many of these affordable housing developers building new homes.

This would be disastrous for these affordable housing providers. As Washington evolves its housing policy around the state, I think this issue could threaten the fabric of the housing coalition. And as Seattle looks at its current catastrophic drop in construction, and mulls an update to our current program, this has raised a conundrum:

We have very good reason to convert our Seattle program to funded inclusionary zoning. This would get us more integrated mixed-income buildings, and reverse or reduce any perverse effects of our inclusionary requirements. We are facing a four-alarm fire when it comes to housing production, and we need bold solutions.

But adopting the legislature’s FIZ program would mean removing existing in-lieu fees as a revenue source for affordable housing providers — which could be quite the blow, especially at a time of financial turmoil for many nonprofit builders, which have already needed bailouts. Plus, builders will likely still fight on-site performance, since they’ve complained that administering an on-site program is burdensome. Affordable housing providers united with private-sector builders against housing policy is not a recipe for success or policy stability.

If we were to keep in-lieu fees, there is no obvious way to implement funded inclusionary zoning. And so I have been told that we have to choose between funded inclusionary zoning OR the in-lieu fees that do so much to keep affordable housing developers building new homes. 

A novel solution

I reject this false choice between funded IZ or in-lieu fees. We can have nice things! I think we can have community-funded inclusionary zoning with in-lieu fees. 

And here is how:

1. Seattle sets an inclusionary zoning requirement, similar to now. Builders can choose between on-site performance and an in-lieu fee. 
2. Seattle simultaneously implements funded IZ by setting a building abatement rate for all projects subject to inclusionary zoning.

Voilà! That’s all that is required to untie the knot. 

Yes, it’s weird that we are giving people a tax abatement to pass on via a cash payment to the in-lieu fund which funds affordable housing. 

But weird is fine! They don’t call it sausage making for nothing. It satisfies the political and housing-outcome constraints. 

A few things would make it better. It would be better to tie the fees to similar neighborhoods, so we don’t just reinforce concentrated poverty and racially segregated development patterns. We should do this with our in-lieu fees one way or another. It would be best to set the abatement rates as an exemption as exactly equivalent to the in-lieu fees paid out. 

(And yes, it would be better overall to not have to build such byzantine policies, and simply guarantee the billions in funding needed for affordable housing statewide by actually taxing the rich. We should continue to fight for that. But until we have those funds secured, funded IZ presents a threat to affordable housing developers and this policy removes that threat). 

Funded inclusionary zoning with a funded-in-lieu fee option would make homebuilding more feasible. It would maintain and possibly even expand the funding available for affordable housing development because more developments would get built, generating more affordable housing funding. 

With proper assessment practices, funding IZ will not decrease revenue for local governments. And crucially, it would keep the region’s increasingly strong housing coalition together, pressing forward through the next waves of needed reforms.

The post Op-Ed: Seattle’s Path to Fund Inclusionary Zoning and Boost Homebuilding first appeared on The Urbanist.

Like other cities across the state, Kenmore is updating its development codes to comply with Washington’s Middle Housing and accessory dwelling unit (ADU) laws intended to address the housing affordability crisis. Most of Kenmore’s proposed changes will meet the minimum requirements of the law.

But Kenmore may adopt an inclusionary zoning (IZ) policy alongside state mandates that would require developers to offer 10% of units as affordable or pay a fee-in-lieu. A Regional Coalition for Housing (ARCH) recommended the IZ plan to Kenmore, as the influential Eastside organization has done in other cities.

At the May 12 meeting, the city council told staff to rewrite a key provision in the Planning Commission’s recommended IZ proposal — instead of a “project-size” exemption threshold, the council wants to exempt developments based on “unit-size.”

The difference matters.

The “project-size” threshold recommendation from the Planning Commission would have exempted projects with less than four units (such as single-family homes, duplexes, and triplexes) from the mandate. That could raise the cost of multifamily projects with more than four units, potentially encouraging developers to build larger, more expensive homes. Because there would be no funding or bonuses attached, the plan could stifle middle housing projects with four or more units.

In contrast, the “unit-size” threshold policy the council preferred would exempt smaller, typically more affordable multifamily homes from the mandate, while larger, more expensive homes would pay the fee or offer an affordable unit. New homes smaller than 1,750 square feet would be exempt from the IZ mandate.

Kenmore’s Mayor Nigel Herbig supported the “unit-size” threshold, saying it “both penalizes what we already have too much of, which is large single-family houses, and incentivizes what we’re looking for, which is smaller, more affordable units.”

Smaller homes tend to be more affordable than larger homes. Last year, the median size of a new condo in Kenmore was 1,487 square feet and sold for $712,353, according to ARCH data. In contrast, new single-family homes in Kenmore list for over $1.5 million and typically are larger than 3,000 square feet. 

The Planning Commission approved the “project-size” threshold recommendations by a 4-3 vote. The dissenting commissioners wrote a “minority report” arguing the proposed exemption for projects with three or fewer units could unintentionally incentivize larger, more expensive units and continue a common development pattern of large single-family homes, limiting production of more affordable units. 

Under the Kenmore IZ proposal, 10% of new units would need to be offered as affordable. An owner-occupied home must be affordable for people earning 80% of the area median income (AMI). Rental units would need to be affordable to people earning less than 50% of the AMI. Developers could pay a fee-in-lieu for fractional units or to avoid offering the affordable homes. 

ARCH recommended the city set a fee-in-lieu of $6 per square foot, and said the fee would be modest compared to other ARCH cities such as Kirkland and Redmond. Sammamish recently adopted a 10% IZ requirement similar to the one under consideration in Kenmore. 

Proceeds from the fees-in-lieu would go into Kenmore’s fund for affordable housing, and could be used by groups like ARCH to pay for regional housing needs.

Kenmore is a member of ARCH, a partnership of East King County cities working to preserve and increase housing for low- and moderate-income households. ARCH coordinates resources, shares staff and technical resources, and helps administer programs. ARCH is helping Kenmore draft their ADU and Middle Housing code amendments, and provided the city with financial modeling and feasibility analysis.

While the funds might be useful for building new affordable housing, Mayor Herbig had reservations. “I’m concerned about adding additional costs. I would much rather […] find additional sources of revenue for housing. It’s something I really want us to figure out. I’m not sure if taxing housing to incentivize housing, or taxing housing to fund other housing. […] There just seems something a little almost perverse about it.”

Kenmore currently has a voluntary Residential Density Incentive program, which offers incentives, such as bonus units, for developers who build affordable housing units. The city also offers tax breaks for affordable housing through an existing Multi-Family Housing Property Tax Exemption (MFTE) program, but that MFTE program does not apply to the neighborhoods where the proposed IZ would be implemented.

Kenmore’s proposed IZ policy would apply to the city’s R-4 and R-6 zones – its largest, traditionally residential neighborhoods. These formerly single-family-only zones will be upzoned to follow the state’s Middle Housing laws. The city plans to exempt properties along Swamp Creek and the Sammamish River and tributaries from the middle housing rezone, which represents about 14% of total single-family lots. State law allows cities to exclude up to 25% of lots in single-family zones from middle housing requirements.

Kenmore has until June 30 to adopt the state Middle Housing and ADU code changes. Formerly single-family zones will permit Middle Housing home types such as duplexes, townhouses, and cottage housing. At least two homes per lot, and up to four units if at least one is affordable, will be permitted. Within a quarter mile of a major transit stop, the allowed density increases to four units, with up to six units allowed if one is affordable. Up to two ADUs per lot will be permitted, and parking requirements will be reduced. 

Those changes will increase the development capacity (and land value) of properties within the upzoned areas. According to ARCH and city staff, implementing IZ concurrently allows the city to “capture” a portion of that increased land value created by the upzoning to help fund affordable housing, without necessarily causing undue financial pain to developers. ARCH said their analysis suggests the plan would leave a net gain and warned the city that trying to adopt new IZ requirements later, after the capacity increase is already in effect, could face legal challenges.

However, many builders view mandatory inclusionary zoning requirements differently, arguing such policies raise the cost of homebuilding and the price of housing, especially at high percentages and deep affordability levels. The Master Builders Association warned the planning commission their draft IZ policies could unintentionally hinder housing production. 

Small-scale builders also argue their margins are smaller and access to capital more limited, making it harder to absorb IZ costs in middle housing projects. Caitlin Sullivan, a Kenmore real estate investor focused on middle housing infill development, criticized ARCH’s research. “When the ARCH inclusionary zoning proposal was first introduced, it didn’t look right. […] We cannot risk adding a fee onto small developments, especially when we’re doing it on bad data.” 

Sullivan urged the city council to adopt a square footage exemption. “We have enough large single-family homes which decrease affordability in our community, and we need to start rebalancing the scales,” she said.

A public hearing on the draft rules is planned for June 9, with a final council vote anticipated on June 23. Kenmore has until June 30 to adopt development code changes, or the state model ordinance will take effect. 

This artile is an expanded version of a piece that first appeared on Oliver J. Moffat’s personal site.

The post Kenmore Considers McMansion Tax in Zoning Overhaul first appeared on The Urbanist.

Constructing affordable housing in the cities on the east side of Lake Washington has always been a challenge, thanks in part to high real estate prices, restrictive zoning and regulations, and more limited funding sources compared to Seattle. And though some municipal policy changes in the past five years have helped ameliorate the situation, other factors still make it extremely challenging to fund, permit, and build affordable housing on the Eastside.

A Regional Coalition for Housing (ARCH) is the fulcrum of affordable housing efforts on the Eastside, having built more than 9,000 units since its inception in 1992. Since ARCH is set up as a council of governments, with key leaders from the 15 Eastside cities composing its various boards, its policy guidance is hard to undo once it’s been made. It’s an efficient system when ARCH is on the right track, but critics contend that organizational structure contributes to ARCH’s processes being hard to course correct and opaque.

While those governments are free to adopt their own policies, ARCH’s recommendations hold substantial clout. ARCH’s monthly board meetings are not posted publicly – one has to email the organization to seek permission to listen online.

Getting housing policy right is crucial, as local housing prices spiral out of reach for working families and the risk of a housing slowdown grows. According to Apartment List, median rent for a one-bedroom apartment is currently $2,188 in Bellevue, $2,081 in Kirkland, and $2,062 in Redmond — that’s higher than in Seattle, where the median one-bedroom is $1,924.

Though a boom in apartment construction in the past several years has actually led to a decrease in median rents in Kirkland (-1.8%) and Redmond (-1.1%) in the past year, the pace of construction of market-rate and subsidized multifamily housing is expected to slow considerably. Even with the apartment boom, many families find themselves entirely priced out of the for-sale home market, as average home prices have climbed well north of $1 million in most Eastside cities.

Angela Rozmyn, sustainability director at Natural and Built Environments, a Kirkland-based development firm (and also a member of the Kirkland Planning Commission) says that the Eastside is now in a housing recession, especially with regard to multifamily projects. “We’re still seeing quite a bit of single-family housing, but when you talk about larger projects, those have mostly been put on hold at this point,” Rozmyn says.

“It’s hard, because people see construction going on and lots of cranes,” she says. “But what you don’t see are the applications that aren’t showing up, you don’t see the design review board meetings that aren’t happening.”

Two additional pressures are adding to the difficulty: 

• Parking requirements that drive up the cost of affordable housing projects, and 
• Mandated affordable housing contributions, which include increasingly strict area median income (AMI) requirements as part of mandatory inclusionary zoning.

This confluence of factors is making it increasingly difficult for developers to make projects pencil out as feasible. 

Unlike Seattle, Eastside cities lack a housing levy or a payroll tax dedicated primarily to housing to provide a steady source of revenue to fund affordable housing creation. As a result, the Eastside is more dependent on developer mandates and corporate philanthropy to make affordable housing happen. In the last few years, Microsoft and Amazon have announced billion-dollar housing pledges to provide affordable homebuilders low-interest loans and grants. But the mix of corporate loans, philanthropic gifts, state grants, and federal tax credits isn’t necessarily enough to get projects off the ground in the absence of City contributions.

Rozmyn notes that high interest rates, steep land and labor costs, and changing regulations are hindering the creation of both affordable and market rate housing on the Eastside. Kirkland is falling well behind on its goals to create more affordable housing, she said.

“A project [in Kirkland] that was originally planned to be 600 apartments is now being built out as 100 luxury townhouses, which to me is extraordinarily disappointing,” she said. “It means that we really have failed as a city.”

Nevertheless, late last year, the Kirkland City Council took small steps to encourage walkable neighborhoods in its 20-year growth plan, but made no major zoning changes. Kirkland is in the process of upzoning two large sites in the Juanita neighborhood to accommodate up to 770 homes.

The city has had decent success building accessory dwelling units (ADUs) after Kirkland (and Kenmore) approved reforms making it easier to build ADUs in 2020. Kirkland has also been ahead of the curve on House Bill 1110, which requires upzoning near transit: the city had already reformed zoning to allow cottage housing, duplexes and triplexes.

But Kirkland has created about 1,400 new units of new affordable housing since 2019, well short of what was supposed to be a goal of 2,500 by the end of 2025.

Other cities in the region are slowly starting to take a more proactive approach to affordable housing. The city of Bellevue launched a new Office of Housing in February after passing a one-tenth-of 1% sales tax to fund affordable housing and services in 2021. Bianca Siegl, Bellevue Office of Housing director, says Bellevue has two surplus city properties it’s hoping to develop into affordable housing – one in the Bel-Red neighborhood and one in Wilburton.

“We’re currently in the application period and looking to develop, between those two sites, around 400 units of affordable housing,” Siegl said.

Wilburton, the site of a recently opened Link light rail station, is key to Bellevue’s strategy for affordable housing and transit-oriented development (TOD) as well as its newly adopted 20-year growth plan. The Wilburton Vision plan, launched in 2021, imagines a walkable, relatively dense, transit-oriented neighborhood in the Link station east of downtown. In the past two months, the city council has been debating and finalizing plans for zoning and planning changes, and an inclusionary zoning plan.

That plan, which the city council is expected to vote on soon, would require one of three options on all multi-family rental projects constructed in the Wilburton neighborhood: 10% of units at 80% AMI, 7% at 60% AMI, or 5% at 50% AMI.

Kenmore, under the leadership of Mayor Nigel Herbig, has also expanded its focus on affordable housing, working with A Regional Coalition for Housing (ARCH) to fund and permit a variety of projects, including two in the pipeline: The Approach at Kenmore, a 121-unit development with multifamily housing for those earning 50 to 60% AMI, and Larus, a 175-unit affordable housing project for seniors. That project received $3.6 million from ARCH’s housing trust fund.

However, Kenmore has been more hesitant when it comes to affordable housing specifically geared toward people who were previously homeless. In late 2023, the Kenmore City Council blocked a development agreement with Plymouth Housing to add 100 units of permanent supportive housing on a City-owned parcel, bowing to local pushback. Instead, Redmond swept in to take on the project.

Kenmore was hardly unique in levelling extra scrutiny on facilities for homeless people and scaring off some low-income projects. For example, Bellevue delayed a homeless shelter for men for roughly a decade due to local pushback before finally opening it in 2023.

Since its founding in 1992, ARCH has grown into a collaboration among 15 cities on the Eastside and King County that funds and develops affordable housing. 

“They have a tough role, where they’re working for a bunch of different cities and trying to balance all of the various views of different cities,” Herbig said. “But they’ve done a good job at getting units stood up. Their record of leveraging outside funds is phenomenal.”

Sharon Lee, the director of the Low Income Housing Institute, says her organization has worked with ARCH on two affordable housing projects in Bellevue – the 68-unit Aventine project, which rehabilitated an existing apartment building into units affordable to families earning below 30, 50 and 80% AMI, and August Wilson Place, a 57-unit affordable housing building that opened in 2015. 

“My opinion of ARCH has increased a lot since the old days,” Lee said. “In the old days ARCH had very little money, and so you’d have to apply and reapply.”

Though no one would go on record with The Urbanist to directly criticize ARCH, housing activists and developers say the organization has a reputation for being less than transparent. Case in point: ARCH declined to be interviewed by The Urbanist for this article.

Another criticism leveled by housing activists at ARCH is its fondness for requiring parking in affordable housing projects. 

In February, 2023, the Kirkland Planning Commission met to consider zoning code amendments for the 85th Street Station Area, a dense, mixed-use urban area near a new Sound Transit “S2” bus rapid transit route expected to open in 2029, following a series of delays. Among the proposals brought to the commission by city staff, which documents show was in direct consultation with ARCH, included a recommendation for a 0.75-to-1 ratio of parking stalls per one bedroom unit of affordable housing. The station area plan exempts studio and one-bedroom apartments from the parking requirements, but multi-bedroom apartments continued to face them.

In addition, the City of Redmond has a complicated set of parking policies with respect to affordable housing, whether Multi-Family Tax Exemption (MFTE) units or otherwise, apparently at the advice of ARCH. Buildings with a parking ratio of 0.75 stalls per home or greater are required to reserve a proportional amount for the affordable units and offer those stalls at a discounted rate, although buildings with lesser parking ratios do not face this requirement.

“The binding covenants (which ensure that the dwelling units designated as MFTE affordable units would in fact be operated as affordable units) for mixed-income developments contain boilerplate language requiring a minimum of 1 parking stall per affordable unit,” Christina Wilner a spokesperson for the City of Redmond told The Urbanist. “However, the MFTE program defers to the zoning code for parking. As such, for those mixed-income MFTE developments with a parking ratio of parking stalls per dwelling unit greater than 0.75 (averaged across the entire project), then a corresponding proportion is reserved for affordable homes at a discounted rate. If the mixed-income MFTE development has a parking ratio equal to or less than 0.75, then no special parking provisions apply for allocation of parking stalls to affordable housing units.”

But with Governor Bob Ferguson signing a statewide parking requirement reform law earlier this month, Kirkland and Redmond’s mandates on affordable housing builders will be overridden and invalidated in most cases by 2027. 

According to the new state law, cities with a population over 30,000 cities can only require a 0.5 parking stalls per home in market rate projects and can no longer require any parking for affordable housing units – making ARCH’s recommended policies in Redmond and Kirkland moot (Kirkland, Redmond, and Bellevue all exceed the 30,000 population mark – only Kenmore is below that figure, with a population of about 24,000).

“Providing parking is expensive for any project,” said Bellevue housing director Siegl. “While Bellevue is in the process of a major transition to a more TOD-focused development pattern, in certain nodes, we are not now in a place where we’re going to be removing parking requirements. But there are incentives in place for affordable housing that reduce parking requirements near transit.”

“Bellevue City Council, Planning Commission, and staff leadership have been great partners as we continue to work hard to help ensure rezones and code changes reflect the ‘new normal’ in today’s very challenging real estate market,” said Bellevue Chamber of Commerce CEO Joe Fain. “What worked six to eight years ago, when interest rates were at zero and construction costs were favorable, doesn’t work anymore – and likely never will.” 

Herbig said he supports Kenmore loosening requirements for parking, “Every additional parking space adds cost to development — $70,000 to $100,000 if you’re talking about structured parking and $15,000 to $30,000 for surface lots,” Herbig said. “And you also consider the buildable area and all of that.”

In addition, Kirkland city staff, on the advice of ARCH, in 2023 made Kirkland’s inclusionary zoning program in the 85th Street Station Area rezone so difficult to qualify for that no apartments have been built there since the zoning changes.

Bumping up from a longtime standard of requiring 10% percent of units to be available at 80% AMI, Kirkland voted to change the AMI for the 85th Street Station Area to a threshold to 50% AMI and to base the percentages of required affordable units on building heights: 10% to 15% for buildings under 65 feet tall, and 20% to 25% for buildings more than 65 feet in height. These percentages are not effective until
624 units are created in the station area.

A group of developers, in a strongly worded letter to the city of Kirkland in April 2023, faulted the 85th Street Station Area rezone, claiming it only looked to future market conditions. “Adopting code that is predicated upon future, wholly speculative market changes that would be necessary for any projects to move forward will have a strong chilling effect on Kirkland’s multifamily market,” the group said in its letter. “Kirkland should work with developers to adopt something that pencils today and will yield the desired outcome for everyone.”

“[The planning commission] went through a big station area workplan a couple years ago,” Rozmyn noted, “and we have not seen a single apartment project happen since those rules were updated.”

The city of Redmond has also lowered the AMI thresholds for its Multi-Family Tax Exemption (MFTE) programs – with the stated goal of creating more deeply affordable units. But as Seattle’s experience has shown, lowering the AMI levels doesn’t necessarily encourage the building of affordable units, and in fact often makes it harder for developers to make the project pencil out – and as a result either decline to participate in voluntary programs or simply not build market-rate projects in areas where strict inclusionary zoning requirements are in place. 

Redmond, which is rapidly increasing density and just opened two new light rail stations on the 3.4-mile extension of the Link, has a mandatory inclusionary zoning policy that requires all new multi-family apartment projects to dedicate 10% of units at 80% AMI, with higher requirements in the Overlake growth center.

Its MFTE program, which began in 2017, initially offered the voluntary tax incentive as an option for projects in downtown, Overlake and Marymoor. This included a voluntary program that offered an 8-year tax exemption for 10% units at 60% AMI or a 12-year exemption for 20% at a mix of 65 and 85% AMI (the rate was slightly more restrictive for Marymoor).

In 2023, Redmond briefly eased its 12-year tax incentive MFTE program, giving breaks to projects that offered 20% of units at a mix of 80 and 90% AMI.

But in 2024, as part of its 2050 comprehensive plan, Redmond made MFTE programs more stringent, with downtown 12-year incentives increasing to 20 percent at a mix of 50 and 80%, Marymoor’s eight-year program increasing to 15% at 80% (and the 12-year incentive eliminated) and Overlake’s eight-year incentive raise to 12.5% at 50% AMI, and its 12-year incentive eliminated.

MFTE is a voluntary incentive program that, when used well, creates new middle-income housing, said local land use and housing consultant Natalie Quick. “In this market, if AMIs are too low in a MFTE program, one of two things will happen: the MTFE program doesn’t get used and the municipality doesn’t benefit from the middle-income housing or, if the tax incentive is needed to make the project pencil and it can’t be considered because the requirements are too stringent, then the project isn’t built until rents on the non-MFTE units rise high enough to offset the MFTE requirements.” 

The upshot is that all these changes Redmond and Kirkland have made in the interest of promoting more affordable housing have sometimes ended in discouraging affordable units and even the creation of market–rate apartments. And it turns out that since 2020, Redmond’s MFTE program hasn’t generated all that much housing: resulting in just 310 affordable units (60% AMI or less) over the past six years. According to Christina Wilner, a spokesperson for the City of Redmond, there are currently 131 affordable units in the pipeline – and all are in downtown, and all built through the eight-year incentives that haven’t changed since the program’s inception.

Still, some activists are optimistic things will change and that Eastside cities will ramp up efforts to create affordable, transit-oriented units. Jazmine Smith, director of advocacy for Futurewise, views Bellevue’s Wilburton rezoning plans, once they’re passed by the city, as a good model for the Eastside. (Smith also serves at The Urbanist Elections Committee co-chair.)

“I think that we’ll have a huge win in Wilburton,” Smith said. “I’m excited to see how City Council will move forward with the final legislation. I think that with the eco-district, and transit-oriented development districts they’ll be enacting with this vision they will really be able to set the stage for a great deal of affordable housing being built into the code.”

Kenmore Mayor Herbig, however, believes that until the county comes forward with at least a billion-dollar housing levy or the state significantly boosts funds for affordable housing, the Eastside won’t really begin to address its affordable housing deficit. 

“I’d love to see the county step up with a really big housing levy, because I think that’s the only way we’re going to get what we need,” he said. “We’re so far behind. We’ve been not doing our jobs for the last 50 years, and what we have to do is astronomical.”

Correction: The original draft stated Bellevue’s homeless shelter broke ground in 2023, but that is the year the project opened. On June 4, the article was updated with additional information from ARCH, which belatedly responded to The Urbanist’s inquiries, and a clarification from the City of Redmond around parking requirments.

The post In Eastside Affordable Housing Efforts, ARCH Provides Both Help and Hurdles first appeared on The Urbanist.

On Tuesday, the Washington State Senate approved a bill queuing up significant zoning changes around light rail stations, commuter rail stations, and bus rapid transit stops. The framework outlined in the bill is poised to lead to tens of thousands of new homes near transit, though a phased implementation schedule will mandate those zoning changes gradually.

Yonah Freemark, a researcher with Urban Institute, noted Washington’s bill would be a “very substantial” expansion of zoning capacity in a Bluesky post. “It would be one of the largest state-sponsored upzonings ever in the US,” Freemark added. In 2023, Freemark authored a report that laid out the housing capacity such a bill could unlock in the region.

House Bill 1491, sponsored by Rep. Julia Reed (D-36th, Seattle), represents the culmination of three years of work to find a framework for transit-oriented development (TOD) that the two legislative chambers could agree upon. The state House already approved the bill in early March. The two chambers will need to reconcile their respective bills after the Senate amendments.

“In the last couple years, we’ve made some really significant progress on things like legalizing accessory dwelling units, co-living spaces, middle housing,” Senator Jessica Bateman (D-22nd, Olympia), chair of the Senate’s housing committee, said Tuesday. “But if you talk to the experts, they will tell you that those solutions, while important and nimble and flexible, really are not going to allow us to gain the economies of scale that we need if we’re going to actually build one million homes over the next 20 years. That’s where this bill comes in.”

The Washington TOD bill is complicated and applies unevenly throughout the state, but it would nonetheless represent a large upzoning through many municipalities throughout the Puget Sound, as well as in Spokane & Vancouver WA. It would be one of the largest state-sponsored upzonings ever in the US.

— Yonah Freemark (@yonahfreemark.com) April 15, 2025 at 3:58 PM

Under HB 1491, cities across the state will need to make room for larger apartment buildings within a half-mile of light rail, commuter rail, and streetcar stops, and within a quarter-mile of all bus rapid transit stops. More capacity for housing must be created near the rail stops, and cities can distribute that increased capacity equally, or concentrate it closer to the transit stations. Cities can exempt up to 25% of the stops around their bus rapid transit stations, but only if they allow additional density near the other stations.

The bill does not require immediate upzones around Sound Transit light rail stations and RapidRide stops. Because it follows the preset schedule for local update of Comprehensive Plans, HB 1491 won’t become mandatory in King, Snohomish, and Pierce County until the end of 2029. Comprehensive Plans see major updates once per decade, with a minor update at the halfway mark. Vancouver, with its Vine bus rapid transit system, will need to comply with the bill by mid-2026, with Spokane to follow by the end of next year.

If a transit-oriented development bill had been approved in 2023 — the original “year of housing” at the Washington legislature — then it likely would have prompted changes in the state’s most transit-rich places sooner. But the details of the proposal took longer to work out. When the Senate approved a TOD proposal that year, by a landslide 40-8 vote, it landed like a thud in the House because it didn’t include any mandate for developers to set aside affordable units in the resulting buildings. That requirement was seen as essential by many House Democrats to ensuring that lower-income people have access to amenity-rich areas near transit.

Yet the next year, when the House approved its counterproposal, which included a mandate for at least 10% of the units within station areas to be made available to lower-income households, it was not able to garner majority support in the Senate — in large part because that mandate was seen as a non-starter by Republicans and market-oriented Democrats in the legislature.

The bill was able to get across the finish line in 2025 thanks to a compromise. In HB 1491, the affordable housing mandate remains, but it’s paired with a tax exemption program, a move that ensures that developers aren’t being the ones asked to take the hit for a good everyone broadly agrees is needed: more housing near transit. High requirements without offsets could end up depressing homebuilding, rather than stimulating it, as intended.

This is where things get really wonky. Under current state law, cities are authorized to create a 20-year multifamily tax exemption (MFTE) program that provides a property tax break if a builder sets aside at least 20% of their units as affordable. Though the tax break lasts two decades, the units must be kept affordable for 99 years. But this bill creates a new 20-year program that only requires developers to set aside 10% of their units for 50 years. They can also choose to set aside 20% of their units as workforce housing, available to households making more modest incomes.

There are other incentives as well. Projects participating in the new MFTE program receive a 50% discount on impact fees, and builders can receive even more development capacity if they include more affordable housing than is mandated. Family-sized units (three bedrooms or more) are completely exempt from the density limits that apply to smaller units.

“This is a balanced bill that ensures that low-income people can be a part of the transit utopia we’re seeking to build while creating mixed-income communities where everyone can belong,” Rep. Reed said ahead of the bill’s passage in the House last month. “This bill ensures we’re getting the best return on investment for our most-used transit assets. But embedded in this dry text about zoning are the dreams of people like me, people in their 30s and 40s who dream of making a life in this state, in an affordable home in a vibrant mixed income community near family and transit assets that facilitate easy commutes. That’s the dream this bill seeks to realize.”

While HB 1491 will take a while to go into effect in Puget Sound, a last-minute amendment in the Senate could bring changes there sooner. A proposal by Senator Yasmin Trudeau (D-27th, Tacoma) directs the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) to pilot transit-oriented development on its existing park-and-ride facilities, including those along State Route 99 and I-405. That move could bring TOD to underutilized state land close to transit much sooner than the other provisions of the bill.

While it took a while to get everyone on the same page, HB 1491 seems to be a robust framework for transit-oriented development that everyone can agree on, and is poised to allow many more people across Washington State to live in affordable homes near transit.

The post State Senate Greenlights Sweeping Transit-Oriented Housing Bill first appeared on The Urbanist.

The Woodinville City Council last week agreed to advance work on temporary zoning regulations that would require all new apartment buildings within the city’s downtown to set aside at least 10% of their units as subsidized affordable housing. Legislation is expected to be officially taken up by May and presumably propose a rent limit for the required “affordable” homes, which wasn’t yet discussed.

Councilmembers are framing the move as an attempt to ensure that new development in the city meets a baseline threshold for badly needed affordable units. But with such a quick process and so little in-depth discussion, the move appears to be more for show than anything else.

The discussion topic last Tuesday was initially scheduled to be a full moratorium halting building permits on all multifamily buildings in Woodinville, a request made by Councilmembers Rachel Best-Campbell and Al Taylor in mid-March. On its face, the moratorium was framed as a way to prevent projects moving forward without furthering compliance with the city’s affordable housing goals.

But the discussion quickly pivoted instead to interim zoning regulations, with numerous councilmembers pushing back on a full moratorium as an action that could chill the development environment in the city for years to come.

Woodinville’s downtown has seen a radical transformation over the past decade, with hundreds of units built and many more anticipated. But tensions have been increasing over the future direction of the city, with the generally pro-development council majority heading for a likely clash with those who see Woodinville transforming too fast.

A new political action committee (PAC) called “Democratic Woodinville,” which is funded primarily by Woodinville resident and tech worker Jeff Lyon, has been recruiting council candidates via mailers and billboards. Lyon’s group has been promoting a 26% affordability requirement for all development — a threshold so high it would likely be the same as imposing a moratorium in effect.

At the center of the debate is the former Molbak’s garden store property in downtown Woodinville. Green Partners, the property’s owner, has submitted initial plans to the city to turn the 19.2 acres it owns into around 1,300 units of housing along with a 200-room hotel and 89,000 square feet of retail space. But the company is seeking a development agreement, a site-specific plan for its property that will get individual buy-in from the council and will likely include a specific number of affordable units. Whether the city has an overall affordable housing mandate in the case of Molbak’s is likely irrelevant.

The yet-to-be-determined interim requirements are anticipated to stay in place until later this year, when the city expects a more thorough analysis on the impact of an affordability requirement in the context of Woodinville’s housing market. For now, the city is shooting from the hip with the 10% number. Allowing developers to utilize an existing state incentive program in which they receive a property tax break for providing the affordable units, via the state multifamily tax exemption (MFTE) program, is seen as providing an incentive to offset the mandate.

“This was a compromise to tell our city and tell our constituents and tell the property owners that we are serious about affordable housing, and we don’t believe that stopping construction citywide gets affordable housing,” Woodinville Mayor Mike Millman said of the pivot toward interim zoning in a conversation with The Urbanist. “We are going to get, I believe, to some type of mix of a carrot and a stick approach, like you want to develop here, here’s the mandatory [requirement], and if you want to take advantage of the MFTE benefit, we can do that.”

During the council’s discussion last week, Best-Campbell, who made the original motion on March 18 to consider a moratorium, brought up the idea that an initial 10% number could be too low.

“What concerns me most is: how low are we going to go in the interim? Are we going to go too low, that we give away a lot and don’t get much in return, all because we’re not willing to wait for what’s coming in the fall,” Best-Campbell said. “If we’re going to do something minimal? Okay, fine, let’s do something minimal. What matters to me is that we get something down that actually works, that gets some affordability started.”

Cities around the region that have implemented affordability mandates — also known as inclusionary zoning programs — have generally done so at the same time that they’ve created significant housing capacity through upzones. And most jurisdictions spend a considerable amount of time trying to calibrate its requirements. Redmond, which was cited in Woodinville as a positive example, has seen some success with its 10% mandate, but decided to increase that mandate to 12.5% in its key Overlake growth center last year at the same time that it added more housing capacity, including some highrise zoning.

Woodinville did not start to seriously explore implementing an affordable housing mandate until late into the process for updating its Comprehensive Plan, which has still not been fully adopted by the city council. With the council throwing out a number of 10 units as a minimum to trigger the requirement, it doesn’t look like any actual projects on the horizon are set to fall under that requirement, illustrating the fact that the move is more about signaling support for affordable housing rather than actually creating any.

“As far as any new projects over 10 units, there is nothing [that’s] currently been proposed,” Woodinville’s Development Services Director Robert Grumbach said at the meeting. “You do have discussions about the Green Partners project, but they’re still in the very early stages. Building permits for that aren’t going to be here, probably, for quite a while still.”

As cities regionwide grapple with an anticipated development downturn as high interest rates converge with new tariffs on construction materials, Woodinville is poised to quickly implement a new barrier that risks being the nail in the coffin, stopping homebuilding dead in its tracks as projects fail to pencil out as financially feasible.

“Let’s come up with a good number that we can be happy with, because I don’t want to just give things away to developers,” Best-Campbell said.

The post Woodinville Scrambles to Implement Affordability Mandate Downtown first appeared on The Urbanist.

Once the 2 Line extends across Lake Washington to Seattle, which Sound Transit hopes to achieve by the end of 2025, riders in Wilburton will be able to get to Downtown Seattle within 25 minutes and to Downtown Redmond within 15 minutes, and Bellevue wants to prime the area for growth. A Wilburton boom is a key element of the city’s newly adopted Comprehensive Plan, which outlined a vision for creating capacity for nearly 15,000 new homes in the area, with the highest buildings focused between I-405 and the Eastrail corridor to the east.

But now the task is getting Bellevue’s land use code to foster that development, rather than stifle it. For months, Bellevue’s planning commission has been considering a code update that will set the stage for Wilburton’s redevelopment, increasing zoning capacity while at the same time setting requirements that will create badly needed pedestrian and bike infrastructure in the area. In mid-March, the commission unanimously voted to approve a suite of recommendations and send it to the Bellevue Council, which is expected to take it up later this spring.

“Wilburton presents Bellevue, in my perspective, the next major opportunity to replicate the vision of the Spring District, and the rezone would mark just such a pivotal moment in creating thousands of transit-oriented homes that we all know will be alongside vibrant public amenities and trails,” Patience Malaba, Executive Director of the Housing Development Consortium, told The Urbanist.

Malaba is one of the co-chairs of the Eastside Housing Roundtable, a broad array of organizations that have been working behind the scenes to come together on a set of aligned recommendations that will lead to housing growth in Wilburton. Among them: the Bellevue Chamber of Commerce, Amazon, Microsoft, Seattle King County Realtors, Habitat for Humanity, and Plymouth Housing.

“You might think that there’s some strange bedfellows in the roundtable group, but actually, no, most of the folks there are building housing, whether that’s affordable housing or market-rate housing,” Holly Golden, a land use attorney with Hillis Clark Martin & Peterson and a member of the Eastside Housing Roundtable steering committee, told the commission at a hearing earlier this year. “There’s a shared fundamental belief that we should be creating an abundance of housing to solve an affordability crisis, and we need more housing.”

One of the core issues in Wilburton has been whether to pursue an inclusionary zoning (IZ) policy that would require developers to include affordable units in new buildings, or pay a fee that would allow construction of affordable units elsewhere. IZ policies are in place in nearby cities, including Seattle, Redmond, and Kirkland, but not in Bellevue — though the city did dabble in the past.

In 1991, Bellevue was one of the first cities in the region to implement an IZ program, requiring all multifamily development with more than 10 units to set aside at least 10% of units for households making 80% of King County’s area median income (AMI). The results of the program were seen as lackluster, with fewer than 300 units of affordable apartments and condos built over the first five years of the program. In 1996, the program was converted to an incentive-based system, and Bellevue leaders have been reluctant to pursue a similar program ever since.

Now Bellevue is poised to give the idea another go in Wilburton, a move that is aligned with the King County Affordable Housing Committee’s recommendations on how Bellevue should implement its Comprehensive Plan to meet broader regional goals. “If Bellevue increases residential development before or without adopting an inclusionary housing policy, market rate development could occur, representing a significant missed opportunity to create affordable housing units,” the committee wrote to the City last summer.

When Bellevue walked away from its IZ program in the 1990s, the City did not replace the developer mandate with a program directly raising revenue to build affordable housing. Seattle has had a housing levy since 1986, which has raised hundreds of millions since and contributed to the creation or preservation of more than 12,000 affordable homes currently housing an estimated 16,000 people. Bellevue has not gone that route. Even when a funding mechanism dropped in its lap via state legislation, Bellevue opted to go it alone rather than partner with the County on a more ambitious program, which has delayed investments.

“From the start, we’ve seen it as a really necessary part of this whole thing to make sure that we see affordable housing in Wilburton as a critical asset for the success of the neighborhood,” HDC’s Brady Nordstrom told the planning commission. “Community doesn’t exist without that housing and without different ranges and sets of income levels.”

And while any IZ program implemented in Wilburton could serve as a precedent for the rest of the city, unique dynamics have been driving the conversation around what exactly it would look like here. Wilburton’s large blocks, which hinder pedestrian and bike mobility, are going to be broken up as development occurs and the proposed code amendment will lay out standards for those new connections. Because that new infrastructure will be both paid for by developers and ultimately subtract from the amount of space available for both housing, retail, and office space, any affordability mandates added on top will have to take those additional requirements into account.

In the end, the planning commission endorsed an affordable housing mandate of 10% of units affordable to households making 80% of the county’s median income. That 80% AMI level is currently around $90,000 for a family of two. While the ratio matches the requirement imposed in the 1990s, significantly more development capacity will be unlocked in Wilburton. The policy would provide an option for developers to pay a fee that allows the construction of those units off-site, making the program more adaptable. Additionally, a catalyst program will offer the first developers ready to come into Wilburton a discount on the affordable housing mandates.

“It’s fundamentally important to get the calibration right,” Malaba said. “It’s fundamentally setting the goal of affordability and overlooking maybe sustainability instead of housing first, but bringing a balance to both, given that the city has goals on both ends.”

The draft code includes several brand new street connections that would break up Wilburton’s superblocks, a required condition of redevelopment. The exact configuration of these brand new streets has been hotly contested, but the recommendation approved by the planning commission includes a requirement to set aside 67 feet of space, to make way for two 10-foot travel lanes, two eight-foot parking lanes, 22 full feet of curb and amenity zones, and two 10-foot sidewalks. Alternatives put forward but not recommended including shrinking the sidewalks to six feet, which pedestrian advocates view as absurd given the amount of space provided to cars, and eliminating the requirements for on-street parking.

The code also includes requirements for any optional internal street connections beyond those included on the map. More midblock connections would provide big gains for mobility, but making the requirements too onerous could discourage their creation. In the end, the recommendation includes eight foot sidewalks, a reduction from the originally proposed ten, with no on-street parking.

As for off-street parking, originally Bellevue planning staff recommended that all mandates for developers to include a certain number of parking stalls be fully dropped in Wilburton, in alignment with the vision for a multimodal neighborhood.

“With several light rail stations within a 10-minute walk from points within the neighborhood, as well as Eastrail, a major regional trail running directly through the center of the neighborhood, Wilburton finds itself at the epicenter of new transportation opportunities for the region,” a staff report from last March noted. “Taking advantage of this unique opportunity for innovative strategies, and acknowledging the environmental and safety impacts vehicles impose, staff are recommending that parking not be required for new development in Wilburton.”

But in a testament to how far Bellevue still has to go in truly embracing best practices around urban density, that recommendation did not make it to the end of the planning commission’s process. In the end, a 75% reduction in existing parking mandates within the Wilburton area moved forward instead, a move that could still require a significant number of off-street parking in new development that is intended to be transit-oriented, adding housing costs that get passed onto future tenants.

The Urbanist has detailed the self-defeating nature of Bellevue’s intense parking requirements before, and while that trend looks poised to continue in Wilburton, the city at least appears to be inching in the right direction. But ultimately, any parking mandates are likely to cut against the city’s own goals, and certainly won’t help Bellevue’s reputation as a fully car-focused city. (A statewide parking reform bill could also prove to be a big help here, exempting smaller commercial spaces along with affordable housing.)

While the planning commission has officially made its recommendation, debate over all of these elements will almost certainly continue up until a final council vote. And while all of these components work together and determine whether projects will truly be able to pencil, the core of the package — the affordability mandate — seems to be firmly set in place at this point.

“As we move into this affordable housing era, where we’re talking about putting a tax of $10,000 per unit on a housing unit, we really need to find ways to reduce the cost of producing the housing and achieving the density in Wilburton,” developer and former Bellevue Councilmember Kevin Wallace told the commission.

But if Bellevue is able to get that balance right, the dividends could be huge. Now it falls to the Bellevue Council to decide whether to get on board.

“This is, in my mind, a once-in-a-generation opportunity for them to move forward inclusive housing growth in Bellevue,” Malaba said.

The post Bellevue Primes Wilburton for a Potential Urban Transformation first appeared on The Urbanist.

Getting a transit-oriented development (TOD) bill across the finish line has been touted as a central strategy to increase housing affordability in Washington, alongside policies like 2023’s middle housing law. But the fact that a bill wasn’t able to pass in an earlier year comes with a cost, in terms of timing.

For most cities in the state that are part of a high capacity transit network — including everywhere Sound Transit operates — the bill would not go to into effect until the end of the decade, thanks to the state-imposed timelines for major updates to local comprehensive plans. Vancouver and Spokane, the only cities outside central Puget Sound with bus rapid transit systems, would be required to implement the bill first, in 2026, and essentially pilot some of the bill’s provisions.

In a conversation with The Urbanist before the bill was introduced, Rep. Reed framed the path to get to this point as less about tweaking policy and more about getting legislators on the same page.

“We’ve been working on this bill for several years, with a lot of stakeholders and the policies within it, I think, are very well baked at this point,” Reed said. “People really understand what’s in the bill, and a lot of it is sort of helping members get their arms around what’s in the bill, because it is quite a long and complex bill, especially if you’re not working in the housing space all the time.”

When fully implemented in Puget Sound, areas around Sound Transit light rail stations, Sounder commuter rail stations, and Seattle Streetcar stops would be required to allow larger apartment buildings, with areas around King County Metro RapidRide, Community Transit Swift, and Sound Transit Stride stations also required to upzone but not as dramatically. Public facilities and critical areas would be exempted, but that development capacity would have to be made up elsewhere within the station area.

Under the bill, the requirement to allow density is determined by a measurement known as floor area ratio (FAR), which is how much floor space a building can take up on a lot. The higher the FAR, the more development is allowed. A one-story building taking up an entire lot has a FAR of 1, and a four story building taking up exactly half of its lot has a FAR of 2.

Cities would have to allow buildings with an average FAR of 3.5 within the entire half-mile zone around rail stops, a requirement that would likely lead to four to six story apartment buildings given the current economics of building construction. Cities could allow more density closer to the train station and less slightly further away, but the total would have to average out to 3.5 FAR.

Near bus rapid transit stops, buildings with an average of 2.5 FAR would have to be allowed — but a city can exempt 25% of those bus rapid transit stops, in which case an FAR of 3.0 would have to be allowed. The definition of BRT in the bill is tied not to the frequency of the line, but the its infrastructure, including “elevated platforms or enhanced stations, off-board fare collection, dedicated lanes, busways, or transit signal priority.”

The bill’s most controversial provision is a mandate for developers to set aside a certain number of units as income-restricted affordable housing, a policy known as inclusionary zoning (IZ) that many local cities around the state have already adopted. At least 10% of units have to be made available to people making 60% of a county’s median income — currently just over $72,000 in King County for a family of two — or at least 20% of units made available as “workforce housing”, defined as a household making 80% of the county’s median income.

An affordability mandate was not included in the 2023 transit-oriented development bill, sponsored by Sen. Marko Liias (D-21st, Edmonds) and approved by the Senate in an overwhelming 40-8 vote. Even with the departure of some of the Senate’s more moderate members after last fall’s election, the mandate is likely to remain a major sticking point on the bill this year.

Inclusionary zoning programs have been coming under increasing scrutiny nationwide in recent years, as they’ve become more popular with cities trying to find ways to incentivize affordable housing. While modest affordability mandates in high-demand locations can bring subsidized housing units along with significant amounts of new market-rate housing, if the mandate is set too high relative to demand for a specific housing market, they can stifle development.

“One of IZ’s fundamental shortcomings is that it does not address—and likely exacerbates—the housing scarcity that drives higher rents and home prices,” noted a 2024 paper by Shane Phillips, at the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies, looking at the potential impact of different affordability mandates on the housing market in Los Angeles. “It improves housing affordability for a few at the risk of worsening affordability for many, and it taxes precisely the activity needed to ameliorate the housing shortage and bring down rents: development.”

But Reed sees the removal of an affordability mandate from the bill as a non-starter.

“People, [including] some of the folks in the developer community, seem very anchored on this idea that I think is fantastical, that there is a realistic opportunity to pass a TOD bill with no affordability requirements, which, not only do I think it’s fantastical — no one has introduced that bill in the last two plus years,” Reed said.

“I’ve been happy in the background, asking, dare I say begging, the developer community to come to the table and talk about how we could do funded affordability and what that would look like for them, and what levers we could adjust to dial affordability to a workable level, to provide other offsets to the cost of adding affordability to projects,” Reed said. “And frankly, I just haven’t gotten any response. No one’s been wanting to come to the negotiating table. No one’s been wanting to talk about it.”

While HB 1491 is intended to ensure that cities are maximizing the area around their high-capacity transit stops, many of the cities covered by the bill have already moved to densify those areas and in many cases are going further than the requirements of the bill. In places where existing allowed allowed density meets or exceeds the requirements spelled out in the bill, the affordability mandate would not apply, keeping it from interfering with more ambitious local policies already in place. In Seattle, where the Mandatory Housing Affordability (MHA) IZ program is already in place and requiring affordability of different levels across the city, those policies would also be able to stay in place as pre-existing, but cities could not add new IZ programs with a lower affordability mandate.

Senator Yasmin Trudeau (D-27th, Tacoma), who sponsored the Senate counterpart to Reed’s 2024 TOD bill, told The Urbanist that she’s not sure that the amount of effort that it would take to get this policy across the finish line this year is worth it, given the level of disagreement in the legislature around the affordability mandate. “For me, the issue is, what are we giving back to our constituents to say, we hear you, and we understand that housing affordability is a really big deal,” she said. “It’s just two ends of the spectrum that just keep butting into each other, and no one wants to have that conversation.”

Trudeau pointed to Shoreline, which has an inclusionary zoning policy in place, but also provides an incentive to developers that offsets the cost of the mandate, via the state’s Multifamily Tax Exemption (MFTE) program.

“If developers want to work with locals to unlock development capacity, there’s already local governments that are requiring affordability, like Shoreline,” Trudeau said. “I don’t want to spin my wheels mandating something that isn’t going to come into effect for five years, and that we’re not really prepared to do with the level of attention that I think is important to our people.”

Senator Jesse Salomon (D-32nd), a former member of the Shoreline City Council, also used that city as an example of affordability mandates needing to be fine-tuned for local conditions, in contrast with blanket standards that would apply everywhere in the state. “Once we got it right we saw a lot of development [in Shoreline],” he said. “You can put on paper whatever the hell you want, but if it doesn’t translate into real units, you didn’t accomplish anything. So I’m afraid that this conversation is stuck in an ideological component, not a technical component.”

The bill’s delayed implementation in central Puget Sound is also another reason why lawmakers may decide not to act this year, but there Reed also sees a potential silver lining.

“There will still be an opportunity to update the bill. There will still be time for cities to adapt,” Reed said. “And I think in a lot of ways it’s helpful if the state passes the bill in advance, because we do hear from cities how challenging it is to be working towards a certain framework with your Comprehensive Plan, and then to find out, ‘Oh, well, now there’s a new state law that we didn’t take into account a year ago when we started this process’.”

At first glance, Democrats in the House and Senate appear to be more united on this issue than ever. But time will tell whether that will translate to this complicated and substantive policy finally getting across the finish line, or whether things are more fractured on this issue than they initially appear.

The post Washington Legislature Sets it Sights on Transit-Oriented Development…Again first appeared on The Urbanist.

The Mercer Island City Council unanimously approved a motion this week to modestly expand housing capacity in its Town Center neighborhood south of I-90, close to Sound Transit’s 2 Line light rail station, set to open in late 2025 or early 2026. Under the proposal, properties on the north end of the neighborhood, close to the freeway, would be able to rise to seven stories compared to the five-floor height limit today, and properties further south would be able to rise to five stories.

At the same time, the Council also approved a directive to increase restrictions on developers that could result in even less housing built in Town Center in the coming years. A high housing affordability requirement on new housing may sound helpful in theory, but if it deems construction financially infeasible, no new housing would result, affordable or otherwise. That would be par for the course since Town Center hasn’t seen a new building permitted since 2014.

The impetus for Mercer Island’s proposal isn’t necessarily a desire to create more housing opportunities close to regional transit investments, but rather to comply with state law, namely the housing requirements in House Bill 1220. HB 1220 is a 2021 law that updated the state’s Growth Management Act to require cities to align anticipated future housing needs with the expected income levels of future residents, and rezone accordingly.

With lower-income residents priced out of detached single-family or even missing middle housing types, such as backyard cottages or duplexes, only the option to construct multifamily housing aligns with those expected residents. The average Mercer Island single family home is valued at $2.3 million, according to Zillow estimates.

Across the state, cities large and small are grappling with how to implement HB 1220, as it represents a brand new way to look at local housing growth targets. It doesn’t allow municipalities to plan for growth using capacity that exists on paper but remains highly unlikely to result in housing that’s affordable to most Puget Sound residents. In Mercer Island, the law has resulted in significant frustration given an across-the-board reluctance to look at rezoning lower density residential areas, including those just as close to light rail as some areas of Town Center.

The 20-year housing target that Mercer Island has to incorporate into the update of its Comprehensive Plan, due by the end of 2024, is 1,239 dwelling units. While the city as a whole has capacity to add over 1,400 homes without any zoning changes, much of that capacity exists in its single-family zones, which make up 83.4% of Mercer Island’s residential land. And of those 1,239 homes that the city needs to plan for, nearly 60% are expected to house people making 50% of King County’s area median income or below — around $74,000 per year.

Guidance from the state’s Department of Commerce has been to correlate affordability levels with density, with the bottom line being that the city needs to create more multifamily capacity — at least 143 units in Mercer Island’s case.

Earlier this year, the city briefly explored the idea of creating new multifamily housing capacity in south Mercer Island, near a commercial hub that includes a QFC grocery store. However, that proposal was met with vociferous opposition from Mercer Island residents, who inundated the city council with emails pushing back on the idea.

Council also explored whether to convert a commercial-only zone along I-90 but shied away from that as well. This week, they considered whether to upzone the entire Town Center area by one story — labelled option A — but ultimately picked option B that concentrates the new capacity near I-90, raising the upper height limit on several blocks to seven stories.

Mercer Island hasn’t exactly been in a rush to see its Town Center develop. In 2020, city council imposed a development moratorium on the southeast quadrant of the neighborhood, citing concerns around loss of retail space, and did not lift that moratorium until late into 2022.

The entire Town Center had also been under a moratorium from February 2015 to June 2016, which was in response to “Save Our Suburb” backlash against a mixed-use apartment proposal across from Metropolitan Market. That project is finally breaking ground a decade later under a different developer, albeit with fewer homes planned. Nonetheless, those 159 new apartments mark one of only a handful of new apartment buildings in a mostly lost decade for Town Center, leading up to light rail’s arrival.

The extra capacity Mercer Island is contemplating now could potentially add a few extra hundred homes near some of the fastest planned transit connections to both Seattle and the Eastside, but the council added a big caveat. Council also approved a motion that will lead to an increase in the mandated number of affordable units in new buildings, raising the requirement from 10% to 15%. Those 15% of units would have to be affordable to residents making 50% of the county’s area median income (AMI) or below — a requirement that would mean Mercer Island has one of the most stringent affordable housing mandates in the region.

While buildings two stories or less would remain exempt from that requirement, it would cover the entire Town Center area, even where height limits aren’t being increased.

Affordability mandates, through so-called “inclusionary zoning” programs, are becoming more popular around the country as a way to create subsidized affordable units without raising taxes more broadly. Seattle’s Mandatory Housing Affordability (MHA) requires a range of anywhere from 5% to 10.6%, depending on the specific parcel, with cities like Shoreline and Redmond having 10% baseline requirements. While some cities do have percentage requirements at 15% or above, those requirements are almost all paired with a higher income cap than the 50% of area median income that Mercer Island is proposing. In Seattle, the affordability requirements were tied to greater zoning capacity, offsetting their cost, at least partially.

For units being built to own and not rent, Mercer Island would require 15% of units be available to people making 80% of the area median income — or around $118,000 per year and below.

In Tuesday’s meeting, Mercer Island city staff were asked about the process to develop the 15% number. Jeff Thomas, Mercer Island’s Community Planning & Development Director, said that they had been in conversations with A Regional Coalition for Housing (ARCH), an organization that works to create affordable housing on the Eastside in partnership with a broad coalition of Eastside cities that contribute annual funding.

“What we found in having ARCH’s consultant work with Mercer Island here recently, is that […] even with interest rates where they’re at currently, in the process of falling it looks like, 15% does come pretty close to a standalone feasibility on a seven-story project on Mercer Island. With the lesser stories, so like going from the four to the five, that was also part of option B, [it’s] not quite there just yet, with interest rates, in terms of feasibility at the 15% level.”

Thomas added that additional strategies outlined in Mercer Island’s draft Comp Plan, like streamlined design review, lower parking requirements, or waived permit fees for affordable units, could go even further toward making projects pencil, but it’s not clear when exactly the city would get around to advancing those ideas.

Mercer Island Mayor Salim Nice touted the potential for outside funding sources to fill the gap when it comes to feasibility, focusing specifically on units-to-own.

“I have heard and had discussions with other mayors in the region that with subsidies and and funding through Microsoft and through Amazon’s housing funds, that there is development contemplated at 100%, 80% AMI units. And so there are going to be some things in the marketplace that are not free market principles, but do have other forces behind them that can help us get to the 80% AMI units.”

Not mentioned was city-provided funding: Mercer Island’s contributions to the ARCH housing trust fund in 2024 totaled just $76,611, or 0.2% of the City’s general fund budget.

Nice has been a familiar figure at state legislative hearings in recent years, often advocating against bills increasing minimum residential density like House Bill 2160, which would have required Mercer Island to permit larger apartment buildings within a quarter-mile of its light rail station. HB 2160 didn’t make it across the finish line in 2024, but if it had passed, Mercer Island likely wouldn’t have had any trouble complying with HB 1220 — an analysis conducted by the land use advocacy group Futurewise showing that compliance with the bill would unlock 25.5 million square feet of development capacity in Mercer Island, all of it outside the existing Town Center area where zoning already exceeds the baseline requirements of the bill.

Meanwhile, city leaders have hosted little discussion of building more housing to alleviate the region’s housing shortage and improve outcomes for working class residents. With Mercer Island’s primary consideration apparently a desire to appear compliant with state law, Nice was already focused on 2029, when King County cities are evaluated on their HB 1220 performance.

“At the five-year check in, being able to go in there with this kind of capacity and with these types of targets into our bonus incentives, I think it gives us good ground to say that we did try,” Nice said. “We’re not going to want to argue that we didn’t achieve our goals because there were points in time in the five-year period that we didn’t have the capacity that was required.”

While other regional leaders are focused on trying to move the needle when it comes to housing affordability and homelessness, Mercer Island leaders remain deadset on doing the bare minimum needed to comply with state housing law. That effort may find success under the current growth target framework, but may not survive additional changes in state law that could be coming down the pike.

The post Mercer Island Plans to Densify Town Center… With a Big Catch first appeared on The Urbanist.

In its modern form, however, zoning is thought to have begun in Germany in the 1870s, though the American system diverged within a few decades. As Sonia Hirt, professor of landscape architecture and planning at Georgia University, and author of Zoned in the USA says, zoning in the United States had developed into an “autonomous” and separate system by the 1930s.

In many early cases, zoning was used to separate the functions of industrial, commercial, and residential living. In addition, it was often used as a tool to enforce class and racial separation. From the beginning, residential zoning tended to favor the building of single-family homes, which exacerbated racial and class divides, and in many cases prevented access to good school districts and healthy neighborhoods for those on the outside. 

Approaches to zoning have changed significantly over the past 150 years, with zoning codes expanding inordinately, driven in part by “not in my backyard” (NIMBY) homeowner activism. In some places, opponents of NIMBYism, who sometimes call themselves YIMBYs, have won policy changes to redress the problematic effects zoning has had.

What is Zoning?

Zoning is a way of determining the use of land, or parameters of buildings in urban space. Zoning can be based around the function of a development, such as residential, commercial, or industrial. This use can be single-use or mixed-use. For instance, a mixed-use zone could include apartment buildings and low-impact commercial enterprises, such as restaurants, small shops, cafes, and public services such as hospitals and schools.

Zoning can also be based around form, such as a limit on the height of buildings, or a zone that requires a certain level of density. Other types of zoning may be based around the effects of a development, and how it will contribute to the existing area, or zoning based on incentives. One example of this could be a developer who is allowed to build an apartment block, but only if they include public housing, a community center, and a park as part of the development.

Opponents often refer to restrictive zoning as exclusionary zoning. For example, zoning for only single-family housing is exclusionary zoning, as it increases housing prices and may shut out lower-income families from the area (who could, for instance, afford an apartment, but not a single-family home). 

On the other hand, inclusionary zoning intends to provide affordable housing as part of apartment developments and multi-family dwellings. In its mandatory form, inclusionary zoning requires that builders provide a set percentage of affordable housing. Set the percentage too high, and some housing advocates would argue inclusionary zoning has the opposite effect by making new housing infeasible to build. Inclusionary zoning may create more opportunities for nonprofit homebuilders.

The History of Zoning in the United States

Early zoning focused on separation of land uses, which was in some instances fine-tuned to separate industries within industrial zones. William Fischel, former professor of economics at Dartmouth College and author of Zoning Rules! says that many early zoning codes focused on separating land based on industry, such as keeping meat-packing districts distinct from clothing districts. In part, the intention was also to reduce congestion in cities, first keeping workers close to their own industries, and later, keeping residential areas free from large trucks and buses.

This continued until the late 1920s, when the Standardized State Zoning Enabling Act came into force, followed by the Standard City Planning Enabling Act. These two pieces of legislation provided a standard regulation that was intended for states to follow, and guided the development of zoning regulation over the next decades.

Alongside the more practical developments, many early zoning codes were also used in pursuit of racial and class segregation. In Buchanan, a famous case in 1917, a White man (Buchanan) had sold a house to Warley, a Black man. In Louisville, where they lived, an ordinance didn’t allow Black people to live on a block where the majority of existing residents were White, and vice versa. This type of ordinance was common throughout many Southern states at that time. The Buchanan case went to court, as Warley cited the ordinance as a reason why he couldn’t complete the purchase of the house. The court ultimately struck down the ordinance as unconstitutional.

Despite this ruling against direct racial segregation, cities did not pursue integration, and instead post-Buchanan zoning codes became one of the primary means to enforce segregation. Unlike the struck-down ordinances, zoning does not explicitly mention race. Nonetheless, Harland Bartholomew, the Saint Louis urban planner who wrote or consulted on hundreds of zoning plans in cities across North America, admitted the intent of his zoning plans was to seek racial and economic segregation. “According to Bartholomew, a St. Louis zoning goal was to ‘preserv[e] the more desirable residential neighborhoods,’ and to prevent movement into ‘finer residential districts … by colored people,’” legal historian Richard Rothstein writes. 

In 1919, Frederick Law Olmsted, a landscape architect and planner, stated in the 11th National Congress on City Planning that “apartment houses and multi-family houses should be assigned to specified districts, and single family houses should be in districts which have adequate protection against apartment houses.” This was to prevent the intermingling of people who lived in each type of dwelling, which typically aligned with class and race. According to Strong Towns, this was also considered to be a “moral” issue, with the character of the “American home” at stake, threatened by apartments.

At a high level, Fischel explains that zoning in the United States has had three main phases. At first, zoning was a tool that was very pro-developer. Developers were able to build relatively freely, without large amounts of pushback from homeowners or the public. Homes also retained relatively stable prices during this time.

In the second phase starting in the 1960s and 1970s NIMBYism arose much more strongly, coupled with the environmental movement. The NIMBY movement was characterized by community resistance to a large swathe of potential developments. The 1970s were also the time of the great inflation, with prices for houses rising rapidly. 

Fischel also says that when people have such a large amount of money in one particular asset, they become protective of that asset. Unlike a diversified stock portfolio, a house is an extremely concentrated investment. The investment of homeowners in their properties led to increased political involvement (what Fischel calls the “Homevoter Hypothesis”) and an influence on zoning codes and how they were used. This investment of homeowners can have positive effects, such as preserving or improving the neighborhood in ways that are considered to be desirable, as this increases the property value. 

However, the NIMBY movement also led to a resistance to any “undesirable” developments or encroachments on the neighborhood. This resistance included pushback against low-income housing, people from lower-socioeconomic groups, and racial discrimination, much like the segregationist policies of decades before. In a 1998 article, Raphaël Fischler explains that because “proximity to people of a lower social status diminished the market value of property, the stability of prices depended on the preservation of safe distances between socioeconomic racial groups.”

In the third phase, which is arising now, Fischel believes that the YIMBY movement has begun to shape the discourse around zoning and housing with “responsible communities, who realize ‘Uh oh, what were we thinking?’ … This sensible tool has gotten out of hand and is causing a lot of social problems.” Fishel says that the YIMBY movement is “emblematic” of larger societal shifts “… maybe it will be an important change.”

Zoning approaches are certainly in need of many adjustments. Samuel Stein, author of Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State, explains that zoning at this point has become a tool that is overused by cities, with the zoning code in New York City ballooning “from a hundred pages to several thousand.” 

Stein explains that “we try to do more and more with zoning, because other means are less available. Zoning was not really supposed to be a tool of affordable housing production, for example, but because so many better ways of achieving affordability are off-limits to cities. This is either because the money isn’t there, or because there are preemptive laws that prevent them from doing things. So, they do it through zoning instead.”

Why Zoning Matters

So why does all of this matter? And are the old discriminatory approaches of zoning simply in the past? 

Using zoning as a tool to govern land use has shaped the urban landscape in a number of ways, many of which have both positive and negative consequences. Separating functions of land provides increased health benefits (i.e. being further away from a large steel factory), but in the absence of good public transport access, can increase sprawl and a reliance on cars. 

In addition, the single-family home is now culturally embedded in the idea of the American dream, which creates resistance to change. Sonia Hirt says that “there is a very deep American attachment that goes back to the time of William Penn, to the idea of living a private life.” The connection between single-family homes and the idea of a “private life” is clear. 

Nonetheless, Hirt explains that when it comes to planning and zoning, we cannot blame the issue only on culture. It’s “more complicated than this,” she says. “I don’t think we can just blame it on the people and be angry about it.”

Richard Kahlenberg, author of Excluded, agrees, saying that the cultural connection to the single-family home is there. However, he notes, “No one is saying that people who own a single-family home have to change and have to build a duplex. It’s just that they can’t prevent all their neighbors, who might choose to do that, from doing so.”

Aside from finger-pointing games, it is clear that zoning matters: its use as a racial and class discrimination tool has had a large number of effects that cannot be described as “in the past”. Many effects are generational, with consequences that continue to ripple out. In addition, exclusionary zoning is still present today, with zoning for single-family homes still predominating. A New York Times report found that in many neighborhoods and cities across the US, around 85% of the urban space is zoned for single-family housing. 

Interestingly, one study that examined the distribution of prohibitive zoning laws in California, found the most prohibitive zoning in areas that lean predominantly liberal. In addition, as noted by Kahlenberg in a piece written for The Atlantic in 2023, Jenny Schuetz’s work finds that “overly restrictive zoning is most prevalent and problematic along the West Coast and the Northeast corridor from Washington D.C. to Boston.” These areas — like most big U.S. cities — are predominantly run by Democrats. 

Omar Wasow, an assistant professor of politics at Princeton University said in a CNN interview that “There are people in the town of Princeton who will have a Black Lives Matter sign on their front lawn and a sign saying ‘We love our Muslim neighbors,’ but oppose changing zoning policies that say you have to have an acre and a half per house”. Kahlenberg explains that some of this has less to do with issues of race, and rather discrimination based on class: as Fareed Zakaria puts it, “the great sin of the modern left is elitism.”  

With housing prices prohibitively high in many places, and significant resistance to change even in apparently progressive communities, urbanists, communities, and city governments are all looking for answers.

Looking ahead to solutions

Zoning plays a complex role in the history of the United States, including as a vital aspect of enforcing racial and class segregation in many cities. It has also contributed to a swathe of single-family homes across the country, and prohibitively expensive housing for many people. The solutions to this issue have been somewhat elusive, although many are working on it. Some of the answers appear to be clear, but require consistent action at numerous governance levels.

In Part II of Zoning 101, we will take a look at solutions to the housing shortage that restrictive zoning policy has promoted. We’ll also go through a few examples of cities and how they are dealing with zoning issues.

The post Urbanism 101: Zoning’s History and Role in the Housing Crisis first appeared on The Urbanist.

Humans are multiplying like rabbits in the Issaquah Valley, and frankly, Issaquah Councilmember Tola Marts has had enough. He’s ready to tamp down the population, and for Issaquah that means keeping restrictive fees on homebuilders in place, forcing humans to seek refuge in other corners of the region.

As his colleagues weighed the pros and cons of a pilot program proposing a minor adjustment to homebuilder fees and incentives in order to encourage development in Central Issaquah at a council meeting on Monday, Marts boldly suggested they were wasting their time.

“I want to gently poke at the underlying narrative that there’s anything wrong that we have to fix here,” Marts said. “So, we had so much development in 2016, we put a moratorium in place. And we had a moratorium in place for two years because housing was growing like rabbits in our valley.”

As he got warmed up in his degrowth manifesto, Marts also shared his frustration with statewide missing middle housing reforms spearheaded by Olympia Representative Jessica Bateman.

“And thanks to our friends in Olympia, we’ve thrown open the barn door and now people can build all sorts of condos and duplexes up on the hillsides,” Marts said. “So we’ll get even more market rate that we will be unable to control. So I don’t want more market rate, but I’m willing to put up with more market rate, and we can get the workforce housing that we so desperately need.”

Marts blamed newer Issaquah residents for traffic congestion and said the City was “choking” on growth and had not built sufficient infrastructure to handle it.

“I think what’s critical to know here is that we — over the last 20 years — have built a radical amount of market-rate housing in this town,” Marts said. “I’m proud of what we did while we did it, but we are now choking on all the housing that we put in without the infrastructure to support that housing.”

While Marts posited Issaquah was growing much too fast, City figures show housing growth had tanked in Central Issaquah, the city’s designated regional growth center, after the city implemented strict inclusionary zoning requirements, which at 12.5% were set significantly higher than even Seattle’s equivalent: the Mandatory Housing Affordability program.

Central Issaquah’s inclusionary zoning requirements mean that if a developer built a 200-unit apartment building, 25 units would need to be set aside as affordable at 60% area median income. At reduced rents, the homebuilder ends up operating the affordable units at a loss, but the hope is the other units are profitable enough to make the whole enterprise worthwhile. However, given the added costs and the difficulty convincing banks and investors to invest in such an environment, most builders focused their energies on other cities.

Issaquah added just over 1,600 homes citywide from 2017 to 2022, but most of them were not in Central Issaquah which local leaders had intended to be the city’s growth center. Instead it has been the sprawl-ier Issaquah Highlands that has continued to be a focal point for growth.

Nonetheless, it was the promise of robust growth in Central Issaquah that helped then-Mayor Fred Butler convince the Sound Transit board to add a light rail line with two stations in Issaquah and a direct link to downtown Bellevue. At the time, Kirkland was viewed as resistant to growth and Issaquah as embracing it. Thus Kirkland only got one station at the very edge of town, compared to Issaquah’s winning two stations, one near its city center.

Issaquah was growing quickly in the lead up to the Sound Transit 3 package assemblage and voter approval in 2016. But in September 2016, Issaquah passed a development moratorium — officially in the name of slowing suburban style-growth and shifting to a more urban character via new design standards. Issaquah lifted the citywide moratorium in 2017, but extended it in Central Issaquah to continue tinkering with affordability requirements and other standards. Even after the city council lifted two-year moratorium in Central Issaquah, few projects materialized, which builders have attributed to the inclusionary zoning requirements that went into place at the time.

That’s where the “Pioneer Program” proposal that Issaquah City staff are crafting comes into play. The idea is to ratchet down the affordability requirements a tad in hopes of enticing a few mixed-use projects in Central Issaquah. The proposal also called for a eight-year Multi-Family Tax Exemption (MFTE) to provide another incentive to build. Since inclusionary zoning requirement would tick down only a couple points to 10% at 80% of area median income, it’s a modest proposal.

However, Marts rejected the whole premise.

“So I don’t believe that residents are telling us to build more housing,” Marts said. “I believe residents are telling us we build too much market rate housing, and we didn’t recover the costs of the infrastructure associated with that market rate housing. So we have traffic and no ability to pay for things that will help manage that traffic. We built tons and tons and tons of housing in the valley already. That’s why we have low targets going forward because we blew out our numbers over the last 20 years.”

While Marts posited the usual ‘growth should pay for growth’ arguments typical of anti-housing homeowners, more anemic growth in Issaquah also robs the city of tax revenue from sources like the real estate excise tax and sales tax on builders. And of course there’s that old pledge to the rest of the region that Issaquah would build a dense urban neighborhood around its future light rail station on a line the region was invested billions of dollars in building.

While Marts assumes Issaquah residents are with him, polling shows strong support for expanding housing across the state. And many environmentalists would not agree with him that sustainability requires abandoning urban growth.

A four-term Councilmember first elected in 2009 and unopposed in his last three elections, Marts “chose to run for office to try to help his adopted community of Issaquah make the transition from being a growth community to one focusing on sustainability,” his council biography notes. (While Marts lives astride Squawk Mountain sandwiched between two massive parks and Tiger Mountain State Forest, people hoping to move to Issaquah to enjoy those amenities are just too late to the party — those pesky little rabbits.)

Marts argued it was premature to recalibrate Central Issaquah’s inclusionary program pointing to the disruption of the pandemic. However, that was misleading, since development activity has accelerated in some Puget Sound cities since the pandemic rather than slowing down. Seattle set a recent record in 2020 with more than 20,000 housing starts, as builders sought to take advantage of a streamlined online design review approval system.

Plus, housing prices show demand continues to be very strong. When Issaquah instituted its development moratorium in 2016, the city’s average single family home price was around $650,000 and the average condo sold for less than $300,000, according to Zillow estimates. Single family home prices have doubled since then, peaking at $1.4 million in 2022 and coming down slightly since then. Average condo prices peaked just shy of $550,000 during the pandemic. These price spikes are typical for the region and especially the Eastside, which has grown an increasingly exclusive enclave in recent years. People who were lucky enough to buy before the boom accrued incredible housing wealth.

No cities in the region are building enough housing to keep pace with demand, and unfortunately many are participating in a race to the bottom to see how little housing growth they can get away with. Some have gotten very sophisticated at disguising anti-housing policies in the trappings of progressive concerns, such as wanting new projects to immediately solve other ills, like traffic congestion, inadequate school funding, and the lack of affordable housing or reliable transit. Instead of an outright moratorium, loading potential housing projects up with fees and running them through a labyrinth of process will do.

Marts’ comments Monday were interesting for saying the quiet part aloud amidst the dog whistles. He sees less new housing as a virtue rather than a problem to solve.

That race to the bottom is exactly why a broad coalition of advocates came together behind Representative Bateman’s statewide missing middle housing reform. To people not lucky enough to already own a home, throwing “open the barn doors” doesn’t sound like such a bad idea.

Likewise, views seem mixed on Issaquah City Council and most of Marts’ colleague seemed open to the pioneer program to encourage more development in Central Issaquah. Contact the Issaquah City Council to let them know you want more housing in Issaquah, especially near the future light rail station.

The post Issaquah Councilmember Shares Anti-Growth Manifesto During Housing Debate first appeared on The Urbanist.