On a quiet street in Seattle’s Rainier Valley, a row of single-family homes is on its way toward transformation.
The nonprofit Cham Refugees Community plans a lively new community center for the site, a new home for festivals, classes and other gatherings. The group serves Seattle’s Cham population, descendants of the Kingdom of Champa in Southeast Asia who immigrated to the U.S. from Vietnam and Cambodia. Permits and plans for the new center are underway.
But Slayman Appadolo, a project coordinator for the group, believes his community needs more than just a gathering place. They need affordable housing.
“A lot of people have either passed or been displaced, going out further. And so there’s no point in creating a center if everyone is not in the area,” Appadolo said.
That’s why Appadolo is backing a city proposal he and other supporters say could help organizations like his build much-needed housing, although the proposal struggled to gain council support this week. The plan, if approved, would allow developers to build denser housing across the city when they partner with certain community groups and set aside affordable units, with additional benefits if they build in areas where racist housing practices once excluded people of color.
More narrowly tailored than the city’s other upzoning efforts, the proposal is meant to encourage not only new housing but also mixed-use buildings that feature community centers, child care facilities and hubs for neighborhood groups serving people who are at risk of being priced out of the city.
“This is a tool that communities need so they can navigate their own development,” said sponsor Councilmember Tammy Morales.
Cham Refugees Community has been acquiring properties slowly over the past three decades — land they likely could never afford at today’s prices, Appadolo said.
In its makeshift space, the organization has hosted language classes, vaccine clinics and popular night markets. Someday, leaders envision a larger “village” made up of the community center, affordable housing and a health clinic on-site.
Allowing larger buildings on the property “would really help a project pencil,” Appadolo said, because building more apartments generates more revenue to help pay for the development and allows room for both housing and space for the nonprofit.
But the council’s new majority appears ready to reject the idea.
A majority of the five-member land use committee voted Wednesday to reject the proposal. Councilmembers Tanya Woo, Maritza Rivera and Cathy Moore voted no, raising various concerns about affordability, process and how partnerships between nonprofit groups and private developers might work. Morales voted yes and Councilmember Dan Strauss abstained.
The proposal “builds more housing, but it does not stop gentrification or displacement,” said Woo, who voted no.
“Developers who want to do affordable housing are already doing it,” Woo said. Other developers, she said, “exist to bring profits to their investors.”
As the city debates its larger growth strategy for the coming decades, the legislation offered an early test of the new council’s vision of density and some hints at how they may approach tackling the sky-high housing costs that have already pushed scores of Seattleites out of the city.
Morales, a progressive now in the minority in City Hall, described the committee vote against her proposal as a failure to take the city’s housing shortage seriously.
“Despite the fact that everybody’s talking about the need for more affordable housing,” Morales told reporters after the vote, “when it comes down to it, there’s either no understanding of how we actually get there, or no willingness to really take action.”
After failing to gain committee support, the proposal will head to a full council vote on April 30, but appears unlikely to pass.
How density bonuses would work
The legislation would allow nonprofits and certain developers to build taller and larger buildings if they include affordable housing or spaces for “equitable development uses” such as social services, job training, arts and gathering spaces, health clinics or retail spaces. Those projects could also bypass city design review and parking regulations.
The city would allow those projects in most areas of the city that allow residential development, except downtown and high-rise zones.
For example, in areas of the city where multifamily buildings are already allowed, the program would allow buildings 10 to 15 feet, or about one story, taller than what is allowed today. In certain commercial areas where development is currently limited to 30 feet, projects qualifying under the new policy could be 55 feet tall, or about five stories.
In residential areas that are home mostly to single-family houses, buildings could not be taller than existing limits but could take up more of the property they’re built on and be closer to neighboring buildings.
Builders could unlock more density allowances if they build in areas of the city that are at high risk for displacement or where racist property covenants once excluded people of color.
Affordability debate
Opponents raised questions about whether the program would help create housing that is affordable enough.
The latest version of Morales’ proposal would require 30% of new homes in qualifying developments to be affordable for people with low to moderate incomes.
Studio and one-bedroom apartments would be priced for people making 60% of area median income, or about $57,500 for a single person. Larger rentals and homes for sale would be affordable for people making 80% of area median income, about $71,000 for a single person or $91,000 for a family of three.
Morales originally proposed allowing all affordable rentals to be priced for people at 80% of area median income, arguing that “workforce housing” was desperately needed and easier for developers to make work financially. She adjusted the affordability levels after her colleagues complained that the homes weren’t affordable enough.
“We’ve got a lot of market-rate units. We have a lot of — although still not nearly enough — units for folks at 30% [of area median income] or below. But it’s really hard to find an apartment that you can afford if you are a grocery worker,” Morales said in a late-February interview.
Projects would be exempt from the city’s other primary affordable housing program, known as Mandatory Housing Affordability, which requires developers to set aside between 5% and 11% of new homes as affordable or pay a fee to build affordable housing elsewhere.
Redevelopment under the new program would be limited in scale: The new rules would last through 2029 or until 35 projects qualified, whichever happened first.
One goal is to support nonprofit groups that want to add housing to their property, even if they’ve never developed housing before. To qualify for the extra density, builders would need to be nonprofits or public development authorities focused on certain issues (including affordable housing and fighting displacement) or private developers partnering with those groups.
The nonprofit would need to own a majority stake in the project or have a controlling role in whatever entity owns the land. The bill directs several city departments to come up with a process for determining whether organizations qualify.
Donald King, CEO of the Nehemiah Initiative who works with churches to convert their land to housing and supported the bill, said the proposal would offer nonprofits and developers “flexibility” to build new housing and encourage mixed-income communities.
“We have gotten rid of our very low-income enclaves and we don’t want to see that come back by saying we’re only going to cater to the very low-income and therefore push middle-income people out so we have a city now that would then begin to look like the very low-income and very high-income with no middle,” King said in an interview.
But some council members were skeptical, arguing that the developments allowed under the bill still wouldn’t be affordable enough.
“This bill allows for developers to partner with nonprofits to build housing in communities of color that communities of color… can’t afford to live in,” Woo said before voting against the bill Wednesday.
Strauss proposed requiring all homes in new developments to be affordable, rather than just 30%, but council members rejected that, too.
The program could help cut development costs and pair community groups with developers to build the projects those groups envision, Morales said.
Opponents suggested trying to address displacement in other ways, such as programs to help people of color hold onto homes they own or by taking up the idea as part of the city’s larger 20-year growth plan. During public comment, speakers raised concerns about trees and decried development.
Some council members raised the possibility of revisiting Morales’ idea citywide, though it’s unclear whether any of them will propose that idea as the council considers its growth plan in the coming months.
“In my opinion, a more effective approach to attaining citywide neighborhood affordability is to make the benefit of development capacity generally available to all,” said Councilmember Moore.
Appadolo, from the Cham Refugees Community, told council members after the vote that he was disappointed, particularly after two years of discussions. “What is the point in waiting when we need to build more homes for families as soon as possible?” he wrote in an email to council members.
When the legislation comes before the full nine-member council later this month, Morales could theoretically find enough votes to pass it, but the council member acknowledged Wednesday that “seems unlikely.”