An Audio Recap of The Urbanist’s ‘Future of Seattle Housing’ Panel

The Urbanist hosted a “Future of Seattle Housing” panel discussion on April 23, alongside Seattle YIMBY, at El Centro de la Raza in Beacon Hill. The panel was moderated by Doug Trumm, The Urbanist’s publisher. Listen to the recording and check out the transcript below to get a play-by-play recap.

The panelists were housing leaders in the private, non-profit, and public sectors:

• Patrick Cobb, developer, architect, and a founding partner of Stack, a firm specializing in urban infill development.
• Naishin Fu, Co-Executive Director at House Our Neighbors, a nonprofit focused on expanding social housing.
• Michael Hubner, Long Range Planning Manager at the Seattle Office of Planning Community and Development (OPCD).
• Jesse Simpson, Director of Government Relations and Policy at the Housing Development Consortium of Seattle-King County and a board member at The Urbanist.

The panel touched on a wide range of housing topics, including the basics of what a Comprehensive Plan is, how Seattle’s phased approach to approving its plan will work, and the best avenues that advocates have to improve the plan and push for more housing. Additionally, panelists dove into the economics of homebuilding and how to ensure regulations actually translate into housing built, given the considerable headwinds that builders are facing.

In particular, the discussion touched on stacked flats as a means to add more housing in formerly single family zones, and how obstacles to their economic feasibility could be overcome (check out this op-ed for more suggestions). Stacked flats also hold promise for allowing more space for both family-sized housing and ample tree cover and green space.

Transcript

The transcript was auto-generated and edited lightly for blatant errors and clarity. Apologies for the errors that made it through.

Diego Batres  00:00

Hello, everyone. Thank you for coming. For those of you who don’t know I am Diego. I’m the director of events at The Urbanist. Thank you all for coming. This event has been put together in a collaboration between the Urbanist and Seattle YIMBY. Thank you to Chris, who is manning the desk back there, for representing Seattle YIMBY and helping with the lift from getting this going a couple things before I let you all hear from the people you are here to hear from, first off, bathrooms and water to your left, down that hallway. Two, the structure of our panel tonight. The first half is going to consist of questions dictated by our wonderful moderator, Doug, who is also the publisher of The Urbanist questions that were submitted in advance. Some of these have been sort of condensed down, because there are definitely questions that we’re all asking the same thing, but sort of just slightly not worded the same. So we’ve condensed those to the thrust of the question.

So, the first half, roughly an hour is going to be of that. Then we’ll have a brief intermission. We will also, then, during that time, collect the index cards for those of you who have written a question down, and then the second half of the panel will consist of getting through as many of those as possible. Obviously, can’t promise that we can get through all of them. We are starting a little bit delayed due to the traffic I’m sure everyone experienced in some form or another.

Finally, the last thing I will say before I let you go is it would be remiss of me not to mention that we are in the middle of The Urbanist subscriber drive, spring. Subscriber drive. I love putting on these kinds of events. I think they’re really valuable. I hope you find them useful. If you find yourself feeling more informed, or have something an opinion you have challenged or generally want to support more of these kind of things. Here to point the QR codes at the front or back desk. I guess depending on how you orient the room, to leave us a little donation, it really helps get this sort of thing going and off the ground. Because what we love doing these things, they aren’t free. YIMBy is also an advocacy organization. Of course, I’m sure we’re going to hear more about how you can get involved with various activities and advocacy wings through our panelists. But also, if you just want to get involved with YIMBY sign up for their emailing list up in front. They’ll follow up with you. They also have a QR code up there for their Slack. So join that as well. That is all. If you need something during the panel, come grab me or Chris. With Chris is back there. Raise your hand, Chris, and we’ll see what we can do for you. Other than that, I’m going to hand it over to Doug.

Doug Trumm  02:47

Thanks for coming, everyone. Doug Trumm, publisher of The Urbanist, thanks to our panelists, thanks to coming on a sunny day to help all of our wonderful audience. And also thanks a ton to El Centro de la Raza for this lovely space. And I’d also love to put in the plug now is a great time to be giving to nonprofits doing work with immigrants. And I don’t have to draw a map on that one. Why that is but they could also use your support, and this time, join me in donating to them, in addition to us during our drive here, but we’re going to try to cover a lot with the comp plan. Try to break it down for folks who are just getting up to speed and trying to get into some detail. For folks who kind of feel like they have the basics, but really want to get at the issues at play.

But let’s start by introducing our panel. I’ll start down at the end.

We have Patrick Cobb. He’s a developer, architect and a founding partner of stack, which is a local architecture firm specializing in infill development, the kind of stuff that we’re going to try to promote with this plan.

Then we have Naishin Fu, who is Co-Executive Director of House Our Neighbors, which is a nonprofit focused on expanding social housing. And they are fresh off of winning the Prop 1A campaign to get a dedicated funding measure in that measure was a 26-point win, that is going to mean more than $50 million a year for social housing. So definitely exciting development for people who want to see more housing.

And then we have Michael Hubner, who is a long range pointer, and I’m not going to order now, because I’m going alphabetical, sir, but Michael Hubner, who is a long range planner at the Seattle Office of Planning and Community Development, OPCD, and he’s also been at Puget Sound Regional Council before that. So he’s definitely very seasoned in the comprehensive planning process and long range planning in general, and has been the city’s point person on this plan. So, you’ve been to a lot of these.

And then we have Jesse Simpson. He’s Director of Government Relations and Policy at the Housing Development Consortium of Seattle King County, and also a board member at the Urbanist and the co-chair of the Complete Communities Coalition, which is the Urbanist is a member of — and many other groups. That’s kind of our clearinghouse for comprehensive plan advocacy. And if you’re not familiar with Housing Development Consortium, they’re sort of an alliance of all sorts of different people who make nonprofit housing happen, from financing to actual builders, the providers all of that. 

Doug Trumm  05:39

So yeah, let’s go down the line with sort of some warm up questions. I think it makes sense to start with Michael, since you are our expert for people who are just getting up to speed, give us your kind of your five-minute elevator pitch on what’s going on in the One Seattle Comprehensive Plan and how it will affect and hopefully improve housing outcomes in Seattle?

Michael Hubner  06:02

Great turnout. Thanks, Doug, thanks for everybody for coming out. Five minutes is a big plan, and I’ll assume it’s a couple of people in the room, at least, who may not know that much about this process. But very briefly, the city updates its comprehensive plan, which is a 20-year plan where we plan for how we’re going to accommodate population growth, job growth, housing everything the city does as we grow and develop. We do it every 10 years. We update it for the next 20 years. We started this process several years ago. Whenever we update a comprehensive plan, we consider what are the major challenges facing the city, and the slam dunk answer for this update was housing, housing supply, housing diversity, housing affordability. People in communities were telling us this. The data was telling us this, looking at the housing market and what was coming online, and the state legislature was telling us this as well. And there were a series of state laws that were had been passed, that were that were setting the ground rules for what we do as a local government to plan for housing.

So this is very much a Housing Center comprehensive plan. So we started several years ago. We’re now at the process where we, on the executive side in Office of Planning and Community Development, have handed the plan off to the city council. We’re also working on zoning legislation that implements the plan. So for those of you are going to be doing some advocacy and maybe want to be engaged in the process over the next little bit, that’s a really important point to bear in mind, there are several pieces of legislation. There’s the policy plan, which is comp plan, and then there’s zoning. And I can talk about the two couple pieces of zoning legislation, but I do want to highlight where we landed with this plan and what it does in terms of providing new housing opportunity across the city. One is that it expands the capacity and the ability to build what’s called middle housing, housing that’s between a single family, detached home and an apartment, things like duplexes, triplexes, town homes, small apartment buildings called stacked flats, which are at roughly the scale of a single family neighborhood, cottage housing and courtyard apartments, among among others, and that these would be allowed across the city. That’s a new state law that we have to do that.

But what we did is we drafted doing it the Seattle way. We went above and beyond the state law in several areas. I can certainly touch on those as we go through the questions tonight. So that’s number one, middle housing. Number two is starting with our current growth strategy, which is based on urban centers and urban villages. We’re in an urban village right now at Beacon Hill or the light rail station. The City, for the past, really, 30 to 35 years, has planned for growth around about two dozen different distinct neighborhoods across the city. There are against this neighborhoods and almost all of our housing growth in those areas. We entered this plan cycle talking about, where else in the city should we be planning for housing? Not only just more apartments that we see here, but middle housing, a more diverse set of housing in all neighborhoods. So there’s several ways in which the plan goes above and beyond the middle housing of that area. Number one is, we’re expanding some of our urban villages and urban centers. About six different urban center urban villages we’re now calling those urban centers, are being expanded. Those are significant expansions in some areas, like upper queen, Anne, Greenwood, Phinney and several others, we have a new urban center around the light rail station and northeast 1/30 Street, that’s a new link station that’s going to be opening in the next couple of years. And there’s a whole new area for new apartment scale development in that area, as well as the expansion areas, think five to. Eight story apartment buildings, and then we have a brand new type of place that we’re planning for growth in the city, called a neighborhood center. These are like the urban villages. They’re denser. They have a mix of uses, maybe local shops and services at the core, good transit service, and a several block area, so smaller than an urban urban center around which we would be planning for new housing opportunities. Think four and five story apartment buildings.

There are 30 of the new neighborhood centers in the plan that the mayor has proposed to the council. And the last piece are our transit corridors. We have bus service, a very rich network of bus across the city, and there are a lot of those areas which currently are zoned for neighborhood residential essentially what historically has been single family zoning. This was another opportunity that OPCD and the mayor identified for creating new housing opportunity, primarily five story apartments in some places, four story along, along all most of those stretches of transit where there’s transit service at approximately every 15 minute headway or more frequent, these are great places for people for new housing, where people have access to the rest of the city, using the transit on those corridors. All together, the zoning changes, they implement this plan double the capacity that the city has to meet our housing needs going forward, and increases our middle housing capacity from less than 10% of our potential to more than 25% so that’s a big new portion of what can we build in the city that will be in that middle housing space? There’s more affordable housing, home ownership opportunities in the middle housing, and there’s more housing opportunities in all of our neighborhoods, a lot of which have been historically very exclusive of new housing generally, and more affordable housing types, like middle housing specifically. So this plan is doing a lot in a lot of different domains of housing. It is implemented both through the policy level and those very specific zoning maps.

We released draft zoning maps last fall. We got a lot of public comment on the zoning maps. We heard a lot of positive things. We also heard a lot of concerns from neighborhoods where the greatest change is proposed. That’s something that we have taken in as an office and we are taking a look at that legislation before it goes to Council. This is primarily going to be in the council’s hands in the coming months, and I’m really looking forward to hearing what people are thinking about the plan, and hear what some of those ideas are going forward in the very near term, just in terms of dates, I know there’s interest in engaging in the process the select committee on the comprehensive plan is having ongoing meetings right now. The next one is next week on the 30th that’s a special topics meeting, but maybe more of interest to the attendees.

There is a hearing is scheduled for the 19th of May to hear from the public on interim legislation, which is the first step, interim legislation to implement that new middle housing zoning. Later in the summer, there’ll be public hearings and other meetings of the Select Committee on the Comprehensive Plan legislation and on additional zoning legislation. So I think I’ll stop there. I’m sure we’ll get back into process and the content to plan with other questions.

Doug Trumm  13:20

Thanks, Michael, yeah, let’s go over to Naishin. As a social housing advocate, what are you looking for at the point in the plan, as far as you know, new, new opportunities for social housing, and perhaps where the plan could go farther.

Naishin Fu  13:43

Thanks for having us, Doug, in Seattle again. My name is Naishin. I just want to make clear that I speak for House Our Neighbors. We are not the social housing developer that is a separate entity, so I do not make decisions about actually how this housing will be built. But we have a lot of we still have a lot of thoughts. So just a little background for those who may not be familiar with social housing. Social Housing is a form of affordable housing. It is publicly owned, so owned by the government in perpetuity. It cannot be turned over to the private market. It doesn’t have a profit motive. It is permanently affordable. So those who live in social housing, you won’t pay over 30% of your income in rent, and third it is mixed income. So while traditional affordable housing is limited to usually to 60% of the median income, or 80% of the median income, social housing can go higher.

In Seattle, our recommendation is, you know, to serve those zero to 120% median income, so you can actually cross subsidize a little bit more than the rents of the higher incomes to help subsidize the lower incomes. And you can operate and maintain a building without continuous subsidy, and everyone is still paying an affordable rent. The problem is. Can’t build social housing in most of the city right now, we as housing neighbors are looking for a comp plan that addresses the exclusionary zoning issues and allows multi family social housing throughout the city, you know, near parks, near schools, near transit and neighborhood residential areas. And we also need to make sure that social housing and affordable housing have height and other bonuses available to them to make projects more feasible. King County’s projections, you know, when I was looking at them, it says over the next 20 years that over 70% of the housing is needed for those under 80% of the median income. I don’t know all the numbers, but I don’t think that the new housing that’s being built that 70% of it is affordable to those 80% making 80% of the median income and below. So right now, we are building as much desperately needed affordable and public housing as we can, and we need more of those, but those resources are limited, and a lot of it is from the federal government, and I think we know that right now, for the next two years, the federal government is not going to come to our rescue, and the funding might even be threatened so now that we have this tool of social housing.

So, in Seattle, we have passed I-135, in 2023 by a 14 point margin that created a social housing developer, and this past February, we passed Prop one, a which funds the developer. It was not legal to fund it in the first initiative, so we have to break it up. So now there is a funding source for social housing. We have this new tool that enables us to grow our stock of affordable housing, of public housing that that can counter the private market we have, you know, ourselves, seen firsthand. We’ve traveled to Vienna and Singapore, and you know, we’ve seen like in Vienna, almost half of their population lives in social housing, and they have this huge stock of publicly owned housing as well as housing on the private market. But really the housing costs are affordable to most residents because they have this strong program. Montgomery County, Maryland is somewhere in the United States that has been building social housing for the past few years. I believe I have heard that its production of affordable units so lower income units kind of matches that of the rest of the affordable housing industry in their area. So we have proven in this country that it works.

And so I know social housing was included in the original comprehensive plan draft that was put out by OPCD. It was listed as an anti displacement strategy. It has since been removed, stripped out, I think, in the mayor’s plan. So we need to see it back in and called out as a part of the strategy to address our housing crisis. And also, again, as I mentioned, to be included in the bonuses and exemptions granted to affordable housing developers. And last, I’ll say, like, first, it’s also not just about, like, just more housing units, but communities. You know, this is a great example. There’s housing here, there’s community spaces that can be used by organizations. We’re having an event here next week, mixed income communities, cross class communities, intergenerational. That is what we’re looking to build and foster a community atmosphere. Thanks.

Doug Trumm  18:21

And you can pass it to Jesse, because he’s up next. Thanks. Yeah, in your work, you know, your day job with mostly affordable housing developers. So same question, but for the conventional affordable housing space, what are you seeing as the unique new opportunities and maybe room for improvement?

Jesse Simpson  18:38

Yeah, I think in a big picture, what the affordable housing developers, which encompasses a full range from permanent supportive housing developers like Plymouth Housing, including El Centro de la Raza and other similar community based developers doing more like 50 and 60% AMI housing, and then Your long standing workforce housing developers like her Bellwether Housing, all of them serve different populations at different targets, but in each case, the developments that make the most sense are the mid rise apartment building, the basically what you can see as you look right around this plaza. It’s the most economical form of building to go in, that basically six to eight story mid rise development, where you’re still able to use wood frame and it’s over a concrete podium. So in terms of how the comp plan can better support affordable housing development throughout the city, to expand the neighborhoods in which it’s allowed to be built. We really need to be expanding mid rise opportunities beyond just the existing urban centers and places like downtown and Capitol Hill and other urban villages that have seen the vast majority of the affordable housing that’s been built built there.

So, I think in terms of my, my assessment of the Comprehensive Plan as proposed by the mayor and the OPCD is that a lot of the strategies for how to encompass more housing over the next 20 years are right on the mark in terms of expanding regional centers around transit, allowing middle housing, broadly creating new neighborhood centers and allowing more housing along the transit corridors. Consistently, though what we have as the complete communities coalition advocated for us to turn each of these dials up. So looking at expanding on along the frequent transit arterials, allowing for multi family mid rise housing in the area, in the walk shed, around bus stops, rather than just on the arterials themselves, to add even more neighborhood centers and expand their bounds to ensure that they’re big enough to support a grocery store, as well as to expand this proposed stacked flat bonus, which I think we’ll talk about a bit down the line, and make that more usable, to expand the affordable housing density bonus that’s proposed in the plan, which I think is a great step, and to expand that city wide and create a similar bonus in the low rise zones, so that affordable housing developers like El Centro are able to do the development that makes the most sense for them in a broader swath of the city.

Doug Trumm  21:39

Thanks. And now we’ll get into Patrick and you worked as a architect and developer, and it’s really important that we think about market-rate development too, because obviously that’s still the lion’s share of what gets built in the city. And even if we wanted to change that, that would take a long time. We’re going to need for-profit development for the foreseeable future. And what are you seeing as a developer and architect that’s good in the plan and what you’d like for improvement?

Patrick Cobb  22:08

Yeah? Well, being a developer has been […] really fun the last few years. I’ll bring it a little closer. I’m not as practiced up on the stage, but it’s been a lot of fun the last four or five years trying to develop properties and kind of the, I guess, the financial constraints that are happening when it comes to interest rates and inflation and just kind of lack of land to develop. And I think that that’s a big part of it is expanding the opportunities for flexibility with market-rate developers to be able to build more and build a more diverse type of housing mix in Seattle. And I think just in general, I think Michael and the city of Seattle has done a great job with the new comprehensive plan, and kind of the direction that we’re going, kind of, you know, looking back a little bit.

So I’ve been developing in Seattle since 2013 and So originally, it’s really hyper focused on townhouse development, single family development and low rise zones. So that’s your LR-1, -2, -3, and then later expanded into doing larger scale, mixed use, multifamily types of projects. And, you know, one of the things about that is it was highly constrained in terms of where you could build those projects. And it was, it was kind of predetermined by how the how the code, how the land use code and zoning, what you were allowed to do. So there were places where you built five over twos. There were places where you built town homes and your LR zones, and then you had single family, which made up a vast majority of the land area in Seattle. And so it really made us focus on as developers when we’re acquiring land on those LR zones and NC zones, where you could build mixed use, multifamily, and where you could build townhouses, which I think what that led to, just in my broad kind of view of it, was a kind of a lack of diversity in, you know, especially economic diversity in the single family zones, where a lot of the wealth was was kind of held at and and kind of isolated certain people to what they could specifically afford.

So I’m really excited about the new code. We’ve been looking at, you know, probably 10 to 20 properties a week, and looking at, you know, how does it pencil today? How is it going to pencil once the new code passes? And starting to look at, well, what can you do in a NR zone from or today, maybe it’s a tear down and it’s a single family. I think we saw a lot of positive movement when ADUs and DADUs were introduced to the market, and just looking at how those have been, I mean selling and kind of the how it’s been received by people who are looking for new homes in the city, there’s really been a pretty big shift from people looking for townhomes, to people looking for that type of product.

And so [I] kind of see that as a precursor to, well, how is this going to roll out, and how are people going to receive new new development? And single family, what previously was Single Family Zone, just in general, in terms of the flexibility that the types of homes that can be built. I mean, you’re going to be able to do apartments, you’ll be able to do condominiums, you’ll be able to do town homes, you’ll be able to do single family and as a you know, as a developer, the way I see it is, how can you make it more of a free market, kind of a free market landscape, so that developers can build what is the highest and best use for a location and respond to the demand of the buyers that are in the market. And I think the new, the way that it’s it’s structured now opens up a lot more to where we can really look at a single family neighborhood that already is served by a lot of the great infrastructure that Seattle has, from transit to, you know, parks and amenities, and then kind of think about, well, you know what? What is the highest and best use for this location, what is the need in this location? And then respond to it versus being really defined by, well, what can I put here?

I can put a three-level box that holds 1600 square foot; it’s a townhome. That’s what’s allowed. Or I can put, you know, the largest single family home. We can be a lot more flexible in terms of responding to what the need is for people who are moving into the city. So that’s, you know, just in general, it’s been a really positive reception of the code.

You know, there are, there are certain things that could be improved. There’s, you know, some parking requirements, maybe being able to expand the quarter mile to half mile radius around approved transit stops where you can, you know, reduce the parking requirements for new projects. But in general, I think it’s been a really good reception, and I think it’s going to help.

I think what I’m seeing from neighbors and friends and just people I’m talking to is, you know, a lot of people are nervous, right? A lot of homeowners are nervous, who love their neighborhoods, who love their homes, and are afraid of change that’s happening. And I think, you know, my message to that, or kind of, how I think about it, is, well, I’m looking at, you know, 500 properties a year, and how many of those actually are, what will pencil or will be financially feasible? Well, 500 maybe I look at 25 out of that, 500 that’s worth underwriting and site planning and starting to actually try to develop, and then out of that, we may get five properties that we can actually develop.

So I think the view, you know, the way I see it, is it’s not going to be like tomorrow. Suddenly, all of the neighborhoods change, and there’s developers coming in and they’re tearing down houses left and right. I think it’s going to be more of a 10 to 20 year kind of transition plan where, over time, kind of parcel by parcel, in an incremental growth, the neighborhoods will change, and they’ll start to become and you know what, what they’re going to be, and the city will have time to kind of respond to, you know, the positives and the negatives, to ensure that you know the outcome is actually good, good for the community and good for our neighborhoods and a good place to live.

Doug Trumm  22:16

Yeah. Thanks, Patrick and slow us down for using too much jargon or anything. I will say, ADU, DADU accessory dwelling unit, and DADU is just detached accessory dwelling, which think of as a backyard cottage, whereas an ADU is in the [primary] building itself, basement flat. Sometimes the shorthand for that. So we use that term amongst ourselves very often. So everyone’s like, Ah, sorry that we didn’t get that because we’re using the insider thing. But yeah, ADU, DADU. It’s fun to say, so maybe learn that one, and we’ll all start throwing that around. But yeah, thank you for that answer. And you know, being our mail list is what it is between YIMBY and The Urbanist. We got a lot of questions about, you know, how we can get more housing in this plan, and maybe with adjusting now, with this, this first audience question, which was sort of looking at: how can we kind of get this city council on board with expanding housing in the plan, and whether that’s through neighborhood centers, transit corridors, increased bonuses for stack flats. What avenues are you seeing?

Jesse Simpson  29:26

I want to take a step back here and talk a little more about the general politics of housing in the city. I think I’ve been involved in the outreach that the city has done for this comprehensive plan for two and a half years or so, starting from some very early scoping conversations that were like, What could we possibly build, and having neighbors together in these big 10-person conversations. Where they were talking about what the biggest priorities are. And you know, a lot of people, even those who would, you know stereotype as NIMBYs, were actually very pro housing and recognizing the importance of creating more housing opportunities throughout the city of Seattle. And then at this abstract level satellites are overwhelmingly agree that we need more housing, and it says you get closer and closer into the way you mean that lot next to my house, you want to allow five-story apartment buildings on the more difficult that the politics of this become and I think we’ve seen that reflected in terms of the tenor of the public feedback to the comp plan as we move through the process.

So I think Council is hearing a lot from anti-housing advocates, people who like their neighborhoods as they are, don’t want to see them change and aren’t personally feeling the pinch of the housing market. I think they need to hear a lot more from people who are feeling the pinch of the housing market, whether that’s as a renter or a senior on a fixed income and facing difficulty remaining in their their housing, because as we move through the final God knows how many months, years, maybe, of the process, it’s going to be critically important for people to show up and let Council know we still believe we need more housing. We want you to put housing first in this comp plan, and we want you to work to strengthen the mayor’s plan and not water it down in terms of how receptive council members have individually been about potential for improving the plan, making tweaks.

I think overall there’s a fairly strong Council majority for at least holding the line on the plan as it’s been proposed by the mayor’s office and OPCD. But will, I think they’re overall in a state of if we’re going to downzone any area compared to the plan, we’re going to need to upzone another area in practice that can become a little bit inequitable, as it means shifting a proposed up zone of an existing single family area down and then increasing that density, maybe on the arterials in the existing commercial areas. So that’s going to be one of the main pressure points as we are moving into this process.

I view our own role as the Complete Communities Coalition to be pointing to ways that the council can equitably add housing opportunities, so adding more neighborhood centers in the places with low displacement risk and great access to opportunities, North Queen Anne, North Broadway. There’s many other examples, and I think also just keeping on beating the drum of what what Seattleites have been telling the planning staff and Mayor’s Office for for years now, through this, through this process, that Seattle needs to allow for a lot more housing to be built, and that we’re not going to see progress on the main social issues facing the city until we do so,

Doug Trumm  33:34

Yeah, and I think we have scientific polling to point to that shows, usually, yes, specifically in your neighborhood. The result is, is, I think two thirds, roughly, of people generally say, Yeah, more housing, please. So sometimes the loud meetings aren’t always the most indicative. We’ve been doing good about saying this just kind of five-minute rule thumb, but I thought we’d slow down a little bit just because it one thing that’s really complicated with the comp plan process is it’s now phased and we have this interim ordinance. So that’s what sort of the legislation in Council’s, you know, purview right now is this interim ordinance, which became a thing because of a legal appeal from six different neighborhood groups, mostly homeowner-dominated groups, exclusively homeowner-dominated groups. Could you break down how that phasing will work now, with the interim ordinance going into then a permanent ordinance, phase one, and then a phase two, that’s kind of stretching to 2026, so maybe we should be working on that.

Michael Hubner  34:43

Let me take a first cut. Great. Let me take a first cut at that. First of all, it was not our preference or our vision that there would have to be an interim ordinance just to complicate what was already a complicated process. So we feel your pain. Yeah, we experienced that ourselves every day in the office, having to deal with it, the appeals, unfortunately, and it was great for just more process and just making sure the council was continuing to consider the content and the policy issues that the appeals have been dismissed. We’re certainly happy about that.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t soon enough to allow us to have new zoning in place in our neighborhood residential before a state deadline of June 30. So that’s why the interim the importance exists one path forward on the interim order ordinance, just to keep it simple, and that’s certainly the message we as an office of the giving to council is there’s a state model code for the new housing, middle housing requirement under the Growth Management Act, House Bill 1110, and that narrows it makes it more straightforward. What we should probably do with an interim ordinance is keep it within the box that the model code has, and any of the issues or questions or potential modifications to the interim code would have to be adopted in the permanent legislation anyway. So, that’s something Council is chewing on that.

In other words, if there were amendments to the interim ordinance, the permanent legislation would also have to be amended. They’d have to have the same conversation all over again several months down the road. So I hope, versus myself, speaking, that the wisdom and efficiency of doing that would mean that this interim ordinance is something that Council could get through pretty quickly, as is, it would only be in place for a relatively short time, and I’ll look to Patrick here. My guess is most developers are going to wait for the permanent legislation before investing too much in new development proposals under the interim code, especially because our permanent legislation has a lot more features, and in many cases, would allow building more housing under the permanent legislation. So I know there’s a little bit of a longwinded answer, but I hope the interim code is simple. Get it out of the way once the interim code is acted on by Council, which will be by the end of May.

Number one is comp plan legislation. That’s the policy plan, several hundred pages. It has a high-level map of where growth goes in the city called the future land use map. We also call it the growth strategy that gets adopted by council, probably at nearly the same time as that is going through Council. I mean, we’ll see how the process plays out, the permanent legislation for the middle housing for HP 1110, will also be acted upon by council, so to have those conversations at the same time, the comp plan is super important, because how many neighborhood centers, how many expanded urban centers, and some of the other key sort of foundations of the growth strategy will be determined in that plan, the specifics of the zoning into LR2 or LR3.

That’s going to be a conversation for another day, and unfortunately — and this was discussed at the last select committee meeting — there’s not going to be enough time before the budget process starts in the fall for the council to really take up the rest of the zoning legislation that neighborhood centers, the transit corridors, the other places where we’re talking about LR3, mid-rise zoning and more of the apartment scale changes that, unfortunately, is going to be taken up after budget, and likely would it would have to be addressed passed by council in early 2026 so there’ll be some time. So the focus in the near term is comp plan and middle housing, neighborhood, residential, permanent legislation. That’s where I would focus efforts, and that’s where you’ll have opportunities to engage.

Doug Trumm  38:59

Did you want to jump in on the if developers are going to build under the interim audience?

Patrick Cobb  39:07

Yeah, well, it’s risk, right? Yeah. We don’t know if we’re buying a property. We don’t know what we can do with it. It definitely adds risk before you start making investments in design. So as soon as I saw the interim plan, I was a little bit worried, but it’s either go now or wait another six months, or…

Michael Hubner  39:26

It’s a free country.

Doug Trumm  39:29

Yeah, Michael, I’m curious if there was any discussion of, like, would there just be value, just letting the state model code go into force, or if that is our own in that whole separate risk?

Michael Hubner  39:37

Yeah, we certainly have looked at that. Unfortunately, the state model code, and this is, I won’t go into the details of it, but the state model code is not written like a real development code. It leaves a lot of things ambiguous. It would have some conflicts with how, just generally, our own code is constructed, if it just went into effect. It would lead to a bit of chaos. From a permitting perspective, it might even create some legal risk for the city. In terms of best thing, of committing to permit development is much better for us to have our own code drafted by the city. So that’s why we’re running it now.

Doug Trumm  40:16

And I don’t know if you have your PSRC ears out there, but are any cities doing that? I think I would have heard about it from Ryan Packer by now, but is anyone just going to do that?

Michael Hubner  40:25

I’m not aware of any. I know there are a lot of cities that are struggling with but timelines to get their comp plans and the middle housing legislation done. I’m not aware of any interim ordinances that are being considered by other cities. But I’m also not aware of any other city that has been appealed under SEPA for their for their EIS like the city has. So we had uniquely impacted by that

Doug Trumm  40:53

Before we move, just to break that down so it’s clear. The neighborhood centers: that will be in 2026 based on the current timeline we have here, and that’s where most of the multifamily apartment type zoning is. So we’ll have to wait a little bit for that. But, we are getting to that in time. And, then, we’re all referring to, House Bill 1110, passed in 2023, Jessica Bateman’s bill that that’s why there’s this state code. Anyways, I think we covered that. But just bears repeating, like there’s the state mandate that we’re up against. This stuff is happening one way or the other, because the state model code will go into effect. But yeah, Bellevue just it’s sort of advanced.

Michael Hubner  41:42

I just want to clarify. This is because I know this is really important to people in the room. The number and size and location of neighborhood centers will be in the comp plan. So that’s not waiting until 2026. Yeah, the zoning is like how tall the zoning would be in the neighborhood centers will be in 2026. So, that’s super important to keep in mind.

Doug Trumm  42:01

Yeah, so the discussion will be ongoing but as far as when a developer like Patrick can go build it, you need the zoning for that. You can maybe start planning a little bit. I don’t know it’s dicey, but we got a question about Bellevue, because they just kind of are advancing the plan. It’s not done yet, but we kind of got a picture of where they’re going. And the Bellevue Planning Commission is considering extending the areas where six plexes would be allowed to a half mile of rapid ride bus stops. And JJ audience member asked if there’s any push for Seattle to take a similar approach, because, as we heard earlier, it’s quarter mile right now, but it’s possible they could change that theoretically, and the state bill says quarter mile is the bare minimum, but as Bellevue showed, that you can go above and beyond if you want. I put that one as a free for all. Anyone wants to jump in.

Naishin Fu  43:02

We want to turn up all the dials. So I think you’ve already addressed this. Yeah, you did kind of do want to turn up the dials. And I would agree that we should turn up this dial. I’ll just say, personally, I used to live outside of Boston, Massachusetts and Cambridge, in a in a triplex, and it was half mile from from the subway, and I walk there every day, and that was very normal. I think a lot of people would rather make that choice to walk half a mile or bike half a mile to get to transit, then move way further out, you know, and have to have even longer commute. So,

Jesse Simpson  43:40

Yeah, my first reaction to this is, I want to distinguish between just what what the city has done with the sixplex zoning, which is allowing for increased density within that quarter mile around the major transit, the RapidRide and etc. And what Bellevue has done, which actually allows increased floor area ratio so you can build a bigger building, which makes it a lot more attractive for developer to do and practice. I think that the city’s six approach to sixplexes in the current draft is not anticipating that too many will use that particular bonus, it’s there as an option if the developers want to carve up the housing proposed into smaller homes, basically. But I think the practical uptake of it will be on the lower side, the more substantive bonuses that they’ve proposed are the stack bonus, which allows a fair amount of increased development capacity for small apartment buildings, basically in the neighborhood residential areas and. As well as a quite large affordable housing density bonus, which allows you to go up to four stories and quite a bit larger as a building. But half of the homes have to be affordable to low income people.

Michael Hubner  45:17

And I would just briefly say, No, we’re not. We haven’t been considering. It’s not in the proposal to have to expand the quarter mile to a half mile for the allowing six units. But, and I don’t know the details of the Bellevue proposal, but I suspect how we address density and our proposed neighborhood, new neighborhood residential zoning, goes beyond, I suspect it goes beyond Bellevue in that for larger lots, because we use a lot area per unit standard for how many units you can build on a site for larger lots, even if it’s outside of a quarter mile of a major transit stop. You, in many cases, you can get to five, six or even more units, because it’s a larger lot. That’s not required under state law. We just thought that was a rational, predictable, city wide approach to regulating density,

Doug Trumm  46:15

We got a question on the city’s economic feasibility study, sort of on a similar topic, because we’re still in neighborhood resident residential zones here. But the city, for folks who aren’t familiar: as part of this process, they typically do a economic feasible stability study, just to make sure the housing that’s on paper is, you know, hopefully, actually gonna get built. And, I mean, they’re not like gospel, but it’s a good idea of where we’re at, as far as if this housing is going to pan out. And the study found that about 79% of lots did not pencil out as feasible, at least on the economic assumptions they use right now. And obviously, there’s some concern that those market fundamentals aren’t going to get better if we head into a recession or other chaos coming from, you know, I guess, the federal or international trade situation. But anyway, you know, what is Seattle thinking? As far as you know, is that, does that feasible ability study? Is that acceptable level? Are you looking to maybe recalibrate to try to get more of those lots to be feasible? What did you make of that study, Michael?

Michael Hubner  47:36

You know, it’s kind of a: is it a glass half full or glass half empty.

Doug Trumm  47:40

It’s better than it was before.

Michael Hubner  47:43

I guess I want to start there, which is, we had an original feasibility. We want middle housing to get built in this is not just a paper exercise. It’s not something just to to technically meet the requirements of a new state law. We very much want to see new middle housing built in the city. As I think I mentioned earlier, there’s a really small slice of existing zoning that allows middle housing now, and it’s not a huge part of what is actually being built in the city right now. It’s significant, but it’s not as big as it should be. So we’ve been trying to draft this new neighborhood residential zoning with feasibility in mind. It’s complicated. Depends on feasibility for what? And last spring, spring of 2024 the draft we put out of the public had a floor area ratio, one of the development standards which was designed to do a certain thing, which was encourage larger, smaller units on sites.

But I think rightly, we heard from the public record, from The Urbanist and the HDC others, that that was put a damper on project feasibility, and we need more units on more places, so we upped the floor area ratio to a 1.2 for wonks in the room. You’ll know what that means, but allowing more building on a site, and we ran it through this we had ECOnorthwest, a firm that does a lot of this work, run it through their model. The second time, it boosted the number of sites that are feasible. Patrick was talking about feasibility. I can’t remember the exact percentage. It was not quite double, but it increased by a significant amount how much middle housing we would get those a great change. We’ve been doing a lot of other things.

The density, the per lot area density, way of regulating density, is another thing we tried to do to encourage feasibility. The stack flat incentive that’s also aimed at project feasibility. You know, having 20% of our existing neighborhood residential sites as potentially primed economically to have four or more units and new forms of housing that we’re not producing right now is actually a lot. It’s we’re talking about about 70,000 new units coming online on those. Sites that would be a big increase from what we have right now. It is based on assumptions that are the current market conditions. Those market conditions could look better for that kind of development in the future.

And what we’re basically going to walk monitor closely what happens year on year, see what we get, and we’ll have opportunities to tweak the development standards to see if we can make projects easier and cheaper to build. What was the you said you looked at 500 properties and you ended up with 25 or that’s a bad that’s our percentage is better than his. I mean, that’s just the real it’s just the reality of development. A lot of sites are not going to work. It’s stuck out there.

Doug Trumm  50:38

Yeah, and that’s a good segue, because we’re going to Patrick next. I think the other thing the city studies and that city found is a lot of this is probably going to be townhomes, but there is this new opportunity for stack flats. It’s hard to sort of gauge what that has. It just hasn’t been built that much. Part of the problem middle housing in this country is we don’t really build that anymore, so we gotta get those muscles we’re going and we do build tandems, but things like that are rare. But it could be there’s, there are architects who are excited about it. Michael Eliason wrote something for The Urbanist. If you want to get in, geek out about that, check out that article.

But yeah, the stack flat bonus, it’s received a lot of positive attention, as you know, Jesse brought it up. And can you tell us more about, you know what stack flats are for folks who aren’t familiar, Patrick, and then also, you know what, what we can do to make sure, you know, there’s a path for those, whether that’s zoning, regulations that would incentivize them get this fledgling industry going.

Patrick Cobb  51:40

Yeah, sure. So stack flats are essentially just stacked apartments or condos with a walk up with a stair, unless, I guess you want to design it with an elevator, you could do that, but it’s a pretty efficient form of you know, it’s a wood-frame structure so you don’t have the concrete podium like you would see in a five over two, where you might have two levels of concrete and additional wood frame above it to kind of maximize your density. These tend to be more Low-Rise Residential, which is, you know, really unique.

Yeah, I was thinking about this a little bit, and about how, you know, whenever you see most multifamily in Seattle, most of the new multifamily is built more like five over two podium product, and it’s usually built by professional developers who are using institutional capital from large investment groups. Maybe it’s coming from insurance companies, pension funds, etc, that are being applied to building these much larger, much larger projects. And, you know, it’s just, it’s a different kind of way of going about development than if you’re going to build kind of a parcel based, you know, small-scale walkup. And so just thinking about, like, I think there is an opportunity in your in your low-rise zones, in your in our zones for smaller scale investors who maybe live in the neighborhood or live locally, to be able to acquire property and build something that could, you know, generate long term wealth, something that’s been really interesting is a discussion point among some other architects.

I was talking with Johnson architects, and they had built a project with a group of residents who wanted to age in place. And so they had all gotten together. They lived in a neighborhood. They didn’t want to leave the neighborhood, but owning and maintaining a single family home was just too much for them, and so they got together. They pooled their resources. They acquired a property, they developed a property, and they they’ve moved in subsequently, and are living in a multifamily building where they have their own apartment, and then they lease out other apartments in the building. I think that’s really interesting.

I think the other thing is that I’ve been kind of banging my head on is, how do you do condos in Seattle? Large-scale condos have a lot of risk, a lot of difficulty for developers and investors who are coming into into Seattle and want to do that type of product. You randomly see the Canadian developer come in and they’ll try it out, but it’s been really hard to get it to work on wood-frame product in neighborhood areas, and so I think maybe, you know, there’s a lot of risk there because of being potentially sued through a class action lawsuit, whenever you have 100 different residents and a window fails, and you know that type of thing happens, but maybe in a smaller scale product type of six or eight units that may reduce some of that risk of a class action lawsuit and open up an opportunity to do condominium flats that I think could appeal to homeowners who don’t want to walk up four levels in the town home. Maybe that doesn’t work for them. Maybe they want to live in a flat that’s really efficient and they can, they can get in and, you know. Maybe, maybe there’s ADA opportunities, or, you know, accessibility opportunities for people who who can’t walk up for flights of stairs to able to access their unit but still live in, you know, neighborhoods that they love. So I’ll stop there.

Doug Trumm  55:16

Yeah, thank you that. And I think that goes back to just the general point of what would housing look like if we started from the user standpoint, like, what kind of house would you like to live in? Is it a four-story tight, skinny box or not? You know, like, it’s great that we have that option, but I don’t think a lot of people, it’s their what their platonic ideal thing is. So a stack flat is one way to address that problem, while still, you know, getting a lot of housing on a small lot. So yeah, I wanted to also talk about social housing in that context. Like, are these neighborhood residential zones an opportunity for advocates? You think in, you know, stack flat something you’re looking at, are you still mostly similar Jesse mentioned, like with affordable housing developers, mostly looking at these larger bit rights and, you know, multi family, bigger zoning areas.

Naishin Fu  56:12

I think we’re looking at it all, yeah, and we’re not, I’m not as much of a longer politics, whereas everyone else appears. I don’t know exactly the feasibility numbers and what, when and how and what will work, but for social housing, I mean, we just want flexibility, wherever it is to start. And I again, I don’t speak for the developer, but I believe to start for the first projects, likely larger projects would make more sense. But you know, this developer is going to have be able to balance across its portfolio. So if it has a number of larger buildings, it could maybe do a smaller building in the neighborhood residential zone with flats. And, you know, make that work. We do love the idea of flats. We hope social housing can serve families. We do know from talking to developers that the social housing model, you know, has fewer pressures, I guess, to create volume of units, and maybe has a little more leeway to create more family-sized units.

I know I have kids in public school. I know our public school enrollment is declining and we need more families to stay here and and that, you know, coming from a parent’s perspective, a stacked flat, a three bedroom is is much more friendly to a family than a town home is, which a lot of families in my neighborhood live in right now, and similar for retirees.

So I love your comments about starting with the user. I’m actually a former tech worker, as I’m sure many people know, why I was a product manager, software product manager, and we always started with the user. And so coming from a social housing advocate perspective on like, what would it take, I would like to start with the question, which I think it’s probably too late, but what would it take to make social housing and affordable housing feasible in neighborhood, residential zones, and then, you know, create our boundaries that way, instead of trying to shoehorn it the other way. So, yeah.

Doug Trumm  58:08

Maybe next time. So we have one question that really just wanted to drill down on cost control issues in general, just the cost of building housing keeps creeping up in that that inevitably ends up costing folks more in their housing. So Patrick, I’m curious if you could help this audience member, what is being done to make it easier and cheaper to build in Seattle, and how can someone help in those efforts? Whether they’re talking about advocacy, or maybe they mean, just like, you know, if they’re, if they’re, I don’t know, maybe their investor too, but, you know, what do you see the high impact things here?

Patrick Cobb  58:53

That’s a that’s, that’s a tough question. It is tough.

Doug Trumm  58:55

Yeah, solve your entire industry five minutes. Yeah?

Patrick Cobb  58:58

Well, I mean, I think back, you know, 2014 or ’15, we were getting pricing for town homes around 150 bucks a foot. Now, whenever we’re looking at a new, a new project, and we’re looking at, you know, town home construction, or even single family, it’s, you know, 300 it’s 275 to 330 bucks a foot. So that that’s a that’s a big issue, that’s like doubling the cost of construction, and then on top of that, obviously you have to get a construction loan to carry that cost. And so now you’re incurring more interest, you know, and that just kind of snowballs. And guess what? All of that gets passed on to the homeowner, to the buyer or the renter, in some way to be recouped so that you can pay back the bank, whether it’s short term or long term, so that that’s been a really big issue.

And you know, obviously we have really high labor costs here. Material costs have gone up. Inflation has been really tough over the last few years coming out of Covid and so. I’m hopeful that that’s, you know, flattening out so that we have some predictability. And that’s probably what I want to like focus on, is predictability, because I think that that has been really tough with new projects. And this is where we’re, like, we really partner with the City on developing projects. They’re probably the group that we speak with the most during the course of a project, from your first, you know, your first meeting, your preliminary application, and your preliminary, you know, going into city, like, constantly, kind of going trying to work together to complete a project.

And so, some of the really big costs that we’ve incurred have been through, like, right-of-way improvements. So that’s where, if you’re doing a project that requires street walks, it requires wheelchair ramps, it requires sidewalks, could be infrastructure improvements. So you have to bring in electrical and so you have to work with Seattle City Light. You have to bring in your sewer. You have to connect it to all the homes Seattle City Light, for instance, I waited last year for, I think we were delayed by it took us eight months to get a crew to come out and connect our primary power after we had already installed all of the electrical to all of the units on a project. And so in like, half the project basically just stopped construction because it was almost completely done and we were almost ready to sell the units, and we were basically sitting on a completed project that was incurring, you know, like, maxed out construction cost and interest rates from the bank. So that was, that was tough. And so I think that’s where you know, not to, not to, you know, blame the city or because they’re doing great work.

It’s really hard, but it’s really about, how do you get that predictability so that you can work together, so that whenever you’re ready to make that power connection, to get your electrical meters, you know, to bring in your sewer, that can be done, and then how can we work together to maybe reduce some of the costs that are incurred where we have to do infrastructure improvements that get put on on the developers plate, versus being carried by, you know, by the city’s budget.

And I think that, if we’re adding significant density and people into the neighborhoods, there’s going to be a lot of infrastructure improvements that are going to have to happen. And so who ends up paying for that? Is that going to be the developer? Because I guarantee, because I guarantee you, if you buy a single, a 5000 square foot lot, and you want to put four units on it, and you’re told that, hey, you don’t have a water main that connects, right? And you have to extend it 300 feet, that’s going to be, like, $400,000 to make that extension, and then the project doesn’t work. And so that’s going to be a, it’s going to be a big, kind of a critical piece is, is making sure that the infrastructure is there for those future projects. So, yeah, predictability, continuing to work with the city to kind of find a way to to be quicker, be be more expedient, with the delivery of projects without any unnecessary delays.

Doug Trumm  1:02:59

Yeah, thank you for that. And that reminds me, I have a question from Donna Breske that’s going to be on this topic. Donna is a practicing civil engineer who is on sort of a personal crusade to get water hookup fees and other utility fees under control from Seattle Public Utilities, because that’s been one complaint of especially small developers, but also even some affordable housing developers have gotten hit with huge assessments. And luckily, one that was a poster child for one of these articles got reversed. It was actually on Beacon Hill, Pacific Village. I think it was. It was going to have to pay million dollars for a fire hydrant and water main associated with it. It turned out the fire department didn’t want it. So thankfully, we got that one taken off, but it would have been a million dollars that this affordable housing developer would have had to pay, and probably cost some hours and stress working on that problem, and hopefully not too much delay.

Patrick Cobb  1:03:58

I might add one more thing, yeah, and this may not be popular with everybody, but Mandatory Affordable Housing [fees] in areas where it’s required, I think that has been one of several components that has stopped a lot of large scale, multi family projects from moving forward. So whether not saying it’s right or wrong, I think it’s good, it’s necessary to have that kind of funding set aside, but it has made it, you know, much more difficult to move those projects along.

Doug Trumm  1:04:26

Yeah, I think the city has to be really strategic about when, when that feasibility point is being killed. And I know there’s a Portland solution where missing middle projects are not a part of that program, 20 units or less. So I don’t know if that’s something they’ll look at, but definitely want to make sure that you know that it’s going to be zero if they don’t have projects, so you don’t want to set a percent too high. But yeah, Donna’s question was sort of, you know, and she actually said it’s part of the comp plan, because, you know, the long term sewer plan is. Is, it’s a part of the comp plan. It’s an element of it, the forgotten element. But she’s seen the impact as a civil engineer, because there Beacon Hill isn’t a good example that there’s a lot of neighborhoods that are designated. And sorry, you’ve really signed up for some nerdy stuff here. But there’s no water hook-up areas where, basically, if you owned a single family home and you wanted to build a fourplex or a sixplex, that you’re going to contact the Seattle Public Utilities. And congratulations, you live in a no hookup area. If you want to build here, you have to pay for water main improvement, which, in one of our stories, the number she quoted was $700,000… I don’t know if you’ve looked at that issue, Michael, or maybe you as Patrick, but is there anything you can do to kind of gets more certainty — at least certainty, if not lower prices for developers.

Michael Hubner  1:05:58

On that front, we could probably spend another couple of hours talking about this. I mean, this is a really complicated topic, and I’m not the right person to get into all the details. I certainly can’t speak for City Light in your eight months, and I’m not going to get into the Donna Breske specifics. We’re certainly familiar with the issue she’s raised, but just a couple quick so I just and I just for clarity for everybody. You won’t find in the comp plan, all of the details around both the water plan for area as of growth, there are high level policies in there. But I think the important thing I wouldn’t want to convey is City Light, Seattle Public Utilities, these SDOT, all of these departments of the city that build out the bones that allows housing to get built and serves neighborhoods have been at the table through the whole process. They do develop their own more detailed plans. They are very aware of the new maps of neighborhood centers, other places where this new density plan for we have a housing sub cabinet that convenes regularly across departments in the city that’s been meeting for quite some time.

I think having this new growth strategy really focuses the attention of that group too, on what can we do now to ensure that housing can get built more efficiently, more predictably and less expensively for folks who provide it, like Patrick and affordable housing producers too. So we’re working on that. The Comp Plan does not solve all of that. The Comp Plan provides, I hope, more certainty and more collaboration across departments at the direction of the mayor as we’re doing this. But there’s work certainly yet, yet to do.

For a nice, approachable way of hearing from some of those departments, we did a presentation at the Select Committee on the Comp Plan. Can’t remember the exact date. I think it was either the 29th of January, or might have been the 5th of February. Excuse me for not remembering exactly which date, but if you go to the council website, there was for the recordings of those meetings. I was up there with a whole panel of these capital departments at the select committee. They gave really nice, very, very bite-sized, 10-minute presentations on exactly how they do this, reference, their plans, their process, how they provide what’s needed with new development, both in a long-term perspective and as projects come in the door. It’s a nice primer for those who want to do a deeper dive on this. We’re definitely trying to make improvements.

Doug Trumm  1:08:39

Any hot water takes before we move on, Patrick?

Jesse Simpson  1:08:44

I’ll just say affordable housing developers deal with the same issues. I could go through plenty of random horror stories that we hear, but in general, we find that it can cause many issues when the utility, when the utilities don’t talk to the permitting people early enough and force a redesign pretty late in the process. So it’s it’s something that affordable developers have run into, and it just ends up costing the public more money and reducing, you know, how many affordable homes we’re able to build with the limited resources we have.

Michael Hubner  1:09:23

If I could mention one other category we haven’t even touched on, which is design standards and design review. That is something that we’re directly working on. So in the new zoning legislation, we have very in the proposal, very simple, objective design standards in our neighborhood residential but also a simplified version for low rise. And then the design review process is something that Department of Construction and Inspections is preparing legislation to comply with new state law that there be simplified, objective processes in place for Design Review. You look for that as legislation coming forward is something you may want to be engaged in to make sure it works to get us more housing built more cheaply, and…

Doug Trumm  1:10:08

That’s a June 30 deadline as well, right?

Michael Hubner  1:10:12

I think so. Don’t quote me on it. It’s not something our office is working on. It won’t be in place by that by June 30, but it’s coming quite soon, at least. I don’t think it’s it would be in the land use committee and not in the select committee. It’s a different path of the council, but they’re gonna be busy. They’re gonna be busy like I say. It’s a different department that’s working on that legislation now.

Doug Trumm  1:10:35

A topic that we heard a lot about from from folks who submitted questions in a very near and dear topic to any, any Seattleite, any true mossback: trees, I think there’s a broadly shared goal of having more tree canopy. And I guess where people start disagreeing is how? So, you know, maybe starting with Jesse. What do you see as the way that we can plan for more trees?

Jesse Simpson  1:11:07

hot topic. Quick audience participation. How many of you were at or watched the February 5 public hearing on the comp plan? Kind of curious. Okay, pretty good portion. Thank you all. Yeah. So trees were a big topic of conversation. There. You thought we were talking about the tree code. I think if you were plugging into this from the from the get go, it is definitely the prime concern that opponents of new housing raise at this public hearing and expect in future public hearings. I think there’s trees are they’re important. They have an emotional resonance here within this region. I think we all want to see Seattle increase its tree canopy. I think where it comes down to is where that is prioritized.

If you’re looking at an individual lot where there are trees, I think there should be greater flexibility and incentives to preserve those trees, to shift around the building on a lot, but in some cases, that may not be enough to be able to preserve a tree if you’re adding additional housing, and that becomes a bit of a value judgment of, do you care more about trees or housing in those unfortunate edge cases where good policy can help with this dilemma is in terms of creating that flexibility and incentives to try to create, try to enhance our tree canopy as we are adding more housing in every neighborhood.

One other thing I think the city should do a better job of in terms of the tree canopy, is focusing on the right of way. So looking at, where can you expand trees in the planting strips in, if people are familiar with the kind of Northeast edge of Capitol Hill where you’ve got the trees that actually block off an intersection within the within the side neighborhood streets. You know, why can’t we have that in more than just the like mansion row of Seattle? I think it’s expanding that kind of tree canopy in the Right of Way is a direct way for the city to be leading in terms of expanding our tree canopy as we are adding more housing, and it can have an added benefit of increasing safety for people walking and rolling around the neighborhood,

Naishin Fu  1:14:00

I’m going to assume good faith that folks who are advocating for trees are coming at it with concern for the environment and climate change. And just want to zoom out and say, you know, we all at our organization, care about that as well, and we do think we need more tree canopy. We also don’t want to just look at the tree canopy in a vacuum in terms of what impacts climate change. So one really cool thing that housing neighbors did last year was we worked with students from the UW Department of Geography. I think we came with the idea. They did a lot of the work. They analyzed geospatial data on housing density. They mapped housing density with tree canopy coverage and emissions. And two key findings were that, and this has been shown in other areas like the New York Times, I think as well, the areas with more density had lower per capita carbon emissions. And then also areas with the most tree canopy coverage had the highest per capita carbon. Emissions areas like mountain lake being kind of the top of that curve, because they’re, you know, associated with single family areas, larger homes, more cars, more energy needed.

So not to say that the tree canopy is not important. It is. We love when we’ve gone to Vienna, we’ve had colleagues go to Singapore, we see really abundant housing there, and also amazing green space, a lot more than here. So again, I’m not the wonk, and I don’t know what what are the knobs you do to make that happen, but just to say that we have seen that happen, and we have seen really amazing social housing that is dense and also include a lot of green space. And I think a lot of that goes to what Jesse was saying in terms of flexibility and being able to preserve some of that while allowing building as well.

Michael Hubner  1:15:51

So the city is committed to and set a goal for a 30% tree canopy by 2037 is something that’s restated in the Comprehensive Plan update. We firmly believe that we can get there while also providing for the housing needs of the city, middle housing, more apartment, more areas for more apartments, and we’ve designed the growth strategy proposal and the zoning to get us there while recognizing that there’s a lot of attention to zoning for development related to the tree canopy, and I’m glad it’s been touched on here, which is there are a lot of different tools and arenas that the city can be active in to promote tree canopy. It’s not just about what happens on private property within that limited space of what we can do with the zoning proposal.

We do have a new approach for tree planting and crediting and incentivizing more tree planting and planting of the types of trees that provide more canopy benefit or more significant canopy over the long term, and we’re taking a long term view of the canopy as well. There are going to be some trees lost through development. That’s just a natural, just expected part of the development process. We do have, we went through a big, long process of developing a new tree COVID that does provide a lot of protections to existing trees. I know there’s a lot of debate about about that particular code, but that’s in place, and that helps.

What we can do through the comprehensive plan and zoning is aimed for the long term is, how can we help new development, with middle housing, with new opportunities for people to live in the city and drive less? That’s a fascinating finding, by the way, from that class foot, plant more trees on-site. Plant more trees in the right of way through street improvements as development occurs, and do more in our other public lands, like parks. It’s the full package next on the 30th. It just so happens that the primary topic for the next select committee is trees and tree canopy. And apropos of everything, I just said, it’s not just going to be OPCD presenting to the select committee, but the Office of Sustainability and Environment, other other folks who are working at the city, SDCI, others who are contributing to what we’re doing at tree canopy. To give the council that full picture.

Patrick Cobb  1:18:24

Developers jump through a lot of hoops to try to get trees taken down. That’s, I mean, that’s the reality. So if you are looking at a property and there’s a tree that you can’t remove, it tends to limit the number of units that you can put on the property, which essentially devalues the property from the perspective of a developer. So that’s that’s just generally the case, whether you love trees or don’t love trees. It’s always a little bit of a challenge. I’ve also seen some incentives where, you know, I think this is good, where you have incentives, or maybe you can encroach into a setback further, or you can build higher. Isn’t always. It still adds cost, because if you’re going to build a three level townhome, and then suddenly you have to build a four level townhome, it’s a different cost. It’s a different design. It adds complexity.

So it’s always going to be a challenge, but I think it’s so important that we retain a lot of the trees that are already on the properties, and that we improve the public spaces. Because, you know, the best cities in the world, where you have the most urban development, you know, if they have a great public space that are green and welcoming. I mean, that’s really where people should be. But I have a beautiful willow tree in my backyard. I’m never going to cut it down.

Doug Trumm  1:19:42

We are going pretty good on time here, so I want to make sure we get to some of the audience questions. Diego, how do you want to do that? Are we going to jump right into it or take a brief pause while we got the best?

Diego Batres  1:19:53

I think everyone take a brief intermission. Our panelists going to use the bathroom if they may or may not have been aching to. That per minute reminder down that hall over there, I and Chris will come around and grab index cards from folks who have questions, and we’ll try and rattle through as many of them as we can after like a five minute intermission, yeah, see you all back here in five.

[INTERMISSION]

Michael Hubner  1:22:06

What’s important from just from a housing outcome perspective, we think is because we are up proposing upzones in from neighborhood residential to Low Rise 3 as the most, the most, by far, the most common proposed changes from neighborhood residential to a Low Rise 3 that’s along the transit corridors our neighborhood centers expansion areas that’s a pretty big boost in development capacity and MHA would be applied like we do now, when we do upzones like that in those areas.

Jesse Simpson  1:22:49

Just the one thing is, Council could add it to the neighborhood residential areas, but it’s not in the mayor’s proposal

Michael Hubner  1:22:57

It has been discussed by council on the day us, just at a very high level. And then we did do a presentation on MHA a couple of meetings ago. So yes, that’s something they will be considering.

Doug Trumm  1:23:12

And I know that Councilmember Cathy Moore has expressed the interest in maybe adding it as she seems pretty curious about that. We have a lot of questions here, getting at the housing cost issue from another way, which we touched on a little bit but worth more discussion. You know, as far as like, red tape in there was mention of permanent reform and sort of an effort that the council is also working on a little bit right now. Actually, this our current council member in this district, Councilmember, Mark Solomon, has mentioned it’s a goal of his during his interim term through November, to do some streamlining. Thoughts from anyone about the impact of that and what you’d like to see, as far as that cutting of red tape and permit streamlining. How about Patrick, since you’re the developer, yeah, you know what you would what’s your goal? What was the biggest thing you’d want to see from the city’s Council effort to do so, a little bit of permitting reform or a lot of it?

Patrick Cobb  1:24:20

Well, I don’t know if they’ll take on but I was building my list after I answered the question earlier on, how it made it easier and faster? I think it’s just, you know, it’s efficiency, how quickly you can get you can get through the process, how quickly you can permit things with that predictability,

Doug Trumm  1:24:37

yeah, and coordination between departments and just knowing the answers quicker.

Patrick Cobb  1:24:41

Yeah, that’s true. You do find yourself a lot of times like trying to connect the dots between different different groups, or you talk to somebody that you know, no, you need to talk to this person in this other office. And I would love to see the this. And I don’t know if this happened already, but I. You still love to be able to actually go to the 20th floor and talk to the planners and actually talk to people face to face. That’s what I would love to see come back, is the ability to actually go downtown and go up that elevator and talk to people.

Doug Trumm  1:25:15

Sorry, yeah, you’re not the only architect or developer brought that up. The city did a panel, and that was that came up anything just here, or should we keep going?

Naishin Fu  1:25:24

Yeah, very much in favor of streamlining or cutting out design review. But I know that there are existing exemptions already for affordable housing, which is great we would like for social housing to also take part of those exemptions right now, it wouldn’t qualify because the exemptions are based on the median income you’re serving with housing. Since social housing can serve a higher range of incomes, it does not qualify for these same exemptions now. But if we want more social housing, I believe the voters have said we do. Then we also need to include, you know, either publicly owned housing or social housing, however you want to define it in in those

Doug Trumm  1:26:17

We got some questions too about sort of the larger planning process, you know, in what a we can do with this current plan to make sure that there’s not further delays. And I guess there’s implied further question of like bigger picture, if there’s a way to do this more efficiently in the future, so we’re not right up against the deadline.

Michael Hubner  1:26:44

Well, briefly, just being in the trenches on this, we appreciate SEPA reform, state environmental policy act and helping us not get bogged down in appeals over environmental review, we actually got the appeals dismissed because of some recent state changes in state law on SEPA. So we appreciate that it’s also something we may look at as a city. Our own city code talks about how we would proceed when under appeal, and are there ways to speed up and not delay processes going forward. Nobody within city government certainly likes that.

We want to get issues in front of Council and with the mayor moving things forward. And so that’s that’s certainly one in terms of the current process, as I kind of led with, is to very soon, the entirety of the legislation, all of the zoning legislation and the comp plan, will be in the hands of the council. And the council has some, you know, sets its own schedule and its own process. I think there is a reality of the budget. Well, I think probably everybody understands that there’s a very significant conversation around the city budget, but understanding that lobbying your council members about having an expeditious process and considering the comp plan and the zoning could help in short term.

Jesse Simpson  1:28:11

Yeah, and just to build on to that, the next public hearing for this will be the interim middle housing legislation is on May 19. That’s up Monday. It’ll be at 9:30am yeah, not my decision, but we’re pushing as many people as can to show up to their express support for the interim legislation and urge the Council to take up the rest of the comp plan as quickly as possible. I think also one, one thing that stuck it out to me is the importance of state leadership on land use actions that like, I don’t know if we would be where we are now, with middle housing being proposed to be allowed city wide, if it weren’t for the state’s leadership on HB 1110, was certainly part of the conversation. But I think the fact that the state has said it’s just mandated makes it quite a bit easier for the city to come to neighbors concerned about the speed of change.

And what we’ve seen in this past legislative session is some real leadership in terms of passing the transit-oriented development bill, HB 1491 which will allow for mid rise housing in all of the all the areas around major transit, like the bus rapid transit, as well as light rail. And so that as we look ahead to 2029, and the half check in time of these horrendously long, comprehensive plan timelines, that’s going to be a real game changer in terms of going even further than what’s in the proposed plan. And I there’s similar leadership that the states stick out in terms of parking reform to eliminate parking mandates for affordable housing and many other types of types of housing.

Doug Trumm  1:30:15

We got a couple questions. We were talking about transit oriented development a little bit, TOD, but there’s also people interested in BOD, bike corridor development and ferry oriented development, FOD. These aren’t actual acronyms. So, yeah, I’m curious, Michael, if you could shed some light, if anyone’s ever thought about like, Well, okay, well, does it make sense to think about bike, major bike quarters that way, or the ferry that way, as being a center for development.

Michael Hubner  1:30:47

Well, those are two very different transportation.

Michael Hubner  1:30:53

So, on the bicycle side, and by the way, I bicycle into City Hall every day that I can, which is most days. And do appreciate as a biker, when I see a business or some kind of opportunity right near the trail, I’m often do stop myself, so I that’s appealing to me, just from a, just a just a resident perspective, I would say the bicycle trails and bicycle basically places where there are bicycles, where there is people moving through is just one of a constellation of things that we look at in terms of places that are appropriate and good places to plan for more housing and more commercial. I don’t think alone like a bus line or a train line. I think has a different gravity, a different level of traffic. So it is just part of the picture.

We certainly look at the trail maps and the bike infrastructure in the city, and it probably is just or more as important as when we’re planning for new neighborhood centers and other places for growth that we are creating the bike ways of different different ways to be able to get in and out. So it follows the growth of where we need the new bike infrastructure, ferries. I actually think ferries are maybe Jesse. I’m trying to remember if the new TOD bill includes ferries. I think it does.

Jesse Simpson  1:32:15

I think it did in the first iteration. Someone in the audience might be able to correct me here, but I believe it was taken out.

Michael Hubner  1:32:23

Was it, okay? Well, in any event, we do have one of our neighborhood centers is near the near the Fauntleroy, and the line near the ferry dock there are other downtown is obviously already downtown. So I think it’s more of an issue for non Seattle jurisdictions in terms of ferries, it’s been a regional conversation for some time as to what role ferry, dock, station areas should play. I like it personally.

Doug Trumm  1:32:51

And sorry, Michael, I think I have another one for you. So you’ve been getting the work out here, but I’ve heard you give like a 15-minute answer at the Wallingford Community Council, because I’m not going to do that now, no, you got asked the same question five times. But, you know, I guess the question basically gets it. How much new zoning or you could say how much new housing capacity is too much? And, it’s never enough to some in the ambience here. But yeah, how do planners think about this issue? Because it’s complicated, because you’re looking at projections.

Michael Hubner  1:33:27

It is. I’m not going to actually say any numbers in my response. That’s just about ideas so and then you may fill in the numbers later. We we don’t just look at how much we have grown. We just don’t. We don’t look at future projections. We look at a whole array of data to tell us what our major challenges are and around housing. We know from looking at how much we’ve been growing in terms of jobs versus housing, we know population versus housing, we’re falling behind on those measures. We know from market signals which are very strong and blaring. This is an emergency home prices, rents, cost burden for low and moderate income households for renters, 20% of renters, all renters, are paying more than 50% of their income for just, just however we focus their head, racial disparities and housing on down the line, we look at those things to tell us that a fundamental is we need to provide more housing in the city so that the status quo is not enough.

So that’s really the philosophy that guided this plan, is that not doing the minimum. Now, what is too much? We didn’t address the plan from a numbers perspective. We’d rather ask the question. Just said, we need more. We need. Lot more, where are good places to plan for more housing, the neighborhood centers, the transit corridors. Expand our urban centers, so that if there’s a light rail there, or just a really strong bus node, or a major business district, that a full walk distance around those places was going to be zoned for apartments.

We’ve put all those things together, and we came up with what this plan does is it provides for capacity for about 330,000 housing units. That’s about double the current capacity that theoretically what can be built. That’s a big number. It’s a lot more than our state mandated minimum. We think it’s actually very reasonable to zone for to plan for a lot more than your minimum, for a number of reasons, we’ve always grown faster than projections in the city for the past 30 years. I went back and looked over the old projections and the old growth rate the city has grown basically twice as fast as everybody in the region thought we would grow for the last two and a half decades or so. That’s probably going to continue. So we ought to be ready for it. That’s good planning.

And we need to provide enough room for the market to find locations that make sense for a developer like Patrick, for affordable housing developers to find appropriately zoned, 567, story sites, so they’re not competing with the market rate developers for a shrinking universe of sites for new housing. So 330,000 is a big number, and some people think that that’s our question. Is that too much? We think it’s an appropriate response to all of those signals that we need to do more?

Doug Trumm  1:36:40

Yeah, thank you. That was succinct. In Seattle added over 14,000 homes last year, which is a high water mark in least recent history that I looked at. So certainly good sign, but a lot of permits were, meanwhile, very low, so there’s certainly mixed signals as far as that goes. And the increased zoning might change that.

Jesse Simpson  1:37:05

But yeah, and just to tag one thing onto that too, I think looking at this historically, in New York and LA in the mid century, mid 20th century, they saw that they had zoned housing capacity that was like 55 million for this for New York, and like 30 million for LA, and that began a major down zoning of both cities to try to align zoned capacity with just how much additional growth they were going to expect, to try to channel it into a given area, and I think not by happenstance. That’s also when you start to see a housing crisis emerge in those cities, as you’ve restricted the ability of developers, of people to add new housing to the market, to free up to free up additional homes and reduce the competition that is continuing to drive up prices. Yeah, I appreciate the OPCD’s approach to looking way beyond just what number is correct and thinking more about how to encourage housing choices through this conflict.

Doug Trumm  1:38:23

Yeah, yeah. And sort of thinking about what the downsides are different versus, if you don’t have enough capacity, the downsides are pretty big people don’t have homes, versus the downside of giving yourself padding is less. We could get into that, but probably sufficient to say.

Michael Hubner  1:38:40

One more thing on that too, and I can’t remember who said it earlier. Well, I know it was Patrick. You I really like the way you talked about what neighborhoods should expect in terms of change. That was another thing that we definitely thought about in designing the proposal with the council right now, which is if every neighborhood has a more significant role in terms of having their housing opportunities, opportunities to develop market rate and affordable housing. No, no, the market demand is not going to be funneled into a limited number of spaces.

Like we hear a lot, and I get it, I hear from people in Ballard, for example, north of downtown Ballard, there was a lot of redevelopment to town homes in recent years, and it was a big change to that area. I’m not necessarily saying it was, in and of itself, a bad thing, but it certainly was a very different experience than other neighborhoods, largely because it was one of the few areas in the city where you could build townhomes, if we’re allowing through middle housing in many more neighborhoods, your change is going to be more spread out, more incremental, a little bit more organic, and with a lot more flexibility for developers as well.

Doug Trumm  1:39:52

We got a question, and we’ll try to be quick, because we’re running out of time, but the question mentions that most new apartment buildings are mostly studios and one bedrooms. Sizes are shrinking, and what are we doing to ensure that larger multi family includes two bedrooms and other amenities so that there’s more family-size housing? And we can also look at family-size housing more broadly in our minute on this topic.

Naishin Fu  1:40:20

I think I already talked about this earlier, but social housing does offer increased opportunities for family-size units because it is, it does not need to make a profit, so it has a little more leeway to, you know, not only just create the most number of units possible. I know, affordable housing, I think, has some restrictions too. That kind of incentivizes more units. But social housing, as long as they can make a pencil out just, you know, make sure they can operate and maintain the buildings that offers a little bit more room to build family size units, two to three, you know, bedrooms. Again, I want to when we say family-size, people think it’s out of a single family home. But I know a lot of families living in town homes in one bedroom or two bedroom apartments. Families come in all shapes and sizes. So we need to, you know, two bedroom can be also family-size units.

Doug Trumm  1:41:14

And Patrick on the on the marker inside is, is there any hope for that? You know, come back with a dingbat or something like that, that that is, I think that’s like the little garage on the bottom with the like three story apartment on top. You know, in some of that is the older stock of condos or apartments that are little bit larger, but that might have just been a creature of the 80s or whatever 70s, when people are something like that. But can developers even make that work in Seattle? Or is the price is just too high?

Patrick Cobb  1:41:46

You know, I think that there are locations or it’ll work because, you know, the way it’s perceived, in a pro forma, whenever you’re doing your financial modeling, and you’re you’re taking comps, is that the smaller the unit, the higher your rent, right? Like, that’s been, kind of, sort of is on a sliding scale. As you move in from your straight up one bed to your two bed, your three bed, your rent per foot goes down, and then your model tanks. Whether that’s true and it’s actually built or not, is sometimes debatable, because it costs more to build smaller units. So sometimes it backfires. But I think a lot of times, when you go into actually, you know, establishing what the direction of the project is, it’s really easy to kind of say, Oh yeah, the average unit size is going to be a one bed. It’s going to be 670, square feet, with some smaller studios, and then maybe some two beds, and then maybe one three bed, sort of somewhere lands in the in the project, because you can’t figure out what to do with the corner or something like that.

We did have one project I was working on that was over closer to the Roosevelt Station that worked really well for two beds. And I don’t know why exactly it was working, but I think it just had to like there was a demand for two and three beds in 2022 2021 where they were achieving rents that were comparable, or just a little bit below smaller units. And so in that project, we had a much larger percentage of two beds and three beds. So sorry to get into the boring economics of it. That’s a lot of times it drives it, and I know there’s a need for it, and I would love to see more two and three beds in multi family rental buildings well.

Doug Trumm  1:43:28

And I think this will be our last question. Thanks everyone for sticking around for this whole in-depth and very involved, and we’ve been here two hours. Hats off to you, but this seems like a fitting last question for the housing advocates, you know the comp plan. Phase One, the permanent electrician being pushed to or no, sorry, phase two being pushed to 2026 do we expect the 2025 elections to pivot on housing at some level.

Jesse Simpson  1:44:00

Yeah, housing is one of the top issues we have locally, so I expect it to be, well, I don’t know we’ve got, we’ve got two different council members from D2 in the in the room right here, both are running on housing. They’re here this evening. I think the like Alexis Mercedes Rinck is run on as a very strong housing advocate. Dionne Foster challenging Sara Nelson has a strong housing platform. Sara Nelson is a housing champion in her own sense, though, has some different ideas about taxation than Dionne, for sure, you know in terms of how they differentiate themselves, I don’t know how much that’s going to permeate the discourse. But it remains to be seen, and it’s certainly going to be a topic of conversation. And

Doug Trumm  1:45:07

And you just won an election on housing. So this is a great topic for you.

Naishin Fu  1:45:12

I think that regardless of where the comp plan is that it was going to be, housing is going to be a tough issue for everyone, I hope. And I just want to say that all of you can ensure that that is the case as well by asking your candidates those questions. I know, for House Our Neighbors, we’re going to be doing candidate questionnaires. Maybe we’ll do an event. We’ve heard from candidates already that they are getting a lot of questions from, you know, possible constituents about social housing, and that’s great to hear. And they’re listening to those so what? What voters are asking really matters, and so keep the topic of housing top of mind and social housing.

Doug Trumm  1:45:51

Any last thoughts?

Patrick Cobb  1:45:55

Yeah, I have a couple. So just kind of behind the you know, we were talking earlier, and I never gave a response on this, but it’s 300,000 is that enough to kind of aim for? And something that’s been kind of a discussion point among a lot of investors and developers in Seattle is kind of running to, oh, I’m not going to develop in Seattle anymore. I’m only going to develop on the Eastside. I’m going to develop in Kirkland. I’m going to develop in Bellevue or Redmond. I’m never going to develop in Seattle again. I hear that from lots of people I know and and obviously, you know, I think that’s wrong. I love Seattle, and personally, you know, this is a place I want to develop in forever.

And I’m really excited to see how, how the new land use code, how these new opportunities can help to bring back investment to Seattle, like we are in competition, to some degree, with our neighbors across the water. We are in competition with other cities in the country when it comes to investment in new housing and and, you know, having more money flow into our city, and we have a top tier city with wonderful neighborhoods, with a lifestyle that, you know is, I’ve lived in Dallas, I’ve lived in New York, you know, I’ve lived in a couple other places. And I would say, like our lifestyle here is top notch, and people should want to be here, and investors should want to be here. So how do we grease that? How do we make sure that we stay, you know, kind of the premier location within the entire Pacific Northwest. So anyways, that was my last little plug.

Michael Hubner  1:47:29

I just want to say thank you for having us here from the city that this conversation is a really high-level conversation on housing and great audience and great questions. My hope for next year, I’m not going to say any try to stay out of politics for obvious, obvious reasons, but I did. I was telling Jesse — we were both at the HDC luncheon today, and the City of Bellevue won an award for their housing planning. And I was for just from a selfish staff perspective, hoping there were some elected officials from Seattle in the audience feeling a little bit jealous of their Eastside neighbor for winning an award. So maybe next year you’ll have a housing panel be the day of the HDC luncheon, and Seattle will have won an award for its great comprehensive plan.

Doug Trumm  1:48:18

Well, that’s our show, everyone. Thanks for coming. And I think we do have to clean up the space, but if you want to mingle, the plaza is obviously open. It’s a great thing about this space is we have a beautiful pedestrianized public plaza.

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