Guest Post from Liz Pisciotta:
Monday, I had the opportunity to join a tour of microhousing
projects that Neiman Taber helped organize. The aim of the tour was to show
city policymakers examples of microhousing, from historical SRO (single room occupancy)
buildings to today's SEDU (small efficiency dwelling unit) and congregate
housing. Our goal was to highlight the need for affordable market-rate housing
solutions and to demonstrate how Seattle's regulatory choices have negatively
affected our ability to produce this housing. The tour group included leaders
from several city agencies, including the Mayor’s Office, the City Council, Office
of Housing, SPU, OPCD, SDOT, as well as several developers and architects who
work on this building type.
For some time now, David Neiman has been writing about the
importance of microhousing as an important tool in the affordability toolkit.
Unfortunately, microhousing has succumbed
to a slow death by a thousand policy cuts. While many policymakers understand the
problem, politicians have been unwilling to expend political capital on the
issue. Fortunately, this appears to be changing. The explicit purpose of the
tour was to familiarize city leaders with the importance of microhousing as an
affordable housing typology, show different scales of microhousing, and to
illustrate how policy choices have increased the cost of microhousing or
eradicated it altogether. The hope was that the agency leaders will be primed
to collaborate on the mayor's effort to develop a comprehensive set of policy
prescriptions and legislation to make microhousing more plentiful and
affordable, enabling it to play a meaningful role in delivering affordable
housing solutions for individuals and couples in core Seattle neighborhoods.
We all piled into a couple of vans and headed off to our first
destination: The Helen, a traditional SRO building, built in 1908 and recently
remodeled. The apartments at The Helen are simple bedrooms, most of them
without a private kitchen or bathroom. Bathrooms and full kitchens are shared
down the hall. Think of your typical college dorm set up but nicer. The
building is a good example of basic housing that allows people to live in a
desirable neighborhood at minimal cost. It's a three-story building with no
elevator, no in-building waste room, no bike room, no exercise room, no frills.
Buildings like this used to be commonplace and were a key type of workforce housing
when Seattle was growing at the turn of the last century. Homes at The Helen
rent for $800 to $900 a month, which is affordable to someone making less than
the minimum wage (35%-40% AMI). SROs were built before much land use regulation
even existed. Once modern zoning codes came along, SROs were pretty much
outlawed.
Originally included in the tour but cut for time was Spring Park Flats, a townhouse-style pod micro. Seattle built a couple of thousand
units of this type from 2008 to 2014, before the City Council passed legislation
that killed off this type of project. These projects feature townhouse clusters
with eight bedrooms and eight bathrooms in each townhouse. When they were
developed, they were legal to build in any multifamily zone in Seattle, and so
they sprung up in locations all over the city. This project type shares some
important features with its historical cousin, the SRO. They were simple
low-rise buildings with no elevator, no parking garages, and no amenities other
than the basic shared kitchens.. They had low barriers to entry because they
were small and inexpensive projects, so mom-and-pop scale developers were able
to build them, and a lot of them got built very quickly. They delivered
affordability, with rents for these simple pod-style townhomes currently
ranging from $900 to $1050 per month (40%-45% AMI).
The first two projects are examples what builders produced
in the past but were regulated out of existence. The next two projects on the
tour are pretty good examples of what Seattle allows instead.
The tour’s next stop was Betula House, a SEDU apartment building.
SEDUs are miniaturized studio apartments, and at Betula, they average about 250
sq. ft. per unit. Betula is a new and beautiful apartment building with
well-designed units, large windows, and lots of natural light. In 2014, when Seattle
prohibited
pod-style micro townhouses and severely limited congregate housing, they paved
the way for SEDU projects like Betula. Critics at the time complained that the
resulting units would be larger, more expensive to build, and as a result, the
rents would be less affordable. Unfortunately, the critics were right. SEDU
units at Betula are currently advertised at $1400 a month, about 40% more than
a room at Spring Flats. Betula was on the tour to make this point, but also
made a related one. In the few years it took for Betula to go from the
sketchpad to finished construction, new regulations have added so much cost and
diminished so much value that the developer of Betula (Ben Maritz) estimated
that if he tried to build a similar project today, he would not be able to get
the project financed and built unless the rents increased to about $2000 per
month.
The final stop on the tour was 500 Broadway, a brand-new
congregate housing project located at Broadway and Jefferson, designed by Neiman Taber. The
2014 microhousing code revisions banned congregate housing from low-rise zones but permitted them in
limited areas, such as NC3 zones where intensive development might provoke
fewer complaints from constituents. 500 Broadway is an example of what happens
to congregate housing when you try to build it in these areas of the city.
500 Broadway is an 8-story building, a height that necessitates an
elevator. Once you introduce an elevator, accessibility codes trigger a
requirement for all units to be accessible. That means larger doors, larger
maneuvering spaces, larger bathrooms, and lots of special details throughout
the unit. In rough terms, it means that the units get about 20% larger than
they would otherwise, increasing costs, and often adding the square footage in
the bathroom and other areas that are less than ideal for a small unit used by
an able-bodied person. The height of 500 Broadway also requires more expensive
concrete construction, which adds significant cost. Bicycle rooms are required
to have about three times the amount of storage than building managers see
utilized, so essentially, they are bicycle rack storage rooms. This is
unfortunate because these spaces could be optimized to provide other amenities,
such as a music practice room, an exercise room, or even another unit. We are
proud of 500 Broadway, which occupies a prominent corner on First Hill. The
building is clad in gorgeous manganese iron spot brick and Oko skin panels
imported from Germany. Were these natural design choices for an affordable
housing project? Perhaps not, but they were the way to get the project accepted
by the design review board.
The basic market-rate units at 500 Broadway rent for about $1200-$1300
per month. To achieve a deeper level of affordability, Housing Diversity Corp.,
the project developer, struck a deal with the non-profit Enterprise Community
Partners to become a partner in the project to lock in affordable rents. The
subsidized units start at $1050 per month (50% AMI), which is a great deal to
live in a beautiful new project like 500 Broadway with premium finishes,
generous shared amenities, and killer views of the skyline. However, we also
need to realize that, in just a few short years, we are in the frustrating position
where bringing significant subsidies to the table still isn't enough to achieve
the level of affordability that a project like The Helen or a townhouse pod
building could achieve just through its simplicity.
As we hit the different stops on our tour, I and the other tour
guides made sure to drive home a long list of issues that drive up the cost of
microhousing. A sample of some key points:
·
The update to the energy code introduced in
2021 has added about $20,000 of cost per unit — units
which cost only $120,000 each to build. This summer will bring a new energy
code that will increase costs more. As a firm, we are concerned about
sustainability, in fact smaller, denser units are already much more efficient
per user than larger units. Unit and user density should be taken into account
in the energy code and the code should focus on the energy use per occupant.
·
Due to stricter requirements, many waste rooms
now require waste chutes, compactors, and two-story tall internal truck loading
docks. Smaller projects cannot absorb these costs and often lose meaningful amounts of housing to oversized waste facilities.
· New pedestrian zone requirements add expensive
oversized canopies and create empty commercial storefronts which are too deep, large,
and expensive for small shop owners to lease.
·
Street rental fees to construct projects have
ballooned from five figures to six figures.
·
The scope creep of street frontage
improvements have piled lots of new costs to projects, often to replace improvements that were perfectly fine in the first place. In addition to the cost
of the improvements, the cost of
permitting the work is sometimes as expensive as the work itself.
·
It’s a positive thing that we are phasing out
fossil fuels but now projects that previously didn’t need in-building
transformer vaults require them.
·
Individual projects pay for million-dollar
upgrades to aging utility mains, often well beyond the site extents.
·
Congregate buildings are required to provide
15% of the room areas as common space, which makes for a nice building, but
these spaces are a luxury that shouldn't be required for basic housing.
·
Subsidized affordable housing are currently
exempt from design review. The city should extend this exemption to housing
projects that choose the performance MHA path.
·
Congregate housing should be allowed in
low-rise zoning. This would provide a lower barrier to entry for multifamily
developers and offer more affordable housing in more areas.
What most impressed me about the tour was the
in-between times of the day — the conversations in the van or questions in the
hallway — curiosity and support coming out of institutions that have previously
been openly hostile to microhousing. There was a hopeful spirit of
collaboration and excitement.
An oft-quoted estimate by the Puget Sound Regional
Council is that we'll need to produce 800,000 new homes in the Seattle metro
area by 2050. By that measure, we're falling behind year after year. As
a city, we have regulated our way into a corner where we can no longer produce
the housing we need at prices that the people who most need it can afford. The
shortfall has gotten bad enough that the City's top leadership are finally
paying attention and that's what this tour was all about. To hit that target
and ensure that future Seattle will be a city that has a place for everyone,
this is an all-hands-on-deck moment. Certainly, we will need publicly
subsidized housing but we will also need market-rate solutions and
public/private collaborations if we hope to dig ourselves out of this
predicament. We will need to be creative and collaborative.
I'm typically a realist — there's a glass and there's
water in it. Here’s how the glass currently looks: in
the ten years since the term "housing affordability crisis" has been
buzzing around Seattle, City leaders have generated policy after policy that
has addressed the concerns of individual agencies and constituents in ways that
have made all housing more expensive, often disproportionately affecting Seattleites
who can afford it the least. This tour, however, made
me cautiously optimistic that Seattle can produce effective housing policy and,
once again, be a leader in microhousing.
-Liz