Forget reinventing...How about re-legalizing Microhousing?

Casey Jaywork from the Seattle Weekly wrote a great article last week describing how Seattle has all but banned the production of congregate micro-housing and has refused to take up the HALA committee recommendation to revisit this policy. The article features a discussion of our Yobi Apartments project and how last year's micro-housing legislation has made it all but impossible to develop more projects like the Yobi.

The article used data from a DPD housing report that captured production through May of 2015.  I took that report and updated it to the current day, filling in some missing projects and adding in all of the 2015 pipeline. Here's what I found:

Annual Totals	Congregate Units	SEDUs
2010	79	0
2011	168	0
2012	755	32
2013	1804	82
2014	1203	251
2015	124	902

One surprise: Virtually all of the new congregate housing projects are coming out of our office.  This has nothing to do with us capturing market share; our workflow on congregate housing projects has been fairly stable. Rather, it is a reflection of the rest of the market being driven away from congregate micro-housing and shifting their efforts over to SEDU production.