Housing Affordability, Supply, and Quality. Is Seattle's Lowrise Code Helping or Hurting?

 

Anyone who has ever been trapped in a corner with me at a cocktail party can tell you that I spent a good deal of time helping to shape the 2011 update to the lowrise zoning code.  The new code has radically changed the work of our office for the better.  We have been able to design projects with higher design quality, more density, better affordability, in a wide variety of formats that serve niches ranging from micro-housing apartments to high-end ownership townhomes.

That said, one of the goals of our office is to innovate new ideas that are replicable. We don't just want to design pretty unicorns - we are trying to develop archetypes that other architects, builders and developers see as useful models for their own work. I sat down a few weeks ago to write an article about our Marion Green project and the other Terrace Courtyard projects we have designed with the goal of promoting the idea to others.  I showed the article to my friend Alan Durning over at Sightline.  He expressed some interest but was more curious to learn about the townhouse market as a whole, and how our work compared to the other kinds of housing being produced.

This led me to do a deep dive into the city records, looking at the last 5 years of building permits since the new code went into effect.  After a great deal of sorting, filtering, and brute force downloading, I compiled data that shows the amount and type of housing we are producing in our lowrise zones.  I was surprised to discover how much we are distorting the type, quality, and density of our ownership housing via our regulatory rules. 

Thanks to Dan Bertolet from Sightline who took my ramblings and turned them into cogent reporting, no small feat when trying to make land use policy into something readable. You can see the whole article over at the Sightline blog:

http://www.sightline.org/2016/02/24/a-good-way-to-make-housing-scarcer-and-more-expensive/