2019 AIA Housing Forum Presentation - The Roost: Micro Housing, Community and Cultural Space

The summer we were honored to be given a showcase at the 2019 AIA Housing forum to present The Roost: Micro Housing, Community, and Cultural Space. We gave a 30 minute presentation about the project including some background behind the project, the challenges inherent in designing for small spaces, and the tensions inherent in playing the dual role of architect / developer.

Video of the presentation (and of the other presentations given at the forum) is available at the AEC Knowledge website

https://aecknowledge.com/courses/140

Housing Choices for Everyone

This summer The Master Builder's Association invited me in for an interview to talk about The Roost for a video series called Housing Choices for Everyone. It is aimed at educating the public about the changing landscape of urban housing and the new housing types that help serve the needs of ordinary people. Its a brilliant project and I'm really proud to have been asked to participate.

Ben Leiataua, the resident featured in the video, is one of the many artists who make their home at The Roost. Ben spent many years working as the marketing director for a casino before deciding to change direction and lean into the craft of singing and acting more fully. The Roost provides him with a modest home in the city from which to pursue his art in the company of other people who share his passions and interests. Ben's work is in Seattle, but before he moved to the Roost he was living in Auburn, where he had been commuting 60 miles a day in order to find affordable rent. Ben's story is fairly typical in that respect. Over 75% of our residents moved to The Roost from distant neighborhoods or exurbs around Seattle.

Later this fall we will publish a series of stories from The Roost, introducing some of our residents, and telling their "housing story". The goal is to put a human face on the answer to the question "who lives in micro-housing". Coming soon to a blog near you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6fWvtvz5NE

We Did It! The Roost Artists Live-Work Lofts is Complete

In early December, we crossed an important threshold, leasing up our last remaining apartment as well as signing up an arts non-profit for our commercial space. That milestone represents the completion of a four year effort to design and develop The Roost, a first-of-its-kind artist's live work micro-housing development.

The Roost has 33 units with 34 residents, 7 dogs, 2 cats, and is home to about two dozen working artists. Our residents share kitchens, living, dining, co-working and laundry rooms. Nine of our residents live in units that are subsidized through Seattle's MFTE program, capping their rent at $702/mo. The market-rate units rent for an average of around $1200/mo.

Images from the 2018 Women's March, featuring artwork produced and distributed by Amplifier

The Roost is also the new home of Amplifier, a non-profit media lab that helps connect artists with social change movements to design, produce, and distribute art and media that helps those movements reach a wider audience. Bringing Amplifier to The Roost is the culmination of a years-long effort with Seattle's Office of Arts and Culture to identify a non-profit arts institution whose activities could provide interest and inspiration to our tenants. We hope this collaboration ican serve as a model for how new development can help support arts and cultural institutions in Seattle.

It has been a lot of work getting to this point, and we were at times uncertain if we would be able to pull it off. Having finally crossed the finish line, it's worth taking a moment to reflect on what we have accomplished and to share some of the lessons we learned along the way.


Background
Four years ago (November 2014) we purchased a 4000 sf lot near the future Rainier Light Rail Station with the intent of developing our first micro-housing project. Our starting point was the community micro-housing model that we first conceived for projects like the Yobi. These early projects paired compact, affordable private sleeping rooms with generous common areas arranged to promote chance interaction and help build community among the residents. We aimed to push this form of housing beyond its utilitarian roots, improve the general design quality, and explore the inherent opportunities and challenges that are created when people live in community with one another. We described this effort as Microhousing 2.0.

Could we design housing that helped build friendships, social capital, and quality of life? Our first intuition was that we might be more successful if we could assemble a group of residents that shared some common interests and/or challenges. So we looked around the neighborhood and tried to imagine what a natural resident cohort might look like. With projects like Hiawatha Artspace next door, Pratt Art Institute nearby, and work spaces like Inscape and Rainier Oven within a short walk, we saw a natural opportunity to create artist's housing that could have a symbiotic relationship with these exiting arts institutions.

At the time, Artspace had 150 rooms available in Seattle with over 1000 artists on a waiting list. Projects like Artspace are an important but scare resource, accessible only to those patient and lucky enough to get a spot. We saw an opportunity to create a market-rate analogue to Artspace's non-profit development model; aimed at helping the same group of people but with a solution shaped by the toolkit that we have at hand. Artspace provides large generous units to its residents, charges its commercial tenants market rate, achieves affordability through federal tax subsidies and insures those subsidies benefit artists by screening applicants through a portfolio review. The Roost, by contrast, would achieve affordability through space efficiency and shared resources. We would use conventional private financing, charge market rate for our rooms, and use Seattle's MFTE program to achieve a deeper level of affordability. We would provide subsidized commercial space to attract an arts-oriented anchor tenant. Our doors would be open to anyone, so we would have to find ways to attract artists to the project via marketing and outreach.

Early Design Concepts
Our earliest designs featured three upper stories of small (160sf) studios with a main floor dedicated mostly to a large common work room. The idea was that residents could live upstairs and work together downstairs in the common studio. This vision was a natural extension of our own past experiences as architecture students working in large shared studios. We took the earliest sketches of this idea around to a range of schools and institutions (Pratt, UW, SEED, Equinox, Artspace) with experience providing artists work space. The feedback was not encouraging: Artists work in a variety of media, at all hours, often with specialized, expensive tools and supplies. They have unique personalities, a fierce devotion to their work, and a need to protect the fruit of their labors. Accordingly, almost every institution that provides artist work space provides it in the form of four walls with a door and a lock. Our vision of a gleaming storefront space full of artistic collaboration and creative foment needed a bit of re-thinking.

An early planning concept for the main floor featuring a large common work room.

We published our plans online and sent a survey around to get feedback directly from prospective tenants. Some respondents found the idea intriguing. Many artists were suspicious of our intentions, which was generally presumed to be some sort of artwashing scheme. One pearl of wisdom that we gleaned from the outreach: Respondents put a much higher priority on living in a building with other artists than on working in a building with other artists.

Based on the feedback, we shifted gears a little bit. We gave up on the common work room and redesigned the main floor to have a conventional commercial space that we would reserve for an arts-oriented tenant. Having lost the common work area, we put a little bit of that work space back into each unit. We turned the upper three stories into two levels, but made each unit double height to accommodate a small bed loft. Lifting the beds up off the main floor opened up a small space for a work area within each unit - a miniaturized live-work loft,

Walking the Walk
Throughout the process we have had to live with a degree of uncertainty about the outcome. While we have always had a high level of confidence that we could make the project work as a conventional housing development, right up until the last we didn't have a clear sense if we could actually deliver on the promise of creating an arts community. It's one thing to want artists to come live here, but whether or not they will take up the invitation is another matter entirely. We offered up our storefront at reduced rent to arts institutions, but two years of matchmaking during the design and construction phase didn't produce much beyond a series of first dates. As the project approached completion, we sat down with our property manager to discuss a lease-up strategy, and a contingency plan.

We completed construction and got permission to occupy the building in mid-August. Summer and early Fall is considered a great season for leasing apartments. A conventional lease-up strategy would immediately buy up a lot of advertising and focus on getting the units leased before the slow season arrived.  In our case, we felt our best chance to establish the project as an arts building would be to make sure that the first crop of tenants included as many artists as possible. So, rather than advertising broadly on general media sites like Craigslist and Zillow, we wanted to do our early outreach directly to artists.

We found ourselves at a junction where the project's financial best interests (quick lease-up) were in direct conflict with the projects stated goal (arts community), so we had to do a little soul searching paired with some spreadsheet work. We ultimately decided that we could afford to give artists a six-week head start and stick with our guerrilla marketing plan through October 1, at which point we would need to switch over to a conventional marketing strategy to get our units leased up and start paying on our bank loan.

Lease-Up
We reached out to over 60 arts non-profits and 35 galleries to use their bulletin boards, reception counters, telephone poles, and online social networks to spread the word about the project. We blogged, handed out postcards, and tacked up posters outside of art supply stores and art schools. We got enormous help from a few key institutions like SEED Arts, Artists Trust, Equinox, and Artspace. Slowly at first, and then more steadily, artists began to find the place. By the time October 1 rolled around, ten of the units were rented up, with artists living in seven of them. It was a promising start, but we were out of time and needed to move on. Conventional advertising had to begin. How many more artists would show up? We were just going to have to find out.

In early Fall we finally caught a lucky break on leasing the commercial space. Amplifier was looking for a new headquarters, and the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture helped connect the dots. We began working on an agreement to get them into The Roost, and the match finally took. We got ourselves a dream tenant, and the final pieces began to fall into place.

In October and November, the building continued to lease up steadily at the rate of about 3 units per week. We wanted to know how many of the later lease-ups were artists. It's not easy to know. When people apply for an apartment, they declare their income and where they work for a living, but very few working artists make their primary living through their art, so you don't really know if someone is an artist until you get a chance to ask them directly. To answer the question more accurately, we are conducting a tenant survey. While the information is still coming in, so far (with a 75% response rate) about 85% of our respondents identify as artists.

What's Next?
Our development projects provide us a laboratory to push new ideas and experiment in a way that isn't always possible in our client driven projects. The Roost is the first of a series of micro-housing projects where we are both the architect and the developer. These projects provide an opportunity to test new ideas in the marketplace, and enhance our subject matter expertise for this kind of housing. Operating the buildings is a unique opportunity to learn more about the day-to-day lives of our tenants, and deepen our understanding of this specific housing type. It is a form of research that can help us improve our future projects, guide our clients more effectively, and speak with more authority in our public advocacy role.

1501 NW 59th St - Construction to Begin Spring 2019

8311 15th Ave NW - Shared Residential/Commercial Courtyard

8311 15th Ave NW - Under Construction. Completion Jan 2020.

Credits

Neiman Taber Architects Design Team: David Neiman, David Taber, Elizabeth Pisciotta, Patrick Taylor, Kyle Jenkins, Juan Vergara, Erin Feeney, Sharon Rubin.

General Contractor: STS Construction Services

Consultant Team: Malsam Tsang (Structural); Sitewise Design (Civil); Pacific Landscape Architecture (Landscape); Geotech Consultants (Geotech); Evergreen Certified (Built Green); Solarc Energy Group (Energy Modeling); Chadwick and Winters (Surveyor).

West Seattle Church of the Nazarene Townhomes Project on KING5 News

KING5 has a short video about our townhouse project for West Seattle Church of the Nazarene.

https://www.king5.com/video/news/local/church-finds-creative-solution-to-afford-space-in-seattle/281-8280844

The Roost Gets Discussed at City Council Hearing

We got a nice complement from the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture last week when our work came up in the context of a city council meeting about creating and preserving cultural space. The project they are discussing is The Roost at 901 Hiawatha PL S, where we are offering the building commercial space to an arts non-profit at below-market rent. In doing so we hope to both make a contribution to strengthening the arts in our city, but also to secure an arts identity for our building and provide our tenants with goods and services that are enriching for the folks living upstairs. As they allude to in the discussion, we think we are very close to announcing a deal with a tenant for the space.  Stay tuned...

Nazarene Townhomes City Council Hearing

The rezone application to allow development of six new townhouses on the church green of the West Seattle Church of the Nazarene (WSCN) will go before the City Council PLUZ committee on Monday, November 27th.  The project is an interesting test case for the city's new Mandatory Housing Affordability (MHA) program. The general idea behind MHA is that a re-zone is supposed to confer value to the property owner, and in exchange the city asks the owner to contribute that value back to the city. In the case of WSCN's project, the proposed project includes a Property Use and Development agreement (PUDA) that will dedicate much of the land to a public open space, constraining the use of the site to such an extent that it will actually have less development potential after the re-zone than it does today.

The church pursued the re-zone in the first place to change the zoning from SF5000 to LR1 so that the flexible use standards of lowrise zoning could be employed to cluster the development toward the back of the lot, preserving the front half of the land as open space. We spent over four years working with their community to get support for the project, modify the Morgan Junction neighborhood plan, get a comprehensive plan change passed, get through design review, and pass through the SEPA review process. Now that they have arrived at the finish line, they are facing the prospect of having to pay a $200,000 MHA fee in order to get the re-zone that would enable their project to move forward.

The fee represents a significant chunk of the money that the project will raise to pay for repairs of the WSCN sanctuary building. The Morgan Junction Community Association has been loud and clear in their support for the project and their objection to the MHA fees as punitive and redundant.

The diagrams below show the development proposal - six units and 9,900sf of housing, compared to a development scenario under today's SF5000 zoning with three large homes, three backyard cottages and over 16,500sf of housing.

What will the City Council do when faced with a project that voluntarily provides community benefits that prevent it from using the development potential conferred by a re-zone? Does the property owner have to pay anyway even though they receive no value in return? Is MHA really about a fair exchange of value creation and value capture, or is it just a fine levied on all new development?  We'll find out next week.

WSCN Rezone Site Plan Showing the 6 new townhomes and 9900 sf of new development

Alternate Site Plan of what is legal to develop today without a re-zone. 16,400 sf of new development

Building a Better Boom: Designing a Thriving City

I was recently invited to speak at Building a Better Boom: Designing a Thriving City, a community workshop aimed at helping participants to create a feasible vision for how their neighborhoods can be made more affordable, inclusive and sustainable. My presentation focused on the key elements of our zoning code, with an emphasis on understanding the key factors that decide what kind of projects get built where in neighborhood scale development.

The presentation can be seen on the Seattle Channel here:  https://www.seattlechannel.org/videos?videoid=x75776

Microhousing: More News From the Trenches

Last year I collaborated with Sightline to write “How Seattle Killed Micro-housing” about a series of legislative actions and administrative decisions that have gradually eroded our ability to produce micro-housing, turning Seattle from a national leader into a cautionary tale. While most of the issues detailed in that article remain unaddressed, the Mayor’s office did catch wind of one small aspect of the problem and asked the Construction Code Advisory Board (CCAB) to review some of their recent building code interpretations regarding minimum unit size with affordability in mind.
I served on the CCAB subcommittee that studied the issue, which just wrapped up a minor re-write of the directors rule that governs the design of SEDUs. While the new directors rule will add a little bit of design flexibility, the committee was unable to agree on changes that would allow SEDU's to be as small as they are intended. I've written about the process in a new post on Sightline that explains in detail the issues reviewed by the committee and where we got stuck.

http://www.sightline.org/2017/03/20/how-seattle-killed-micro-housing-again/

More Housing and Less Parking

2016 was a busy year for us, with a slew of new projects breaking ground and an even larger number starting the design process. I did a quick look back at our work from this year to see what we have been up to.

All together we worked on 31 projects, creating new homes for 599 people. Five of the projects were townhouses, five were single family homes, and 21 were apartment buildings.

Increasingly we find that our clients are trending away from single family and townhouse projects towards apartment buildings. Inside of this shift toward apartments is another trend regarding parking, the extent of which I hadn’t fully appreciated until I did this look-back exercise: Our townhouse projects have a lot of parking, but our apartment projects have hardly any parking at all.

# of Projects	Type	Unit Count	Parking Count	Parking Ratio
21	Apartment	562	18	0.03
5	Townhouse	31	44	1.42

Our townhouse and apartment projects are getting built in fairly similar locations, namely close-in neighborhoods on small infill lots of 5000-10000sf. When this land is developed at townhouse density (1 unit per 1000sf of land) these projects can hold a parking ratio that is fairly typical for a car-based city. But at apartment densities (1 unit per 100-200sf of land) providing parking in any meaningful quantity becomes untenable. Put another way, if the code still required parking, very few of those apartment projects would have ever gotten built. Instead, they would likely have been townhouse developments, and in place of 560 apartments we would have built about 75 townhomes (and 100 parking spaces).

This trend in our work reflects a simple truth about the direction we are headed as a city: Over the coming years we are going to welcome a lot of new people, but we are not going to add a lot of parking spaces. Rather, we are going to build infrastructure for public transit. We are going to walk more and bike more. We will learn to make use of car sharing and delivery companies. We are going to price our street parking to use the resource more effectively, and we will eventually learn to stop thinking of the curb in front of our homes as our personal possession. 

This will not be an easy transition for many people. Seattle is going to become a very different city than the one I grew up in. Yes, we will lose some bits and places that we love. But we are also minting new treasures by the armload with many more yet to come. By allowing the city to grow and change and make room for new people, we preserve the city’s essence as the place where people come to seek opportunity. I for one am excited to help build our future, to make homes for the people moving here, and to extend to others some of the same opportunities that I have so richly enjoyed.

Seattle Microhousing "Fix" Eliminates 830 Affordable Homes Per Year.

In my last post I illustrated how a succession of poor policy decisions over the last two years have suppressed the production of micro-housing, making it larger, more expensive and less plentiful. In this post I want to explore how many affordable housing units we are losing and how much more people are paying for their housing as a result.

Lets begin with my assumptions: 2013 was the last full year where congregate micro-housing was relatively unrestricted and no major event disrupted production.  Since mid 2014, every few months some new regulation has come along to shake up the playing field.  For lack of a better option, I'm using 2013 as a baseline year.

In 2013 we built out to roughly 576,000 sf of micro-housing. The chart below shows what this scale of development produces today compared to what it would produce if the city were to fix their recent policy mistakes. Built into these numbers is an assumption that a fixed policy scheme would produce about 50% SEDUs and 50% congregate housing. Since we have never enjoyed a year where our policies didn't tip the scales one way or the other, I'm making an educated guess.

Year	Congregate Units	SF per Congregate Unit	Congregate Total SF	SEDUs	SF per SEDU	SEDU Total SF	Total SF All Types
2013 Baseline	1804	300	541200	82	425	34850	576050
Today's Rules	183	315	57605	1,110	467	518445	576050
Fixed Policies	960	300	288025	678	425	288025	576050

Under today's rules, about 90% of production is in the form of SEDUs, The remaining 10% is congregate housing.  This skew towards SEDUs is because of a 2014 zoning change that limits congregate housing mostly to zones that are inappropriate for this type of housing.  SEDU projects rarely produce affordable housing because their market rents are too high and their MFTE rent levels are so low that SEDUs rarely participate. Current data suggests a 12% participation rate for SEDU projects, compared to a 50% participation rate for new development in general. Lastly, a new director's rule has made micro-housing units larger and more expensive than they would otherwise be. This in mind, a normal year of production under today's rules would look roughly like this:

Today's Rules	Congregate Units		SEDU Units
	Cong Market Rate Units	Cong MFTE Units	SEDU Market Rate Units	SEDU MFTE Units	Total
Unit Count	160	23	1,077	33	1,293
Rent	$900	$633	$1,300	$850
Average	$866		$1,295		$1,235

For comparison, if we fixed the zoning criteria for congregate housing, we would expect a higher percentage of projects to swing back toward the smaller, more affordable congregate variety.  If we set the rent requirements for the MFTE program at a discount comparable to other housing types, we would expect SEDU participation to normalize at around 50%.  Congregate housing is already set at a reasonable rate for MFTE, so participation for this type would continue to be fairly robust as well. The net effect is a huge rise the number of affordable units created and sharp decrease in average rents.

Fixed Policies	Congregate Units		SEDU Units
	Cong Market Rate Units	Cong MFTE Units	SEDU Units	SEDU MFTE Units	Total
Unit Count	840	120	593	85	1,638
Rent	$875	$633	$1,200	$850
Average	$845		$1,156		$974

 Every year our current micro-housing policies remain in effect:

• 1300 people pay an average of $253 more per month in rent.
• 345 fewer units are built, pushing up prices by adding to the city's production shortfall and increasing economic displacement of low income renters within our existing housing stock.
• 97 units of 40% AMI housing are not created (affordable to someone making $25k/yr).
• 731 units of 55% AMI are not created (affordable to someone making $34k/yr).

Multiplied over ten years, this represents the loss of 8,300 units of affordable housing, a 25% rent hike for 13,000 people, and 3,450 units of housing production lost.  We could fix this with a couple of administrative actions and a minor change to the zoning code.

Do you agree that we should fix this?  If so, please send a note to the city council, let them know.

*Prior to 2014, SEDUs had a design review threshold of 4 to 8 units depending on the zone, whereas congregate housing was not subject to design review.  This is the primary reason for the strong skew in the 2013 data towards congregate housing development.

Microhousing news goes from bad to worse

In my last post I delivered the bad news that Seattle just functionally eliminated micro-housing by issuing Directors Rule 7-2016, making Small Efficiency Dwelling Units (SEDU's) almost as large as a conventional studio apartment. This week the other shoe dropped.  I got official word that the new rule doesn't just apply to SEDU's.  It applies to all housing, so it will make conventional studios larger as well.

To understand just how far we have wandered off the path, let's compress the last two years into the narrative of a single development project:

You buy a plot of land in a dense Urban Village to develop microhousing.  Your goal is to provide housing at affordable rents in a desirable neighborhood for the most people that you can.  You'd also like to participate in the Multi-Family Tax Exemption (MFTE) program so that your rents can be as affordable as possible. You draw up plans to build (40) 175sf units and rent them each for $900/mo. 

Not so fast. Some of the folks who live nearby are upset about what you have planned, so the city council passes new rules to help you compromise with your neighbors.  First, they propose to bump up your units to an average of 220 square feet, then in committee, they add some more rules that bump your average unit size even further.  You re-design your project according to the new rules. You are now down to (27) 260sf units that rent for about $1200/mo. Your projected rents just went up 33%, but at least you are in the MFTE program so 20% of your units will offer a discounted rent of $1020/mo in exchange for a property tax reduction, which is a nice break for some of your renters and actually works out to your benefit as well.

Hold on just a second. The Office of Housing figures out that the MFTE deal is too good for you. They reset the program requirements, dropping SEDU rents down to $628/mo. Some quick math tells you this is a drastic over-compensation that will cost you way more in rent abatement than you would ever get back in property tax relief.  Then the Mayor's office jumps in and decides to promote family-sized housing by bumping your participation rate up from 20% to 25%.  You're not exactly sure how driving you out the MFTE program is helping to build family-sized housing, but you've got bigger fish to fry, so you give up on the MFTE program.  There will be no discounted units, but at least you'll be adding some much needed inventory to the housing supply.

Nice try.  The building department in concerned that your units are so small that they pose a threat to life, health and safety.  They publish a new code interpretation that requires your SEDU's to have larger living rooms. You re-design your project again. You are now down to (24) 290sf units that rent for about $1300/mo. At this point, you realize you're better off converting the units into to small conventional studios.  Your unit size bumps up again, to a little over 300sf, but at least conventional studios can rationally participate in the MFTE program, so 25% of your tenants will get an affordable rent.

Not quite. The building department has a follow-up memo.  It turns out that the living room size problem doesn't just concern SEDUs; conventional studios are also in danger of sliding below the minimum threshold for human habitation.  The new interpretation applies to all housing, so your studios have to get larger again. Your units jump up to an average of 330sf.  Your unit count drops to 21.  Your rents are now at $1400/mo.

This is how Seattle micro-housing has evolved in less than two years. Spread over the dozens of small-unit development projects this represents the loss of significant amounts of affordable housing and a huge increase in average rents.  How much? I'll explore the numbers in a follow-up post.

The War Against Micro-housing is Over. Micro-housing Lost.

Our practice is deeply involved in micro-housing – as architects, as developers, and as proponents in the public policy sphere. Getting these projects done has become an ever-increasing uphill battle.  Taking stock and looking back over that last couple years, I think I’m ready to call it:  The war against micro-housing is over…and micro-housing has lost.

The straw that broke the camel’s back is a recent SDCI director’s rule that places new restrictions on Small Efficiency Dwelling Units (SEDU’s) to the extent that that they will no longer be meaningfully smaller than a typical studio apartment. It is a significant setback for micro-housing and the ability of private market development to help with housing affordability.  But it is only the latest in a series of unforced errors that has taken Seattle from being a national leader on this issue to leaving the stage altogether.

As a firm we have worked to create plentiful, high quality, small-unit housing, designed to support livability and promote community among residents.  We have worked to get the Multi-Family Tax Exemption (MFTE) program aligned with micro-housing development to increase the supply of affordable rent-stabilized units.  We have worked with policymakers and legislators to avoid unintended consequences when crafting policy language and code interpretations.  We worked with the HALA committee to get micro-housing promotion into the HALA agenda. Along the way we have won some kudos for our design work and for our advocacy efforts, but frankly little else.  We have had some success getting policy makers to agree with us in principle, but where the rubber meets the road we are not seeing any actual progress on the ground.  To the contrary, the policy direction is still moving backward.

How did we kill Microhousing?

There’s no one single moment where we drove the bus off the cliff.  Rather, it’s been a process of accumulated bad decisions. To help illustrate, I went back in my files and pulled together the following timeline summary of the past few years:

2007-2009:  Microhousing first appears in the Seattle Market. In 2007 Calhoun Properties remodels an existing duplex to create small units with private bathrooms paired with shared kitchens and open space. In 2009, they apply this idea to two new townhouse developments in the UW and Central District. Average unit size is about 140sf.

July 2009: Seattle Times publishes an article about Videre Apartments (23^rd & John).  Public awareness and outrage grows.

2010-2013:  Microhousing proliferates and evolves.  Average unit size increases to about 175sf. Production ramps up to over 1000 units per year.

2013:  New Microhousing legislation is proposed, requiring all projects to undergo design review and to include more amenities such as common areas and bike parking.

2014: Revised Microhousing legislation proposes more expansive changes, prohibits congregate housing development in low-rise and most neighborhood commercial zones, replaces congregate housing with SEDU’s having a minimum average size of 220sf.

August 2014:  King County Superior Court rules that all current pod-style microhousing projects must go through the design review process.  Most existing projects switch over from pod-style to SEDU’s.

October 2014:  Microhousing legislation passes with some additional (hostile) amendments. Congregate housing is virtually banned, and subsequently disappears from the development pipeline. SEDU’s are encouraged as replacement for congregate housing.  A minimum unit size of 220 sf is required, but the minimum size is hard to achieve due to other restrictions. A 250-270 sf average unit size becomes a more typical outcome once all regulations are met.

December 2014:  A hearing examiner appeal invalidates the working definition of frequent transit, because SDCI determines frequent transit based on “average” time between transit stops, but the land use code definition does not contain the word “average”. Small unit development is no longer possible in portions of several Urban Villages.  Despite the fact that the issue was flagged by the HALA committee, and that the issue could be resolved by a one word addition to the land use code, no legislative fix has been brought forward to date.

February 2015:  The city council passes new rules that exclude congregate housing from participation in the MFTE program and sets a price for SEDU units that makes SEDU participation improbable. Since this time, only one SEDU project has applied for MFTE.

July 2015:  The HALA report is published.  HALA acknowledges the de-facto ban on congregate micro-housing, recommends relaxing recently created restrictions to increase the supply. This recommendation is not included in the city council HALA work plan.

August 2015:  SDCI enacts a new internal interpretation for the minimum clear floor space in a dwelling unit (the 70-7 rule).  The smallest (least expensive) unit sizes in all of our congregate housing projects are no longer legal. To date the 70-7 rule remains unpublished in any public document.  Applicants can only discover the issue only through a correction notice during permit review.

February 2016: Neiman Taber submits a CCAB appeal of the 70-7 rule for congregate residences, arguing it is inconsistent with the published code interpretation manual, past practices, historical models of small unit housing, and counterproductive to the very habitability and livability concerns that it aims to support.  The CCAB ruling upholds the 70-7 rule but acknowledges that we have a point.  The CCAB asks SDCI to develop a code change to accommodate the design of small congregate units.  SDCI has taken no action to date.

June 2016:  New SEDU rules are enacted apply the 70-7 rule to the entire living area of the unit. Many unit designs in the 250-280sf range will no longer meet SEDU requirements.  Note: 300sf is the bottom end of the range for a small regular studio apartment.

What now?

With the advent of the new SEDU rules, all of our projects with SEDU units will be going back to the drawing board for a re-design to enlarge the units.  An example of this change is shown below, where a project loses two units per floor under the new SEDU rules. In a nutshell, the unit count drops by about 10%, and the average unit size goes up about 10%, with rents rising accordingly.

BEFORE - Floorplan Layout Using Old SEDU Rules

AFTER - Floorplan Layout Using New SEDU Rules

Congregate housing production, which peaked at over 1000 units per year, has been reduced to a trickle.  Going forward, the SEDU development that largely took its place will be virtually indistinguishable in density and unit size from conventional studio apartments.  Barring any future changes, microhousing in Seattle is essentially done. There will be a few projects around the margins (mostly ours) that will continue to keep the format alive in the technical sense.  But in terms of providing an affordable alternative to conventional development at a production scale where it can make a meaningful difference?  Nope.  Game over.

How can we fix the situation?

Policymakers need to hear from citizens that care about these issues.  Here’s what you can do:

·         Ask the city council to fix the frequent transit definition in this year’s omnibus code cleanup. This is the lowest of the low-hanging fruit of the HALA agenda.  This problem has inhibited small unit development in a number of neighborhoods for almost two years, with no end in sight. Contact CM Rob Johnson.

·         Ask SDCI to revoke the new director’s rule for SEDU’s.  Size requirements beyond the building code minimums should not be superimposed on a housing type that exists for the sole purpose of being a smaller and more affordable option. Contact SDCI Director Nathan Torgelson.

·         The Office of Housing needs to revise the rules for SEDU participation in MFTE.   The rates for SEDUs should be evaluated using the same criteria as all other types - that participation is about 50%.  It is currently at about 4% (one participant for 25 active projects). Contact CM Tim Burgess and OH Director Steve Walker.

·         Ask SDCI to follow through on the CCAB request to develop building code language that will support small affordable congregate microhousing. Contact SDCI Director Nathan Torgelson.

·         Put re-legalizing congregate microhousing on the council agenda. In the meantime, request that the city sell their listed surplus properties in NC3 zoning to be developed as microhousing to make up for the suppression of market production. Contact CM Rob Johnson and CM Tim Burgess.

·         Ask the city to create an executive branch staff position for a HALA cop – someone whose portfolio is dedicated to challenging city staff and agencies when their actions are inconsistent with the intent of HALA. Contact Mayor Ed Murray.