Does Money Grows on Trees?

Last week Erica Barnett wrote a thought provoking article in Publicola looking at the proposed tree legislation. Among its criticisms, the article noted the cost of the new staff needed to administer this proposed legislation against the expected revenue the city hoped to raise to fund a tree planting in underserved neighborhoods.

… the city’s Department of Construction and Inspections says it will need to hire three new full-time staffers at an initial cost of $273,000 a year. That more than offsets the revenues the city expects to receive from payments in lieu of tree plantings, which will be used to plant new trees on city-owned property—an estimated $191,000 in the first year.

Analysis of the tree legislation didn’t include the exact cost of replacing trees removed for development. But using the city’s own average “nursery purchase price” of $2,833 per tree, that $191,000 would plant about 67 trees citywide

Barnett raises that the point that it's hard for government initiatives to be effective when more money is spent on administration than on actually achieving their goals. A few months ago AIA Seattle sent a letter to the council and the mayor critiquing the proposed legislation and outlining some principles that they felt were important in crafting a successful tree policy. One of those principles was very much along the same lines as Barnett's criticism:

Spend money on planting trees, not on paperwork:  Arborist reports, regulatory review, city inspections, and the attendant delays and bureaucracy associated with an emphasis on verification of compliance are costly. City and community resources are better allocated to developing the tree canopy.

If we take Barnett’s point, and expand the cost of the program to include not just the salaries of the new SDCI staff but the cost of all of the paperwork and bureaucracy required by the program, how much would that be? How much are we spending to generate $191,000 of fees for the city to plant 67 trees per year? I sat down this week to make a rough estimate.

I began with the city permit data from data.seattle.gov for issued building permits for 2022. My goal was to figure out about how many permits each year might trigger a tree review. The first step is to figure out how many permit processes a year are going to be affected by the new tree legislation. I began with all of the new construction permits. Safe to say a new building is going to have significant ground disturbance. I also looked through the additions and alterations, filtered by the keyword “addition”, and then manually checked the project descriptions to remove projects where the addition seemed likely to be at an upper story and not at the ground level. Most of the projects left over are additions to single family homes, attached accessory dwelling units, and projects like decks and porches that create ground disturbance.

Seattle permit data isn't exactly straightforward. Some permit applications generate more than one permit number. If there are multiple structures proposed on a site, SDCI will issue a separate permit for each freestanding structure. So, short of researching each individual line item, there's a little guesswork involved here. Most of the new multifamily projects are of the townhouse variety which typically generate 2-3 permits for each project, and many of the new single-family projects include a DADU which would generate two permits for each project (one for the house and one for the DADU). I created a summary table of each project type and divided the single family permits by 2 and the multifamily permits by 3. From that I got an estimate of about 1200 completed permit applications per year.

Some of those projects aren't going to have trees on site or on neighboring sites or anywhere near the area of ground disturbance and so they won't require a review. But the whole point of this legislation is to require careful study of all sites to make sure protected trees are identified and that exhaustive means are taken to protect them, so I think it's fair to assume that a significant percentage of projects are going to have to go through the new processes outlined by this legislation. For the purposes of this exercise, I assumed that 65% of sites that have ground disturbance will be subject to the SDCI arborists review during the permitting process. That works out to just under 800 unique permit application processes each year that will be subject to new reviews.

2022 - Complete permit applications with ground disturbance
	Permits	likely # of projects
Single Family/Duplex	847	424
Multifamily	242	81
Commercial	37	37
Additions	681	681
Est. projects with ground disturbance		1222
% of project sites requiring review		65%
Annual permits requiring review		794

The next step is to estimate how much these new permit reviews will cost. All projects with a tree nearby will now begin with a survey and an arborists report. Once those elements are provided the architect must translate those into a series of diagrams that analyze the trees, their protected root zones, any proposed disturbance into those root zones, placement of protection fencing etc. The city arborists will review the architects’ diagrams and the arborist report. SDCI has the discretion to request further site investigations to explore the extent of feeder roots so that those elements may be located with precision and protected if deemed necessary. Based upon those site investigations, the tree protection areas may have to be adjusted and the building redesigned.

With this background in mind, I have attempted to estimate the additional costs per project that we might expect in order to comply with these new requirements:

Estimated Costs of Proposed Tree Legislation per Application
Required Costs/Processes	Low	High
Survey	$3,000	$5,000
Arborist Report	$1,500	$2,500
Arborist Supplement	$500	$1,000
Arborist review letter	$300	$500
Architect site plan and diagrams	$3,000	$5,000
SDCI reviewer charges (5-10 hours)	$1,500	$3,000
Architect plan revisions (15-50 hours)	$1,500	$5,000
Time delay costs (1-2 Months)	$5,833	$11,667
Estimated total	$17,133	$33,667

This works out to an average of about $25,000 per project. That might seem like a big number but if anything it's probably a lowball estimate, because this is just looking at costs incurred during design and permitting. It doesn't take into account costs during construction required for tree protection fencing, SDCI inspection fees, and increased fees for right of way usage due to the inability to stockpile materials on site. But that's not exactly my world and those costs will vary a bit more depending on project specifics, so for now let's just go with $25,000 additional cost per project. With that in mind we can flesh out our earlier table to get a total annual cost of this new process: $20 million dollars! 

2022 - Complete permit applications with ground disturbance
	Permits	likely # of projects
Single Family/Duplex	847	424
Multifamily	242	81
Commercial	37	37
Additions	681	681
Est. projects with ground disturbance		1222
% of project sites requiring review		65%
Annual permits requiring review		794
Total Annual Process Cost		$20,177,971

So, if we put all of this information together, our new tree legislation will generate $20 million in new bureaucracy costs every year to plant 67 trees. That's $300,000 per tree. If you're looking for an example of ineffective and wasteful government policy, the $300,000 tree is right up there with the $10,000 toilet seat.

Imagine what else you could do with that money, aside from pushing a bunch of paper in a circle. $20,000,000 would fund the planting and maintenance of 7,000 trees on public land every year. Or, instead of paying city employees an hourly wage to plant and maintain trees, you could simply give away free trees and let an army of volunteer tree lovers do the rest.

Some pieces of problematic legislation are basically sound ideas that simply need to be tweaked. This proposal is not one of them. It's based on a flawed premise that the way to grow our tree canopy is to create a massive new bureaucracy to restrict and fine landowners into retaining the trees they have. But trees are something that people really like, are generally happy to maintain, and will often volunteer to plant all on their own. Where do you think all the trees that we have today came from? 

We are working to get this proposal amended to try to blunt the worst effects that might suppress housing by making sites undevelopable. But there's no tweak that can pave over the gulf between the millions of wasted dollars and the thousands of dollars in benefits. Here's hoping the council can find five votes to send this one back to the drawing board.

Proposed Tree Legislation Awaits its Turn to Add to Seattle’s Housing Woes

 

I have an editorial in the Urbanist today that outlines my objections to Seattle's proposed new tree legislation and frames it within the context of the recent collapse in housing starts caused by over-regulation. The numbers are pretty shocking: Townhouses down 50%, losing 940 homes per year, and apartments down 67%, a loss of over 8000 homes per year. 

You can read the editorial here. Due to the complexity of land use regulation and the limited space available for an Op-Ed (even in a generous publication like The Urbanist), the article isn't able to fully explore legislation in detail. For land use and policy wonks only, I have included a more complete explanation below

Top ten problems w/ the proposed new tree legislation:

1. This legislation will elevate tree protection to a level of scrutiny and review roughly equivalent to the amount of effort we put into geotechnical review. Each project will require a survey, and arborist report, an arborist’s review of plans letter, and likely several rounds of back and forth with reviewers to ask for refinement of documentation on the plans, further detailed field investigation to determine the extent and location of key feeder roots, soil conditions, water table, etc. It will create significant cost and time delay associated with each project, and in most cases, it will just be process for the sake of process.

 

2. The only provision for the removal of exceptional trees (tier 2 trees) in this legislation is a rule that allows for removal if the basic tree protection areas leave less than 85% of the site available for buildings, access, walkways, utilities, etc. This is a rule that is workable for townhouse developments on low-rise sites that have relatively low lot coverage. However, it is totally unworkable for commercial zones, where the building itself typically covers 80% of the site and the flexibility for how the building is configured is minimal. For these types of sites, tree preservation is almost always incompatible with full development to the zoned capacity. There needs to be a general rule that allows trees to be removed if an applicant can demonstrate that preservation is incompatible with development to the zoned capacity of the site. The current tree regulations have such an exception, but it's been written out of these new regulations. Developers are paying MHA fees for every square foot they build in exchange for the last increment of floor-area. Regulations that deny developers access to that development potential essentially turn MHA fees into a taking.

 

3. There will be many instances, particularly in commercial zones, where full development along with preservation of a tier 2 tree might be technically possible but would lead to a bad design. Boards need to have the discretion to allow for tree removal when doing so leads to a building that is more compatible with the design guidelines. Some Tier 2 trees will be exceptional specimen trees, but many of them will be ordinary and otherwise unremarkable. Quite often trees will be designated as Tier 2 because of a low fork in the tree that increases the measure diameter of the tree. There are also a number of trees in the six-to-12-inch diameter range that are designated as Tier 2. We need rules that allow design review boards and planners to make discretionary calls.

 

4. The legislation uses two concepts: “Basic tree protection area” is what we use today. This is the area under the tree canopy. This is easy to define. “Tree protection area” is a more nebulous concept that includes the basic tree protection area but can also be expanded up to twice the area of the tree canopy. Mostly the legislation refers to the more nebulous “tree protection area” in determining portions of the site where you cannot build and where construction activities cannot occur. Leaning heavily on this subjective standard will make it difficult for applicants to understand where they can build and where they can't. It will require the preparation of extensive reports on the part of the applicant which the Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections (SDCI) must then evaluate and whose conclusions they may choose to challenge, leading to a difficult and lengthy review process. This is a swamp into which we will sink countless hours of arborist reports, opinion letters, correction cycles, increased costs, and lost housing.

 

5. All trees >12” are required to be administered with the same care that we reserve today only for exceptional trees (mostly 30” diameter and larger), and no trees >6” can be removed without a building permit. This is a massive increase in the bureaucratic load that SDCI has to carry. This is a problem for housing developers, but the problem is not just associated with new development. 150,000 homeowners who believe they are entitled to the quiet enjoyment of their own land will wake up to discover that they have a whole new relationship with city government that they will not be happy about, and with good reason.

 

6. The inflexibility of these rules and the City’s discretionary role in enforcing and defining a tree protection area is particularly problematic when it comes to off-site trees. It is not uncommon for trees to be planted near property lines and for canopies and root systems to extend from neighboring properties onto a development site. While state law allows for a property owner to limb a neighbor’s tree at the property line, this legislation does not seem to acknowledge any limitation for when a neighboring tree can impinge on the development potential of a neighboring site. Given that the city has the discretion to define a tree protection area as being twice the tree canopy, large portions of a site could be rendered undevelopable by a neighbor’s tree. No remedy for these situations is recognized in the code.

 

7. This legislation requires costly processes both in the permitting stage and during the construction process to protect existing trees, but it also allows removal of trees as needed to facilitate development. Most developers and builders will logically conclude that they should remove every tree possible from a site so as to avoid the costs and bureaucratic hassles associated with preserving them. If this legislation were enacted, it is easy to imagine a situation a few years down the road where people will be complaining about developers clear-cutting sites then calling for further restrictions on new development, when in fact the problem is the costs associated with tree preservation.

 

8. For the Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections (SDCI), the obvious outcomes from this legislation are likely to be:

 

• A surge in applications for hazardous tree removal, which is now the only way to get rid of a tree outside of new development.

• A massive increase in the workload for the SDCI arborist department, leading to a staffing crisis and long delays in permit reviews.

• Significantly increased costs for every permit application for survey, arborist reports, detailed exhibits from the architect, numerous correction cycles, increased permit review fees for all the staff time.

• Increased time required for permit approval.

• Increased disputes between neighbors. As the impact of off-site trees on development sites becomes more significant, the legal landscape becomes murkier, and the stakes become higher.

 

9. This proposal includes 48 new pages of rules. The costs, time, and bureaucratic headache created by it are all chasing after incredibly little benefit. Most of the benefits this legislation aims for could be achieved in a two-bullet point memo.

• New development should attempt to retain existing trees.  Development and construction activities should minimize disturbance of the tree roots underneath the tree canopy.

• Where sites cannot be developed to the full zoned capacity while preserving trees, such trees may be removed, equivalent trees must be replanted on-site, or a fee must be paid to plant them off-site.

 10.        This legislation is all stick; no carrot. The goal of the legislation is to protect existing trees, most of which came into existence simply because people like trees and so they plant them where they can. Instead of trying to leverage our general affinity for trees and encourage the planting of more of them, this legislation proceeds from an assumption that people will cut down trees at the first opportunity they have to do so. The City has an army of people that would be delighted to plant trees on their land, and to help plant them along parking strips and in natural areas. It offers no rewards to the landowners or developers who protect existing trees. On the contrary, it burdens them with page after page of new restrictions on the quiet enjoyment of their land.

Seattle Policymakers Microhousing Tour

 

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

All Policy is Local Podcast - The Case for Building More Microhousing

 

Councilmember Andrew Lewis invited me in to his office a few weeks ago to talk about microhousing: Who needs it, how we killed it off, why we should bring it back, and what needs to change to make that happen. The fact that this episode got made and aired is a pretty good indicator that policymakers are finally coming around to doing something about Seattle's anti-microhousing policies. A year ago, Mayor Bruce Harrell dropped in an PSBJ interview that he wanted to put microhousing "back on the table" to see if they "can once again become an effective tool to achieve density".  This year looks to be the time when those good intentions may ripen into a legislative agenda. Similar rumblings are coming from the council side as well. I'm hoping this conversation with Councilmember Lewis is a starter's whistle of sorts. Fingers crossed.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/david-neiman-the-case-for-building-more-microhousing/id1650317040?i=1000596317318

701 S Jackson Street wins Approval from ISRD Board

 

At last night's presentation to the International District Special Review District Board, we got formal approval for a new development at 701 S Jackson Street. The project is an eight-story building with 202 apartments and about 7000 sf of commercial space. The apartments are a mix of one-bedroom apartments and congregate housing units (the smallest and most affordable form of micro-housing). In addition to providing units that are generally smaller and more affordable than what you see in typical market rate development, the project will participate in the city’s MFTE program, guaranteeing that 25% of the units are reserved for income qualified applicants at prices set by the Office of Housing.

The building is clad in brick masonry, following in the tradition of the old residential hotels in the Chinatown International District  The building has highly repetitive window arrangements with window openings that are set deep into the façade that create strong shadows that reveal the depth of the masonry.

The building has a step in the massing that is partly driven by fire code height restrictions, but also helps to scale the building down at the corner. A reveal at that step that helps incorporate the step into the whole building design and helps to break down the scale of the overall façade.

The masonry skin employs subtle horizontal banding to break the building composition into a base middle and a top. The base corresponds to the typical storefront heights in the CID of 1 ½ - 2 stories tall. The height of the middle section corresponds to the 5-6 story height of the tallest residential hotels in the historic fabric around us.

A Flemish bond pattern and decorative coursing is introduced into the base of the building to help distinguish the base from the sections above. The windows are set back into the wall to provide a sense of depth to the masonry. The vent openings in the façade needed to meet today’s code requirements for ventilation have been grouped inside the masonry openings along with the window to help keep the masonry looking simple and uncluttered by mechanical penetrations.

The masonry colors were derived from a careful study of the context building to find modern brick that were most compatible w/ the historic fabric. We used a blend of two similar sand colored bricks to achieve the subtle variation that we found in the the surrounding masonry. We also introduced a darker accent brick that allowed us to create decorative patterns and coursing that reflect some of the craft traditions commonly found in historical masonry buildings, while giving them a bit of a modern twist.

Construction is scheduled to begin in Spring 2023, beginning with a cleanup & remediation phase. The larger construction effort will being in the fall 2023. Doors should open in Spring/Summer 2025

The Roost Lofts Receives AIA Seattle’s Honor Awards - Award of Merit

 

For the second time in less than a week, Neiman Taber has been recognized with a design award. We are proud to announce that The Roost Lofts just received the Award of Merit at the 2022 AIA Seattle Honor Awards for Washington Architecture.

The entirety of the awards ceremony can be watched at this link. (The discussion of The Roost starts at 48:13.) Of the project, the jury said:

“The Roost is a model for creating affordable housing in an urban core with no public subsidies. This project is rethinking our living environment. It’s providing affordable units while introducing an innovative housing typology…you have gone above and beyond to stay with a project, persist with a project…this a project that we have a team who has deeply invested in prototyping a way forward for housing and we just found it to be exemplary.”

The Roost is an innovative microhousing development, providing affordable market-rate housing aimed at strengthening Seattle’s arts community. The project combines inexpensive market-rate units, 40% AMI affordable units, and a below market-rate commercial space leased to an arts nonprofit. The housing units are supplemented with shared community kitchens, living, dining, and meeting spaces that improve the livability of the small apartments and provide an opportunity for residents to meet, interact and build community.

Wearing three hats — developer, designer, and operator, we successfully prototyped an innovative housing model that is profitable, affordable, sustainable, community-oriented, and replicable. The project was built for $150K per unit, total project cost including land. The 33 individual units are designed to function as live-work studios. To separate the bed space from the work area, we made each of the units double-height and lifted the sleeping area into a small loft. The vertical segregation of uses creates units that live like one-bedroom apartments, all in about 220 sf of space.

We are so pleased that the AIA Honor Awards jury recognized all the hard work that went into this project and how it addresses a critical issue in our community. For more information, please see:

2022 AIA Seattle Honor Awards Gallery

2022 AIA Seattle Honor Awards Roost Information Page

Neiman Taber Website: The Roost

The Roost Built Green 5-Star Certification

The Roost Neiman Taber Blog Summary

Karsti Co-Living Receives IIDA Award - Distinction Accolade for Relevancy

We are proud to announce that Kärsti Apartments just received The International Interior Design Association Northern Pacific Chapter's 19th Annual INawards  INmulti-family - Distinction Accolade for Relevancy. The jury spoke very highly of the project and how it addresses a critical need – housing affordability and community. We are grateful for the honor and are happy that the IIDA INawards jury chose to honor our solution to this important issue.

Individuals in cities across the country are struggling with the same issues – urban isolation, limited housing stock, and a lack of affordability. Co-living allows people to live in places that they otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford. This project brings more diversity to a neighborhood that historically has been inaccessible to many. Residents report the stability and savings they experience allow them the flexibility to pursue education, projects, and career options that formerly were out of reach. These projects benefit not only the residents, but also the larger neighborhood, and the city itself.

Kärsti reimagines affordable micro-housing with a focus on fostering interconnectedness among residents. It provides small private apartment homes paired with generous common amenity spaces. This configuration, generally known as co-living, helps renters with two challenges of urban living – finding affordable rent and building friendships, relationships, and community.

Renters in Seattle are searching for housing that both combats urban isolation and doesn’t break the bank. In terms of affordability, people in the lowest income brackets are often the focus of publicly funded affordable developments. However, another demographic exists, sandwiched between those who qualify for subsidized housing and those who can afford typical market rate. In Seattle, about 25% of renters fall into this income category. This project is designed specifically for this underserved demographic, focusing as much on quantitative measures like affordability as on qualitative values like community, belonging, dignity, and sustainability.

Homes in this building range from approximately 180 to 300 square-feet. 25% of these units are reserved for individuals earning 40% Area Median Income (AMI) or roughly minimum wage (around $34,000 per year), and the other 75% are affordable for those earning 50% AMI (around $40,000 a year). The individual units are modest – consisting of a small bed space, a kitchenette, and a private bathroom – but the communal amenities are ample and easily accessed. Each floor has a shared lounge, dining room, and kitchen well-stocked with everything from cookware, to espresso makers, to insta-pots. Additionally, the building has an exterior deck, exercise room, and game lounge that encourage entertaining – facilitating social cohesion that stretches into the larger community. Circulation routes are designed through the building to serendipitously bring people into contact with one another and enhance connectivity.

The interior is designed to give residents a space that feels dignified. The decor, inspired by 80’s punk rock, incorporates high contrast neutrals interspersed with intense pops of color. Amenity areas in the building hold surprises, including a large-scale mural and a Ms. Pac-Man machine. The goal is for residents to feel excited about their home, want to gather with their neighbors, and feel proud to invite over guests.

The community focus is balanced with individual studio apartments that provide for the private aspects of domestic life. Each unit has a contemporary design aesthetic and high-end materials, including quartz countertops, custom cabinetry, stainless appliances, and hardwood-style flooring. Top floor homes include sleeping lofts with mountain views.

The collective culture promoted by this dwelling is further facilitated by the management company, which specializes in collective living arrangements. As a “co-living operator,” they work to identify community members’ interests, and organize and fund shared meals and events. As resident makeup changes over time, they maintain a working knowledge of their distinct community. Customized engagement events even extend into fully-fledged initiatives, such as the Community Catalyst program, where four residents were given several months of free rent in exchange for sharing their talents and helping establish the tone of the budding resident community. They organize weekly dinners, Music Mondays, group dance nights, and other events. Residents often express how special it is to have a home that feels inclusive, collaborative, and intentional.

People are drawn to co-living housing from a variety of backgrounds, and for a number of reasons. Although this type of housing is commonly perceived as the domain of young professionals, this type of housing appeals to a broader range of individuals, with the average age of residents falling in their mid-30s and largely skewing toward women and BIPOC individuals. Residents are people moving in from more distant neighborhoods or exurbs, looking for opportunities to live closer to the city core. Co-living creates a type of housing that provides a stable home base for individuals to change, grow, and pursue opportunities within the city.

In paying attention to these individuals’ needs and pushing for change in their city, this project demonstrates a model for housing that provides a glimpse of a more collective, sustainable, and equitable future. With its intentionally-designed stylish interior, the building offers a sense of home for each resident at an accessible price point.

Credits:

Development Team: Hamilton Urban Partners & Neiman Taber Architects

Architect: Neiman Taber Architects

Builder: Pacific Continental Construction

Structural: Malsam Tsang Structural Engineering

Civil: Sitewise Design Pllc

Landscape: Pacific Landscape Architecture

Geotech: Geotech Consultants Inc 

Energy Modeling: Solarc Energy Group

Survey: Chadwick + Winters

Furniture, Fixtures and Equipment: Open Door and Neiman Taber Architects

Freya Apartments gets 15 minutes of fame

One of our Freya residents is a accessibility advocate at Starbucks & was featured in a Vanity Fair piece that was filmed at Freya. Scroll down to the youtube video at the end of the article). Its a great slice-of-life story that also gives you get a peek at the spaces & apartments within Freya.

https://www.vanityfair.com/sponsored/story/starbucks-art-on-a-mission?fbclid=IwAR3lmjegmS-Ng44AQcRhTQAIQvChwULzSJnZ7FQFpGJsisYZ-fG2EQCazhs

Project Spotlight on Co-Living in the Registry

We've a had a string of stories come out the this year, providing a variety of perspectives on our work to design and develop affordable and elevated market-rate housing. The coverage continues this week with this feature over at The Registry. The article talks a bit about the design of the two projects, our general approach and firm mission, and also touches on the case for re-legalizing this type of housing, which has been actively suppressed by city policy since 2014. If you hit a paywall, you can read a .pdf version of the article at:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/157kjHPxmWbDRy1Xy8zpSEQbFnbkwNYb_/view?usp=sharing

If you've missed the recent coverage also see:

https://www.kuow.org/stories/in-ballard-a-beehive-style-apartment-offers-refuge-for

http://neimanarchitects.blogspot.com/2022/02/neiman-taber-co-living-projects-in-djc.html

https://www.theurbanist.org/2022/03/09/harrell-micro-housing/

KUOW feature story about Karsti

KUOW has a story out today about Karsti, our newest co-living project in Ballard. I'm really pleased with the time and care that the reporter (Joshua McNichols) took to understand the project, the folks that we are serving, the benefits and challenges of community living, and the things we've done differently to try to make this kind of project really work for people. Here's hoping that the project finds some eyes and ears down at the city!

https://www.kuow.org/stories/in-ballard-a-beehive-style-apartment-offers-refuge-for

Is Microhousing back on the table in Seattle?

For many years now I've been writing about Seattle Microhousing. I began modestly (and unsuccessfully) by trying to influence the 2014 legislation that ended up largely killing off congregate housing. Later efforts focused on documenting the harm done the legislation and by the administrative decisions that came in its wake. More recently I wrote on the strange disconnect between our need for simple low-cost housing to address homelessness and the lack of any urgency on the part of the city or non-profits to use microhousing as part of the toolkit. And last year I asked the question "When is Seattle Going to Fix Microhousing", providing a look back at years of data that confirm the trends that were seen immediately following the 2014 legislation. To be honest, I thought of the question posed by that last article to be largely rhetorical.  However...

The big news last week was that Mayor Bruce Harrell is interested in putting microhousing back on the table. The announcement came as part of an interview with the Puget Sound Business Journal on March 4th. Harrell was non-specific as to what he had in mind, and its a little early in the process to get too excited, but nevertheless this is really big news. This is the first time since 2014 that a powerful Seattle politician has signaled that they both care about the issue and (more significantly) that they are willing to spend political capital on fixing microhousing.

For a quick dive, The Urbanist did a good refresher on the issue here:  https://www.theurbanist.org/2022/03/09/harrell-micro-housing/

Looking to study up? Here's a digest:

Wonkery: There are three articles in Sightline that cover the issue fairly comprehensively. How Seattle Killed Micro-Housing is the history of how the council kneecapped micro-housing in the first place.  How Seattle Killed Micro-housing, Again covers how the SDCI and CCAB made administrative rules that have made the situation significantly worse. When Is Seattle Going to Fix Microhousing? is a 2021 update looking at years of data & trends:  https://www.sightline.org/author/davidneiman/

Homelessness: Low-Cost Housing: Here’s the way to do it is an article that discusses the link between the lack of basic housing and the epidemic of homelessness in our cities. The article also contains four concrete recommendations for how policy changes can help micro-housing to be part of our strategy for combatting homelessness.

Inspiration: A ten minute talk I gave about the development of The Roost, including some discussion about the moral case and the political barriers.

Talking points: Top Ten Reasons to re-legalize congregate housing 

• Provides plentiful 40%-60% AMI affordable housing w/ no subsidies.
• Is affordable to minimum wage workers.
• Provides opportunities for people to live in the city core who would otherwise be priced out.
• Provides people individual units w/ greater security & privacy than house/apartment shares.
• Promotes community, wellness, and social capital through shared spaces and experiences.
• Uses ~1/3 of the energy per unit compared to conventional housing.
• Promotes dense, livable, walkable communities and car-free lifestyles.
• Women and BIPOC individuals are disproportionally the people who live in congregate housing. Women for reasons of improved security, safety, and community, and BIPOC individuals because of the wealth gap.
• A city policy that actively suppresses the development of housing options used disproportionality by women and BIPOC individuals is a glaring equity issue.
• A city policy that actively suppresses the development of housing options for poor people is morally indefensible.

Don't take my word for it! Take advantage of the expert advice already sitting on our (virtual) bookshelf. The HALA, AMIHAC, and The Path Forward reports are three commissions convened in the last five years that all support the advice I am offering.

HALA Report: See recommendation MF8 on page 24

AMIHAC Report: See recommendation 3.01 on page 42 and 3.04 on page 45

The Path Forward: See page 9 discussion of rooming houses/shared housing.

Neiman Taber Co-Living Projects in the DJC

 

The DJC did a little blurb on Freya & Karsti today. We developed these projects in partnership with Hamilton Urban Partners. OpenDoor Co-living opened a Seattle office in order to operate them for us. These projects represent a big step forward for us, marrying our experience designing small apartments & shared amenities to OpenDoor's expertise in operating co-living buildings. 

You can read more here