Looking at this chart, can YIMBYs just retcon the voter approved housing levy as successfully funding MHA? The increase happened to be the nearly the exact amount MHA was

How do you 'lower land price', while not presupposing what Nolan says it presupposes?

2 DADUs proposed for an LR3 lot. ADUs are now MHA free, so creates an incentive for this in LR3 zones

based on that map looks like Seattle = Vancouver and Toronto = most of the midwest & NE

The Lynnwood Link Connections says September *2024*, it's 2026, what happened? March 26, what year? kingcounty.gov/en/dept/metr...

The East and North Link Connections KC Metro bus changes confuse me. Why are they not already implemented? Why is it so unclear when they will be? What's the barrier that has caused the busses not to be updated for over a year after Lynnwood Link opened?

Screenshot from Portland Maps with aerial view and text "New 5-story 25-unit apartment bldg. and associated site work. w/20-217527-MT, 20-217530-CO"

Rendering of the five story building

Building permit issued for a 5-story 25-unit apartment at SE 31st and Belmont www.portlandmaps.com/detail/permi...

The project has been in the works since 2020; I assume recent policy changes including fully-funded IZ and the SDC waiver have gotten this to the point where construction is imminent.

Seattle's SSHD does not use a model that already exists. It's not governed by accountable elected officials, but by an unelected renter's commission and eventually unelected tenants of the social housing. This makes it much riskier and unlike any other model

townhomes and retail, odd combo

Amazing news. Seattle's biggest challenge isn't even upzoning a lot when rezonings occur, it's not having rezonings occur very often at all. Exactly what a mayor at the beginning of their term should look to do

'strongly encourages' is when you allow people to build whatever

I did my best to present an urban geographic oddity in a neutral manner in my post...

I've seen in Seattle that they do. They've closed loopholes that let the rooftops count as part of the required amenity space, requirements for amenity space to be unenclosed, of very specific minimum dimensions

It's great, buyers care a lot less about usable yard space than urban planners and electeds do, and that's OK.

The political goal was trying to encourage it, because every knew Seattle was going to get detached or duplex townhome developments anyway. I am curius why portland has so many parking free detached smaller home developments, while in Seattle it's w/ parking and much larger

The idea was that if you upzone more the property owner gets a bigger land value windfall, so we should tax that. But that's a hot market short term effect, it makes no sense to keep that in place a decade after upzoning and a collapse in land values

Almost no one knows that this exists or the reasoning why we came up with this system in the first place, but it guarantees the more we upzone, the more the lots have to pay in fees, regardless of if it's been upzoned for nearly a decade

One thing we can do to fix MHA is get rid of the confusing, arbitrary M,M1,M2 system.

If two MR lots are identical with the same sized building on them, but one used to be NR while the other has always been MR, the formerly NR one pays nearly double the MHA fees!

Yes 🙌🙌🙌

The whole reasoning behind MHA was that it was going to adjust to market conditions and have a neutral effect on development.

Conditions and land values have plummeting, yet the fees pretend like we're in 2019 still. Time to axe it.

Example of how primary challenges invite bad governance. Presumably he thought it was revenue maximizing to lower it, now he changed his vote to support a worse outcome to appear a different way

Oh but the low density NR1/2/3 all got collapsed into NR, that is a quite rare thing and makes it so at least geographically, most of the city is the same zone

And we're still digging. Adding another mid-rise zone M1/M2

"People can and will have opinions about what SSHD should have been doing the last couple of years" is the mention i guess, which is a pretty funny line to me. basically admitting like yeah we haven't done shit

The ending line of "Trust us to be accountable to ourselves" is not one the voters of Seattle should be willing to accept

There's some honesty from the SSHD op-ed, but it's still a bait and switch.

The beginning paragraphs discuss a radical and unlike-anywhere-in-the-world system of publicly funded, privately governed social housing, unaccountable to the voters, but defend it by referencing Vienna, which is not that.

Right and the piece is making an argument that tech investment will shift between states in the US that have different tax rates. It's not making a claim about what would happen if the Federal Government raised marginal income tax rates across the entire US.

I think anything with a C or P, so NC1, NC2, P zones. For example in Capitol Hill everything in yellow on this map

Regardless of if the retail mandate bill passes or fails, why can't Seattle just end retail mandates on it's own? Seem to be the most punishing in Seattle anyways

Washington didn't have an income tax in the 70s so how is this raising it back to the rates we had in the 70s

IMO a big reason to support townhomes in middle housing zones is so that in areas like this that already zoned for apts, don't get used for low(er) density townhomes