Housing requires creative policies
July 14, 2009
By J.B. Wogan
This is the second installment of a three-part series that examines affordable housing in the proposed Town Center.
Ray Dellecker’s day job is doing marketing for a small European software company, but in his spare time, he’s trying to change the composition of home ownership across east King County.
A resident of the Crest neighborhood, Dellecker would love to see less expensive housing in Sammamish because it would mean the city’s workforce could also live here. As a board member of Habitat for Humanity of east King County, he’s doing his best to make sure that happens.
Cecilia Velazquaz paints the side of a Habitat for Humanity house in a community outside the city of Snoqualmie, one of 50 built in the area. This was Velazquaz’s first day volunteering with Habitat for Humanity. Photo by Adam Eschbach
“Sammamish is sort of behind in terms of affordable ownership housing,” Dellecker said. When Dellecker talks about affordable housing, he envisions homes that clerks at the local gas stations and cashiers at the local grocery stores could afford, homes within the financial reach of local school teachers.
“They have to commute. Many of them come in from 20 miles east of here. The cost of gasoline is a problem, transportation is a problem, it’s just a huge issue,” he said.
If Dellecker and others at Habitat for Humanity had their way, the city of Sammamish would have policies encouraging developers to build homes within the reach of a household making as high as $40,000 a year. The city’s policy abides by a definition of affordable housing that would benefit households making as high as $67,000.
Housing in Sammamish remains outside many people’s price range, with the mean sales price for 2009 being $617,000, according to the King County Department of Assessments.
Those who do live in the city, on average, have a combined household salary in the six figures: the U.S. Census Bureau estimated that the median household family income in 2007 was $129,335 per year.
But policy makers in the city’s Community Development Department think they can make affordable housing in Sammamish a reality.
The city’s expert on affordable housing is Arthur Sullivan, program manager at A Regional Coalition of Housing, who helps steer affordable housing policies for cities across the Eastside. Part of Sullivan’s job involves crafting ways to create permanent and rental housing at prices low- and moderate-income homeowners can afford in cities like Sammamish.
The Town Center Master Plan, adopted in June 2008, requires that 10 percent of all residential units in Town Center be affordable.
The city is now developing strategies to entice developers and property owners to go beyond the 10 percent minimum, although nothing official has been approved.
With Sullivan’s help, the Planning Commission is hashing out details of how the city would meet or exceed its own mandate for the Town Center — creating more than the required 200 housing units for low- and moderate-income homeowners.
Michael Matthias, project manager for the Town Center, said the Planning Commission is considering the idea of an incentive system designed to motivate developers to include more than the required amount of affordable housing. One possibility would be a two-for-one deal where developers would agree to build an affordable apartment or house and in exchange, they could exceed normal density limits and build two market-rate apartments or homes. Matthias said the actual rate of exchange would depend on current market conditions.
The city could also provide benefits in the permitting process, where affordable units would require a faster and less onerous set of permit requirements.
Community Development Director Kamuron Gurol said parking spots might be another leverage point. Developers who build inexpensive units might be able to avoid building the normal required number of parking spots.
Gurol said spots in a parking garage can cost $30,000 while a parking lot parking space can cost between $5,000-$10,000.
The end result might be a Town Center with less expensive housing, less parking and more public transportation, Gurol said.
“We’re not eliminating the car, but we’re putting it in balance with other forms of transportation,” Gurol said. “Over parking is something that we want to really avoid.”
Alex Kimball, an architect working on a property in the Town Center, said he believes affordable housing can happen in Sammamish and he’s encouraged by the commission’s work so far.
“They’re edging on some really great thoughts,” Kimball said. But he cautioned that the city’s affordable housing policy should not give too many bonuses for the sake of less expensive housing. In a worst-case scenario, developers could exploit the affordable housing policy to add more density than the community at-large would want.
“It can’t just be for developers. It’s got to be to make a better place,” Kimball said.
One property owner has an opposing fear, claiming the city should offer more to developers for the sake of making affordable housing achievable.
“It has to be doable. They’re asking too much from developers and developers have other places to go,” said John Galvin. Galvin referenced the commission’s goal of having 400 affordable housing units in the Town Center. He called it “housing that won’t be sold.”
The big problem, according to Galvin, is that affordable housing units need to be accompanied by more public transit and more social services. At the moment, not enough people would want to live in affordable units in Sammamish, making those units a waste of money, he said.
Why it matters
Proponents of affordable housing in the Town Center say it’s only fair: People who work in Sammamish have a right to live in Sammamish. In a city where one-third of the population is under 18, the people who teach those children should have a permanent place in the community, proponents say.
Affordable housing might also benefit the rest of the city — people might work harder and stay in their jobs longer if they worked and lived in the same place. And for recent graduates of the city’s three high schools, affordable rental units in the Town Center might give 20-somethings a way to return home after college without staying in their parents’ basement.
But there are inherent dangers if the policy isn’t conceived of properly. Lower cost units will pay lower property taxes, effectively being subsidized by other taxpayers for the same services. An amped-up incentive-based program could balloon into a Town Center with cramped living-quarters, not enough parking, and an ultra-urban pocket that contradicts the aesthetics of Sammamish as a whole.
And if homes are priced too low without the right incentives for developers, the city could see its affordable housing policy fail from a lack of feasibility.
Sammamish chips in
Even though the city has not invested in an affordable housing project like the proposed units in the Town Center, it has been donating funds to affordable housing projects in other cities across east King County since 2002.
The city has paid roughly $685,000 to A Regional Coalition for Housing, an Eastside affordable housing agency. That money has helped pay for affordable housing projects in Redmond and Issaquah. Sammamish is one of 14 member cities in the coalition, along with Newcastle, Mercer Island, Bellevue and others.
For the city’s 2009-2010 biennial budget, the City Council approved donating $100,000 per year to the coalition.
Reporter J.B. Wogan can be reached at 392-6434, ext. 247, or jbwogan@isspress.com.
To read the other stories in the series, see Part I and Part III
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