Seattle Has 800,000 Problems

This article is published as part of Strong Towns’ ongoing partnership with the data analytics firm, Urban3. Visit this page to learn more.

(Source: AvgeekJoe/Flickr.)

Chris Collier has a problem—actually, he has 800,000 of them.

That’s the number of new affordable housing units that he estimates will be needed by 2050 to accommodate the rapidly ballooning population growth across a four-county region that includes Seattle. According to an analysis by the Puget Sound Regional Council, drawn from U.S. Census Bureau data, the area’s population could increase by as much as 2.5 million individuals in the next few decades, essentially doubling the number of people looking for housing in one of the most notoriously development-averse metropolitan areas of the country.

Chris himself resides in Snohomish County, which needs approximately 120,000 housing units just on its own to absorb the influx of families—a wildly ambitious goal relative to the county’s current housing input.  

Chris isn’t daunted by these data. After all, as the Program Manager for the Alliance for Housing Affordability (AHA), it’s quite literally his job to think about these quandaries and do something about them.

The AHA was formed in 2013 by more than a dozen city and county governments in the verdant swath of Washington State in between Seattle and Everett. At the time, leaders in these jurisdictions were reaching the realization that housing would be one of the most urgent policy and political issues of their lifetimes. Seattle, for instance, grew by more than 20% between 2010 and 2020, more than twice as quickly as in the preceding 20 years. As of the beginning of 2022, economics website Payscale.com indicated that the cost of living in Seattle was 49% higher than the national average. Its dynamic economy was attracting huge numbers of knowledge-economy firms and workers, but squeezing land in a way that was spilling over into the suburban communities to its north. 

Seattle's failure to plan for its growth created an overflow problem for the suburbs who have, all at once, been expected to catch it, when they don't have the staff and expertise to do so, Chris says, echoing a complaint that likely resonates within suburban local governments everywhere. “Without adequate staff and resources, our planners have to carry deeply unpopular messages that could actually put their jobs and livelihoods at risk.”

Unpopular as is in: Population growth isn’t stopping, and more development—in some form—is going to be a requirement, not a choice. 

AHA was formed with a mandate to engage in the data, policymaking, and financing work to creatively address the spiraling affordability crisis. The Housing Authority of Snohomish County (HASCO) agreed to serve as the backbone agency to operationalize the effort, and Chris was brought on board to staff it.

Chris’s first order of business was to look at the facts and get a sense of exactly how bad the problem was, and how bad it might get. As in many parts of the country, single-family detached dwellings were the only housing type permitted by current zoning regulations in most of Snohomish County; furthermore, the true costs of acquiring an average size home were rapidly approaching $800,000—an enormous sum and one that placed homebuying beyond the reach of some three-quarters of the region’s population. Even in the third quarter of 2022, as some home prices have cooled, rising interests have been on the rise, such that the required income to buy a home has also risen.

What’s more, as with many areas of the country, the political environment for developers was challenging. “NIMBY” forces, however well-intentioned, were sophisticated at using any number of environmental, traffic, and quality-of-life concerns to prevent much new housing from being generated, much less multi-family construction at any significant scale. The result: high demand, weak supply, high costs, and growing economic inequality and instability, all stuck in apparently intractable political gridlock.

Chris had only been on the job for a few years when a local planner recommended that he read Strong Towns: A Bottom Up Revolution to Build American Prosperity, Chuck Marohn’s 2019 treatise that succinctly diagnoses what has gone wrong with so much urban development in the last generation and vividly illustrates a better future.

It was in the pages of Strong Towns that Chris first became aware of Joe Minicozzi and the work he was doing at Urban3. Chris’s analytical mind knew that the firm’s unique insights into looking at tax productivity on a per-acre basis and relentless obedience to mathematical fact would likely bear out what he already reasonably suspected about the financial viability of Snohomish County and its peer counties. His political brain knew that using these data to tell a story with pictures would be essential in changing hearts, minds, and ultimately, zoning codes.

“Once I knew what they did, it would have been irresponsible for me not to hire Urban3,” Chris says.

AHA and Urban3 worked together to refine some of Chris’s initial analysis and assumptions, the vast majority of which dismantled long-held assumptions about the kinds of development that the area needed and could sustain. 

For Chris, the experience was revelatory and frustrating in equal measure.

“If you can’t solve for housing, we’re not going to be able to address other critical issues in our community,” he says. “We needed this research to be able to make the argument that not all housing is bad—for the environment or for people.”

Indeed, Urban3’s analysis illuminated some potential new political alliances. Real estate interests clearly had an appetite to build more densely to accommodate growing populations. By showing that much of the built environment of Snohomish County and other nearby jurisdictions was financially unproductive, a unifying message among developers, realtors, and planners began to emerge: More housing in existing communities was in fact a financial, environmental, and arguably moral imperative. 

Even so, Chris knows that he has a long road ahead of him to effect the kind of on-the-ground change that he knows is needed throughout the area served by the AHA. His first step is to use Urban3’s work to more clearly define exactly what missing–middle housing types will be the most useful in addressing his organization’s policy goals of delivering more affordable dwellings for more families. Doing so gives advocates a clearer idea of what exactly they’re fighting for, and allows Chris to move to next steps of making some more specific site recommendations so that new residential construction is located near swelling population centers, amenities, and especially near mass transit lines. 

Chris has no illusions that changing the entrenched views of change-averse residents will be a quick or easy progress. Yet the Pacific Northwest’s continued growth trajectory leaves policymakers little choice but to act. Long-term, he hopes that a stronger, more compact, and more financially viable development pattern in the communities adjacent to Seattle will lead to a more constructive relationship between their jurisdictions. 

“Snohomish and King County’s futures are inextricably linked, and we must work together,” he insists. “Large as this issue may be, we just have to start by controlling what we can control.”

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