It's amazing what can happen.
Let's see, we're looking at about 20 hours since the announcement when people are really excited about the opportunity to do something cool in our city.
My name is Mike O'Brien.
I'm a Seattle City Council member.
I've been working on the issues around backyard cottages and in-law units, accessory dwelling units in the single-family zone in Seattle for a number of years.
Some of the folks around me have been working on this for a lot longer than that.
Really excited today that we heard from the hearing examiner yesterday that we have the green light to move forward with legislation.
To be specific, the hearing examiner reviewed the challenge from the Queen Anne Community Council.
They were challenging whether our environmental impact statement that we released last fall was good enough, and the hearing examiner said, absolutely it is, and dismissed the charges.
And so that is the end of the opportunities for legal challenges between now and us passing legislation.
So we're really excited.
I'm really excited that we can move forward.
We've already laid out a schedule.
Make sure you all have a copy of that, but we will be back in committee two weeks from tomorrow.
By then we will have introduced or at least legislation ready to discuss.
We have a public hearing scheduled the evening of June 11th in our committee.
Expect to hear from a lot of community members to really weigh in on different options we can be considering.
And then hopefully back in committee with my colleagues on the council on June 18th, making some decisions on legislation to send to the full council.
So we're looking to move pretty swiftly, if you call three and a half years pretty swiftly.
But this last part, we're ready to move on.
I want to just touch on a couple of things we're trying to do, and then I'm going to turn it over to some of the folks sitting next to me to hear some of their stories.
This really starts from the idea of, we have a housing crisis in Seattle.
We want to create, to solve this crisis, we want to give people in Seattle more options.
That means we want to give homeowners more options.
That means we want to give renters more options.
That means we want to give more options for multi-generational living.
That means we want to give more options for people that are new to the city, who've been here for a long time.
And we have this great tool that's already on the books that allows people to do an in-law unit in their house or a backyard cottage, but we've heard from dozens and dozens of folks who really want to try this to say there's some problems with the city's regulations.
It's too hard for me to do.
And so we want to loosen those regulations to allow for more housing opportunities in some of the greatest communities in the greatest neighborhoods within Seattle.
These are often very restrictive communities because they're single-family and they can be very expensive.
But building and adding a small unit allows for flexibility for folks to use, and we'll hear some of that flexibility.
I'm going to talk just about some of the changes really quickly that we're hoping to make.
So right now, if you want to build a backyard cottage, you're limited to build an 800-square-foot unit.
I intend to introduce legislation that will allow those to be up to a thousand square feet.
Currently, if you wanted to have an in-law unit in your house, you could do that, or you can have a backyard cottage, but you can't have both.
I intend to introduce legislation that will allow people to have two accessory dwelling units on their property.
There's some height restrictions for backyard cottages that make it challenging for folks to design a usable kind of upstairs.
We're going to allow an extra foot or two of height, not significantly changing it, but it's just enough to make these spaces a little more useful.
There's also a requirement right now that if you add an accessory unit, you have to provide an additional off-street parking spot.
I'm proposing we no longer have a parking requirement on these units.
And finally, there's a requirement that if you have an accessory unit, the owner of that property has to live somewhere on that property, either in the main house or the accessory unit.
And I'm proposing we eliminate that owner occupancy requirement.
These are all things we've heard from community members that have been barriers to them building the type of housing that I would like to see and so many other community members would like to see happening.
And so hopefully now, within the next two months, we'll have a path to loosening some of those barriers.
So with that, I'm going to turn it over to you, Sherry, who's been working on this longer than I have.
Sherry, I understand you're interested in doing one of these projects, and you're also an architect who designed some of these.
So maybe you can talk a little bit about your experience.
That's correct.
And so I have a rental property.
That's about 8,000 square feet and it has a small 700 square foot house at the back of the property.
And so I'd really like to add another house to the property and double the amount of housing on the property.
So I'm super excited about that idea.
And you've, as an architect.
And as an architect, I've designed quite a few ADUs and DADUs.
And I actually have a DADU at my house, and I would love to convert our basement to an ADU.
And so now that's a possibility.
So I'm really looking forward to that.
I've had quite a few people talk with me about how they've been waiting for these changes to happen.
And they've been waiting and waiting, and they're super excited to see it happen too.
And I've been getting those questions too, people saying things like, so can I put in for my permit today and when they'll review the permit in a couple months, will the law be passed by then?
Because I really want to build one of these.
I want to create this housing option for other people.
But I really want to wait until the new regulations are in place.
So hopefully we're close.
I think so.
Patients with the Housing Development Consortium, backyard cottages, is it your real house or not?
I know.
I'm excited about this ruling because it is happening on the first day of Affordable Housing Week.
So it really kicked us off to a great start because what we're calling for on Affordable Housing Week is action.
using every tool in your toolbox to increase housing choices.
And this is one that has been really held up because of the barriers that have been existing.
When you're talking about parking, when you're talking about owner occupancy, all of these barriers have limited the production or the possibility of more others.
So we're excited about seeing 4,400 more units in the next 10 years.
That's an addition.
I mean, today we need 156 thousand additional homes to meet the need that we have in our community for affordable housing and we're going to be having to produce 44,000 homes every five years.
So for us to produce those numbers, we have to be using every tool in our toolbox to do that.
So we're really excited, and we look forward to working with you and supporting this legislation across the finish line.
That's great.
Brittany, Sierra Club hat or more hat.
I don't know which one you're wearing today.
Sierra Club today.
Sierra Club today.
Maybe you can tell us a little bit about, from the Sierra Club's perspective, how Backyard Colleges meet our vision.
Absolutely.
Sierra Club has been supportive of ADUs for a long time.
We're really excited to see this legislation move forward to make it easier for people to build them.
They are a win for the environment in a couple of different ways.
Number one, smaller homes cost less energy, require less energy to build, and less energy over their lifetimes for things like heating and cooling.
Also, any housing that you can add in the city where people live, want to live, where people work and play, means that people don't have to drive into the city.
It makes it easier for them to decide to walk, to bike, to take transit, or just shortens their drive times.
You know, it's just great all around.
We're really excited and we're very supportive.
That's great.
It's great to have your organization's support.
Finally, Laura.
Backyard cottages are fantastic.
They are little a affordable housing When we look at the communities that councilmember O'Brien was talking about that are exclusive access to beautiful parks access to schools that right now a lot of people are Not able to access through our existing housing types.
And so this housing type is is for families And folks that are right now priced out of the city or priced out of certain communities.
They will have access So I really am passionate about this being an access issue more is interested in more options for accessory residences and Granny flats, Fonzie flats, like in happy days.
That's another word for these types of housing.
Backyard cottages are a fantastic housing choice for people at many different income levels and are workforce housing that we need desperately.
Great.
Take some questions in a second.
I'm just going to ask the folks behind us if you want to introduce yourself and any organizations you're with so that you all know who else is here if you want to have a conversation afterwards.
I am Dan Bertolet with the Sightline Institute, and I do research on housing policy.
And I'm Kelsey Hamlin, also with the Sightline Institute, handling a lot of our communications work.
Alice Lockhart with 350 Seattle.
Matt Hutchins with Moore.
Philip Duggan with Moore and Share the Cities and hoping to build a backyard cottage myself.
London Hammer, also with Moore and Share the Cities.
Jesse Simpson with the Capitol Hill Runner Initiative and Share the Cities.
Great.
Questions?
I have a quick one for you.
So, curious, how much housing are you, I think I've read some numbers, how much housing could this open up in the next few years?
So, the environmental impact statement looked at the data and, you know, looks at, you know, what the likelihood, how many lots are available, and the numbers they came up with were about 4,400 units over the next 10 years.
Relative to the need, it's small.
As Patience said, though, we need every tool to be working.
And I am hopeful that we can do better than that 4,400.
There's, I think, 80,000, 90,000 lots in the city that would have the potential to add a backyard cottage.
There's also a lot more than that that could do the in-law units.
And we're working on figuring out ways to help folks, including folks, low-income homeowners, with some tools to help them do some minor adjustments to their house to add additional living space in those houses, too, because we do want everyone to have access to this.
You've heard the criticism so often, but please respond again to the criticism that this really changes the character of neighborhoods.
I mean, we are trying to allow more people to live in our single family neighborhoods.
We've seen the data, frankly, over the last 20, 30 years that the number of people living in our single family neighborhoods, in many neighborhoods, has actually declined as household sizes get smaller.
These neighborhoods were originally designed to accommodate more people.
There's a question, I think people have concerns about tearing down single family homes and building large apartments, and so this is designed to allow the kind of look and feel of the neighborhood to feel similar, but add a new mix of people living in there.
And I guess if, when people say character, it's always hard to tell what they're talking about.
If you're talking about the number of houses, yeah, there might be a few more in the backyards, but I don't think it would visibly change it.
If you're talking about there's going to be a broader mix of people living in our community, people that can't afford to buy a large house but can rent a small thing in the backyard, that does change the character of a neighborhood in a really positive way, I'd say.
You know, that means those are different people that can participate in the civic life of that community, the businesses, the schools, the parks, play on sports teams together with other folks in those neighborhoods.
And so, yeah, I hope the character changes in really positive ways with some of these investments.
Anybody else have any thoughts on that?
And part of this is also looking at houses.
You want houses, new houses, new construction to be smaller.
Is that correct?
Correct.
One of the things that we talked about at length at our last committee meeting last week that was part of the EIS was a restriction on the size of new construction in the single-family zone.
Specifically, we're talking about limiting them to .5 FAR.
That's a technical land use term, but it essentially means if you have a 5,000 square foot lot, you could only build a 2,500 square foot home.
One of the concerns we do hear from a lot of folks is, you know, I hate to see these good homes getting torn down simply because they're too small, but a builder comes in and builds a, you know, 4,000 square foot home because that's what they can make the most profit on.
And so through this regulation, what we're trying to encourage is instead of tearing down that home, keep the existing home, maybe remodel it if it needs some work, maybe add an accessory unit off the back or a backyard cottage if necessary, so that there are more housing options.
But again, from the street, hopefully the house, the lot feels the same.
And that we think can be a way to strengthen these neighborhoods as opposed to damage them.
Taking away the owner-occupied language How do you prevent investors coming in and just making money and trying to put as many people in as they can and not living in that community and not caring about that community?
Well, to be clear, right now, I think 20% of our single family homes are rentals.
So those are people that don't live on that property and there's a renter living there.
Sherry talked about your experience.
I have renters that live around me.
We all do.
I don't think that's a bad thing.
And in a housing crisis, if someone like Sherry says, I think I can add another structure to this property to have an additional unit.
Yeah, I assume you at some point recoup your investment in that.
And there's probably some profit motive.
But we all benefit from an additional person being there.
And right now, Sherry, I can't do that.
That backyard is off limits to another housing opportunity for someone because of our regulations.
And so folks have said, I don't want my neighborhood to change in that way.
I think that that's an okay change.
And this idea that somehow homeowners are better citizens on our street than renters are is something I disagree with.
We do, you know, folks are concerned about loud noise.
We have noise ordinances.
Folks are concerned about, you know, I don't know what, you know, throwing things in the neighbor's yard or whatever.
We have rules against that.
So to restrict it about ownership just feels like it's a little misguided.
Sometimes I think it might be, you know, a little code word for some things that people don't want to see in their neighborhoods.
Other times it might just be an honest concern, but I think we can address that.
One last question.
I am curious to hear your thoughts on, you know, 4,400 units over 10 years does not move the needle that far.
Can you just respond to the fact that, you know, it's taken three, four years to get there and at least two lawsuits, maybe more to come?
Like, what does that say to you about how Seattle's responding to a housing crisis?
As I joked when I walked in here, I wish we were having this press conference in 2016 talking about the legislation we were getting ready to pass, and it has taken three years.
And it's a little bittersweet.
We're all celebrating, I think everyone in this room at least, celebrating what happened yesterday at the hearing examiner.
But it is also a shame that it's taken three years to do something that I would view as a modest step, and we need to be taking dozens of modest steps.
And if each one of these modest steps takes three years or four years, we're not going to be that city that I think we need to be.
I hope that what's played out over this has been a bit of a conversation starter for a lot of us in the community.
And while the 4,400 homes over 10 years is not gonna make a huge difference across the city, it will make a huge difference for 4,400 households or maybe 8,800 households, both people that live in the main units and other units.
So that would be a great thing.
But even better would be is if we've matured as a city to talk about How do we have more options?
The Planning Commission put out a report over a year ago that said that, you know, 75 percent of our residential land is zoned single family and 25 percent of it is zoned some form of multifamily.
And in the last ten or so years, 95 percent of the additional housing we've built in our city has been concentrated in that 25 percent.
That's by design.
We have policies in our city for the last number of decades that says we have this urban growth strategy.
We want to concentrate all the growth in a handful of neighborhoods and protect, I don't like that word, but the rest of the city.
And we're at a point where I think as we continue to grow, we need to revisit that strategy.
And I think one way to do that is through flexibility in the single-family zone.
And I think what we're talking about today as far as easier to build in-law units and backyard cottages, a part of that conversation, but it's the conversation the city is going to need to struggle with and grapple with in the years to come.
And I look forward to doing my part in the next eight months as a city council member, and I look forward to continuing being part of this conversation with a bunch of the folks around me as a citizen Mike after the end of 2019.
I have a really quick question just to finish up, is that if we went back, not to make you dwell on the past, three and a half years our city looked very different.
The housing crisis was a little bit different.
Do you feel like had this been done three and a half years ago, we might be in a different place?
I don't want to pretend that like hundreds or even thousands of additional backyard cottages and in-law units would mean some of the crisis we're facing today would be radically different.
But I do know that for individuals, it could change the course.
You know, there are folks that you talk to who are living in a vehicle or living in a street or in a shelter with a family, and like, I know that some of those people, if they had an opportunity to move into a backyard cottage for the last few years, their life would be on a very different trajectory.
And we can still do that today, but we miss an opportunity.
Similarly, homeowners that I just, I can't afford to buy a house in this market, it's too expensive.
But I might be able to buy, if there was an accessory dwelling unit that I could live in while I rent out my main house for a few years until my income grows.
Again, those folks maybe chose instead to live further out, outside the city of Seattle, because that's what they could afford.
We missed the opportunity to bring them in.
We added to congestion.
Those are all really important opportunities.
Again, I don't think the scale we're talking about at the moment is going to radically shift things.
But I do hope that we can outpace those numbers and really change some folks' lives.
Thanks, everybody.