While housing advocates have been calling for social housing on the City-owned Mercer Mega Block site and other publicly-held land, the Durkan administration is planning to auction the choice parcel off to highest bidder. In fact, the City’s Request for Proposals (RFP) brags about just how juicy this South Lake Union real estate opportunity is and how royally Seattle has messed up its housing market.
Erica C. Barnett released the RFP in The C is For Crank yesterday and noted that the City of Seattle, via its real estate broker JLL, was touting the city’s skyrocketing home prices and increasingly dysfunctional housing market as an asset.
Obviously, when you put artificial constraints on housing supply (such as zoning laws that make multifamily housing illegal in most parts of a city), housing prices increase. Usually, we think of that as a bad thing, because it means that all but the wealthiest renters (and those who can afford to buy $800,000 houses) get priced out of neighborhoods near employment centers, transit, and other amenities. But the city’s marketing materials turn this idea on its head: Restrictive zoning, “high barriers” to homeownership, and spiraling rents make Seattle the perfect place to buy one of the city’s last large parcels of public land…
Perhaps the Durkan housing affordability solution is to join the feeding frenzy so long as Seattle is turning into an enclave for the megawealthy–Seattle’s median household income recently surpassed $121,000. The City may lack a cohesive strategy to prevent displacement and ensure mixed-income neighborhoods throughout the city, but it could be poised to cater to the rich with the best of them.
One person in particular the RFP did not impress was Mike Eliason, who contributes with The Urbanist and co-wrote with Cary Moon the op-ed in Crosscut urging a higher use of the three acre Mercer Mega Block site. In a series of tweets, Eliason argued that the City’s affordability and sustainability stipulations were rather weak.
