Just before Thanksgiving, housing advocates got some good news as Seattle Hearing Examiner Ryan Vancil released a ruling mostly in favor of the City’s Mandatory Housing Affordability (MHA) rezones.
The reason why MHA isn’t the law of the land in most of Seattle’s urban villages and commercial districts is because homeowner advocates, under the umbrella group SCALE, brought an appeal on just about every aspect of the program’s Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS). Getting through the 43 issues SCALE raised took the Hearing Examiner nearly a full calendar year.
A recent memo sent by the director of the Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections (SDCI) to the City Council estimated that the delay on implementing the program across the city has resulted in a loss of 653-717 units of affordable housing.
After sifting through SCALE’s scattershot nitpicking, Hearing Examiner Vancil sided with the City, but he did instruct the City to come back with a bit more analysis about impact to historical sites. He also offered the City some free political advice.
“While the level of analysis for most of the FEIS satisfies the rule of reason and requirements under SEPA, the more ‘granular’ level of analysis called for and debated at the hearing may have averted at least some of the deeply felt community concern expressed in nearly four weeks of hearing and in a hearing process that has taken the better part of a year,” Vancil said.
People who have closely followed Seattle’s housing debates may disagree that housing opponents can be so easily appeased. Was there somehow a number of hoops the City could have jumped through to win the support of SCALE groups without comprising the program? It seems doubtful.
Note that Queen Anne Community Council continues to block the backyard cottage proposal even after more than a year of further analysis (after the homeowner group appealed and convinced the Hearing Examiner to block an earlier Determination of Non-Significance that hoped to avoid a full Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) process in that case). The EIS found that wealthy homeowners would gain substantially from the backyard cottage proposal, but nonetheless they persisted in obstruction.
The ruling builds on a earlier pre-hearing ruling that also went largely in the City’s favor.
