• Seattle is in desperate need of a blueprint for safe, affordable housin

    From a425couple@21:1/5 to All on Sat Jul 20 09:57:14 2024
    XPost: seattle.politics, or.politics, ca.politics
    XPost: alt.law-enforcement

    (The leftests have made Seattle pretty much unfixable.
    This explains a lot.
    In 1990 I owned and rented out 4 affordable houses in Seattle.
    I have sold them all. Many have done the same.)

    Seattle is in desperate need of a blueprint for safe, affordable housing

    July 10, 2024 at 11:00 am Updated July 10, 2024 at 11:00 am

    In Seattle politics, far-left urbanist progressives love builders who
    create more housing, but they hate landlords. To make the housing market
    work effectively, this dynamic must change, writes columnist Alex Fryer. Pictured is a view from the Leschi neighborhood of single-family homes
    giving way to higher-density development in the Central District on June
    26, 2024. (Ken Lambert / The Seattle Times)

    In Seattle politics, far-left urbanist progressives love builders who
    create more housing, but they hate landlords. To make the housing market
    work effectively, this dynamic must change, writes columnist Alex Fryer. Pictured... (Ken Lambert / The Seattle Times)More
    Alex Fryer By Alex Fryer
    Seattle Times Opinion columnist
    On a sunny summer day two years ago, Gov. Jay Inslee, Seattle Mayor
    Bruce Harrell, and other elected officials and local leaders gathered on
    a rooftop to celebrate the opening of a 211-unit affordable housing
    development in the Rainier Valley.

    “We need to build housing, but it needs to be affordable,” Inslee told
    the crowd.

    By the darkness of last December, the place was in turmoil. Developers
    hired two full-time armed guards to patrol the premises to keep a lid on
    the chaos, including fires and open drug use. Property destruction
    included $75,000 worth of ruined furniture in the common areas. Seattle
    police had targeted a human trafficking operation run out of one of the apartments.

    Worse for the project’s financial stability, many residents didn’t pay rent, didn’t fear eviction, and didn’t have the behavioral health
    supports to manage addictions and other crises.

    What happened at this apartment building aimed for middle class tenants
    is not an aberration. All the factors found here are present in other
    buildings around Seattle, said developers, most off the record.

    The financial chaos in the affordable housing market prompted the city’s Office of Housing to release $14 million to local developers and
    nonprofits last week. Not a single new unit will be produced with the
    money: It’s going entirely to triage broken operations. And it’s not
    nearly enough, observers say.

    In Seattle politics, far-left urbanist progressives love builders who
    create more housing, but they hate landlords (see legislation of former Councilmember Kshama Sawant). To make the housing market work
    effectively, this dynamic must change.

    By tracking the brief history of the brand-new Rainier Valley
    apartments, built and operated by Seattle-based GMD Development, several
    themes emerge.

    Pandemic rental rules and eviction moratoriums scrambled expectations
    about acceptable tenant conduct. Backlogged courts struggled to resolve eviction cases even involving people with alarming criminal behavior. Seattle’s tenant protections — once seen as fairly benign by developers
    — became increasingly onerous when coupled with all the other challenges.

    What’s even more maddening, policies that support affordable housing run counter to taxpayer-funded efforts to shelter people with substance
    abuse challenges as well as public funding for tenacious tenant advocacy programs.

    Part of the fallout has been counterintuitive: In the midst of a housing crisis, vacancy rates in the city’s affordable housing stock are
    presumed to be rising. No one is sure by quite how much, which is part
    of the problem.

    Right now, 30% of GMD’s units at the Rainier Valley building are empty,
    a “super-high” figure, said company officials. GMD has housing projects
    in Idaho, Montana and Alaska. This phenomenon is found only in their
    buildings in Seattle.

    GMD financed the $60 million Rainier Valley project mostly through
    private capital and a federal Low Income Housing Tax Credit program
    headed up by the Washington State Housing Finance Commission.

    To be eligible for the tax credit, all units are restricted to residents
    whose incomes do not exceed 60% of the midpoint in the Seattle area. For
    one person, that’s $63,240. A one-bedroom rents for $1,300, which is
    less than what the company is mandated to charge under program restrictions.

    When it opened in January 2022, the folks who rented at first were bank tellers, grocery clerks, flight attendants, said Emily Thompson, a GMD
    partner. It was affordable housing, but the building offered cozy common
    areas, a gym, a rooftop lounge. It was intended to be every bit as nice
    as an apartment that charged hundreds more per month.

    At that time, government programs still offered pandemic-related relief
    for those who got behind on their rent. There was an eviction moratorium
    in place, but the public money flowing into housing largely resolved
    issues before eviction was even considered.

    By March of 2023, GMD began to notice that rent delinquency was
    “alarmingly high.” By the end of the year, the court system was
    overwhelmed with eviction petitions. In 2023, there were an average of
    379 “unlawful detainer” cases filed each month in King County Superior Court — the legal process a landlord must follow to ask a court to
    regain a rental unit — compared to 193 the year before.

    “They (tenants) are having to make choices about where their money goes
    and they are choosing not to pay their rent. When they look at the
    consequences of not making a car payment or rent, there are no
    consequences to not paying rent,” said Thompson.

    And behavior in the building got worse.

    “Those tenants fall into two buckets,” she said. “One bucket was ‘I had bad behavior in your building before COVID, but I kept it behind my
    front door because if you saw it, you would kick me out. But now I know
    you can’t kick me out, so I’m just parading my bad behavior all over the building,’ putting families in danger. They know we don’t have
    meaningful, quick recourse.”

    The other set of challenging tenants were referred by a state Department
    of Social and Health Services-funded program that offers financial
    assistance to people with disabling mental or substance abuse disorders.

    In the past, GMD had five to 10 such tenants in their properties, and
    there were few problems. But the 35 high-needs tenants that the company
    agreed to take in presented far more serious issues, with inadequate
    support.

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    “Once drugs were introduced to the building by several clients who
    actively recruited and preyed upon their neighbors, illegal and chronic
    use spread like wildfire,” the company wrote in its application for the city’s financial assistance.

    “Our properties have experienced multiple high-cost incidents involving tenant-initiated fire or sprinkler flooding in the last year,” according
    to GMD. “Our insurance premiums have more than doubled in the last
    several years and we have been advised to avoid making claims to keep
    our premiums from dramatically increasing further. …”

    The building was expected to generate income of about $350,000 in 2023. Instead, it incurred a loss of almost $2 million.

    Good tenants were leaving. Units needed costly repairs before they could
    be leased again. Expenses mounted just as revenues declined.

    King County Superior Court adopted emergency rules last month that allow landlords to seek an eviction trial more quickly if they can show a
    tenant’s behavior is “alleged to substantially affect the health and
    safety of other tenants, or substantially increase the hazards of fire
    or accident …”

    There was a monthly average of 2,163 pending tenant-landlord cases in
    King County Superior Court this year as of May, up from 481 pre-COVID in
    2019.

    That translates into a six to eight month wait to get a hearing. All the
    while, the tenant may not be paying rent but the landlord must pay back
    debt, meet payroll and fix maintenance issues.

    “We’re trying to figure out ways to build capacity with our existing resources,” said Presiding Judge Ketu Shah. “We’re just kind of
    inventing this as we go along to try to deal with the triaging of these
    backlog cases.”

    Metropolitan King County Councilmember Reagan Dunn has heard other
    concerns besides a simple bottleneck. Many revolve around the Housing
    Justice Project, which provides free legal assistance to renters facing eviction.

    King County provided the Housing Justice Project with $16 million in the 2023-24 budget to fund eviction prevention and rental assistance
    programs and for legal aid to prevent inappropriate housing loss.

    Dunn wants to audit the Housing Justice Project to determine how many
    times tenants averted eviction “versus how many cases were simply drawn
    out through an extended legal process at great cost to the housing
    provider and taxpayers,” according to a news release.

    His office provided examples of correspondence it received from
    landlords and developers.

    “HJP isn’t providing legal representation to defend tenants, they are merely guiding the cases with the sole focus of delaying resolution, be
    it payment, settlement or eviction,” wrote one affordable housing operator.

    “Affordable housing providers and all other landlords will adjust to
    whatever the rules are — but right now it feels like there are no rules.
    HJP can basically just get any outcome they want for their clients,
    using taxpayer funding to wreak havoc in our housing system,” wrote another.

    Judge Shah said he was not aware of any Housing Justice Project or other
    tenant attorney violating professional codes by unethically delaying
    legal proceedings.

    “I’ve heard from landlords who say, ‘Well, the tenants have these attorneys and that’s really causing the problem.’ I don’t see it that way. They have rights that should be respected,” he said.

    Edmund Witter, senior managing attorney at the Housing Justice Project,
    said the problem isn’t people willfully not paying their rent. It’s that tenants on the margins can easily fall into a financial abyss.

    “If somebody does get behind because they lose their job, have an injury
    at the workplace or the rent gets too high and they can’t afford it
    anymore, what are they doing? They’re giving up. They’re just like, ‘I’m
    going to get evicted anyway, what’s the point? I can’t get out of the
    debt spiral,’” he said.

    “We haven’t really developed a sophisticated safety net to help those in need. Whether it’s rental systems or whether it’s behavioral health
    care, it’s really broken. And I think the Seattle situation is becoming
    a perfect storm.”

    When Council President Sara Nelson asked the city Office of Housing for
    the current average vacancy rate in affordable housing, she was given
    2022 numbers and told data for last year would be available later this
    summer.

    That didn’t sit well with Nelson. In a June 12 email to the Office of Housing, she noted that the council is currently making decisions about
    the $970 million Housing Levy passed by voters last year.

    “I’m struggling to understand how we can endorse a blueprint for
    directing those dollars without even knowing how many low-income
    Seattleites and families are actually being housed by the current levy
    and what policies we should put in place to ensure the success of the
    2023 Housing Levy and our affordable-housing providers’ mission.”

    Back at the Rainier Valley affordable housing development, GMD says
    things have turned the corner and they are focused on bringing in new
    tenants.

    As part of GMD’s application for financial assistance, it responded to a question by the city Office of Housing asking how things could be better.

    The company responded: create an environment where residents pay their
    rent, mostly on time. For those tenants who run into problems, rental assistance should be available and predictable. And owners should have
    the tools to deal with safety issues on their properties.

    “These are all basic principles that do not currently apply within the
    city of Seattle or King County,” the company concluded.

    GMD received $390,000 as part of the Office of Housing’s one-time
    emergency financial aid package, which totaled $14 million. Twenty-four
    housing organizations had requested $22 million in stabilization funding.

    The upshot of all this? If housing projects continue to suffer
    financially, developers will not be able to build more housing.

    At a time when affordability and homelessness are top concerns, we are
    headed in the wrong direction. Change is necessary, but it will take
    political courage and policy coordination that balances the rights of
    tenants with the financial realities of those who build and maintain
    housing.

    What the status quo tells us is simple: Combined with human behavior and
    market forces, good intentions can give rise to epic dysfunction.

    Alex Fryer: afryer@seattletimes.com; Alex Fryer is a member of The
    Seattle Times editorial board.

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