What follows is an email I sent to my city government expressing support for proposed policies that would legalize more housing, specifically middle housing.
You are allowed to adapt this text for your purposes. If you do, please state:
- that you adapted it from me, and
- that I did not ask or exhort you to use my text, I merely allowed it.
I’m a resident of Bellevue writing to express support for proposed policies to allow more middle housing in Bellevue, especially near transit, beyond what state law requires.
Housing is very expensive in Bellevue. This shows that people want to live here, but there is insufficient housing supply to answer the demand. The city should improve this situation by allowing more housing, especially near transit.
Benefits
The governor’s office has stated that transit-oriented development should be a top priority:
There is no single housing policy that can produce more homes, for a range of incomes, than a transit-oriented development policy that moves high-density housing past simply being zoned for, to actually being constructed – by up to 70 percent more production.
More homes near transit means more people can live, work, and shop in our city without needing to use a car as much. This means we decrease vehicle miles traveled per capita, which means less tire particulate pollution, less noise pollution, less demand for parking, less wear and tear on our roads, and less traffic violence.
Allowing higher housing density means more tax revenue for the city. Denser housing means more people utilize each mile of water mains, sewers, sidewalks, power lines, and other utilities that the city must maintain, which is a more efficient use of limited city resources. It means more people can live and work in our city, generating tax revenue and supporting local businesses. Residents of transit-oriented developments use public transit more, which puts less strain on our roads than cars, saving the city money on new road construction, maintenance, and traffic management.
Middle housing is widely popular. According to a city survey, 81% of respondents support middle housing near transit and jobs and 67% support it in residential areas. This is a clear majority in both cases. In areas across the country with existing middle housing, it is viewed positively.
Building middle housing like fourplexes and sixplexes increases housing supply, while preserving and enhancing the family-oriented character of neighborhoods. Even without building Manhattan-style skyscrapers, we can increase the number of housing units greatly in our city. This means more families will be able to live here, making the area safer and more welcoming.
Rebuttals to arguments against
I understand that there are those who object to these proposed middle housing policies. I find this regrettable and upsetting. Their arguments, which go something like this, do not stand up to scrutiny:
“This will make traffic and parking worse.”
By building more homes near transit, we make it possible for more people to get around without cars. This decreases demand for parking and costly road maintenance.
Failing to build more housing near transit is the true culprit for traffic. If we don’t build more housing near transit, more people will have to move out of our city and then commute in via car, clogging up and wearing down our roads, polluting our air, and endangering the public, while not paying property taxes.
“This will make single family housing illegal.”
No, it won’t. No current resident will be forced to do anything as a result of improved middle housing policies like the ones proposed. In fact, all we’d be doing is allowing people to do things that are currently illegal.
If a community wants to remain entirely single family houses, they would be allowed to. Legalizing middle housing simply allows current residents to have more freedom to choose what they want to do with their property.
In this sense, legalizing housing is a bipartisan win. Conservatives can celebrate a reduction of burdensome government regulation that is currently stifling businesses (local builders and contractors) from providing the free market what it demanding (housing). Liberals can celebrate increased access to housing for all, not just those who are already rich and powerful enough to afford the artificially high prices of the current limited housing supply.
“This will reduce the number of trees.”
Mandating a sprawling, low-density, car-centric style of development via one-size-fits-all exclusionary single-family zoning is the true threat to tree cover, and the environment in general.
We’ll have to cut down more trees, both to harvest more wood to build more houses that hold fewer people, and to acquire more land that has fewer people living on it, if we fail to legalize denser housing.
“This will worsen the neighborhood character.”
It is the current policy of single-family exclusionary zoning that is worsening the neighborhood character, as middle-class working families are forced out of our city.
I can’t speak to exactly what neighborhood character these people think they are protecting, but any supposed neighborhood character that prices out hardworking families, and which leads to local kids not being able to afford to live here when they grow up, is not a neighborhood character worth preserving.
Without increased housing supply, middle-class families will continue to leave our city and school enrollment will continue to drop. The neighborhood character will turn from working families to wealthy, privileged rich people with every home sale if prohibitively high housing costs are not addressed by building more housing.
“This will go against what current residents want.”
No. There is a clear majority of residents who support middle housing policies, as mentioned above.
However, what they probably really mean is “this will go against what the people who usually go to these public comment meetings want.” But we should note that the people who usually go to these meetings are not representative of current city residents, much less the general public.
The people who tend to go to these meetings are those who have enough time on their hands to keep track of the schedules of all of these public comment meetings, who were lucky enough to buy into the area when it was cheaper, and who now resist any change to the area.
We should reject the minority viewpoint of those few people who believe they would privately benefit from further increase to their already high property values if sufficient housing supply is not made legal. The benefit these property owners get from their skyrocketing property values via this artificial forced scarcity is not worth the extensive harm incurred on the public by failing to build sufficient housing.
Their argument is, in a sense, a self-reinforcing one. By opposing policies that welcome new residents, they deny the status of resident to exactly the people who would have liked to live here but were disallowed by prohibitively expensive housing costs. They thus effectively control the narrative by tending to shut out the very people who would benefit from these policies from the public comment meetings about said policies.
We should think about the people who support legalizing denser housing in our city, and who would live in that housing, but are denied the ability to do so because it is not allowed to exist. We should consider the fact that these people tend to not be heard in these public comment meetings, since they are not residents, but they exist nonetheless, and they would gladly live here and contribute to our community and the city’s tax base, if we only allowed them to.