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Are You Opposed to Growth? No, we’re not. The neighborhood plans included plans for how to grow that made sense for their communities, and could have accommodated the growth Seattle is expecting. Unfortunately, the City recently defunded those neighborhood plans and ignored their enforcement when developers didn’t abide by them.
 
Why Did HALA Happen?  The HALA committee appointed by the Mayor had 28 members, 24 who were developers, developer-related interests, and agencies with city contracts. “Consensus” votes required 80%, 23 of 28. It shouldn’t be a surprise that their policies favored developers.
 
Does MHA Provide More Affordable Housing?  The City’s Mandatory Housing Affordability (MHA) program gives us little affordable housing compared to many other cities. Downtown development requires as little 2.9 % affordable housing, while other cities require 10-35%. We need as much affordable housing as possible. The March 2015 report “Solutions to Seattle’s Housing Emergency” gave 50+ recommendations that would provide significantly more affordable housing, yet this report was ignored by the HALA Committee—instead using upzones (larger buildings) which benefit developers, not middle and low-income communities. 
 
Don’t We Need More Zoning Capacity to Reduce Housing Cost?  We already have 300% more capacity than needed to accommodate the expected growth through 2035 without upzoning. The upzones are great for developer profits (20 -30% annual return on investment), but not for creating affordable housing. 92% of the units built since 2010 are luxury units and have an average monthly rent of $2,077—$25,000 a year. 
 
Our Concerns with MHA as Proposed:

• Displacement Vulnerable communities of color (e.g. South Park, North Beacon Hill) are targeted to be displaced from the only family-sized rental housing available to them in Seattle.
• Displacement & Low Fees Originally the City was going to require [many of the] new projects to be in the same neighborhood where developers removed current housing. After developers pushed back, that’s no longer true and developers can simply pay a fee to have nonprofit developers build somewhere else.
• The program’s goals are 6,000 net new affordable houses.  Unfortunately, the goals do not include the naturally affordable housing that will be razed to build multifamily units.
• No School Mitigation Seattle is adding 800 to 1,000 students per year, and students are going to class in inadequate portables in classes with up to 40 students. We understand Seattle is going to continue to grow but the Growth Management Act’s Environment Impact Statement requires the city to provide mitigation, including contributing to school construction, as most cities do, through impact fees.
• Livability Not Addressed The Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda (HALA) was tasked with addressing livability, but the word is omitted from the recommendations. Likewise, most of the livability issues have been shrugged off in the EIS, and neighborhood planning has been terminated in the city budget. 

 
Few Affordable Housing Units

• To begin with, Seattle’s MHA proposal calls for far less affordable housing than other cities. There could and should be much more.
• There are two methods that developers have to accommodate the MHA requirements: build on-site or pay into a City fund for housing. Seattle’s requirements are very low on both counts.
• Seattle’s MHA (Mandatory Housing Affordability) provides very little affordable housing. In Downtown and South Lake Union, where the most amount of building has and will happen, the percentages of affordable housing are only 2.1-5.9%. That means that for every unit built only one out of 18 to one out of 50 will be affordable.
• For the other neighborhoods or Urban Villages the percentages will be 5-11%, or one out of 10 to one out of 20 units, Virtually no properties are at 11%: only 10 properties in the whole City.

 
It Under-counts People Who’ll Be Displaced

• The City does not adequately address the number of low income people who are displaced from their homes when developers buy up cheaper older units and replace them with high-rent luxury units. For instance if an older, affordable 20 unit apartment is bought and replaced with a 40 unit high rent apartment, and the new apartment complex has to provide three affordable units, then that’s a loss of 17 affordable units, not a gain of three.
• The City uses TRAO as the sole way to count the number of people displaced, but even the City admits there are multiple problems with TRAO, yet that's what they use anyway as though it counts everyone.

 
Upzones Increase the Cost of Properties, Leading to More Expensive Units

• Simply building more housing doesn’t mean housing will be cheaper. Downtown has the greatest number of units built and it has a vacancy rate of 25%.  Manhattan, for example is much denser than Seattle and is one of the most expensive housing markets in the country.