The City Council is holding a public “brown-bag” meeting today, from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m., on the subject of micro-housing, as typified by Calhoun Properties aPodments, the lightning-rod dormitory-style housing that can replace single-family homes with anywhere from eight to 56 inhabitants. Controversy over their affordability — and its costs to the surrounding neighborhood — has kept Capitol Hill Seattle blog pushing big pixels of coverage.
In March, the city told CHS that since 2006, 44 micro-housing projects had been built or permitted. Calhoun Properties alone has somewhere around 400 micro-units on the market.
“A portion of the meeting will include an opportunity for the public to provide comments and recommendations,” says the Council’s Tom Rasmussen, but certainly his colleagues Nick Licata and Richard Conlin will want to discuss ideas that they have been kicking around as well. You can watch the proceedings live here.
“Because not everyone can attend daytime meetings,” adds Licata, “within the next few weeks, Councilmember Rasmussen and I plan to host another evening public forum on microhousing development.” Licata told PubliCola that he’s curious to hear whether the public would like a minimum size set for micro-housing units. San Francisco has forbidden units of less than 250 square feet. Seattle’s residential code requires just 70 square feet for a sleeping area; micro-housing developments locally seem to have aimed for about twice that.
The Council has already tackled at least one major criticism, announced Richard Conlin on Tuesday, which is how micro-housing developers have been counting units. Conlin had previously pooh-poohed the concerns of neighbors, saying that micro-housing developments weren’t appreciably different from de facto student housing of the kind where five or six people rent out rooms in a house.
“Current code allows flexibility to allow up to eight people to live in one unit, assuming each have their own room,” the Department of Planning and Development’s Bryan Stevens told Real Change. “That number has been in our code for the past 30 years.” A “unit” is defined primarily by the presence of a kitchen, so micro-housing structures are built around a single shared kitchen per floor. Depending upon zoning, they can reach five and six stories in height.
“One sore spot,” admitted Conlin recently, “has been the way that developers have used their ‘unit count’ in different ways depending on what City regulation they are working with.” Land use code counts units, as mentioned earlier, by kitchens. But “some developers,” Conlin says, also applied for a Multi-Family Property Tax Exemption (MFTE), meant to encourage affordable housing, by counting each bedroom as a unit. Yet on a price-per-square-foot basis, micro-housing can often bring in more revenue than standard rental stock, which is why it so often replaces an existing structure.
Seven years later, the Office of Housing has closed that loophole: Housing Rule 01-2013 states: “The number and size of dwelling units verified by the Owner in the application for property tax exemption for Multifamily Housing shall be identical to the number and size of dwelling units contained in the Owner’s application to the Department of Planning and Development (DPD) for a building permit….”
This does not, necessarily, mean that micro-housing developments will trigger a design review (which currently occurs with projects of eight units or more). Conlin notes that the DPD is looking at “creating a new threshold for design review based on the size/square footage of the building,” rather than by unit count.
At the moment, micro-housing is earning its investors a premium because a micro-unit’s price point tends not to exist in Seattle’s most popular neighborhoods. Even that, however, is changing. Though you see advertising about micro-units “starting” at $500 per month, or even $475, the going rate has steadily increased to between $575 and $675. “Larger” micro-units, more than 200 square feet, might rent in the $800s. A micro-“suite” can top $1000.
At $675 per month, a 150-sq.-ft. micro-unit is bringing in $4.50 per sq. ft. Meanwhile, a brand-new one bedroom on Roosevelt is going for $2.50 per sq. ft., but the price point is $1,750, which works out to $21,000 per year in rent. That micro-unit? $8,100 for the year.
