Weekly Update: 03/05/2023

This Week

Wednesday: 7:00PM Des Moines Marina Association Meeting (Agenda) (Harbormaster’s Report)

Thursday: 6:00PM: City Council Meeting (Amended Agenda) The main items for moi are:

• The SKHHP Budget. We are voting on two projects to be funded. Neither are in Des Moines. At SKHHP’s last meeting people got very emotional at this milestone.
• We will be voting to approve the final plat on the 216th Townhome Project. This is an issue I helped organise on before I was elected. It was going to be an apartment complex, now it’s going to be market-rate ownership and far better for the neighbourhood.

A few hundred snarky words on ‘housing’

Look, SKHHP has been on-line for over three years into this, so call me when we fund projects in Des Moines. And if that seems snarkier than usual, I appreciate everyone’s hard work. But, we’re supposed to be in a ‘housing crisis’. Forgive me but we’re not exactly treating it like it’s a crisis. We should save the champagne for after we build about 4,000 units in Des Moines.

The planning process needs to be reformed; not just in Des Moines. I’m sure that most of the public does not understand how complex modern land use has become. I certainly am no expert, but just through the brute force repetition of attending 600+ city council and Port of Seattle meetings, I’ve learned something. And the one thing I can tell you is that this stuff is currently waaaaaaay too complex and opaque and all that complexity and opacity applies to everything from this particular plat to  “why the Masonic Home got away from us” to “why the downtown is the way it is!”

If you look at any early piccies of Seattle, or even Des Moines, they look odd in a very specific way. You’ll find a hardware store right next to some guy’s single family home. A mansion and then a tiny factory. When historians talk about ‘the wild west’, they’re talking more about that chaotic land use rather than gunfights at the OK Corral.

Zoning laws first came about in the 1900’s, initially to make certain that a slaughterhouse wasn’t built next to a single family neighbourhood. Almost immediately they also began to be used to promote exclusivity and racism. The explicit racism was written out, but people got more and more accustomed to the notion of each neighbourhood having a particular ‘character’. Nowadays, it is very rare to see any multi-family intermingled with single family homes.

These policies have had terrible consequences for young families. We built a ton of homes after WWII (the big one!), everyone of my age and older got great deals, and then at a certain point we stopped building. In 1950, a ‘starter home’ which would go for $400,000 today, would have cost $40,000 in inflation adjusted dollars. A small amount of that cost increase has to do with better codes, but the vast majority comes down to the fact that we’ve come to see our houses as investments, not just places to ‘live’.

Where I grew up, and in most of Europe, ‘density’ is handled quite differently. It is very common to see duplexes and small apartment buildings (6-12 units) within a single family neighbourhood. The building types look compatible and therefore the residents are compatible.

What we’ve done in most of America is to segregate any multi-family buildings into their own ‘zones’, and that incentivises builders to create the mega-complexes which ²single family homeowners tend to be extremely skeptical of.

I support the kind of townhome building along 216th. But the next step is to make the entire process more transparent and welcoming. We have to find sincere ways to make it easier to build mixed-types of housing in current neighbourhoods.

HB 1110

OK, good news, bad news. If you haven’t already heard about it, you will be inundated with discussions of ‘missing middle housing’, including HB 1110 which looks like it will soon pass in Olympia. The bill is supposed to eliminate some of the barriers to multi-family zoning, but it has loopholes big enough to drive a double-wide through (see what I did there? 😀 ) I’m not so worried about your/my property values going down; I’m more concerned that it might make it even more tempting for developers to build higher-end units and bypass the intent altogether. Also, it has little support from local governments who are rarely anxious to be told what to do when it comes to zoning. I honestly don’t know how I feel about it. Frankly, there are some issue(s) that are so radioactive that no city will tackle them sincerely without being told what to do by the State. Even if your City Council wants to do the right thing, the thought of a room full of angry NIMBYs at City Hall tends to strike fear in almost all local electeds. It’s easier to have the State to blame. 😀 We’ll see.

Last Week

Thursday: 5:00PM: Public Safety/Emergency Management Committee Meeting (Agenda) (Video) Highlights:

• Not really talked about but it was noted that Chief Ken Thomas will be leaving in June. The monthly PD Report contained this Press Release.
• Body Cameras, which were first proposed in 2021, are now active.
• Police February 9, 2023 Leadership Retreat at Beach Park
• Police IEMC Application, King County Emergency Management

Thursday: 6:00PM: City Council Meeting Study Session Agenda. Recap below. But unless you want a Civic lesson, the only item of real note was the fact that the Mayor announced that the City is re-activating the Citizens Advisory Committee. Apply Here.  Go get ’em. 🙂

March 02, 2023 City Council Meeting Recap

This meeting was supposed to be about ‘goal setting’. Or rather, it’s become the current City Manager’s tradition to have two Spring meetings concerning ‘goal setting’.

• Part 1 provides an overview of each department. In this case a three hour and forty minute overview. The main themes, repeated by each department was this:
  • We’re having trouble recruiting everybody. From parks workers to licensed engineers.
  • We’re stretched thin. So if the council wants to do other things, something will have to be cut.
• Part 2, which will occur in April, is the actual ‘goal setting’.

If I could wave the magic wand, the one change I would make to City Council Meetings would be this:

• Provide the presentations ahead of time.
• Somehow the content needs to be limited to about 80% new material. No rehashing. No victory laps. And no explainers. 

¹Annnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnd…. the meetings would last about fifteen minutes. 😀

The really insidious thing

Look, you, ‘the people’ may have found the meeting informative. And at three hours and forty minutes I’m sure it was highly informative. 😀 But these meetings are meant for the Council; to make decisions. It’s not an Infomercial. If we want to do a program similar to Kent’s City 101 (which I highly support) we should do City 101. But don’t waste the Council’s time.

And you can tell that it was all performative by the (very few) questions my colleagues had. Every single one was rhetorical. That may be OK in ‘the other Washington’, but not in local government.

One of my father-in-law’s favourite expressions: “When you waste a dollar, you waste two. The dollar you wasted and the dollar that could’ve gone to something useful.”

I wish he had told me how much that also applies to time.

When you waste an hour, you waste two. The hour you wasted and the hour that could’ve gone to something useful.

And that’s not being snippy. Time is as finite a resource as money. And there is an even more insidious aspect which anyone who has watched basketball knows about: the play clock. You only get so much time to ‘run your plays’. And if the opposing team finds a way to sit on the ball and do nothing? You’re screwed.

At most, we only get 26 meetings a year. That is all the time we ever get to get educated, and to make decisions.

Last year, many of the Committees held 4-5 meetings; not 11-12, as one might expect. Again get educated, and to make decisions.

If we wait until mid-April to get to our ‘goal setting’ we’re also saying that our ‘goals’ are going to be almost non-existent.We proposed exactly zero new ideas last April and zero budget amendments in October. And that is exactly the way the City Manager and current Council like it.

For the curious, I would direct your attention to a 2013 planning retreat. We actually used to have a Council that proposed real ideas and held real discussions.

Evil And Irresponsible Actions, You Say?

¹I’m not advocating insubordination, but anyone who can leak me a copy of those presentations ahead of the meetings may find an anonymous lifetime Starbucks Gift Card. Or maybe a pony. 🙂

²Count me in on this group. The last thing I wanted in 2018 was another mega-apartment complex in my neighbourhood.