One neighbor was Alan Gossett. Gossett was trying to sell his blue Craftsman house, which shared an alley with the new development. Standing on the corner of his rear deck, Gossett pointed through the trees to the half-built structure and said, "I think this is going to be a magnet for very sketchy people."
Why sketchy?
According to permitting paperwork, the building was a commonplace cluster of six town houses—the sort that would typically attract well-to-do buyers. But inside each town house, the developer was building up to eight tiny units (about 150 to 250 square feet each, roughly the size of a carport) to be rented out separately. The tenants would each have a private bathroom and kitchenette, with a sink and microwave, but they would share one full kitchen for every eight residents. The rent would be cheap—starting at $500 a month, including all utilities and Wi-Fi—making this essentially affordable housing in the heart of the city. And, remarkably, for affordable housing, it was built without any subsidies from the city's housing levy. But Gossett was bracing for 46 low-income renters in the space where he'd been expecting six new homeowners instead.
Gossett and other neighbors felt hoodwinked, they told me.
There was no public notification and no review process that allowed neighbors to pose objections. This was due to a loophole in the permits: The city and developers classified the building as six units (with up to eight bedrooms each), instead of as an apartment building with dozens of units, which would have required a more public process. Neighbors said they feared that the area wasn't ready for so many new residents and that the influx of newcomers would usurp on-street parking. But Gossett also seemed concerned by who his new neighbors might be.
"Anyone who can scrape up enough money to live month-to-month can live there," he said, worried that low-income interlopers would jeopardize his chances to sell his own house. "I don't think most people want to live next to a boarding house with itinerant people living in it."
This style of development is called microhousing, or in the case of this particular project, the developer, Calhoun Properties, has trademarked the name aPodments. Gossett and other neighbors said they should be banned. (...)
Seattle is a leader on the nation's bell curve of prosperity, ranking in the top five local economies since 2010, according to a Policom Corporation report. Unemployment is less than 6 percent, construction cranes swing across the skyline, and vacancy rates for apartments are at a scarce 3 percent in some central neighborhoods. Affordable housing is virtually nonexistent. In the past five years, the monthly rental rates for studios have increased 15 percent and one-bedroom apartments have increased 21 percent, according to real-estate economist Matthew Gardner. The price of an average studio apartment in Seattle last month hit $991, and one-bedrooms soared to $1,230, according to the real-estate tracking firm Dupre + Scott.
In this environment, microhousing is in high demand. "Kids are coming out of college, and in not much smaller numbers than the baby boom generation—and are they wanting to live in Issaquah?" Gardner asks. "No, they are not. They are going to want to live downtown. But when you start looking at average unit size, it will be increasingly unaffordable. But they are willing to live in a smaller space if the absolute dollars they pay are less." Since I visited that aPodment in 2009—the first of its kind built for that purpose—several developers have applied for permits to construct 44 more microhousing projects, according to the city's Department of Planning and Development. Seven are complete, and 37 others are getting permits or being built. In all, the city forecasts that 2,371 microhousing units are slated to enter the rental market.
Many community groups have made it their mission to halt this trend. They see this wave of microhousing as an invasive species. In their eyes, developers stand to get rich by transforming beautiful residential areas—defined by lawns and plentiful parking—into crowded, dilapidated slums of inhumanely small homes with shared kitchens and undesirable tenants.
by Dominic Holden, The Stranger | Read more:
Image: Kelly O
