What Wilson’s Executive Order Fixes Fast
Mayor Wilson’s recent executive order launched an all-of-government-effort* to speed up housing production in Seattle. Right now, permitting delays add a lot of cost and risk and cause homebuilders to choose elsewhere.
So Mayor Wilson’s executive order is a BFD.
(Image credit, KOMO)
Instead of the usual virtue signaling about permitting, Mayor Wilson broke down the walls that separate the “permitting department” to include the other bottlenecks - Seattle City Light, Seattle Department of Transportation, Seattle Public Utilities, and Seattle Fire Department, whose work impacts what we can build and how fast.
The executive order does three big things.
Forces these departments to work together to make timelines shorter and more predictable across all the departments. This is huge!
In the meantime, each department has to identify its point person who owns the problem of interdepartmental coordination. No more getting passed around!
To help with affordable housing specifically, the main permitting department will provide extra support to move affordable housing projects across the departments faster. The Mayor also will make a budget request to the council for a future designated interdepartmental lead who can move projects and resolve disputes.
*It’s not literally all of government, but it is all-of-the-relevant-parts-of government. Good enough for me!
Another big housing win under Wilson
This comes on the heels of many other parallel efforts underway, including Mayor Wilson’s “Taller, Denser, Faster” housing plan, or her collaboration with the council to recently raise the bar for appeals to broad zoning changes to be more in line with the region and less in hock to anti-housing groups.
What Mayor Wilson’s teed up next
Mayor Wilson has also put together a task force to identify other ways of accelerating housing production, with a specific eye toward preventing displacement, and supporting affordable housing, among other things.
This task force represents many of the relevant centers of power in the housing movement, as well as some of its inner tensions.
Some have criticized the Mayor for “another task force,” as a form of delay.
My own view is that the task force is clearly not meant to punt uncomfortable topics away from the foreseeable future. It is stacked with too many key power players for that to be the case, including its co-leader Eddie Lin, the council’s strong YIMBY housing leader. It was instead created to hammer out the key political compromises that are needed inside the Mayor’s governing coalition in order to get additional major wins for housing production.
In an upcoming piece, I will suggest a policy tool that could unlock housing production while unsticking the most difficult area of disagreement inside our housing coalition - related to fees that fund affordable housing. I hope this will help the work of the committee!