KEXP Presents Mind Over Matters; Sustainability Segment: Margaret Morales

this is diane warren your host on the sustainability segment of mind over matters and k x p seattle ninety point three of them by mobile app and on the way out that katie xv died orgy i guess this morning as margaret neurologist senior research associate for sideline institute a think tank providing leading a regional analysis of energy economic and environmental policy in the pacific northwest margaret morales is here to tell us about the effect of seattle's zoning regulations on structural school segregation and to discuss how increasing housing options in single family zones could allow more students with diverse economic backgrounds to attend seattle's top public schools welcome margaret i think you for having me which i would begin by saying a few words about sideline instituted that line is a regional think tank so we focus on sustainability issues are cascading out and cast gideon mostly covers washington oregon and british columbia and we look at sustainability pre bradley so interested in

environmental impact and also social and economic impact of issues across the region it's only going to detail about the effect of single family zoning restrictions on structural school segregation let's add some context about the pattern of housing types in seattle what does the area fields how things look like well let's see so housing in seattle is down the need and it single family detached home not quite a half of all of the homes in seattle is that one housing and when you look at a zoning it's really the zoning pattern that has led to sell over half and seattle is single family and in the songs are you can build a detached homes and also excess tree dwelling units which are there is things like many flats or backyard packages unfortunately we don't have enough of those in seattle but for the most part when you're looking for housing in seattle your choices are limited quite a bit by the fact that this one's any type cover

so much of the city to what extent are their also duplex is and tripe like says in these single family home areas right so there are duplex is entrap flexes in the multifamily zones that again multifamily zones cover is a pretty small portion of the city well now what's interesting is that we're finding there are many duplex is interprets is in single family sense they're not legal to build those housing tanks today those are relics i have a more flexible zoning history that we have here in seattle when the zoning code was more flexible be rebuilt and then as many neighborhoods have been downs and those duplex is a triplex as were grandfathered into the neighborhood if a geographical pattern of the diverse housing stock what does amount of multi unit homes and single family neighborhood look like if you look at the map of seattle so housing types in our single family zones are extremely high mountainous we don't see much diversity at all we are lucky and benefiting

from historic selling code which was much more flexible and resulted in a number of grandfathered in units things like these duplex is untried parks so they are the only reason we see a little bit of diversity right now and a single family zones we see most of these grandfathered in units closer to the center of the city the northern and southern extremes of seattle we have fewer of these grandfathered in units in the single family announced that we think that we need a lot more of this this is just a good loaf or taste of what could come if we open that single family zones to a little more diversity home the extra people are likely house by the diversity in housing stock that existed in single family areas so these grandfathered in units less than the excess or dwelling units and mentioned create capacity for an additional twelve thousand people we estimate in the city that really is a wonderful wonderful contribution to our housing supply that these

units are providing us today what is the economic status of people living in boxes an accessory what we think is really interesting and exciting about these diverse housing options is that he treat a range of housing prices so they're coming in at more diverse price points in these neighborhoods into the treatment options in neighborhoods that are dominated by owner occupied single family homes which isn't more about how the changes in zoning overtime of effect in the pattern of housing stock though prior to nineteen twenty three seattle didn't have a formal zoning code and so builders to be very reactive to what was needed they could build what was needed where it was needed across the city and there were advantages and disadvantages to get so nineteen twenty three the city saw its first zoning code hit the books and it was very flexible compared to what we have today in zoning there were only two residential zoning times

one was the equivalent of what we have today of single families owning the other way a second president sounding which is any housing tape beyond a single family home so from a duplex to an apartment structure and the way that these are just carried it was most of their single family zone was it on the extremities of the city the northern and southern portions whereas the more flexible residential zone was around the downtown core and so that is why today we have more housing diversity around the center of the city than we do on the extremes you've presented a block in wallingford and is that an example of how selling has affected a specific area would you like to describe the block that you've talked about in your study just kind of profiled a pretty typical block in the wine for neighborhood so wallingford is one of the neighborhoods inner city that's benefiting from these grandfathered in units the block that i looked at in my article and a number of the

duplex is and i think a triplex as well and they were almost all built prior to nineteen twenty three so most of these grandfathered in units were built prior to the first sony and then we see some more built after the first learning code in neighborhoods that were later downside to single family zones what're seattle's current zoning regulations for housing could you just underscore exactly what arizona regulations are at the moment here i think it's important to make clear zoning it's really just this set of rules that accumulating puts on itself regulating where we can build what types of health is so their community imposed rules and in seattle we have a zoning type single family homes in which you can only felt detach single family homes and it covers more than half of the city so it really has and metastasize since nineteen twenty three but began as only a small portion of the city about a third now it's over half of

the city is covered by the most restrictive zoning time we have on the books i'm diane horn and my guest is margaret morales senior research associate for sideline institute our topic is structural school segregation in seattle zoning and your turn to the sustainability segment of mind over matter is almost not howard k e x e ninety point three of them by mobile app and on the bread k x p pandora j why did you choose to study the connection between housing type in educational opportunity what is your goal oh there isn't an exciting opportunity in seattle right now the city is considering letting its zoning code become more flexible and so we're interested in what would happen if if this policy proposal went through so we're looking both at how the existing zoning code in seattle is impacting a variety of factors an education access is one of those and they were looking at how if we need any zoning

code more flexible more adaptable to the house anuj we see today what with the result that we that we went to education that's a big amenity it's a big opportunity in the sea and were interested in how changing the zoning code would change access to education how much a steady set up what did you evaluate so we looked at public elementary schools in seattle and here is operating system it's actually a national rating system schools in the country so the great schools index and it ranks schools from one to ten ten rated schools are those that have the strongest performance on standardized tests and schools without thinking of one of the lowest performance so this is just you know one metric of looking at school strength it's not the full story but it's a useful metrics for us so we looked at those schools that really really high and the symmetric the have attend rating and then we looked at what is this morning around those schools

and so around seattle's top schools we found that there's a disproportionate amount of single families on the already thin the families earning is just putting the city and really restricting or housing options and that is even exacerbated around our top schools so what would you say are the key findings of her study you've started alluding to that already so first we found that housing options around the top schools are very restricted so when you look at the attendance areas that is the areas and which school tries it almost three quarters of the detained in syria the top schools a single families and you know how a lot of housing options if you want to get to go to one of these schools as the first thing we found then we found of the housing that exist around the top schools it's very expensive it's about twenty percent higher than the average home price in seattle so you have only one type of housing option really single family homes an expensive so not surprisingly household income of the only is living on these top schools is also higher than

the seattle average there was the result of these three factors you have a very high margin is housing types it's leading to homogenize economic background of the people that can afford to live in these neighborhoods the result is that the schools the top schools in seattle are how much of this so we're seeing that the student body at these top schools is overwhelmingly white non poor english speaking and that we think is in large part the result of the restrictive housing types around the schools what are some examples of specific neighborhoods that illustrate the original findings in my most recent article i looked carefully at her school the ridge elementary interview rich neighborhood and if you look at the trend in syria a ninety three percent of the land around here it is single family and so most of the homes around few ridge are single family homes and they're very expensive homes i think the average

home values like a hundred fifty thousand dollars though seattle's are expensive that's even more expensive and then we kind of looked at the breakdown of the student body and we found the same things you know a much higher percentage of students at the ridge elementary are white non for an english speaking then you see across the district fear getting kind of enclaves of students at these top performing schools based on your study what do you propose a solution to make better educational opportunities available for all economic growth so i think you're making in need and range we need a suite of policy tools too create more equity across our school system is loaning policy and housing is just one tool in that toolbox that's the one that religion and i think of that if we can create more diverse housing options to a wider range of price points around good schools away it range of housing options you know maybe not all

feelings are ready or even want to own home so then used to be run auctions around these top schools if we can create that kind of diversity will give us more diverse neighborhoods initiative has more diverse schools how can a more diverse housing stock they encourage so what we are very excited about is a policy proposal it's in front of the seattle city council right now and it's part of a housing affordability policy package that seattle it received in twenty fifteen well when you say that package is to grind it went types of housing can exist in single family zones and that means allowing things like duplex is anti pike says hands them row houses to alter existence in the family these are kind of small multifamily options they're all with indie existing thighs constraints of single family homes so we're not proposing building enormous new structures and single family sounds were proposing building a greater diversity of same size structures

in these arms so we think that if we could create this kind of broader diversity of housing choices these duplex is these subtract taxes that would allow a greater range of neighbors in some of our most expensive neighborhoods what is the timeline for the city council deciding on this proposal for like selling requirements well what we're hoping that the city council will turn to hit sometime this year what are the key barriers to housing stock diversity in addition to selling so in addition to the zoning restrictions there are also restrictions on excess tree dwelling unit construction in her single family sounds so excess redrawing its using things like many flats or basement suites their backyard packages and while it is currently legal to build the peas on a single family not a single family pretzel it's extremely difficult and that is because there is just all phone book worth of

regulations on edu reading so one regulation for example is that if you wanta construct an accessory going in at your home you have to show proof of you off street parking prices so there'd be one for the meat home and one for the additional unit is incredibly difficult to get in seattle and so it's just kind of a whole laundry list of things very difficult permitting requirements as a result only slightly less than one percent of single family homes in seattle have been accessory drilling unit associated with them and that is so much lower than many world class cities if you look at anchor of nbc over a third of the homes there have at least one additional unit and sometimes too so seattle is really lagging behind and it's because of these policy barriers i'm diane warren and my guest is margaret morales senior research associate for sideline institute our topic a structural school segregation and seattle zoning and your turn to the sustainability segment of mind over

matter isn't listener powered k x p ninety point three of them by mobile app and on the web at atx the doubt or ge are there any efforts that are coming forward to try to make it easier to build the accessory dwelling units and there are still working and to make excessive a dwelling units more feasible by reducing some of those policy barriers that's another piece of this policy proposal and mentioned so this policy package it's called holler the housing affordability and livability agenda it contains a host of policy proposals for seattle to address the housing crisis were experiencing in the city and so that includes both making our single family zones more reactive to what we need in terms of housing and reducing policy barriers to access retelling what were some of the concerns you've heard people express about the accessory dwelling units

still newlyweds are nervous about having more accessory drilling and there are a host of reasons for this wine is that people worry about parking they worry that there's an alchemy enough space to park my car on the street if there are more people living on my block well i think that points to a deeper issue that we have in the city which is that the city is not walkable enough we shouldn't all be parking a car on the street and the only way to make a city walkable is by having enough people to support transit enough people to support local businesses secret have a chicken egg problem here you need to get out of our cars that's the real problem in the nation to affording more educational opportunities to lower income families in what other way split single family neighborhoods be affected by the proposed hollen zoning changes i think that if we were to open up single family sounds to a greater diversity of housing options

those neighborhoods would probably see a greater diversity of neighbors aram feelings that right nokia consider looking for a home in the ridge for example you might be able to find something there maybe there'll be a duplex though you'd see maybe some more diversity across our city so more mixing across neighborhoods we've also been doing some research looking at other city amenities that seattle residents might get access to if we broadened our single family sounds so we've been looking at parks and i think a lot more people would have access to some of the wonderful parks in the city if again we created more housing options in single family new products in humans might start to look a little bit different if we permitted more housing types the proposal is very sensitive to the family stone's in that it's not proposing enormous new buildings in our single family neighborhood it's proposing buildings that are consistent with the style and the size of buildings currently in those neighborhoods and finally and

this is my hope for the future if we permitted greater housing diversity in our single family zones i think we might start to see more local businesses and more walkable neighborhood because again you needed the new neighbors to support those things and so if we could create if we could create enough patrons for your local chocolate shop mean you could how one that she could walk to that we need their clients to do how does your study fit into the overall picture of bringing quality to the public schools so again i think that making a zoning code of mauritania made in response to our housing means that's just one piece of the story here there has been a lot of research showing that the seattle public school district fits it exceptional public school district but there is a lot of economic segregation across the district making a zoning code more flexible is the one thing we need to do to address that problem it's not the whole story so i think it's a step

along that you alluded to this earlier but how do we compare with other major cities as far as the diversity of our housing stock so it is remarkable how much land in seattle is covered by single family zone that is quite unusual in a booming city like seattle so that is unique and then when we look in a world class cities you know they're a lot more options for things that are the equivalent of an accessory drawing right i talked about the case of vancouver bc where we see it there have their homes have an accessory dwelling unit and here were struggling to get one percent so there's just a lot of restriction on what you can build a waiter in seattle what do you think the reason is that seattle lights have found themselves for some of single family compared to these other cities you know i think some of it is that he had on his thought of itself as a sleepy town so it thinks of itself as just a sleepy quiet small neighborhoods

and it is scary to change but the fact is that seattle and satellites are benefiting every day he found the growth we're seeing in this city mean every day as new businesses use to headquarters hear the entire cd benefit and so we have to look at those people so i think we're having a little bit of tension between are selling coded and what seattle has become it's not a sleepy town anymore it is becoming a us senator for her technology and business in this country and a zoning code is trying to catch up to that reality is there anything else you'd like an artist though i think that when you're a strict or housing supply by things like overly restrictive zoning we put a major burden on members of our community that have the least margin in life those with the smallest economic reserves and

so we're creating a housing crunch because of these rules and when we do that those people with the least margin in their life phillies africa the feel that crunch first so santa has a few creating housing crunch because were nervous that that change or to walk into that change together as an open community that's the message you'd like to leave our listeners were dismayed by stoning nuances been wary it sounds unlike fiancee far off policy think don't cutter rules we impose upon ourselves they are the rules we choose to say about where we can build want and we can build what affects people's lives and we have the opportunity right now in seattle to change that code to change those regulations and the client was it neighborhoods in the city on time some intriguing here thank you you were just listening to margaret morales a senior research associate for cycling institute for more information check on the web at sideline dot

org forward slash schools arms again sideline dot org chief forward slash schools arms sustainability said when interviews are available as podcasts along with k e x these music podcasts go to k x p dowd orgy click on demand and then podcasting i'm diane hein thanks for listening and be sure to turn into the sustainability segment again next week and listener powered ninety point the fm via mobile app and on k x p doherty