Housing is a complex issue influenced by several factors and participants. While the housing supply is influenced by factors beyond the City’s control, the City’s Community Development Department is working to make sure we do what we can to support the development of enough housing for everyone in Auburn. To do this work, the City has received a grant from the Washington State Department of Commerce to develop a Housing Action Plan (HAP).
On November 18, 2019, the Auburn City Council considered and adopted City Resolution No. 5471 authorizing the City to enter into a contract with the Washington State Dept. of Commerce (Commerce) to accept the grant and prepare a Housing Action Plan. The contract specifies that the Housing Action Plan (HAP) must be adopted by the City Council.
Purpose:
According to the contract language, the goal of a housing action plan is to encourage construction of additional affordable and market rate housing in a greater variety of housing types and at prices that are accessible to a greater variety of incomes, including strategies aimed at the for-profit single-family home market. The housing action plan should:
(a) Quantify existing and projected housing needs for all income levels, including extremely low-income households, with documentation of housing and household characteristics, and cost burdened households;
(b} Develop strategies to increase the supply of housing, and variety of housing types, needed to serve the housing needs identified in (a) of this subsection;
(c) Analyze population and employment trends, with documentation of projections;
(d) Consider strategies to minimize displacement of low-income residents resulting from redevelopment;
(e) Review and evaluate the current housing element adopted pursuant to
RCW 36.70A.070, including an evaluation of success in attaining planned housing types and units, achievement of goals and policies, and implementation of the schedule of programs and actions;
(f) Provide for participation and input from community members, community groups, local builders, local realtors, nonprofit housing advocates, and local religious groups; and
(g} Include a schedule of programs and actions to implement the recommendations of the housing action plan.
Scope of work and phases:
The work effort and contract are generally divided, in two main phases:
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The first phase
The first phase consists of the development of a South King County Subregional Housing Action Framework document in collaboration with neighboring jurisdictions of Burien, Federal Way, Kent, Renton, and Tukwila. This collaborative effort collected sub-regional data necessary to support the development of individual Housing Action Plans. This cooperative effort provided economies of scale and allowed the sharing of information and facilitated the comparison between several south county cities. The cities cooperatively selected and hired a professional consulting firm with specialized expertise, EcoNorthwest, to gather information and assist the city in the preparation of this document. This document was completed in August 2020. This document sets the stage to evaluate and incorporate appropriate policies, tools, and incentives for increasing residential capacity.
The Fact Sheet/Executive Summary of the South King County Subregional Housing Action Framework document that captures broad factors impacting housing choice, cost burden, and existing conditions of housing stock in South King County was shared for February 22, 2021 council meeting.
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The second phase
This second phase and main phase builds on the contents of the South King County Subregional Housing Action Framework document developed in the first phase but focuses specifically on the City of Auburn. And this phase is independent and conducted under a separate contract component.
Step A - As a first step for this phase, the City’s consultant prepared information specific to the City of Auburn. The consultant prepared a draft “Auburn Housing Action Plan Existing Conditions Memorandum which details the current conditions influencing housing capacity in the City. This document was provided to the City Council in advance and was the focus of the February 22, 2021 Study Session.
This document has the following components:
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Introduction
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Housing Needs Analysis discusses the current housing inventory in Auburn, current demographics and employment trends for Auburn residents, housing affordability trends and displacement risk, and estimates future housing needs for Auburn through 2040.
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Market Conditions provides data on recent rents, home sales prices, vacancy rates, and development trends in Auburn.
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Housing Planning and Policy Evaluation discusses the most relevant planning documents – from state to county to local levels – that guide and influence housing development and housing planning decisions in Auburn. Building on the work completed in the South King County Subregional Housing Action Framework, this section also evaluates five policies that are in place in the City of Auburn to assess their successes at encouraging housing development.
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Methodology, Data Sources, and Assumptions lists the data, sources, and the methods used in this analysis.
Step B - Continuously throughout this entire phase, the City has actively conducted a public outreach effort to solicit public feedback from persons with understanding and experience with housing in Auburn. This has been ongoing while the plan is under development and then continuously through making the draft plan contents available for public comment. To get the most relevant and valuable feedback, this outreach is targeted to persons impacted by, or with knowledge about housing issues and circumstances in the City of Auburn. City subconsultant of Broadview Planning has developed and implemented a public engagement plan consisting of online or virtual forums for:
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Individual stakeholder interviews
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Focus/small group discussions
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Open houses/community forums (May 12 @12:00pm & May 17 @ 5:30pm))
To counteract the restrictions associated with the COVID -19 pandemic, the city has also implemented a new on-line tool as an additional method of gathering input. Please check out the following website: https://speakupauburn.org/hap See the summary of key engagement findings to date, in Part 2 of the Plan.
Step C – A public draft of the Housing Action Plan has been prepared and is being made available for public review and comment opportunity through June 1, 2021. An introduction and explanation of this Plan will be the focus of the May 24, 2021 Study Session, especially the recommendations. (see Figures 30 and 31 in Part 4 of the plan for a summary table of the recommendations).
This public draft version of the Plan uses the public input gathered so far along with the research conducted to analyze the current and forecasted conditions in Auburn and generate recommendations/implementation strategies for the Housing Action Plan. This Plan will help the City guide its housing policies and regulations and decisions over the 2020-2040 (20-year) planning period.
The recommendations offered in this HAP are informed by several components of this project. In addition to building on the work completed in 2020 for the South King County Subregional Housing Action Framework, the recommendations in this plan were developed using the following components.
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Data on current and future housing needs discussed in the Existing Conditions Memorandum,
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Suggestions and ideas generated from the community through the community engagement process, and
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A development feasibility analysis and review of Auburn’s zoning code / development standards to evaluate impacts to the feasibility of new construction.
These three source inputs were used to arrive at the recommendations offered in this plan. More specifically related to this third input, the consultant used a development feasibility analysis to inform recommendations about the development standards and affordable housing programs that can support more market rate and affordable housing.
Due to time and expense limitations of this effort, it was not possible to study the entire city and recognizing the limitations of source data, with help from city staff, the consultant focused on certain limited geographic areas for more in-depth study. The study area includes downtown and nearby R-5 and R-7 zoned areas to the east (see Figure 3).
For the downtown area this focused on the study of “podium type construction” (4-5 stories of wood frame construction over 1 or 2 concrete base floors) as representing market rate units and micro-housing units (about 220 square foot living area) as workforce housing units. For nearby R-5 and R-7 zoned areas, the development feasibility focused on provision of middle housing. In this analysis, the term “middle housing” refers to duplexes and triplexes as a generally more affordable type of housing.
They evaluated the development feasibility of several development types (or prototypes) using development feasibility analysis and sensitivity testing. The analysis allowed analysis and testing the impacts that result from various changes to development standards and incentive programs.
Plan Recommendations:
The HAP set out to address the following four city goals:
A. Encourage market rate development in Downtown Auburn: more development and denser development
B. Encourage the development of below-market workforce housing in Downtown Auburn
C. Encourage the development of middle housing types in R-5 and R-7 Zones in the Study Area (see Figure 3)
D. Prevent displacement and encourage the preservation of existing affordable housing
With these four goals providing the framework, the plan identifies several recommendations or strategies to increase housing capacity and to meet the goals. The recommendations can be categorized into three types, as follows:
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Recommendations call for a zoning code or Comprehensive Plan change. Recommendation can be implemented through the Zoning Code and/or through Comprehensive Plan update and code amendment processes.
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Recommendations call for a new program. Implementation will require staff and or resources to support new or expanded program operations.
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Recommendations call for increased partnerships and collaboration. Implementation will focus on enhancing relationships and securing partnerships.
In the coming years, implementing this HAP will require the City to balance and coordinate its pursuit of actions, funding, and partnerships with its other policy and programmatic priorities. The recommendations in the HAP will require varying levels of effort for the City to implement. Each recommendation will require different levels of staff time and resources and will have achieve different objectives (see Figures 30 and 31 in Part 4 of the plan for a summary table of the recommendations).
Each of these recommendations lies within the City of Auburn’s influence, but work will span departments and involve meaningful contributions from stakeholders such as City Council, Planning Commission, residents, homeowners, neighborhood associations, advocates, developers (both affordable and market rate), and many others. Additionally, some of the actions in the HAP are intended to support enhanced coordination with government agency and non-profit partners.
Next Steps
The City will accept public comments on the public draft of the HAP through 5:00pm June 1, 2021. Staff will evaluate all comments received and make relevant revisions to the document. To fulfil the grant contract with WA State Dept. of Commerce, the revised document will be presented to the City Council along with a resolution for adopting the final Housing Action Plan near the end of June/beginning of July.
While implementation will take several years, one of the first steps will be to develop a work program and assign tasks. The City will need to assess the varying levels of effort, allocate resources, and examine technological solutions to develop work programs that can help complete the needed analysis and initiate important conversations with these stakeholders.
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