We must embrace small ‘missing middle’ changes to address our big housing challenges
The Missing Middle muddle is warming up again this spring, and we forecast rising temperatures in the next few months.
Last year, the Olympia city council passed a package of measures to promote urban density, including changes that would have loosened single-family housing zoning and allowed more accessory dwelling units (ADUs) such as backyard tiny houses and mother-in-law apartments. In some areas duplexes, triplexes, or townhomes also would have been allowed.
That plan was shot down by the Growth Management Hearings Board, and is now languishing in a court appeals process.
In the meantime, the state Legislature passed a watered-down measure that encourages (rather than requires) cities to take any or all of 12 suggested actions to increase urban density. The suggestions are intended to increase the supply of affordable housing, prevent sprawl, and concentrate development where roads, sewer and water systems, and pubic transit already exist.
The city of Olympia is now exploring three suggested items on that menu. One is allowing duplexes on all corners in a single-family housing zone. The second is loosening some restrictions on ADUs. The third would allow duplexes, triplexes and courtyard apartments in some zones.
These ideas, now being discussed by the city’s Planning Commission, have set up a rematch of the fight between NIMBYs (not in my back yard) opponents and YIMBYs, (yes in my back yard) proponents. The NIMBYs want to protect single-family neighborhoods and their neighborhood character. The YIMBYs want to encourage construction of lower-cost housing types. NIMBYs feel very strongly about adequate parking; YIMBYs want to encourage more walkable neighborhoods.
Olympia is certainly not alone in this dilemma. Similar conflicts are playing out in Omaha, Minneapolis, and the entire states of Oregon and California.
We stand with the YIMBYs. We understand that changes in the way we live can be challenging and even feel threatening. We have come to think we have a right to expect conditions as they have been in the past. But the world we live in is changing whether we consent to it or not. As citizens and neighbors, we need to be flexible enough to adapt, accommodate, and innovate.
We face a housing and homelessness crisis. A lack of adequate housing supply has pushed prices higher far faster than wages. Failing to produce more affordable housing means more people in poverty, and more pushed out of housing altogether.
Population growth is inevitable, and the I-5 corridor as a whole is failing to build enough affordable housing to accommodate it. Seattleites and Tacomans are being pushed to move here as prices rise there; Olympians are being pushed to Shelton, Montesano and Centralia as prices rise here. That means longer commutes, more pollution and endless traffic jams.
Under these circumstances, hanging onto the status quo of single-family “neighborhood character” seems downright antediluvian.
It’s understandable that homeowners have a financial interest in preserving their rising home values, but a duplex on the corner is not really a threat. And the worry that duplexes, triplexes or ADUs will be ugly, in spite of the city’s design standards, fails to recognize the subjectivity of who thinks what is ugly.
Many of us also need to get over distrust of all private housing developers, and support the regulatory and zoning changes that would encourage them to build more affordable housing. NIMBYs tend to imagine that a nefarious developer will tear down the modest house next door and build a duplex, without considering that right now, a developer could tear down that house and build a McMansion.
People worry that greater urban density means overcrowding, but we live in a growing, ever more urban area, and we simply need to adjust our perception of how closely we live to one another. A duplex or even a triplex in your neighborhood is not overcrowding. Mumbai is overcrowding.
Ultimately, Missing Middle measures will produce modest increases in housing units compared to the greater densities that can be achieved by building larger apartment buildings along urban corridors. But every unit of housing matters. And all of us, in every neighborhood, need to contribute to the solution of our housing crisis.
What concerns us most is how long even these modest changes are taking. Our response to our housing crisis feels way too similar to our response to climate change – excruciatingly slow, and therefore dangerous to our community’s future.