Agreed that lack of units is at fault. This kind of mandatory affordable housing is an attempt to mitigate displacement within neighborhoods dealing with gentrification. In my case, this is Seattle, which has no parking minimums, but has suffered from too many single-family zones and not enough dense zoning. The rezones are an attempt to correct these issues.
Seattle needs to dezone MLK, Interbay and other major transit corridors and allow these areas to densify. The transit is there, and the property is either empty parking lots or 1 story slum commercial as the zoning restricts the area to a certain use. These areas should be replaced with dense, mixed use development.
We can have $800 apartments inside the city if we so choose, but with zoning forcing developers to build skinny dual towers and similar, we are forcing the minimum apartment price skywards.
No, the areas will still have restrictive height caps that will stave off tall buildings per that HALA overview doc, we need these areas de-zoned, not rezoned.
I feel like you're letting great be the enemy of good, but we can agree to disagree. With few exceptions, all cities have zoning to keep some consistency and continuity within neighborhoods. Within that frame, I'm happy the city is pursuing "larger than normal" upzones and converting some SF zoning to mixed-use.
Its a temporary bandaid though, that is the issue. With a lack of zoning, like we had not even 100 years ago, we'd have much more core development, and it'd prevent much of the extremely destructive single family home infill that is occurring.
Zoning adds risk to projects and creates an overheated housing market, where the cost of housing is land cost, construction costs, & zoning cost plus whatever the seller can get thanks to the artificially constrained supply.
"They aren't making more land" is entirely due to zoning ensuring most of the city is underdeveloped.
