Owner Occupancy Requirements for Accessory Dwellings are a Class Barrier not an Environmental Impact.

As part of the ADU ordinance that is currently winding its way through legal and environmental challenges, the Owner Occupancy requirement is proposed to be removed. Among opponents, there is concern that decoupling ownership from residency will cause developers to swarm into established high land value neighborhoods like Queen Anne, out bid families with inflated offers for detached houses, develop DADUs and rent both without any concern for neighbors, and lead to a less affordable or livable city.

How all this plays into an Environmental Impact Statement, I don’t know. But the owner occupancy requirement is at it’s heart a CLASS argument against more neighbors with less means, masquerading as environmental one.

Some thoughts as to why:

1. House prices are insane, increasing 15–20% year over year, at the fastest rate in the country. The market is overheated based on scarcity, and delaying DADU ordinance isn’t helping. Regional demand is to blame. Developers aren’t causing this — it is in part because we aren’t allowing developers to build things like DADUs that we’re in this mess.
2. The owner occupancy requirement isn’t grounded in keeping housing prices down, it’s to keep lower income renters out by limiting the number of options for less expensive dwellings to exist. For evidence, I’d direct you the entire history of residential zoning.
3. There is an irrational stigma against landlords and renters, though clearly we have no problem with renting out a single house. A single house is an ‘investment property,’ but when you add a second unit for rent, the narrative switches to ‘slumlords’ and ‘transients.’
4. Tens of thousands of houses are rentals now, almost 25% of our house stock, and most don’t blink an eye because the tenants are by and large fine neighbors. Most rentals are owned by regular everyday people, usually by holding on to their starter home (naturally occurring affordable housing!).
5. As for livability, renters are the majority of our Seattle. If you love Seattle, please acknowledge that renters are just as responsible as property owners for the great places, neighborhoods and events, support all our local businesses, and make up the underlaying tax base that funds our government, parks, police, and transit.
6. There is a substantial body of work documenting how and why denser communities are better off from an environmental standpoint (like from https://www.strongtowns.org/), but I’d to focus on just this one excerpt from a recent article by Lloyd Alter: ”…. The Influence of Urban Form on GHG Emissions in the U.S. Household Sector showed that “doubling population-weighted density is associated with a reduction in CO2 emissions from household travel and residential energy consumption by 48% and 35%, respectively.” It concludes that “given that household travel and residential energy use account for 42% of total U.S. carbon dioxide emissions, these findings highlight the importance of smart growth policies to build more compact and transit friendly cities as a crucial part of any strategic efforts to mitigate GHG emissions and stabilize climate….”

Doubling density nearly halves CO2 emissions, and allowing more accessory dwellings everywhere would have widespread benefit. So if we’re really serious about Environmental Impacts where we live, the name on the deed shouldn’t matter.