- Okay.
Good afternoon.
Thank you all for joining me today for the signing of Council Bill
12093 and Council Bill 121135.
New legislation to help accelerate housing and commercial development in Seattle.
Thank you to Council Member Lin for his leadership
in stewarding these important changes over the next 20 years.
Seattle needs to add
at least 80,000 homes to meet our state and regional obligations.
However, we also know that we need to add much more housing
than those minimum targets to truly have an impact on housing costs,
to create more housing options in all of our neighborhoods,
and to relieve the intense market pressure that is driving
so many people out of Seattle or into homelessness.
Too often, our own rules and processes stand
in the way of getting new homes online faster.
This legislation streamlines review processes, removing redundancies
and ensuring critical housing and commercial development can come online
5 to 12 months faster and with less money spent waiting.
It will also help expedite the 1000 units of emergency
housing and shelter that I'm committed to opening up this year.
Our city
processes already prioritize environmental considerations.
Removing this additional review keeps intact our legacy
of protecting our natural resources while allowing new development to proceed.
While increasing supply alone will not build
the affordable Seattle that my administration is working towards.
Accelerating review
timelines helps market rate and affordable housing providers alike.
I'm committed to finding more opportunities like these to support
the new homes we need, and this legislation is an amazing start.
I'm now going to turn it over to Council Member Lin to deliver some remarks.
- Thank you, Mayor.
Thank you.
So excited to be here for my first bill signing, with Mayor Wilson.
The mayor and I both ran, for office, given our shared commitment
to address the affordability crisis and to go big on housing.
And as a mayor just mentioned, we clearly do not have enough homes, in Seattle.
And the cost is way too high.
This deeply impacts our, our youth are working families,
our seniors on fixed incomes, and really,
anybody who's not making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.
And we've known about this housing shortage for years.
We did not get here overnight.
And we're not going to solve this overnight either.
But these bills,
fixing our permitting process, addressing permitting delays,
reducing these redundancies is a critical
first step, to addressing our housing,
affordability crisis, to addressing our housing deficit.
And so that's why I was so proud to, to support these bills.
And I just want to give a huge shout out to, all the staff who worked on these
to my policy director, Thaddeus Gregory,
to SDC to us, who have been working behind the scenes,
for a long time to make this a reality.
And this is just, the first step amongst many
to, to the partnership collaboration.
So thank you.
- Hi, everyone.
My name is Logan Schmidt with the Master Builders Association of King and Snohomish counties
How much county is representing more than 2400 homebuilders
across the Puget Sound, working to deliver the much needed housing that we need?
I want to say thank you to Mayor Wilson and even a Stration,
Council member, Eddie Lin, and the rest of the city council
and all of the staff that, the council member Lin also mentioned,
to move this legislation forward.
This is smart, practical reform.
And as the city looks to address the housing shortage
that we have citywide, we need to look at every single lever
to pull to accelerate housing and get more housing produced.
Super reform is a easy step,
and I'm very glad that we are, moving that forward.
And once again, thank you to,
you know, to the administration and council for making this happen.
- Hi. Jesse Simpson from the Housing Development Consortium.
I'm really pleased to be standing in front of some great city leaders
who move forward.
Another important policy to remove barriers to the construction
of affordable housing and housing overall that our city needs.
Too often we've seen, environmental regulations like Sepa
be weaponized by bad actors to extend project timelines,
and delay the much needed housing that our members
and others are building throughout the city of Seattle.
We really, thank the city for moving forward.
This legislation, which treats Sepa, as it should be,
looking at the environmental impacts of overall housing across the entire city,
rather than creating processes by which a single individual can,
sue and hold up, a project development, for months or even years.
And this, this we have seen our members,
especially be impacted by some of these, sepa lawsuits.
So I'm really proud to see the city of Seattle taking a strong leadership
position. Really.
We want to thank council member Eddie Lin.
That is Gregory and Mayor Wilson for moving on forward.
Thanks.
- Good afternoon.
I'm Carter Nelson here on behalf of NAIOP, Washington State,
the Commercial Real Estate Development Association.
And I'll just echo, everyone else's comments.
We are just really grateful for the partnership.
We commend council member Lin, members of the council
and all the staff that worked really hard to move this legislation forward.
You know, representing developers, contractors, builders
and all the folks that work in the market rate development space.
We're really excited
to unlock more housing across our city to address our affordability challenges.
So thank you very much and look forward to the continued partnership.
- Okay, guys, what day was this passed?
There you go.
Okay. 10th.
10th day of February.
Present is
on the graph.
Okay. We're going to we're just going to do the signature.
Okay.
Today. So you need to do okay.
I'm very prepared here.
Okay.
Thank you. That's all right.