thank you for coming to this panel discussions discussions on development and gentrification in the u district but of course we see that everywhere in our region my name is clifford caught on i'm a professor over bellevue college and also housing developments kind of my personal jam so to speak but also it's the development housing is something that all of our amazing panelists know well about so we have peter mr peter steinbrck one of the port commissioners and former sea council members and he also runs urban strategies consulting he's going to present as results of a survey of small businesses and their needs and you distort as well as a number of other interesting fact face and also their successful organizing efforts around mitigating some of the inequities relating to zoning process that we're currently seeing unfold as well as mr chris peterson to his running and one the strongest coffee houses in the entire city and he's a key player here in the u district and last but certainly not least council member lisa hoare bolt of district one my former council member and she has led the charge equitable development initiatives as well as a lot of amazing work on workers rights as well as at sea when it comes to housing and most of the progressive legislation that we've seen come down the   we have a new guess this is when life throws me a little bit of a curve ball least the bathrooms and this is very important so you should all understand this the bathrooms are through that door follow the signs in fact you are going to do camera reverse p yes you'll want to follow the signs in there clearly marked for women and men and they passed diverges kind of like a fork so just asking one at the exits if you have any questions or need to be directed towards bathrooms now the subject that we're going to be going on tonight is kenny av in all seattle's neighborhood small businesses survive up zoning runaway growth growth in equitable development as well as of course a big in a room chance for cation rank so the challenges facing small businesses basically renters facing low income homeowners are going to be the crux of tonight's discussion and hopefully you'll leave here bit better informed about some of the things are being done and some of the things that can be done around displacement so without further ado i can go on and talk for another three minutes but as my students know it's usually not really that fun so in that case i'm going to turn it over to mr peter steinbrck and hope that's been at least a little shout out just so folks know this is of course being sponsored by the being sponsored by the seattle displacement coalition and if you've not checked out side city hall which is the news blog that seattle  the seattle displacement coalition that's been in formation since nine hundred seventy seven and a regionally responded to displacement that was happening on capitol hill after the boeing bust and has been reporting and intervening anti well in displacement struggles says the seventy's if you want to learn more information if you want to see some of the work that's being done there is a sign in sheet back there before outside  which is the news blog as well as the seattle displacement home coalition if you want to get involved so thank you all for coming this is a great turnout thank you k u a w for the plug this morning and there was a really interesting story some of the  saw a little bit older the jog on the displacement coalition but not that much older i suspect that some of the early conversations took place a c l a grow it for the displacement coalition went a lively and informative session here we're going to dive right in i've got about ten to twelve minutes to cover a short slide deck i just want to preface by saying this was a community led effort and nationally spearheaded by this placement coalition but taken up by the university district's small business a so alliance what it's called direct something like that with rick as one of the champions here it was the work was done largely to address the city's intent to resolve on the university district as part of the overall hollow housing affordability livability agenda for that was still under way to up zone most much of the business districts throughout the city including the five urban centers which the university district is part of that was cause for great concern among many here many small businesses and residents where there are still there's still a level of affordability and a place to start a small business and to grow one so we're going to get into that let's go to the first slide here and i'll just tell you so the purpose was to better inform the city and communities on issues affecting small businesses and non profits and the university district and there was a great support from the top nonprofit including roots here with effort was undertaken questions were developed through a community led process my role as my consulting role was to help facilitate bring some professionalism to the process and some objectivity and some science based approaches to the work but it was really i can't emphasize enough this was a community process involving directly the local businesses and non profits with help from the city's office of economic development i want to just shout out to mike wells who's here half of the he was very helpful personally and engaged in the efforts and offered some advice and review of our approaches and so forth it was conducted entirely anonymously the survey work with community volunteers over a period of about ten days or so with some oversight will move to the next oh i've got this businesses were identified we used a database from the city that was i sorry to say was pretty outdated some help but not but we found there were a lot of businesses that just weren't even on the record and we focus on small independently operated owner operated businesses not the franchises not the larger businesses and so it all one hundred twenty three businesses were directly contacted by door to door personal interviews and some have been taken by most really a face to face effort which is quite remarkable ninety percent along the universe itself from forty first to fifty six and we went around the side streets a little bit but we didn't have the time of the resources to do the entire university five percent of the businesses are run by the owner and others owner operated that is one of the precepts of pike place market and how it has always run so it's an important data point and that very large number of owner operated businesses with the business owners on the premises working day to day and we have a restaurant obviously cafes eateries coffee houses where the largest category followed by merchandise about twenty nine percent retail clothes this the district is known for its vintage clothing stores and that's one of the reasons people come to the district who don't necessarily live here professional services of course fill out th say this just talks about the kind of physical characteristics of the small businesses fifty percent less than twenty five foot storefront that's about half the width of this room that those are pretty small storefront something that people like it's a finer fabric that makes for a unique character of our businesses are fifty nine percent were under two thousand square feet also quite small and that regard ok and space needs most of the businesses ninety percent rent their commercial space are not owners of property owners let me make that clear and fifteen percent on a month to month basis so that's a fairly high proportionality of month to month renters covered a pretty significant portion of the businesses at least at the street level and some upper levels along the elbe sixty five percent responded identified as women or minority owned and in many cases both seventy percent percent unsure don't know seventy three percent said yes which is a positive i think indication of an intent to stay and the desire to stay if the property where your business is located were to be up  would have a positive or negative effect on your business the negative of this is the very highest with almost fifty percent fearing the upside on that had been proposed twenty six percent no and twenty two percent suggested it was a would be a positive thing to have the ups on is a pretty basic questions but kind of getting at some of the central issues commonly cited neighborhood issues street homelessness crime etc straight conditions alleys hi operating costs traffic parking those things tend to come up some positive comments regarding light light rail and its advent of a rival here soon with the brooklyn station more police excess ability lack of political response and this came up to small business challenges now we didn't plan these terms they were provided to us in the comments and we summarize the comments so need for affordable housing there's a strong commitment socially here in the i think represented by the business community as well as residents and others ok and the future of the average guarding rezoning some of the similar issues fear of displacement due to and increase property value so let's continue what would you need to remain in the university district protection from redevelopment was one of the listed some of the same kinds of issues lower taxes  etc let's move on and recommendations part of this now we did some research around commercial judge occasion and the united states there's not a whole lot out there i can tell you that's current so we kind of combined a perspective from what research has been done recently within the last few years judge occasion as both economic cultural and social it's not just one thing and it's complex but it generally means displacement of one kind of population or community so the recommendations or the findings here i should say large predominant business businesses are women minority own business frontage is are small tenants feel vulnerable many perceive the opposite of negatively and let's move on to the next one with the recommendations here this comes from urban strategies and myself the need to provide better outreach to small businesses vulnerable to displacement before the up not after especially the english a second language businesses and the immigrant communities we did not find and this is no criticism of this shop which is a great one at city hall the level of outrage that would be expected when imposing such a dramatic change of conditions economically amongst vulnerable business communities and residential communities so we felt the city could do much better particularly in light of its longstanding social grace and social justice initiative or let miss test that things are supposed to go through and i should add emigrants to that list also update the city's database so that there's a better knowledge about and map those misses before proposing dramatic up zones and identify where they're located what type of the characteristics just as we've tried to do and that employ some best practice anti displacement measures i think council members herbal may talk about that for small businesses and there a number of of strategies incentives and other ways to address to protect those small doesn't usually it means have valving them in the first place upfront in the beginning before changes are proposed proposed community informed sauteing development standards that will help protect those small businesses and the character that people value and cherish strengthen the voting development standards and that deals with the sign reviews storefront are just the with the front edge is if you pay if you have a development that's a full block and you just let anything go you get big bucks development and it can wipe out half a dozen businesses that used to be there on the stuff on the street frontage  we're just about here and then also recognition of the importance of landmark preservation it can go hand in hand with housing preservation and protection for small businesses if the these these tools and  couple finally strengthen the social services that goes without saying our city's response to street homelessness and youth next one this is a really important slide here just want to take us a few seconds to talk about that colorful patch work quilt there actually represents the parcels that the city through its studies had identified as potential high develop high low medium redevelopment parcels not just blocks but it is possible to go through with this kind of information and identify the number of businesses where they're located and which are most subject to displacement through increased rents loss of tennessee and all of the other pressures that go go with that hand in hand so i'd say this is something really helpful that the city provided but it wasn't taken to the next step finally we'll just put a plug in for the work of the displacement coalition this was a precursor to our study done by the displacement good coalition looked at housing affordability and the impacts of up zoning found that some twelve hundred units and the university district would be highly vulnerable to displacement redevelopment and the destruction of the many red brick buildings that exist here that have no protections right now the provide level of market rate low income housing thank you very much for your time and attention and i'll try to paddle that's ok it's ok see sometimes i don't make folks answer questions for my students in the audience say sometimes that being said let's move on to our next speaker rickman's nick loughlin my apologies and  notified any of us and all of a sudden there's this whole city plan saying you know what you know we need to start putting thirty two storey buildings in the district and you know we need you guys on board or like hey wait a second you know like we've got to assess this that's where's the data you know she even justifying the need for these types of up zones and like well we have a housing crisis in the city so we have to do it to justify you know that horrible housing crisis that we're you know having this like well ok that's that's one topic that's a separate topic where's your study is on gentrification across cultural impact small business impact and they had none and they essentially had a e i a s of the time that was you know pretty pretty crappy and we've said you know what you know let's do some of the cities work for them and that's create our own small business impact study and let's try to you know use data to show the vulnerabilities that are here and try to use as much impact through you know collecting small businesses uniting them together that way it's a stronger voice and so that's essentially what we did and ultimately you know we you know trying to get advice from people here and there and peter steinberg was definitely somebody that i leaned on for advice and lisa herbals another one and we tried to create a strategy to try to save you know the district as a whole but we failed and we were able to pull the ad out and focus on small business districts because really the yeah it is a unique thing it's kind of like the last small business incubator in the city it's a last place to try to find an affordable rent as a commercial runner and it's a last place where you can find a lot of small mom and pops that actually own properties and that's when commercial businesses tricks thrive under their best is when you have essentially a small business owner and that's the property owner that you know maybe one or two lots and they have a direct relationship with their business tenants who are inside there and you know and when that happens you know both thrive because then you have more of like a family you know ok unity in the district and that's been going away for a while now you know you dubs a large buyer of property as well as university district parking association they're very very large a group of property owners that are kind of you know having their will made  ultimately what we try to say is hey you know like i mean culture and small businesses matter like you know let's let's do some research and let's try to fight it the best we can and so that's what we've been doing in the continue to do  i think that the city is going to keep trying to ups own small business you know areas forever you know in this city i don't think it's going to go away in time soon but i think if we do minutes as much you know voices that are informed that care about those businesses that they go to they care about the nonprofit services that are in that area and then ultimately what will have is a stronger community voice and not just a small business voice and that's really what we're trying to do here  essentially free legal counsel and free legal advice for a small business a nonprofit owners and so we've just met with the king county bar association couple weeks ago and it's really exciting to have some projects like that underway and you know just uniting more you know nonprofits the area to work with small businesses and residents and when that happens you know your communities everything and that's what we're here fighting for saw thanks for time thank you very to people that live and work and operate businesses in the district all the time one of the things from a small business perspective that that i'm concerned with in terms of the ads is that we have the vast majority of business district here already and there's going to be a tremendous amount of pressure on the should any more any further up zoning happen  to both gentrify and change the essential character of what we've got and i think we've got a lot that's worth preserving here we have a lot of legacy businesses as peter pointed out we have a lot of minority and women owned businesses here we have opportunities for you know first time business owners we have some commercial affordability based on the structure of the avenue the fact that there's a lot of older storefronts we have we have residential affordability above those commercial units in older buildings which preserve some affordability and housing i think all of us know that you know affordable housing isn't really being provided in new buildings new buildings are expensive to live in and so older buildings are important both from a business and a residential standpoint and i think also the way that i look at the is i think it's it is a well maybe not a historic district it's historically worth preserving it's one of the most important business shopping districts in seattle has been for over one hundred years i think if we look out at the areas in seattle that we've preserved like pike place market or ballard avenue we would say we've never made a mistake by preserving something and i think we need to preserve what we have here we and i think ballard avenue is a great example there's up zoning all around that street but what people love about going to that neighborhood is going to the a couple points of information one and if one of you wants to feel this is fine but just going forward not everyone may know what's up zoning is so if some second  is got the point i was going to say so without any further ado council member if you'd like to take it away of all of the throughout the city and this was a meeting specifically focused on the public safety challenges that many of our business districts are dealing with right now the b i a as you probably know fund some of the activities in partnership with the city clean city activities to deal with garbage in the university district you district b i a fund some outreach services and so this was a very heated shall i say meeting with lots of folks from from the council lots of folks from s p d and the fire department bit from rick about the context for commissioner brooks study and i think what's most important to take away about that story is that because of organizing and because of the strategizing that rick and others did the council made the decision based on you know a really persuasive argument that we shouldn't make a decision about something that we hadn't studied yet and that we needed to hit pause while we studied it and they were successful in getting the city council to take the proposed up sun for the av's that was also proposed and did pass for the for the rest of the  neighborhood but to take it out of the proposal until we had more information about what the needs were of the business district and that's what led to commissioner stein brooks work that i think really  confirmed what a lot of people just knew through their experience both here in the university district and just watching the city change over time and so i think moving forward a lot of those recommendations are going to be helpful to me as a policymaker but i think it's really helpful to folks who are advocating for their communities to really focus on what those recommendations are and what we've learned from them and carrying that message through  also want to give a shout out to the office of economic development in michael wells they have a lot of programs specifically focused on small businesses and everything from you know working with the b i is which is i think one of the things that they're most known for but they also work to work on a program called only in seattle which works with business districts to help them create an identity for themselves  market themselves in a way that improves the the business climate they also have a program called restaurant for success and you know i myself personally i represent west seattle  south park i have just ran across a wonderful example of the work that they do in facilitating what are sometimes some difficult discussions and  decision making with the department of construction and inspection i attended the opening of a small business in south park the other day and she told me how staff at o e d were indispensable in helping her get a permit that she really had a last last minute was being told that she was going to be able to get so the work that they do is really important it is very focused on small businesses as it relates specifically to the mandatory housing affordability program which is sort of the context under which a lot of these up zones are happening that's a program is designed to extract from developers resources for affordable housing in some cases that would be a fee that then the city would issue an r p four nonprofits to compete to build the housing with those dollars in some cases that will mean  performance including affordable housing in the developments that they're building it's a small number of units of affordable housing in most cases it's under under ten percent i have been an advocate of increasing  the requirement of developers to contribute and the reason why this program that's about affordable housing is coupled with zoning is because we can't it's not legal for us to make them make developers pay into an affordable housing fund or include affordable housing in their buildings unless we give them something of value and something of value is that the city has is  so in most areas that's you know a floor or two but that's definitely not the case in many of our business areas business districts because of my concern about displacement prior to the executive issue issuing their recommendations about and how much how much zoning capacity to to to give through these up sons the city did what's called a displacement risk analysis and they they did an analysis of the likely redevelopment all over the city and identified areas that were of high risk of displacement and again i don't think we've gone far enough with that information that's been really fall in as part of this decision making around citywide m h a one of the good things that has happened out of requiring the city to do a displacement risk analysis is that the zoning increases that they're proposing in the areas of  high displacement risk are the minimum amount of zoning increases that they could that they could grant and still extract housing payment so i think that's that's a within a district that has that is experiencing these up zones one of the things that i worked on doing during the effort here in the university district was to require working with john fox on the residential he he had his displacement risk analysis on the number of housing units he felt through the methodology that he used that we would lose with these with these up zones and we've seen development consistent with with john's predictions in some cases the city had a different number was quite a bit lower significantly lower the argument i tried to make is let's have a small increment of an increase percent to basically require developers to pay a little bit more because of the displacement impact that they were going to have and so we kind of we kind of you know rather than arguing with hundred so what we did is we figured out what would it cost to replace those units and what would that translate to in an increase in the development development requirement so i proposed an amendment to do that it was a really frantic nature that the city has with planning in that we acknowledge that it can result in displacement but we're not really willing to do a whole lot to mitigate that displacement so you know i'm going to keep pushing on this as it relates to m h a one of the things that commissioner steinberg's recommendations were related specifically to historic need for a store inventory of historic properties as part of the mandatory housing affordability up zones how many thanks and so you know one of things that we saw recently was that the city was up in arms about the fact that  shoebox was likely to be torn down for development but that was a development that was being proposed by a developer who was going to buy the property under the city's own  new sewing regulations that we had just passed a couple years ago but that's because we are i think approaching zoning from kind of using a chainsaw instead of more of a scalpel and so you know and i believe that if we had really thought about what what are the structures in this area that were rezoning that we want to preserve we will hopefully approach those decisions differently so as a relates to my district district one in seattle and south park i've begun working with the southwest historical society somewhat of an inventory of our our historic landmark properties and not just the ones that are currently  too to actually use owning to preserve those properties that we as a city have identified as important lastly again shout out to id for working with me over the last several years one of the first issues that i started working on as a city council member was this concept of a legacy business i was approached by a constituent who happened to write a book about dive bars in seattle he's an author he used to be a reporter for the seattle weekly and he talked to me about the fact that other cities have legacy business programs he pointed to san francisco and their legacy business per program and how they had they had preserved over two hundred businesses with that program he pointed to london where they have a in english pub legacy business program and to paris which has a legacy business program focused on on  bookstores and the idea being a legacy business program can be focused on older businesses that the community cares about that also say something about a city or neighborhoods identity so we've been sort of plugged in or out plugging along slowly on this for the last two and a half years and i think where we're taken the step that i hope that we were going to take for a long time through the budget process we are going to take again that next step in actually developing a program economic development is going to be developing specific tools focused on on how to help older businesses stay in place in those instances that they that they want to continue as a business you know it so for me it's so important to to focus not just on on small business but specifically legacy business because in a city that's changing so much many times our businesses are  bridge to to our cities culture to our history into we're really what we are about a city so we'll be looking at a process by which we can designate at least one legacy business in each district throughout the city and again like i said economic development is developing specific tools for legacy businesses to help those that are designated oh wonderful thank you you've saved us two minutes or two minutes early right all right so this time we're going to open it up for questions from the crowd i know that and also can we give another round of applause to and also course k o d e x l p ninety six point nine seo one of the best independent radio stations in the city is looking to you guys so in that case y preparing to do a survey of the our own specifically geared towards the legacy report yeah i mean we're going to at least try to interview survey all of the businesses in green with classical than one hundred fifty or seventy fifth yeah i mean more i i just had questions that's all i really have to announce that we're planning on doing that and trying to establish that the only kind of issue i had is that i'm a little bit concerned about the criteria of what defines a legacy business because it  seems like it's mostly going to be bars and restaurants because it's where large groups of people congregate at the same time whereas your hairdresser you know you might all there might be a whole group of people that individually meet their hairdresser they don't know each other but they might know each other through the hairdresser for a you know just for instance  so that's just something we're hoping to make suggestions to expand the definition of the definition has not been created yet there is a definition that was used for purposes of the study but as far as what the guidelines are going to be in designating is a legacy business that is unwritten so far and that's sort of the next step that we're going to be working on with with office of economic development some cities have used a cookie cutter approach and kept it pretty pretty broad maybe it's a category a number of years a category of business in a number of years other cities have really let the individual districts decide for themselves what the criteria should be so you think about like what's important in greenwood and so you use that that sort of visioning exercise to determine what your guidelines are and what businesses would be eligible for applying for legacy business status i think you're your hairdresser a d i think in the case that i'm thinking of a barbershop girls is a great great example in the central district that is that would be a great legacy business because of the role that that sho has had in that area for for generations in a area in particular that is changing and seeing its residential community be displaced out of the neighborhood again is so important to maintain those those are assigned to each of our legislative districts council districts for the city so they are they are always working with the business take holders in each of the city seven districts but i don't think that we process again might be create some broad city wide sort of a skeletal set of guidelines but then after again after working with the business districts in each of the seven districts you we also kind of layer upon it some districts specific guidelines but again this is a work in progress i've been working on for the last two and a half years in and it's probably going to take another another at least six months to get it up off the ground all right folks so let's sir fielding some questions i'm just going to facilitate going around this way ok so please raise your hand so a little bit of an old fogy so i might own the city well they could have gone about it actually you know a smart way and took certain pockets i needed zoning changes and you know left other ones alone but essentially there was so much money to be made in seattle that all the developers wanted piece of it so  back in the day that mary and a council member got a room with a whole bunch of developers and they wrote what's called a grand bargain and essentially it is the grand bargain for developers but it's not for the city and the dollars and essentially they even did some studies and they found this they're using what's called an f a r calculator to try to use square footage of zoning changes to a spec try to give developer impacts and what those should be in reality it's coming in around like seven percent which is laughable and sad because that's basically saying oh down the road seven percent of the working class can afford to be in the city because that's what does this isn't in the impoverished of the city even this is us this is small business owners residents workers that's all down the road seven percent of us are going to be here and that's just laughable and that's a fact of that's their plan is just disgusting so then they did so they found it's like ok well what should the penalty be p i think it came in around like sixty to sixty five dollars a square foot or something like that and the developers in like that they're like oh no that's not good you know because none of them are going to actually put in affordable units in their buildings they're just going to pay whatever the impact fee yes so they're like ok like how about you know ten to twenty dollars you know a square foot like that sounds great and sometimes even less than that and it's laughable what we're giving up right now as far as square footage to what we're actually getting back and that's why they're trying to  developers how much the city should be affordable down the road for us and you know what actually matters to the voters and that's why we have to get a vote because you know his he's a name but johnson's public enemy number one my point of view so far as whether or not this is space i think you're not going to be surprised to hear me say that we have to make this base right i think the point that rick is making about the grand bargain and how it was public policy  recommendations that were crafted out of the public eye really i think gets to the nub of the problem in public policy that supposed to serve everybody if  you want to develop laws and programs that serve everybody you have to have everybody in the room helping to draft and formulate and implement those programs if you  have the folks you know who have the city's best interests at heart and which i believe most people working in city government do have the city's best interests at heart but if you just have them in a room with people who have a monetary will receive a monetary benefit from the decisions that are made and you don't actually have impacted people people with live experiences then the city folks the folks who have people's best interests at heart are not going to be able to take a tough enough stand with the it because it's basically a negotiation public policy it is a negotiation but if you want to negotiate from a position of power you need more people in the room not fewer people in the room so from my perspective we really have to we have to create the space we have to question the spaces that already exist and question whether or not they are inclusive enough  just to answer your question specifically about single family housing so there was a there has been a proposal to expand the city's accessory dwelling in a program that is one way of allowing structures other than single family structures in single family neighborhoods and we see that some people are already have developed a to use under the current laws and those structures can be a great source of income for people who want to age in place or people like myself who you know eventually want to have their mother live with them the classic mother in law apartment right so so that we can care for our elders so you know and the reason why we haven't been able to expand that is because the city has been dealing with  appeal so it's been tied up in the courts but we're expecting to be moving forward on that in early next year and then also the controversial mandatory housing affordability program that we've all been discussing also includes a new zoning category for single family zones that allows quite residential small watch so it would allow up to a building up to the size of like a tri plex but again it's very controversial and some of the folks in this in this room here today are involved in challenging that because of their own concerns about displacement impacts