For the past few years, business has been booming in Seattle. And we’re fortunate to have as much prosperity as we do here. We have strong industries that are creating relatively high paying employment opportunities, so much so that, just within the city limits, we are adding around 14,000 new souls each year to our population.
On the flipside, this has added strain on our community, since not everyone is benefiting from the prosperity. Seattle, and the surrounding areas, are experiencing both a housing shortage and a homelessness crisis. Despite a skyline filled with tower cranes, we simply aren’t building new housing rapidly enough, nor are we making any sort of meaningful dent in addressing the needs of our homeless population.
Here at BUILD, we understand and recognize that our own efforts to make a difference here are limited. Currently, we are working on a large housing project that has established an aggressive goal in creating 80 units of affordable housing. The reality is that private developers usually choose the less thorny route of giving money to the housing fund to be used for publically funded, and more expensive to create, housing by public agencies.
We personally spend much of our pro-bono and fundraising efforts supporting homeless causes. But these are just drops in the bucket, and solving the bigger issue continues to nag at us. More and more in our work, we’re uncovering largely invisible, yet systemic, factors undermining any meaningful attempt to address either our housing or homeless crises. Although there is much concern, handwringing, media and political discourse on the subjects, nearly all of our collective societal steps are undermining our actual commitment to creating affordable housing and addressing homelessness. Today, we’re here to shine a light on this subject. The agendas that are working at cross purposes to the goals of affordable housing and homelessness are deeply rooted; they involve many industries and many livelihoods so we need to acknowledge that a meaningful change will disrupt the status quo. But like the solution to any problem, we must start by admitting we have a problem, and look squarely at all factors contributing to it. We can’t solve what we can’t see, so let’s start by seeing it.
There is a disturbing relationship here in Seattle, and chances are that if it’s occurring here, it’s happening elsewhere: The steady march of adopting new building codes on a regular basis is undermining affordable housing. It’s a simple cause and effect. With each adoption of a new building code, buildings become more expensive to design, permit, and build–much more expensive to build. Every 3 years, code updates are released, and these changes affect everything from energy and storm water drainage requirements to accessibility and egress. With almost zero exceptions, more rules means more cost. One can argue the merits of the code changes, but we’re taking on the undeniable premise that every step “forward” in any of the agendas besides affordability, is pretty much a step backward in affordability. Our industry needs to wake up to the basic crisis it finds itself seeped in.
Despite the healthy economy and booming industries here in the Pacific Northwest, we’ve never witnessed so many tents under freeways and overpasses. The increasing population of Seattle’s homeless is visually staggering and a simple drive downtown reveals an entire society struggling for the basic necessities to survive. As architects and builders, this may be all the more unsettling as we pass throngs of homeless on the way to the building department to coordinate overly scrutinized building permits which cost the community time, money and valuable resources.
We simply can’t pursue all the lofty goals of low-impact buildings, green agendas, net zero design, ever-more incrementally “safer” building codes and affordability in isolation. These concepts run in direct opposition to each other and it undermines housing that is affordable. This concept feels like a kite string unspooling and slipping through our hands.
Here’s one example, among the many, to simply understand the trap we’re all sitting in: The upcoming release of the new energy code for glazing (windows), will increase the required average insulation value of glazing from a U-value of 0.30 to 0.28. Our initial estimates show that this will create about a 20% increase in window cost and achieve about a 6% increase in window energy performance. And this doesn’t even account for new the problems that we will look to overcome as operable window hardware will become stressed 50% more (when two layers of glazing bump up to three) or more glazing issues arise due to the added material and the associated issues. All of this will again add cost. We’ll be gaining a marginal increase in performance, with a disproportionate increase in costs. This tiny performance increase then ratchets up the backward progress toward solving our housing and homeless crises. So if you are looking to sale commercial buildings visit
http://allindiayellowpage.com for detail information.