Renton Highlands revitalization; why do we need apartment houses?

The city council and mayor have spent a great deal of energy lately arguing about the best way to revitalize Renton Highlands. I summarized my views in an earlier blog, and I’m happy that we have made some progress since then. In particular, the mayor has joined the council majority in backing away from use of the Community Renewal Act with it’s threat of eminent domain, and instead now agrees to more of a free market approach. Still, she and two other council members, Dan Clawson and Terri Briere, are clinging to the idea that we should not support any revitalization effort unless it focuses on high density multi-family in place of the current land use. I strongly differ with this view, as do my council colleagues Denis Law, Marcie Palmer, and Don Persson. The four of us appear to share a belief that single family homes can still have a prominent place in revitalization. I took my daughter on a bike ride through the subject neighborhood this evening, and took the following pictures to illustrate my point.

This development went in about two or three years ago, not long before we enacted the now infamous moratorium on development. These four beautiful homes replaced a single 60 year old duplex building on this site. As a result of this construction, the assessed value of this property went up from about $200,000 to over $1,000,000, increasing the appearance of the neighborhood and increasing the city’s property tax revenues by five times! That is five times as much property tax money for police, fire protection, parks, street repairs, libraries and other services. Or dare I say, even cut taxes elsewhere? Yay! Now why did we enact that moratorium again?…

And I heard through the grapevine that the corner home in the above photo was recently estimated to be worth nearly $500,000, a stunning appreciation of nearly 100% since it was built. That property that was worth $200,000 a few years ago, now subdivided, may be close to a value of $2,000,000 thanks to a high quality creative builder, excellent pride in ownership by the residents, and good old american free enterprise.

And here, a creative builder did the same thing. This time the builder did not have the easy corner lot access, but still managed to replace a duplex with four homes. Why would we be opposed to this?

My daughter receives input from a neighbor…

“That moratorium is thiiiiis stupid…..and why do we need apartments when we could have pretty houses?…”

Some duplexes remain in good shape! This is one my wife and I purchased from former Renton Mayor Don Custer in 1990. In addition to Don being a charming statesman and Renton’s youngest-ever mayor, he is a great craftsman, and he personally remodeled the entire interior of this building (including the interior floor plan). Don bragged that neither unit was ever vacant for a single day, as his tenants typically stayed for many years, and when they did move there were other nice people very interested. That has been our experience as well. (This duplex was just outside the specific area being considered for Community Renewal Act blighting, but it is within the greater highlands study area.)