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Quality of Life Policy Guides
In an effort to provide you with a variety of resources on growth
management policies, we are providing you with the following policy guides.
These papers have been prepared as part of a series of policy guides developed
for our Quality of Life policy development program. We hope you find these
resources to be helpful in your efforts to improve the Quality of Life in
your communities and the marketability of property in your neighborhoods by
ensuring economic vitality, providing housing opportunities and building better
communities, and useful in your advocacy efforts with state and local policy-makers.
Policy Guide: Washington’s Real Estate Excise Tax
Washington State government together with its cities and counties are authorized to levy taxes on the transfers of real property. This tax, known as the Real Estate Excise Tax (REET), is levied on the total selling price of the property and is generally paid by the seller. Washington’s Real Estate Excise Tax is the second highest in the nation and negatively affects housing affordability, housing mobility and home ownership. This policy guide has been prepared to assist you in working with policy-makers to better understand Real Estate Excise Tax issues. We hope it helps guide you to more effectively influence the process and assist policy-makers with wise decisions for your community
FEMA Floodplain Maps-The Status of Updated Mapping and its Impacts on Homeowners in Washington
This white paper was prepared by GordonDerr LLP, to be useful in our advocacy efforts with state and local policy-makers. For the past several years, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has been working to update the floodplain maps for most of the counties within Washington State. The new FEMA floodplain maps will likely have significant impacts on the land capacity and buildable lands analyses conducted by local governments planning under the GMA. This white paper has been prepared to assist you in working with policy-makers to better understand the framework of FEMA Floodplain Mapping issues.
Policy Guides: Local Infrastructure Funding and Local Government Revenue Sources
Two new policy guides, "Infrastructure Funding" and "Local Government Revenue Sources," published in conjunction with Washington REATORS® Quality of Life Program will to be useful in our advocacy efforts with state and local policy-makers. Local governments who fail to adequately perform the planning requirements contained in the law and/or fail to utilize the funding tools available to pay for the projects needed, will fail to fulfill their duty to accommodate growth and achieve their vision for their future. The Guide to Revenue Sources for Local Governments provides information on the major revenue sources available to cities for general government purposes. This guide was created to help city government officials and community activists identify appropriate tools and opportunities they can utilize to invest in facilities and services that help build better communities. The tools can help broaden and diversify a jurisdiction’s revenue base so they can continue to provide those services and facilities the community has come to expect and demand while planning for future needs.
Policy Guide: Local Business License Fees and Taxes
This policy guide has been developed to assist you in working with policy-makers to better understand the framework of local business license fees and taxes, and how to work with your local community if they are considering adoption of new business fees and taxes. We hope it helps guide you to more effectively influence the process and assist policy-makers with wise decisions for your community.
Right Size Home: Housing Innovation in Washington
The purpose of this catalog is to show examples of innovative ways to meet a variety of housing needs in our state. The projects demonstrate how housing innovation can be a win-win-win: buyers and renters have more choices, communities get new housing that fits well into existing neighborhoods and we succeed in goals under the Growth Management Act (GMA).
Policy Guide: Jobs and Housing: Can’t Have One without the Other
Prepared by the Housing Partnership, this guide outlines the issues around the balance of jobs and housing. It begins with a discussion of the importance of this balance and the reasons it can tip in the wrong direction. The second section reviews ways to measure balances, in terms of geography, housing type and commute patterns. The third section discusses ways to incorporate the jobs-housing balance into local and regional planning. It is said that a house is where a job goes at night. Employment and housing are linked in complex ways that have a huge impact on economic development, transportation and the overall quality of life. The degree to which employees can find appropriate housing within a reasonable commute, and the degree to which employers can find workers able to travel to their sites, should be a central concern of local and regional planning. In the end, the most useful public policies will emphasize a wide range of housing choices, so that households have the highest likelihood of striking their own balances within their lives.
Policy Guide: Community Housing Strategies: Market Innovation, Local Choice
Prepared by the Housing Partnership, this guide aims at meeting housing needs in a cooperative, but nonetheless explicitly political way. As the Growth Management Act (GMA) has been implemented across the state, the one objective most difficult to meet is housing. The Community Housing Strategy offers a practical way to remedy that. The theory behind the strategy process is very simple: figure out what works in the market and fits with the community, and let builders build it. But as is noted throughout this report, the fundamental precondition for success is the willingness of communities to embrace growth and change that are consistent with market demand. The GMA does not require this, and many communities have found ways to avoid actions that threaten change. So the challenge for the Community Housing Strategy, and the key to its success, is to get the leadership and citizens of the community to see new and innovative housing as an important part of their future.
Critical Areas: Best Available
Science and the Mythology of Buffers
This paper was by Sandy Mackie of Perkins Coie, to be helpful and useful in
our advocacy efforts with state and local policy-makers.
The paper points out how the "buffer science" promoted
to support critical areas programs with significant buffers suffer from two
major defects."The developed shorelines of the state and developed area
wetlands can be managed to accomplish the protection required by the GMA without
creating large bands of nonconforming uses through big buffers."The paper
has been provided to assist you in working with policy-makers to improve the
development environment.
A Citizen's Guide to Critical
Areas Ordinances: How to Understand and Influence the Adoption of Critical
Areas Ordinances
Your participation is critical to this process. Someone must bring to the
local government's attention the economic dislocation and disruption that
may result from excessive buffers or other limiting regulation. Local governments
must be encouraged to identify and seek viable alternatives to state-wide
recommendations that may well close to double current rules when suitable
alternatives are appropriate and reasonably available to a given locality.
There are many opportunities to influence the process and provide
alternatives that meet state requirements. This paper has been developed to
assist you in working with policy-makers to improve the development environment.
We hope it helps guide you to more effectively influence the process and assist
policy-makers with wise decisions for your community.
The Growth Management
Act: A Duty to Accommodate Growth
The GMA was intended as a planning statute, but the clear goal was that the
comprehensive and consistent planning mandated by the GMA would lead to actual
results of accommodating future growth in urban areas and preserving rural
areas, environmentally critical areas, and natural resource lands. Subsequent
amendments of the GMA have refined and clarified the intent and operation
of the GMA scheme. The experience of the first decade under the GMA has also
made it clear that compliance by counties and cities with the GMA includes
the accommodation of future population growth, at least in planning for and
probably in actually accommodating the growth. First, it is clear that the
GMA counties, who bear the responsibility for adopting CPPs and designating
UGAs, have an affirmative duty to accommodate the Office of Financial Management
("OFM") population growth allocated to the counties by providing
adequate lands within the UGAs and planning policies that allow the cities
to plan for growth. Second, it is clear that compliance with the GMA also
includes the accommodation of the growth allocated to each UGA within each
local government comprehensive plan. Local governments have an affirmative
duty to plan for their allocated growth. Finally, the review and evaluation
as mandated by the GMA indicates that the duty to accommodate growth under
the GMA, and thus compliance with the GMA, will extend to the actual accommodation
of growth and to commercial and industrial growth as well as to residential
growth.
Filling in the Spaces:
Ten Essentials for Successful Urban Infill Housing
A growth management strategy that relies on extensive urban infill requires
major changes from past industry and regulatory practice. We now have quite
a number of good examples of innovative housing developments throughout the
region, but few jurisdictions allow these models in infill settings with established
zoning and development standards. A successful infill strategy will make these
innovative housing types into mainstream products built by small local builders.
For the strategy to succeed, builders and local governments must change the
way they operate and work more closely together to further each others' goals.
The ten essentials help guide the public and private sectors as they fill
in the spaces with new homes in innovative developments.
Infill
Development: Best Practices
This policy guide is designed to help identify barriers to infill development
and to recommend actions for overcoming these barriers in light of best practice
techniques for infill development that have been implemented across the country.
Best practices for infill development addressed in this paper encompass a
range of techniques that can be used to encourage infill development. Categories
addressed include: a category of organizational techniques; a category of
financing techniques; and a category of other types of techniques that can
be legislatively authorized and implemented separately or in combination.
The objective is to analyze the advantages and disadvantages of those best
practice approaches in order to examine the most effective approaches for
addressing existing barriers to infill development.
Assessment of the
Development Environment
This report serves as a tool to improve the development environment. There
are a number of primary recommendations which speak to such items as small
lot subdivisions, updated road standards, common public works standards, comprehensive
plans that account for market potential, consolidation of special districts
and a two track permitting system. Each recommendation examines several contributing
factors, biases or embedded practices that if changed would contribute incrementally
to slowing housing price inflation, provide more certainty in the permitting
process, while controlling the cost of infrastructure and the cost of government.
Planning for Growth
Projections: Importance of Accurate Growth Projections
Every community in the state is in the process of determining which growth
target they will prepare for. Therefore, it is important to ensure your county
plans for the most accurate population forecast, as this is what will drive
the need for buildable land capacity needed to accommodate projected growth.
If the plan calls for lower growth than actually occurs, your community will
be unprepared for the consequences of growth. If you plan for more growth
than actually occurs, than your community will be prepared when it comes.
Some citizens are pressuring decision-makers to adopt very low population
growth projections for use in the process. Because the bedrock upon which
the GMA is built is sprawl reduction, and because projections of future population
growth are the foundation for planning efforts designed to implement the Act,
deliberately adopting unrealistically low projections of future growth can
be seen as a fundamental violation of the intent of the Act. Compared to accurate
projections of future growth, too low projections can be shown to create very
large amounts of sprawl. Accurate projections allow for growth management
objectives to be met without unnecessary sprawl.
Land Supply
Lack of buildable land available to meet demand is a primary cause of the
drastic increases in housing costs and lack of design choices in most of our
growing communities. The land supply problem is also a central factor in threatening
economic vitality and fewer job opportunities in many parts of our state.
In the context of growth management, land supply means the amount of land
within a community that is suitable for new or more intense development (housing,
business and industry). Under Washington State's law, land supply within each
GMA county and its cities must be adequate to provide space for the population
growth projected by the state for each county over a specific planning period.
Suitable land is a primary component of the supply side of the housing and
employment equations, and is in fact the only one that state and local governments
can affect to any significant extent; this is because they have primary authority
over the two most important considerations in land supply: provision of basic
infrastructure and regulation of land use. It is the combination of these
two realities that makes state and local planning so important on housing
and job issues. In an analysis of land supply, there are five major factors
or types of constraints which determine suitability for urban growth: government
regulation; provision of basic infrastructure needed for housing or business;
land acquired for infrastructure by public and quasi-public agencies; availability
of buildable parcels to developers; and market forces.
Economic Development:
Planning Guide
Washington's Growth Management Act requires cities and counties to update
their comprehensive plans and regulations regularly. Through this process
communities throughout the state balance and calibrate the growth demands
of new population, jobs, and housing with their concerns for protecting the
physical environment, social fabric, and economic vitality of their areas.
The 2002 State Legislature voted overwhelmingly to require that comprehensive
plans include an economic element. An economic plan focuseson a community's
productive activity: its jobs, income, and aggregate wealth. It devises a
step-by-step strategy for how a community can integrate its goals and objectives
for economic vitality into a hopeful vision for the future of its overall
quality of life. This paper offers a step-by-step process for preparing an
economic plan that can be used by communities wanting to take a fresh and
comprehensive look at their economic future.
Economic Development
Outcomes, Goals and Policies
With the requirement to update comprehensive plans and regulations to meet
growth management goals, cities and counties will consider how population,
jobs and housing growth demands can be balanced with environmental, social,
economic and other community goals. Economic goals and development practices
provide the flow of revenues and dollars to achieve these other goals. All
parts of a community's plan - housing, transportation, land use, finance,
etc. - are interrelated. Changes to one have profound implications for other
elements, including economic development and capital facilities. Adding an
economic development element to a local plan elevates jobs, economic vitality,
revenues, taxes, finances and cost issues so that they can be considered among
all the others. Having a clear community statement of the intended economic
outcomes is one of the most important tools of successful local planning.
With a clear vision accompanied by a set of understandable outcomes, it is
then possible to measure the community's progress in achieving economic vitality.
The economic outcomes that communities would look for as a result of successful
local planning often include: support for new business and jobs, an increased
tax base, increased housing supply, improvements to neighborhoods, sufficient
lands for business, and investments and plans to achieve community goals.
Housing in the
Community: Choice, Availability and Affordability
Providing housing opportunities in your community will require effective planning.
Cities and counties will need to evaluate current growth management policies
and implementation measures to assess their abilities to meet the housing
and associated demands of current and future residents. Community planning
and development regulations should include policies and methods to accommodate
housing needs in the future, reflecting population forecasts and market trends
in the area. The supply and demand interaction is critical in its effect on
how the housing market creates and responds to growth. Demand will usually
be the leading component of housing market activity. With demand comes a response
from the building industry to meet the buyer's needs. To meet the needs requires
available land, ready capital, infrastructure with capacity, timely permits,
necessary materials, skilled labor and some entrepreneurial and "can
do" attitudes. If any of these components are not present, the supply
of housing can be slowed or even halted. If the supply of housing doesn't
correspond to demand, prices will rise. Housing is an important element of
the comprehensive plan. Therefore public policy should make it a top priority
to plan for a variety of new housing that meets the demographic, income and
location demands.
Housing our
Community: Issues Influencing Housing Opportunities
The articles provided in this guide include an overview of housing issues,
provide data showing home price trends, and discuss issues such as growth
management 10 years later, buildable lands and housing targets, reasonable
measures, the economics of homebuilding, affordable urban housing, housing
solutions strategies, and new research on mixed use housing.
Critical Area Review
and Best Available Science
Cities and counties must consider changes to local critical area regulations.
The periodic review will be important, because most jurisdictions adopted
rules and regulations affecting critical areas before the Legislature adopted
the requirements to consider "best available science" as part of
the critical area process. The end product may be the loss or significant
devaluation of many presently buildable lands. The magnitude of local undertakings
to come under this year's critical area review are huge. Critical areas encompass
wetlands; flood hazard areas; aquifer protection; geologic hazard areas, including
steep slopes, mine area, tsunami and volcanic hazard areas; and fish and wildlife
habitat areas, with particular focus on anadromous fish and endangered species
listings. Local governments must recognize the economic dislocation and disruption
that may result from excessive buffers or other limiting regulation. Local
governments must be encouraged to identify and seek viable alternatives to
state-wide recommendations that may well at least double current rules when
suitable alternatives are appropriate and reasonably available to a given
locality.
Understanding Stormwater
Regulation
Beginning in March 10, 2003, stormwater regulation in Washington State will
impact residential development more than ever before. This date marks the
deadline for compliance with the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) Stormwater
Phase II regulations, implemented in Washington State by the Washington Department
of Ecology (Ecology). To meet Phase II requirements, Ecology will be issuing
two new general permits that impact residential real estate development. Ecology
also recently adopted a Stormwater Management Manual for Western Washington
and is in the process of adopting a similar manual for Eastern Washington.
Locally, citizens should work to ensure that the stormwater programs adopted
by local governments to meet the requirements of the Phase II regulations
include flexibility in the selection of BMPs and do not require incorporation
of Ecology's Manual as a condition of compliance. This white paper provides
a more detailed discussion of the impending stormwater regulations in Washington
State and their likely impacts.
A Citizen's Guide to Public
Participation: How to Influence (and appeal) Local Government Land Use Decisions
under Washington State's Growth Management Act
Under our state's political system, citizens are encouraged to participate
in public policy development. This paper is designed to give the interested
citizen activist the basic tools to become an effective participant in local
government's land use planning and appeal process. Presented here are several
fundamental recommendations to set the strategy and tone for local involvement.
If your local government has adopted a Comprehensive Plan or Development Regulations
that are inconsistent with the county-wide planning policies or otherwise
do not meet the criteria of the GMA, you may appeal that decision. However,
you must have "standing" to file an appeal, i.e., you must have
participated in the public hearing process that led to the adoption or amendment
of the ordinance in question. Further, only evidence that is in the record
can be considered on review. That's why we say at the outset that if it's
not in the record, it doesn't exist.
How Lack of Growth Harms Communities
In the discussions surrounding city and county responses to Washington's Growth
Management Act it is important to discuss the potential harm low and no growth
public policies can visit on a community. A more balanced approach by those
supporting rational policies pertaining to growth is to not only expose decision
makers to information about the benefits growth brings a community but also
to material regarding the harm lack of growth brings. That low or no growth
policies have substantial, and negative, impacts on towns, cities, and counties
is indisputable. High growth states tend to have higher rates of income growth,
lower growth in the per capita tax burden, and a lower budget growth per capita
than the ten slowest growing states do. Restriction of growth restricts opportunities,
income, and quality of life for poor people living in that community. Working
poor, middle class, and the elderly bear the brunt of the negative impacts
low or no growth policies bring. No growth policies will begin to see deterioration
in services and amenities. Low growth policies lead to increased pollution,
low density sprawl, and increased pressure on environmentally sensitive areas.
Low growth communities generally have a lower overall quality of life as compared
to communities with more rapid rates of growth. Anti-growth tactics can keep
communities from revitalizing old areas and cause communities that can be
made better to become less attractive areas to live in.
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