Tag: Affordable Housing

65% of 651 like­ly spe­cial elec­tion vot­ers sur­veyed by Change Research for NPI in advance of Seat­tle’s Feb­ru­ary 2023 spe­cial elec­tion said they are strong­ly or some­what sup­port­ive of allow­ing mul­ti­fam­i­ly apart­ment build­ings to be built any­where in the city to pro­vide hous­ing for peo­ple work­ing in pro­fes­sions like teach­ing, while 30% said they were opposed. 5% said that they were not sure.

Aver­age sup­port for six ideas we asked about totaled 70.5%, or more than sev­en in ten Belle­vue res­i­dents. Aver­age oppo­si­tion totaled a mere 22.5%. That’s strik­ing, espe­cial­ly con­sid­er­ing that most Belle­vue res­i­dents we sur­veyed are homeowners.

The most pop­u­lar of five ideas — remov­ing unnec­es­sary approvals and make the per­mit­ting process more straight­for­ward — was endorsed by 85% of respon­dents, with the least pop­u­lar idea — low­er­ing per­mit fees for afford­able hous­ing projects — still got the sup­port of 79% of respon­dents, or near­ly eight in ten. 

These find­ings show that Belle­vue res­i­dents are broad­ly in agree­ment on a num­ber of ideas to tack­le the city and region’s hous­ing cri­sis, from cre­at­ing addi­tion­al home­own­er­ship assis­tance pro­grams to allow­ing the con­struc­tion of Acces­so­ry Dwelling Units (ADUs) such as back­yard cot­tages in every neigh­bor­hood to relax­ing restric­tions like build­ing height lim­its for projects that pre­serve exist­ing mature trees on the prop­er­ty rather than cut­ting them down.

NPI, Com­plete Streets Belle­vue, the Sight­line Insti­tute, East­side For All, and the Hous­ing Devel­op­ment Con­sor­tium (HDC) teamed up in the sum­mer of 2022 to ask Belle­vue res­i­dents about their views on the hous­ing mar­ket and hous­ing pol­i­cy. Read our ini­tial find­ings from that ground­break­ing survey.