Seattle Public Hearing on Affordable Housing Surprisingly YIMBY

Fort Lawton, an army base no longer in use, could become the site of 240 units in Seattle, a prospect many at a recent public hearing were cheering. "Those units would be a mix of apartments for homeless seniors, Habitat for Humanity row houses and town homes, and rent-restricted row houses for people making 60 percent of area median income ($57,600 for a family of four) or less," Heidi Groover reports for the Stranger.

While many associate affordable housing proposal with not-in-my-back-yard anger, this meeting had a decidedly different tone. "A Magnolia church packed with people overwhelmingly in support of a housing project. The public meeting went for three hours with only a handful of anti-homeless slights," Groover reports. Some even called for more ambitious plans with more units.

"Seattle City Council members Kshama Sawant, Teresa Mosqueda, and Sally Bagshaw attended part of the meeting. Sawant's office handed out a statement in which she called the project "a positive development" but blamed "the city's political establishment" for a decade of delays in the project and the relatively small number of units now planned for the site," Groover writes.