Housing Action Plan (HAP)

8/31/2021 UPDATE

The Housing Action Plan (HAP) is ready! Please view the HAP in the documents section on the right side of this page.

The City hosted two online open houses on May 12 and 17 to present the draft Plan and recommendations in the HAP to the public, and to hear your feedback on the proposed ideas.

As we move through this process from plan development, to establishing a work plan, and then implementation, this webpage will be updated with new information and new ways in which you can share your thoughts on important housing supply issues.

HAP Background

Housing is a pressing issue in our region and in the City of Auburn. Since 2010, for sale home prices in Auburn have risen by 88 percent, and the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Auburn increased by 49 percent. While Increases in the cost of housing may be the most visible factor, it is just one factor and the accessibility and affordability of housing is influenced by a number of factors and participants. Not all of these factors can be influenced by the City.

The City’s Community Development Department is working to do its part to develop strategies and policies that support the development of enough housing for everyone in Auburn. To do this the City of Auburn received a grant from the Washington State Department of Commerce to create a Housing Action Plan by June 2021.

The Housing Action Plan (HAP) evaluates the current housing needs in Auburn and take into consideration projected future needs. This data is proposed to help inform the City's housing policies and strategies to achieve Auburn’s goal of ensuring the right supply of housing is available to meet the future demands of Auburn residents at all income levels.

As you read through the information on this website, the term AMI or Area Median Income comes up as a reference point. View the video below to learn more about AMI and what it means.

The First Phase

The first phase consisted of the development of a South King County Subregional Housing Action Framework document in collaboration with neighboring jurisdictions of Burien, Federal Way, Kent, Renton, and Tukwila. As a part of the collaborative effort, up to $20,000 per jurisdiction was allocated for the purpose of collecting sub-regional data necessary to support the development of individual Housing Action Plans. This cooperative effort provided economies of scale, allowed the sharing of information, and facilitated the evaluation of certain housing generation strategies between several south county cities. The cities cooperatively selected and hired a professional consulting firm with specialized expertise, EcoNorthwest, to gather information and assist the city in the preparation of this document. This document was completed in August 2020 and is provided in the documents section on the right side of this page.

Public Engagement

Auburn includes a wide range of households with unique challenges and needs. Therefore, gathering community input is a key part of creating strong policy actions to address the city’s housing needs, and the City is working with a consultant team to assist in policy development and public engagement around housing needs in Auburn. Throughout the process, the City has actively conducted a public outreach efforts to solicit public feedback from persons with understanding and experience with housing in Auburn. The City conducted 12 interviews, two focus group conversations and hosted two online open houses on May 12 and 17 to present the Plan and recommendations to the public and hear your feedback on the proposed ideas. During this process, an equity lens has been used to develop clear, actionable strategies designed to meet all our community's current and future housing needs.

Second Phase

As the next step, the City’s consultant prepared a draft “Auburn Housing Action Plan Existing Conditions Memorandum“ which details the current conditions influencing housing capacity in the City. See the documents section on the right side of this page.

Preliminary Recommendations of the Completed Housing Action Plan

The preliminary recommendations offered in this HAP are informed by several components of this project. In addition to building on the work completed in 2020 for the South King County Subregional Housing Action Framework, the recommendations in this plan were developed using the following components:

1. Data on current and future housing needs discussed in the Existing Conditions Memorandum,
2. Suggestions and ideas generated from the community through the community engagement process, and
3. A development feasibility analysis and review of Auburn’s zoning code / development standards to evaluate impacts to the feasibility of new construction.

These three source inputs were used to arrive at the recommendations offered in this plan. More specifically related to this third input, the consultant used a development feasibility analysis to inform recommendations about the development standards and affordable housing programs that can support more market rate and affordable housing.

Due to time and expense limitations of this effort, it was not possible to study the entire city for this feasibility analysis (3rd input) and the consultant focused on certain limited geographic areas for more in-depth study. The study area includes downtown, and nearby R-5 and R-7 zoned areas to the east (See HAP, Figure 3).

For the downtown area this focused on the study of “podium type construction” (4-5 stories of wood frame construction over 1 or 2 concrete base floors) as representing market rate units and micro-housing units (about 220 square foot living area) as workforce housing units. For nearby R-5 and R-7 zoned areas, the development feasibility focused on provision of middle housing. In this analysis, the term “middle housing” refers to duplexes and triplexes as a generally more affordable type of housing.

They evaluated the development feasibility of several development types (or prototypes) using development feasibility analysis and sensitivity testing. The analysis allowed analysis and testing the impacts that result from various changes to development standards and incentive programs.

The HAP set out to address the following four city goals:

• A) Encourage market rate development in Downtown Auburn: more development and denser development
• B) Encourage the development of below-market workforce housing in Downtown Auburn
• C) Encourage the development of middle housing types in R-5 and R-7 Zones in the Study Area (see Figure 3)
• D) Prevent displacement and encourage the preservation of existing affordable housing

With these four goals providing the framework, the plan identifies several preliminary recommendations or strategies to increase housing capacity and to meet the goals. The recommendations can be categorized into three types, as follows:

In summary, the preliminary recommendations or strategies are:

For more details the preliminary recommendations, please see the more complete description and analysis in the HAP document.

In the coming years, implementing this HAP will require the City to balance and coordinate its pursuit of actions, funding, and partnerships with its other policy and programmatic priorities. The recommendations in the HAP will require varying levels of effort for the City to implement. Each recommendation will require different levels of staff time and resources and will have achieve different objectives.

While these preliminary recommendations are tailored to the specific circumstances in Auburn, there may be other actions or opportunities that could be considered or added in the future. Just like the housing market, the recommendations or strategies are dynamic and continue to evolve.