Last fall, Mayor Murray and City Council called together a twenty-eight member stakeholder committee to help develop a bold agenda for increasing housing affordability and livability in our city. The Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda (HALA) Committee is now up and running, and will deliver a set of recommended actions to the Mayor and Council by the end of May, 2015.
To date the HALA has held three community meetings in locations throughout the city to hear from residents. They are continuing to gather community input through the Mayor’s website. The HALA Committee has met four times, and has established a series of strategy work groups. In addition to the twenty-eight community members on the HALA Committee, the work groups engage more than fifty other subject matter experts and community representatives from around the city to help develop specific strategies. Participants include architects, builders, neighborhood leaders, and financiers. The seven strategy areas are: financing, new affordable housing resources, zoning and housing types, construction costs and timelines, tenant access/protections, housing preservation, and sustainable homeownership. Each group will develop detailed actions that could be implemented to help move the needle on making housing more affordable. These strategies will be reviewed and prioritized by the HALA Committee in early spring.
For more information on HALA, to review meeting materials, or to view a wealth of data about housing, please visit Mayor Murray’s webpage at http://murray.seattle.gov/housing/#sthash.Y8HciqXX.dpbs