Advocates of growth management and smart growth often propose policies that raise housing prices, thereby making housing less affordable to many households trying to buy or rent homes. Such policies include urban growth boundaries, zoning restrictions on multi-family housing, utility district lines, building permit caps, and even construction moratoria. Does this mean there is an inherent conflict between growth management and smart growth on the one hand, and creating more affordable housing on the other? Or can growth management and smart growth promote policies that help increase the supply of affordable housing? These issues are critical to the future of affordable housing because so many local communities are adopting various forms of growth management or smart growth in response to growth-related problems. Those problems include rising traffic congestion, the absorption of open space by new subdivisions, and higher taxes to pay for new infrastructures. This book explores the relationship between growth management and smart growth and affordable housing in depth. It draws from material presented at a symposium on these subjects held at the Brookings Institution in May 2003, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the National Association of Realtors, and the Fannie Mae Foundation. Contributors seek to inform the debate and provide some useful answers to help the nation accommodate the curtailment of growth in urban and suburban domains while still ensuring a supply of affordable housing. Contributors include Karen Destorel Brown (Brookings), Robert Burchell, (Rutgers University), Daniel Carlson (University of Washington), David L. Crawford (Econsult Corporation), Anthony Downs (Brookings), Ingrid Gould Ellen (New York University), William Fischel (Dartmouth College), George C. Galster (Wayne State University), Jill Khadduri (Abt Associates), Gerrit J. Knaap (University of Maryland), Robert Lang (Virginia Polytechnic

Seattle is one of the fastest growing high-tech cities in the United States. Under the Washington State Growth Management Act, there is a finite urban land supply for housing development within the designated Urban Growth Areas. In return, Seattle's housing affordability is in crisis. The city of Seattle formed the Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda (HALA) task force in 2014 and it produced 65 recommendations for how the city can facilitate the construction of 20,000 affordable housing units and 30,000 market rate housing units over the next ten years. One of the recommendations (Strategy L.1: Prioritize Use of Public Property for Affordable Housing) proposes that the city revise its existing reuse and disposition policies for surplus and underutilized publicly-owned property to prioritize these properties for the construction of affordable multifamily housing. This thesis seeks to add to existing research by examining one question: How feasible and effective would a policy be to prioritize the use of surplus and underutilized publicly-owned land for the development of affordable housing to meet HALA's growth target? Any program intended to address affordable housing concerns must be palatable, practical, and have a reasonable chance of producing positive results for all parties involved in order to succeed. This research presents a grounded theory study that uses both qualitative and quantitative measures to document the complexity of the issues associated with using publicly-owned surplus and underutilized land for affordable housing development, including comparative case studies and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) land analyses. The feasibility and effectiveness of a revised property reuse and disposition policy is established using three development scenarios (low-build, medium-build, and high-build) for existing surplus and underutilized public land based on a buildable lands analysis. The research and its subsequent analysis provide a blueprint for understanding the challenges associated with housing development on public land. The conclusion of this research is that modifications to the city's existing reuse and disposition policies would present minimal-to-no additional costs to implement and could result in the development of between 495 and 4,450 affordable housing units, or between 2.5% and 22.25% of HALA's target for affordable housing units. The achievement depends on how aggressive the policies were enforced, but it would require robust political support from the city and creative development approaches to be most effective towards the development of more affordable housing.

This book introduces, synthesizes, and evaluates spatial planning for growth management in the contemporary USA. It discusses the neglected relationship between the actual environmental results of various state growth management systems and the geographically diverse politics of discontent with these various systems.

This book investigates the new urban geographies of “smart” metropolitan regionalism across the Greater Seattle area and examines the relationship between smart growth planning strategies and spaces of work, home, and mobility. The book specifically explores Seattle within the wider space-economy and multi-scaled policy regime of the Puget Sound region as a whole, ‘jumping up’ from questions of city politics to concerns with what the book interprets as the “intercurrence” of city-regional “ordering." These theoretical terms capture the state-progressive effort to promote smarter forms of regional development but also the societal/institutional tensions and outright contradictions that such urban development invariably entails, particularly around problems of social equity. Key organizing themes in the text include: the historical path-dependencies of uneven economic and social development, particularly between Tacoma-Pierce County and Seattle-King County; current patterns of high-wage, medium-wage, and low-wage jobs; the emerging spatial and social structure of recent residential changes, especially with respect to class and race composition; and, finally, transit trends and new urban spaces associated with policy efforts to mitigate highway congestion and car-dependency. Greater Seattle, then, is mapped as a key US urban region inscribed spatially by the uneven search for a more sustainable order. Historically-sensitive, theoretically-informed and empirically topical, this book is of interest to scholars and students at all levels in regional planning, urban geography, political science, sustainability studies, urban sociology and public policy.