LFP Councilmember responds to article on affordable housing in Lake Forest Park

LFP Councilmember Tracy Furutani
Photo courtesy City of Lake Forest Park

By Tracy Furutani, Councilmember, Lake Forest Park

I take exception to Oliver Moffat’s article “Barriers keep affordable housing out of Lake Forest Park and the city’s plan is late for review” (Shoreline Area News, October 7). I offer some significant corrections.

First, Lake Forest Park’s Comprehensive Plan Update – Housing Element is, in no sense, late. The state deadline for adoption of the update by the City Council is December 31, and the city of Lake Forest Park will easily meet that goal. The timeline laid out by King County for its cities does not indicate any other deadline.

Lake Forest Park’s Planning Commission has been working on the housing element of the update (and the other sections of the update) for a year and a half. They have held an open house and a public hearing, as well as a public survey, all in an effort to gain different perspectives of what LFP residents want to see for their city in 2044. The planning commissioners have worked with SCJ Alliance, a consulting firm that works with many local municipalities’ planning commissions in developing comprehensive plans and updates.

The example cited in the article, which states LFP needs to build 760 more units of affordable housing (164 of them for permanent supportive housing, or PSH) over the next twenty years to meet county targets, is used to browbeat LFP. Of course, the “760” figure is in the context of the 797 already-existing units of that housing stock within the city – thus, LFP would need to double that stock over the next twenty years!

LFP is not unique in that regard; Shoreline has 6531 units of the type described in the article, and needs to build 8969 of them in the next twenty years (more than double) to meet county targets. Kenmore has 2377 such units, and needs to build 2498 in the next twenty years (again, more than double). These figures are from the 2021 King County Countywide Planning Policies document Appendix 4. Spoiler alert: NO city does much better for this type of housing.

Oh, and PSH? Shoreline has 89 such units, Lake Forest Park has 9, and Kenmore has none. We all can do better.

No LFP city staff or planning commissioner is quoted, or even cited, in the article. Many of the points I raise could have been clarified with one phone call. In fact, the residents of LFP worked with city staff to hold a well-attended housing forum last month to discuss these same legislatively-mandated changes in the comprehensive plan housing element. During that forum, potential solutions, such as community land trusts and shared housing, were introduced. I wish that some of that discussion could have been captured and presented in this publication.

Lake Forest Park is not exemplary in its allocation of housing types – racial covenants, redlining and other historical discriminatory practices have all played roles in the question of who gets to live where. But to pillory LFP specifically for an issued shared by all cities does a disservice not only to the hard-working LFP city staff, planning commissioners and residents, but to ALL city staffs, planning commissioners and residents who are trying to find solutions that allow housing for all.