June 2021 - Otak

Pushing the Boundaries of Affordable Housing

Posted on June 16, 2021December 9, 2024 by OTAK Team

With their associated regulations and additional costs, affordable housing mandates are one set of hurdles developers face when seeking approval for new housing projects. The perceptions of affordable housing and gaining public support is another. Over several projects¹, and through direct community involvement, Otak has been addressing these obstacles with success, helping guide new housing projects to completion—often with innovative solutions. While each situation has been unique, the common denominator has been a collaborative and integrated community approach.

See Our Affordable Housing Work

Changing City Codes, Expanding Development Options

Cristina Haworth, a Senior Planner in Otak’s Redmond, WA office, has been working with cities to solve the housing shortage many communities are facing, which is paving the way for a broader application of affordable housing solutions. For example, the City of Bothell, WA, a small, but quickly growing city outside of Seattle, was awarded a grant from the Washington State Department of Commerce to implement HB1923. The grant funds the development of housing action plans, municipal code changes, subarea planning, and environmental reviews—actions intended to encourage the production of more housing and a greater variety of housing types.

Cristina has been helping the City of Bothell in amending its housing codes in response to this grant and leveraging the opportunity to create more diversity in the types of housing allowed in new developments. She explains: “While the work is not directly related to affordable housing, the results are having a positive impact in this area. The new codes are providing greater housing choice, which is increasing both capacity and affordable housing opportunities more broadly.” Specifically, the City has raised its short plat thresholds, making it quicker and easier to divide larger lots into single-family city lots within new subdivisions, and has authorized a duplex on existing corner lots in the city. These duplex units are still market-rate, but their size and configurations make them effectively more affordable. The added caveat is that these units are not regulated as affordable housing, which keeps the developer’s costs down. Cristina is working with the City to consider options for allowing one or more multiplex units in new subdivision projects that could potentially be regulated as affordable housing to ensure these needs are met.

Overcoming Rising Costs

Affordable housing projects often cost more than market-rate housing, which can deter developers who need to maximize profit margins for a project to be viable. As Matt Neish, Otak Senior Project Manager, elaborates, “Affordable housing is a tightly regulated sector and is typically significantly more expensive to build. The higher cost presents a problem because a developer could build maybe twice as many market-rate units.” While there are funding sources available, the process can be complex to navigate and may require multiple sources to achieve adequate project funding. This is an area where Matt and Otak have been able to step in and help, “Affordable housing is an evolving sector, and we are seeing more of a nuanced approach to development that takes into consideration a variety of factors and opportunities to help offset costs.” Otak is taking strides to work with developers to determine project scope and viability at the outset. “This is especially helpful for developers who may not have done an affordable housing project before,” Matt explains. He adds that “trying to go back and rework a project after the fact can be an extremely costly and difficult process, so doing our due diligence ahead of time is critical.”

The public work Cristina and others like her are doing concerning code amendments is also helping to ease the higher costs of affordable housing. She states that “when we’re approaching code amendments, we’re trying to look at ways to include affordability requirements or even just make the process a little bit easier. So instead of having to go through a longer land use process to get approval, we are trying to find ways to make sure that a developer can use an administrative process instead. This has the potential to save a lot of time and cost, and it makes things quite a bit more efficient in terms of the permitting process to get to project delivery.”

Adding Density Through Disbursement

What is happening in Bothell is part of a larger movement to create more affordable housing through density and disbursement of higher capacity lots and multiplex units throughout a proposed subdivision. Tim Leavitt, PE, Otak Regional Director for Oregon and Southwest Washington, notes that the thinking on affordable housing has evolved, “The traditional approach is placement of all affordable housing units into one area of a project site. We work with our clients to effectively integrate the project to accommodate a mixing of housing choices throughout the project site.” Through a co-mingling of market-rate and affordable housing products, the result will be a more cohesive and balanced neighborhood.

Another example of an integrated approach to new housing projects is Hyatt Place in downtown Portland, OR. This mixed-use high-rise includes a hotel, and housing, with some units designated as affordable housing. Rather than contribute to a general fund, the Otak team worked with the developer to include affordable housing units within the new building—the benefits of which were two-fold. First, the move to include affordable housing in the project allowed the developer to take advantage of new height allowances within the newly revised city code. Further, tenants of the affordable housing units will have access to the same amenities within the building and the surrounding community as the rest of the tenants. To gain approval of the new building, Otak worked with the neighborhood and the city to ensure all concerns were addressed and the building’s design embraced the history and culture of the neighborhood.

Creating Community and Place

The approach to affordable housing, in general, is being done differently today than in the past. “Affordable housing is no longer about designing and building ‘big barracks’ style housing as cheaply as possible just to fill state or city mandates. A lot more attention is being focused on how a place will function, and how it fits into the larger community,” Matt asserts. He further explains Otak’s approach stating that “what we do is integrate these projects the best we can into the existing communities and not make them be a piece that stands out on its own. The extent we can incorporate open space, trails, plazas, parks, transit connections, even commercial activities into and around housing developments, will go a long way towards integrating affordable housing into a community.”

This place-making and community mindset is a driving force in how Otak approaches each project. It is also integral to the firm’s employee involvement with various organizations, including the Portland Planning Commission. “We’re helping guide missions and policies and the evolution of community development and planning to incorporate affordable housing into our communities,” Tim states. “We’re not just putting up buildings. We are also creating public spaces for all community members to come together.”

Advocacy and Collaboration

Taking a broader community approach to the design and construction of affordable housing units in new subdivisions and existing neighborhoods has been key to Otak’s success in this arena. The recently completed Fields Apartments in Tigard, OR, and the South Cooper Mt. Community Project in Beaverton, OR, are two examples where the Otak team has proactively and collaboratively worked with the cities, residents, and developers to create designs that addressed neighborhood concerns, satisfied mandates, and ultimately won approval. “By engaging with the residents and taking their concerns into consideration, we were able to overcome objections,” Matt states. Additionally, with The Fields project, “by framing the project around housing for working-class families, we were able to present the proposed housing project in a positive light,” Matt explains. In this manner, Otak was also advocating on behalf of the developer who was seeking project approval.

Looking at the Big Picture

Otak has the capacity to remove some of the complexities and barriers around affordable housing, including public perception, and to better integrate affordable housing into communities. “We are addressing an important aspect of the stigma of affordable housing,” Matt states. “Projects of this nature often face considerable public opposition, yet separating them from the rest of the community only serves to compound the problem.” As a multidisciplinary firm, Otak has the internal knowledge and resources to help cities and developers navigate complex zoning regulations, design, review and permitting processes, and funding options. This is coupled with Otak’s community mindset, which demands a big picture perspective and is the driving force behind the firm’s integrative approach to community planning and affordable housing. “Having an understanding of the big picture, and being able to plan through the construction and engineering, natural resources, and transportation, and how to integrate it all allows us to bring so much more to the table for a developer,” Matt stresses. “We’re not just solving one piece of the puzzle, we are offering solutions on multiple fronts and building resilient communities people want to live in.”

Creating Balance Between Park Use and Sustainable Environments

Posted on June 3, 2021March 29, 2023 by OTAK Team

Outdoor recreation in America is booming. Data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis shows that the outdoor recreation economy accounted for 2.1% of the gross domestic product (GDP) for 2019 and all estimates indicate the next report will only grow that number. And it’s no wonder—spending time outdoors has proven to have both physical and mental health benefits and, during the pandemic, proved to be one of the few activities we could still enjoy.

But the number of people swarming into parks has a downside that a team from Otak is directly addressing with the goal of keeping open spaces truly open, enjoyable, and safe, while also protecting natural resources.

Otak has a long history of working with the National Park Service to both improve visitor experiences and safety, while also protecting natural, cultural, and historical resources. Through this work, we have witnessed the tremendous benefits people experience from being in national parks, but also the toll of high visitor use on parks and open spaces. Recognizing a pressing need as park usage continues to rise, in March of 2021 Otak brought on a team of social scientists, based in New England, to expand the focus of our projects through the lens of minimizing overcrowding, creating more efficient people movement, and ensuring safe opportunities for park visitors. The team, comprised of Steve Lawson, director of Visitor Use Planning and Management, and research analysts Abbie Larkin, Bill Valliere, and Annie Engen, has been working together for many years and collectively have vast amounts of experience working on both high-profile projects from Arches National Park to Mt. Everest, to smaller town parks.

The popularity of outdoor recreation has skyrocketed putting a strain on natural resources.

The team had collaborated with Otak on several occasions which sparked the eventual hirings, an effort that was led by Mandi Roberts, Vice President and Principal at Otak who comments,

“By bringing this experienced and talented team into the fold of Otak, we are able to offer an even greater breadth and depth of services to clients, and in particular for the NPS, where social science and visitor use studies are needed on a constant basis. Our team is ready to assist in developing the best solutions for current and future generations of visitors and stewards of our cherished landscapes and settings in America.”

Visitor Use Planning and Management

As more people visit parks, there is increasing pressure on park resources that impacts the quality and character of visitors’ experiences and the overall perception of parks. Learning to identify problems and develop the tools and strategies to minimize impacts is critical to the sustainability of the parks and is the exact focus of this new Otak team. “We provide a data-driven basis for decisions on managing people and protecting the parks, while also providing outstanding experiences to all visitors,” Steve says.

Steve explains that his work involves social sciences, systems modeling, natural resource economics, and park and wilderness management. “I have been applying these skills and training for about 25 years to design and conduct social science research for the National Park Service (NPS) and other recreation resource managers. Our team provides NPS and others with information about who does and does not visit parks, what motivates them to come to parks, and what they do when they visit. We help build a data-driven understanding of visitor perceptions, preferences, and tolerances for park conditions and attitudes and opinions about how to manage use for public enjoyment and resource protection,” he says.

The work Steve and his team conduct requires analysis and modeling of visitor use and patterns. They use survey research and descriptive data collection including GPS and passive mobile data, automated counts of traffic and trail use, and observation studies of the number of people and types of activities and behaviors. The gathered data is used to develop insights about the relationships in parks among the amounts and types of visitor use, the quality and character of visitors’ experiences, and the conditions of park resources.

Case Study: Yosemite National Park Half Dome

Yosemite National Park proved to be a case study on how to better manage visitors through a reservation system.

Steve was instrumental on an NPS project at Yosemite National Park where he was commissioned to study visitor use, crowding, and safety on one of the park’s most popular and iconic hikes, Half Dome. On the last leg of the hike, hikers scale a granite face using handrails that were originally bolted into place in the early 1900s by the Sierra Club. As the hike gained in popularity, the lines for the cables grew and visitors began to make the risky decision to scale outside of the cable area to circumvent crowds and get to the summit faster. These issues drew increasing attention in the press and increasing concern from park managers who decided it was time to address the problem.

Steve and his team conducted a multi-year study where they developed a simulation model of the number of total visitors on the hike, the number of visitors on the cables at one time, as well as the number of visitors going outside the cables and exposing themselves to greater risk. The findings became a primary basis for the Half Dome Stewardship Plan Permit System where the park now manages how many visitors it can sustain at one time and issues the corresponding number of permits per day. As Steve explains, “This became a precedent-setting example of how to effectively and proactively manage visitor use in popular outdoor recreation settings.” The Half Dome permit system “provided for other park managers to acknowledge there are limits to the amount of use that can be sustained beyond which the fundamental values of these areas can be compromised.”

The results of this project were widely published to provide an evidence-based solution to decision-makers who could point to peer-reviewed science as a basis for management decisions. In addition, the project increased awareness of the potential problems in parks.

Long lines waiting to summit Yosemite’s iconic Half Dome created a dangerous situation.

Precedent-Setting Management

Reservation systems are becoming a part of the landscape and conversation in places where they may be needed. The idea is not to “lock people out” but rather to maximize the opportunities for people to experience these places while at the same time protecting park resources.

Steve explains that in places he’s worked where reservation systems have been assessed or implemented, it is possible in some of those cases to accommodate more visitors while still protecting the environment, by virtue of a proactive management system. Parks data demonstrate recreational use is inherently concentrated in time and space, and use generally has seasonal, daily, and hourly peaks “That leaves a lot of potential opportunity on the table to help disperse and manage peak use, but if you passively allow visitation patterns to persist, you may not be making the most of the resources,” he says.

The permit system at Half Dome was a precedent-setting decision by the Park Service as one of the most prominent locations to manage day use. It has led other parks to consider and implement day-use management with reservation systems in national parks such as California’s Muir Woods and Maine’s Acadia National Park as well as popular state hiking trails across the country. Steve explains, “All of the work is structured around a framework that is applicable to each and every kind of place. It’s a sliding scale of analysis. Arches, for example, is at the high end of the scale where decisions should be supported with a data-driven and peer-reviewed basis. But we also work through general legal requirements for use management plans where the use is maybe not intense but nonetheless, there are requirements to have a use plan. In some of these cases, we are at the lower end of the sliding scale of analysis, where extensive data and analysis are not necessary or feasible.” He adds that the approach and level of investment are context-dependent but the management framework that he and his team use applies universally to parks, protected areas, and tourist destinations.

Prior to the pandemic, Steve was invited to Nepal to present his findings to the managers of Mt. Everest, a site challenged by the impacts and risks of overuse. Compounding the problem for the managers is the need to overcome the stigma that quotas will limit tourism to an area where peoples’ livelihood relies heavily on tourism dollars. Steve felt he was making headway to help Nepal develop strategies for sustainable tourism management before the pandemic put this work on hold.

The pandemic exacerbated the issues and challenges in natural areas that are facing higher and higher levels of visitation. The boom in outdoor recreation has shone a light on how critically important the role of parks and recreation are to our society and how much that use needs to be sustainable to ensure what we love about parks today remains for generations. With Otak’s new team in place, we stand ready to help park managers achieve balance in welcoming all visitors and providing enriching experiences while ensuring park resources are protected.