The City of Edmonds has launched an online open house and community survey about its second set of housing ideas — and the deadline to respond is Friday, Oct. 16. The open house and survey are part of community outreach by the Edmonds Housing Commission to gather and organize community input on housing policy concepts from zoning to community programs.
The open house features videos that highlight ideas for many housing policy topics including homelessness prevention and affordable housing incentives. It can all be found at: ECHCOpenHouse.com.
The commission is scheduled to deliver policy recommendations to the Edmonds City Council in late December. The council will then decide what actions to take on the recommendations.
The city council created and staffed the commission in 2019 to develop diverse housing policy options designed to expand the range of housing available in Edmonds. The mission statement of the commission says housing options will be irrespective of age, gender, race, religious affiliation, physical disability or sexual orientation.
According to a city announcement, the commission has met 16 times, including online public meetings during the state’s Stay Home, Stay Healthy Order. For online meetings, the public is invited to provide written comments for the commissioners.
For this round, the commission has arrived at concepts for five policy topics:
- Homelessness prevention
- Affordable housing incentives
- Housing types
- Housing equity
- Housing-related programs.
The housing commission’s current (“Round Two”) policy ideas are still preliminary, the city said. After hearing more from the community, the cmmissioners will decide whether to keep, revise, or drop the ideas. They will prepare draft recommendations for public input by late this fall.
Commissioners, working with a public outreach consultant, have a series of survey questions for the public about the Round Two ideas. A copy of the survey will be mailed to 600 randomly selected residents. It will also be available via the web and social media. The survey is open through Oct. 16.
Results will be available for anyone to review via the housing commission webpage. Recommendations could lead new city programs, investments, or code changes. Any and all final actions are up to the Edmonds City Council.
From the announcement:
Commissioners emphasize there are no right or wrong answers, and the survey is ‘blind’. No one sees personal information. The Commission wants to arrive at policy recommendations that take into account the entire community.
I guess real estate is on a tear again. It reminds me of when everyone bought all the toilet paper. Seattle area leads nation in housing inflation.
I tried to take the survey yesterday on my mobile device–pretty typical in this day and age. It was virtually impossible to do. Small font sizes, way too much to read, and the survey crashed halfway through (it might have been user error since it is unclear whether I was supposed to hit “submit response” or “next” to move on after each section).
So today I had some time and I was on my laptop and two connected monitors. So I thought I would try it again. Now that I could read all the text and I learned that there were five major sections to the “survey,” including four videos I should watch in order to answer the survey questions. Then I was told the whole process would take me 15 to 20 minutes.
Okay I can handle that and I marched on. Got to video #1 — wow 6 minutes. Watched, answered 5 questions. On to video #2 — hmm 5 minutes. Watched it, answered 6 questions. So now I’m up to about 13 minutes. On to video #3 — another 6 minutes, just 4 questions. But I am now at 20 minutes. Ok video #4 — 6 minutes, phew just 1 question. Next — yeah no video, 2 questions. So the 15 to 20 minute “survey” included 23 minutes of video and about 20 questions–so realistically 25 to 30 minutes.
I appreciate the idea of engaging the community in this process, but seriously who is going to spend that amount of time and provide the high-quality thinking that this topic deserves. At a minimum, this would have been better to be 5 small surveys, with shorter videos and more succinct, easy-to-understand questions.