SEATTLE -- Before it was annexed into Seattle in 1907, the maritime city of Ballard was home to working-class Scandinavian immigrants who built boats and caught fish. Now one of the hippest neighborhoods in the city, Ballard is home to a throng of construction cranes cramming apartment towers between modest bungalows. A new two-bedroom apartment in the area, which can be nearly an hour's drive from downtown at rush hour, rents for more than $2,000 a month on average.

The scenario may already sound familiar to Portlanders, who have seen neighborhoods transform and home values spike by double-digit percentages in recent years. But Seattle has been dealing with rapidly rising prices and massive population growth for even longer, perhaps providing a glimpse into Portland's not-too-distant future.

"We're two years behind San Francisco," said Peter Orser, director of the Runstad Center for Real Estate Studies at the University of Washington. "And you're about a year behind us."

Like Portland, San Francisco and a handful of other cities, Seattle is dealing with a housing-affordability crisis resulting from an exploding population and a limited supply of homes.

But unlike Portland and San Francisco, a unique and ambitious plan has taken shape here that sets Washington's largest city apart. It has upended traditional political alliances and played an outsized role in a recent election. And it may offer Portland - a city in the midst of its own effort to plan for growth and infill - a blueprint for dealing with a growing population that increasingly can't afford a place to live.

The path to a deal

In a moment of rare consensus, many of Seattle's developers, environmentalists and social justice advocates have coalesced around a city committee's 65 recommendations for battling the housing-affordability crisis.

But the unlikely marriage wouldn't have happened if the city and developers hadn't been at each other's throats first.

It all began in 2014, when City Councilor Mike O'Brien led the charge for a "linkage fee" on all new multifamily developments. The proposal would have required builders to pay into an affordable-housing fund. Developers responded by threatening to sue, claiming the fee would be illegal under state law. They also argued the proposal wouldn't work, since creating a disincentive to build was the last thing the city should do when it needed more housing.

Sensing a war was brewing, Seattle Mayor Ed Murray convened a 28-member committee to hammer out a Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda. The group became colloquially known as HALA (pronounced as one word) and included a wide range of developers, social justice advocates, environmentalists, neighborhood interests, renters-rights representatives and others.

"He [Murray] had them kind of go away and sit in a room and argue for 10 months," said Dan Bertolet, a senior researcher specializing in housing issues at the Sightline Institute, a Seattle-based think tank that advocates for sustainability and social justice. Sightline's executive director, Alan Durning, was a member of the HALA committee.

Success seemed improbable at first, as the members were all at odds. But in the final two months, they made progress and came to a "grand bargain": the developers agreed to either pay linkage fees or include affordable housing in all multifamily and mixed-use projects in return for relaxed zoning regulations that had limited building heights and density.

The impasse was resolved by a shift of alliances. Social justice, environmental and renters' rights groups - which had historically aligned with neighborhood-preservation interests - joined the developers this time, Bertolet said.

HALA's recommendations also included tenant protections, a doubling of the city's affordable-housing levy and a more efficient permitting process, among others. But one suggestion proved more controversial than all the rest combined.

A political shift

Last July, as the committee was wrapping up its work, an unfinished draft of the recommendations leaked to the local press. A proposal to increase density in Seattle's single-family neighborhoods - more duplexes, triplexes, cottages and in-law apartments - led to a severe backlash.

For about a month, Durning said, the mayor couldn't go anywhere without meeting angry protesters. So - to save the grand bargain and the rest of the recommendations - he and key city councilors backed down.

Orser summed up Murray's thinking this way: "To protect 64 good proposals, we're going to put this one on the backburner."

It seemed the neighborhood preservationists had won. Something interesting happened next, though. In the subsequent primary and general City Council elections, the anti-HALA candidates were "trounced," Durning said. The next day's Seattle Times headline read, "Urbanists appear to be big winners in Seattle election."

"The lesson was that neighborhood preservation groups are loud and well organized, but probably a smaller share of the voters of the city than elected officials previously realized," Durning said, adding that elected officials have since hinted they'll reconsider allowing more density in the single-family neighborhoods, too.

HALA ended up "flipping that narrative that's for so long been with us, that developers are the bad guys and people with white picket fences" are the heroes, Bertolet said. Durning emphasized that "we don't say that because we love developers. We say that because we need more housing."

In a phone interview, Murray said he was "heartened by the election returns that show the people who supported our affordable housing plan got elected." He said there still is "a larger discussion we need to have surrounding single-family zoning."

Murray, a University of Portland graduate, recently visited Portland to address a Metro-sponsored forum on affordable housing. In his speech, he called Portland and Seattle "the most conservative liberal cities in the world."

"People are incredibly committed to low-income housing," Murray said. "But maybe not in their single-family neighborhood."

Linda Melvin, a member of the neighborhood group Livable Ballard, contends low-income housing is precisely what she does support, but all the new construction she sees in Ballard is built for higher-income residents. She said Ballard has already exceeded city growth targets for 2024 and wonders if the neighborhood's infrastructure can support all the new transplants. City buses in Ballard, she said, are routinely standing-room only.

"The city just wants to let the developers take over," said Melvin, who moved to Ballard in 2009. She feels that Murray's HALA committee was too tight with developers and their political allies.

The City Council passed the grand bargain last fall and this year will solicit public feedback on the rest of the HALA plan. Meanwhile, a group called "Seattle for Everyone," composed of affordable-housing advocates, for-profit developers, social justice advocates, environmentalists and urbanists, has organized in support of the recommendations.

"This new coalition is really about the healing of this really divisive fight," said Leslie Price, who advises Murray on housing issues. None of the HALA recommendations are particularly new ideas, she said, but what is new is the comprehensive nature of the plan and the number of voices that were at the table.

A blueprint?

Portland, meanwhile, is in the midst of rewriting its own plans for growth and infill. Mayor Charlie Hales and the candidates who want to replace him have said much about the need for affordable housing, but a HALA-like coalition has yet to take shape. Some of Hales' ideas, such as the erstwhile proposal to tax home demolitions, have alienated developers. Affordable-housing advocates criticized his support for less density in transit-friendly, close-in, affluent Eastmoreland, fearing it would push affordability and density issues elsewhere.

To be sure, Hales and the City Council recently passed renter protections stronger than those approved by the Oregon Legislature, and the mayor has pledged an additional $67 million for affordable housing over the next decade.

Similar political problems plague San Francisco, the city with the nation's most expensive housing. Sonja Trauss, leader of the Bay Area Renters' Federation, said Seattle's HALA is "way more ambitious, definitely" than anything that's been attempted in San Francisco.

Back in Ballard, the surge of construction shows no sign of slowing. On a recent afternoon, Chris Bodan, 41, walked his dog along 22nd Avenue Northwest, where a new six-story apartment building is rising across from the public library. He moved from the tony Queen Anne neighborhood to Ballard with his wife in 2004 and works from his apartment as a freelance writer and editor.

He said he's "a little mixed" on the new development. "I think it's aesthetically and architecturally horrendous," Bodan said. The hulking apartment buildings look jarring next to old, one-story homes with narrow driveways.

But in the end, he "doesn't really have a problem with it," Bodan added. When the couple went from a rented house in Ballard to a newer apartment building nearby in 2010, "we moved to a building with three-pronged outlets, which was a nice change," Bodan said.

"I don't have a problem with density. ... We have really enjoyed living in the neighborhood," Bodan said. "Change happens."

-- Luke Hammill

lhammill@oregonian.com

503-294-4029

@lucashammill