I read with concern Councilmember Mike Cero’s article (May 13, 2015) wherein he expressed concern that increasing multifamily housing on Mercer Island between 2010 and 2035 by 11 percent, as contemplated in the Mercer Island Comprehensive Plan updates, would threaten the values and “senses and priorities” of this community. Mr. Cero attributes many of the attractions of Mercer Island to single family homes: “strong schools, beautiful parks, relatively low crime, easy traffic and fiscal responsibility.” He claims that single family homes enable “high volunteerism in our schools, parks, playfields and well supervised children.” While many of us can endorse land use planning that preserves the small town feel and community values of Mercer Island, I cannot agree with Mr. Cero’s thesis that increasing multifamily homes by 11 percent increase by 2035 will undermine any of these attributes.
There is no foundation for Mr. Cero’s implicit suggestion that the residents of multifamily housing (yet-to-be-built or current) will not support our schools, our parks, and our community. The future residents of multifamily housing are not aliens—they are us. We need more multi-family housing to house our own families: our parents, our children and our grandchildren—if they have any hope of enjoying the benefits of life on Mercer Island. The data as to what East King County’s population, including Mercer Island, will look like in next decades makes it clear that we need more multifamily housing to house our seniors, our firefighters, our teachers, and our millennials over the next 20 years.
The median sale price of a Mercer Island home last month was over $1,000,000 according to Zillow and Trulia. The average listing price was $2.94 million. Only very few young families or Island school teachers and firefighters can purchase at those prices. By contrast, while the current price of Mercer Island condominiums varies widely, young families at least have a chance to buy—and the chance to partake of and contribute to the same community values that have brought so many of us to this island.
Moreover the demographics of East King County are changing. By 2035, seniors will comprise 25 percent of east King County’s population. More multi-family homes on Mercer Island will be necessary to house Mercer Island seniors who would prefer to remain in this community but cannot remain in larger homes due to fixed incomes or for health reasons.
The nostalgia for a more rural Mercer Island is understandable. But this region has irrevocably changed in the past 25 years. What attracted my family to Mercer Island was the community’s commitment to its schools and its children. Mercer Island schools are some of the best in the nation. What other small community supports a children’s theatre like Youth Theatre Northwest? But a commitment to education means an openness to new ideas and faces. Housing prices in the Puget Sound region are vastly different than they were 25, 35 years ago. We are at risk of becoming a moated community of the very wealthy. Mercer Island’s family values would be severely eroded without a community of diverse ages, incomes, ethnicities, etc. We need that diversity—and more multifamily housing for our seniors, young people, civil servants—to create a broad, emphatic community to foster the next generation on this unique oasis connected to two dynamic growing cities.
In closing, I want to thank Councilmember Cero for his dedication and service to the City of Mercer Island. We are very lucky to have citizens, like Mike Cero, who are willing to devote so much time and energy to this community and its future and to raise important questions about our collective future.
Suzanne Skinner
