By Erica C. Barnett

Last August, Seattle’s Department of Planning and Community Development produced a draft update to the city’s Comprehensive Plan that would have allowed for significantly more density in more parts of the city, including single-family neighborhoods, than the final version Mayor Harrell released in March.

The never-released draft plan, which PubliCola obtained through a records requests, would have allowed more density near bus lines, more apartments in areas historically reserved for single-family houses, and more housing of all types in the city’s most exclusive neighborhoods.

The unreleased plan zeroed in on the city’s history of racist zoning restrictions, and left no question that wealthy, white Seattle residents continue to benefit from exclusionary policies today. Areas that once had explicit covenants banning Black residents “remain disproportionately white, restrictively zoned, and characterized by high-cost detached housing,” according to the original draft, thanks to “facially race-neutral standards like minimum lot size and prohibitions on multifamily housing — both of which remain in Seattle’s zoning today.”

Instead of releasing that plan, Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office spent six months taking their red pens to the document—watering down the density requirements, removing provisions that would have allowed more housing in single-family neighborhoods (such as Laurelhurst, Wallingford, and east Queen Anne) and ensuring that the new comprehensive plan would preserve the status quo while just complying with a new state law designed to allow more density everywhere.

Here, for the first time, is a look at some of the changes Mayor Harrell’s office made to the plan that will guide how and where Seattle grows over the next 20 years. The comp plan is an important document: It sets goals for the coming decades and establishes policies to make them happen; these policies become the framework for future decisions about zoning, land use, greenhouse gas reductions, and much more.

The most obvious and high-impact changes to the plan are reductions in the amount of density the city will allow in every neighborhood, especially historically single-family areas. Many of the reductions in density are fairly subtle, but the first one is glaring: The August version of the plan would have created a new land use designation called “corridors,” where buildings of up to five stories would “generally” be allowed, although “higher heights may be appropriate in areas of mixed-use zoning or other focal points.”

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Urbanists (including PubliCola) have raised issues with the idea that apartments should be restricted to big, busy arterials. But that isn’t an argument against tall apartment buildings on streets with bus routes; it’s an argument for denser housing throughout the city.

The proposal the city released in March completely eliminates the corridor designation, taking large swaths of land surrounding streets like Sand Point Way, Ravenna Ave. NE, and East Madison Street off the table for density. According to a spokeswoman for the city’s Office of Planning and Community Development, Seferiana Day, “the Mayor’s Office considered the corridor option but ultimately decided not to include it as part of its Draft Plan as the other zoning changes contemplated in the Draft Plan can readily accommodate any amount of future growth that does occur.”

According to Day, the city has not calculated how many new apartments and other types of housing including the corridors would have added to the plan.

For decades, there has been a tension in Seattle between “accommodating” the number of people who are expected to move here—by allowing enough additional housing for a theoretical maximum number of new people—and providing an abundance of options for everyone already living here as well as those who will move here in the future. The comprehensive plan draft the city release in March takes the former approach, creating “capacity” for about 100,000 new homes over a period when at least 200,000 new people are expected to move into a city already facing a critical housing shortage.

Notes between city staff on a draft of the plan show that there was internal debate on this point, and that the mayor’s office prevailed. In one copy of the draft that included staff notes, a staffer for the mayor’s office questioned the plan’s original recommendation to “Plan for expected growth over the next 20 years while also providing additional housing capacity to enable the city to respond to existing unmet needs and potential demand from future employment growth.”

“[T]his seems to be calling for more housing well beyond what is needed based on projections,” Harrell’s staffer commented. A long-range planner with OPCD responded, “Yes, that is intentional. We have not kept up with past job growth and want to ensure there is a buffer of housing capacity in anticipation of potential future housing demand exceeding the adopted projections (which were low-ball last update).”

A subtler change is the elimination of smaller nodes of density deep in neighborhoods, known in the plan as “neighborhood centers.” The August 2023 version of the plan proposed about four dozen such centers, where apartment and condo buildings as tall as 6 stories would be allowed near intersections and transit stops throughout the city; that number was whittled down to 24 in the final plan, mostly in areas that are already fairly dense, like Georgetown. The final plan also shrunk the maximum size of these centers from an 1,000-foot radius around major intersections to just 800 feet.

Some of the proposed areas where new density would have been allowed under draft versions of the plan, but not the final, include Alki, Magnolia, Queen Anne, Laurelhurst and all of Southeast Seattle, including Lakewood and Seward Park.

Many of the areas that were eliminated as neighborhood centers are in neighborhoods identified by the Puget Sound Regional Council as areas with a low risk of displacement—generally areas with wealthier residents who don’t risk losing their homes when housing prices increase. While the August draft emphasizes the need to “encourage relatively more housing in areas of low-displacement [risk],” the final draft avoids suggesting that these areas are ripe for more housing.”

Asked about this, OPCD’s Day said, “More housing is needed everywhere across the city, regardless of displacement risk.”

For renters, who make up the majority of Seattle’s population, the future the early comprehensive plan draft envisioned was one where rental apartments—not just various configurations of townhouses and duplexes—would be allowed in most parts of the city, giving tenants access to neighborhoods that have historically been off-limits. The version of the plan released in March narrows this vision, continuing to find the vast majority of apartments along the same arterials where renters have always been allowed.

In this version, nearly every substantive policy that would have expanded access to apartments in historically exclusionary areas has been removed. For example, while the August draft directed the city to “remove zoning and building code barriers that prevent the development of comparatively lower-cost forms of housing, like rental apartments, particularly in residential neighborhoods with a history of exclusion on the basis of race,” the draft released in March embraces “lower-cost” housing as a concept, but no longer specifies what kind.

In a similar vein, the new draft removes references to encouraging “courtyard apartments” and “stacked flats” in historically single-family areas. It even removes a goal of “prioritiz[ing] areas away from major sources of noise and pollution when considering rezones to allow more housing.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the final draft also eliminates large chunks of text about historical and current racially discriminatory housing practices, consigning these factors to a few paragraphs and portraying them mostly as unfortunate relics of a bygone past. Day told PubliCola this was largely for “readability” and in the interest of making the draft “accessible” to the general public by focusing on what the plan would do.

But in eliminating much of the historical context, the final draft fails to acknowledge that problems that started when Seattle was founded persist today because of decisions the city has continued to make, like preventing renters from living in most of the city. As an excised section of the August draft put it, “economic exclusion has perpetuated that pattern [of “racial exclusion enforced through redlining and racial covenants”] and has contributed to the high cost of housing in Seattle. As a result, amenities such as well-resourced schools and large parks have been accessible only to those who could afford a limited supply of single-family homes.”

The remedy for this pattern of exclusion, according to the early draft, is to eliminate “zoning restrictions [that] limit the development of new housing choices,” using “greater market production of housing in these areas [to] help absorb demand, expand neighborhood access, and produce housing types with comparatively lower price points.” This sentence, and others like it, no longer appear in the draft plan.

Other changes are smaller, but still significant.

Throughout the document, prescriptive language has been replaced with squishy like “encourage,” “support,” and “consider the value of.” For example, while the early draft directed city policy makers to “Avoid setting minimum parking requirements for residential development,” the plan that was released says the city should avoid minimum parking requirements only “in areas well-served by transit, and “consider removing minimum parking requirements for housing in other areas.” Similarly, a directive to “Use bicycle parking requirements to encourage bicycle ownership and use” now says the city should use unspecified means to “encourage bicycle parking in new construction.”

References to supporting the Seattle Social Housing developer and advocating for “policies and changes in law to allow rent stabilization” are also gone, as are references to the city’s Mandatory Housing Affordability program, which requires developers who build new housing in certain parts of the city to build affordable units or pay a fee to help fund them elsewhere. The program has always been the subject of heated debate, with opponents on both sides of the NIMBY/developer spectrum. Now, Day says, the city is “considering whether to apply MHA” to areas upzoned by HB 1110, and other internal documents suggest the city is doing a wholesale review of MHA as a policy.

The city is taking public comments on the draft Comprehensive Plan update through May 6, and is holding a series of in-person open houses for the rest of April, with a final, virtual public meeting on May 2.