Category: land use

housing, land use, Uncategorized

Opponents of Stadium-Area Housing Say “Core Tenet” is “No Net Loss of Industrial Lands”
Port Commissioner Toshiko Hasegawa speaks at a meeting on potential changes to allow housing in the stadium district.

By Erica C. Barnett

Back in January, Seattle City Council President Sara Nelson convened a panel to discuss legislation that would allow affordable “workforce” housing in an industrially zoned area just south of downtown.

Hotels, retail stores, bars and restaurants, and offices are already allowed in this area, but housing is not; although a 2022 Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS) found that a plan allowing up to 990 “industry-supportive housing” units would be compatible with the surrounding industrial area, the housing was omitted in a last-minute compromise to get the proposal past the finish line.

During the January meeting, Councilmember Dan Strauss accused Nelson of convening a panel that wasn’t “balanced,” because it only included proponents of her proposal to allow housing. Strauss has also made it clear he’s sore because Nelson is hearing the the legislation in her governance committee instead of sending it to the land use committee, chaired by Mark Solomon, where it might not get a hearing.

Echoing Strauss, Councilmember Bob Kettle said he hoped Nelson would give the other side a formal opportunity to speak against her legislation.

On Monday, Kettle and Strauss got their wish, when Nelson invited representatives from the maritime sector to explain why they see the housing proposal as a non-starter. The basic debate is about whether land with industrial zoning should be kept strictly industrial in perpetuity, as the Port and longshore union argue, or if some of that land should be repurposed for other uses, such as housing to support smaller, public-facing manufacturing businesses, as the building trades union has argued.

Currently, the two blocks just south of the stadiums are a mishmash of entertainment businesses (including a strip club) and bars, small manufacturers, underutilized retail spaces, and parking lots.

The first panelist, Port Commissioner Toshiko Hasegawa, came in hot, blasting Nelson’s plan as “a Humpty Dumpty approach to break apart our industrial lands piece by piece, year after year, to the point where we can’t put them back together again.” If the city wanted to open up the debate over the land around the stadiums, she continued, they would have to first satisfy the Port’s “core tenet—no net loss to industrial lands—and [provide] certainty that this isn’t going to come up year after year after year, because a trail of bread crumbs does not exactly exude transparency or confidence.”

The panelists (who also included Dan Kelly from the Freight Advisory Board, longshore union rep Dan McKisson, and Northwest Seaport Alliance deputy CEO Don Esterbrook) argued that housing in an industrial area would harm residents and lead to pedestrian deaths, and potentially drive port traffic to Canada or California as increased car traffic slowed down trucks trying to get out of Seattle.

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Nelson and Councilmember Maritza Rivera pressed the panelists to explain why they believed 990 new apartments would create enough traffic to cripple the Port, given that the maritime industry signed off on hotels, offices, and bars and restaurants in the area around the stadiums, which also create significant traffic.

“I don’t know why allowing for limited workforce housing is really going to have much of an extra impact than [what’s] already there, with the commercial use that includes hotels, entertainment and office space, and the sports complex,” Rivera said.

Hasegawa responded that new housing would bring “additional foot traffic” in an area that’s unsafe for pedestrians, then resumed talking about the potential impact of pollution on residents living near an industrial area. OK, Rivera said, but “we have residents in Pioneer Square, which is right there too”—why is it okay for people to live there but not on the other side of the stadiums? When no one answered that question, both Nelson and Rivera pressed: If allowing housing around the stadiums is such an obviously bad idea, why didn’t the Port or other maritime groups appeal the environmental impact statement that said a limited amount of housing was okay?

When the panelists didn’t really answer that question either, Strauss and Kettle stepped in. First, Kettle reiterated his comment from the previous meeting that the “F” in “FEIS” actually stands for “flawed,” and predicted lawsuits from residents harmed by “noise and air” issues in the area, along the lines of the lawsuits filed by residents of Whidbey Island over noise at a naval air station near their homes. Then Strauss said that in his recollection maritime and industrial unions didn’t like the final agreement to begin with, and only agreed to hotels as a compromise.

“We were furious,” McKisson confirmed, and said they still don’t know “how the non-industrial uses [have] impacted that area.”

After the meeting, Nelson said she hopes to hold a final vote on the legislation by March 18.

City Council, Development, labor, land use

Proposal to Allow Affordable Housing Near Stadiums Reignites a Familiar Debate Over Industrial Land
City Councilmember Bob Kettle yells at building trades union leader Monty Anderson. Remember when this council came into office, promising to restore “civility” and bring a new era of “collaboration” to City Hall?

By Erica C. Barnett

City Council President Sara Nelson has reintroduced a proposal, shelved in 2023 to secure the Port of Seattle’s support for an overhaul of the city’s industrial zoning, that would allow up to 990 units of “industry-supportive housing” —half of them affordable to people making 90 percent or less of Seattle’s median income—on two blocks of land just south of Lumen Field.

Although the city’s original “preferred alternative” industrial lands policy included this housing, the final version adopted in 2023 excluded housing from the area.

While the Port has argued that allowing housing near industrial areas will permanently harm Seattle’s maritime and industrial sectors, housing advocates point to an environmental impact statement done specifically for the industrial lands update that concluded housing is compatible with the kinds of businesses that are now allowed around the stadiums, like breweries, art spaces, and retail stores attached to clothing manufacturers.

In last week’s meeting of Nelson’s governance and accountability committee, representatives from the Port and maritime unions squared off against affordable housing advocates (the Housing Development Consortium), neighborhood business groups (the Alliance for Pioneer Square), and the Seattle Building and Construction Trades Council, which argued the zoning change would bring thousands of new jobs to the area.

Port Commissioner Fred Felleman said the Port had agreed to allow hotels around the stadiums, but “long-term housing in industrial zone without basic amenities is unacceptable and compromises our ability to attract new tenants. Please don’t put housing in conflict with job growth.”

Former Redmond mayor John Marchione, who now heads up the Washington State Public Stadium Authority, countered that the zoning change would create a “new, fully formed community with “jobs, housing, transportation and entertainment.” The area is less than a mile from two light rail stations, which currently have the lowest and third-lowest ridership of the 19 stations on Sound Transit’s north-south 1 Line—largely because almost no one lives near them.

Panel members told the council they agreed to put off the housing question until a later date in order to ensure that the industrial lands policy—which had been in the works for years—would pass with the backing of the Port, which had threatened to withhold support for the plan if it allowed housing near the stadiums. The new policy barred housing in a small area called the Stadium Overlay District, which includes two blocks just south of T-Mobile Field and a long, skinny strip of land next to Terminal 46, known as the WOSCA site for its former owner, WOSCA Terminals.

As part of the 2023 deal, Washington State Public Stadium Authority consultant Lizanne Lyons told the council, Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office told  the housing advocates to come back in the future to seek zoning change to allow housing in the two blocks south of the stadiums. (The WSPSA owns Lumen Field.)

“It was frankly at the 11th hour that we were informed that the deal we thought we had, that we had been told we had, [to allow up to] 990 units of housing in the stadium district were taken out,” Lyons said. “We were told that the timing was sensitive … ‘Come back in a year and get the zoning change you need to enact the housing that we have repeatedly told you you could have.'”

The Port and longshore union argue that allowing apartments in the area would create traffic bottlenecks for trucks and make it impossible for Terminal 46—which currently serves as storage space for imported cars—to be used for container shipping in the future. Before the council can take up any proposal to allow housing near the stadiums, Councilmember Dan Strauss said, they must first make sure they know how that terminal will be used in the future, what kind of development will take place at the WOSCA site (a decision that won’t happen until after the World Cup games next year), and how any new housing will impact freight traffic in the future.

“There are other ports to the north and south that could just as easily take this traffic, and it would be a shame if they start taking our cargo because I- 90, that connects Seattle to the heartland of America, into Boston, can’t get through that last half-mile at the end to meet the port,” Struass said.

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The city’s final Environmental Impact Statement concluded that while housing growth can increase car traffic, it could also lead to better infrastructure for transit, pedestrians, and cyclists in “areas with histories of long-term underinvestment” like SoDo. The FEIS did also found that there would be no “significant adverse environmental impacts” from adding 990 new housing units in the area.

As Mike Merritt, a former senior executive policy advisor at the Port of Seattle, recently wrote in Post Alley, low shipping volumes—not traffic on and around I-90—have led to slowdowns and closures at several Seattle terminals, including Terminal 46, which has not had container service since 2019.

Housing opponents have also argued that the city has failed to consider the potential impacts of natural disasters or an emergency that requires the military to access Seattle by sea.

Channeling these arguments, Kettle said the city had failed to consider the possibility of several types of potential disaster on people living in the area. “There’s not been any talking about Love Canal-type considerations for this location,” Kettle said. Moreover, “SODO is between two fault lines [and sustained] great damage from earlier earthquakes, like in 2001 … These considerations have not been talked about— liquefaction zones, tsunami, in terms of the elevation, the inundation of the water. … We look at the LA fires right now, we look at the hurricanes in the Gulf, in Florida. These are major considerations.”

Instead of standing for “Final Environmental Impact Statement,” Kettle quipped, FEIS should have stood for “Flawed Environmental Impact Statement” because “it didn’t really address some of the unique circumstances” in the two-block area.

In fact, the EIS did consider geological hazards, traffic impacts, and the other potential issues Kettle and Strauss identified. In a section about geologic hazards, the EIS notes that “modern building codes” are designed to mitigate against risks associated with earthquakes in historically industrial areas across the city, including in existing residential neighborhoods like Pioneer Square, Ballard, and Georgetown.

“With mitigation, all these impacts together would not be considered significant,” the EIS concluded. If the Big One hits, of course, it won’t really matter if you live near the stadiums or elsewhere in the city; all of Seattle, but especially areas near waterfronts, will face catastrophic destruction.

Panel member Monty Anderson, head of the Seattle Building & Construction Trades Council, said he was familiar with all the arguments against housing near the stadiums—particularly the ones about future uses for the WOSCA site and Terminal 46.  “‘What if the Coast Guard comes? What if they build an arena? What if we get offshore wind?'” Anderson said. “Everybody knows that it’s just delay.”

Lyons, from the stadium authority, noted that it’s been decades since the two blocks south of Lumen Field have been used for industrial purposes. “It’s a lot of vacant buildings and deteriorating warehouses and vacant lots,” she said, plus “some good development on First Avenue South.”

Apparently responding to public commenters who argued that having more street-level activity would improve public in the area, Kettle said that wasn’t true—just look at downtown, Belltown, and the Chinatown-International District, which have lots of people but also lots of crime. “If residence was the determining factor of public safety, those should be the three safest places in the city. But they’re not.” Legislation the council passed last year, including surveillance cameras, higher pay for police, and “stay out” zones for people who use drugs in public, create “the conditions for safety,” Kettle said; “housing itself will not.”

Later in the meeting, Kettle lost his temper at Anderson after the union leader commented that some people had been “fed lines” and  “talking points” by opponents of the housing proposal. “We all do that,” he said. Although the remark seemed to be aimed at the longshoremen who testified earlier, Kettle seemed to take  it as a personal attack.

Cutting Anderson off, Kettle said his views on industrial land policy are based on his “service as a naval officer, an international security expert [who] understands international trade,” as well as his “studies,” “academic experience,” and time on the Queen Anne Community Council. “I’m not being a mouthpiece for anybody that’s out here, and I just want to make that point clear,” Kettle said.

That prompted this dramatic exchange, which began when Anderson responded to Kettle:, “Since you’re so intelligent and smart and I’m just a stupid Mexican construction worker, I’ll bide down to what you think I should—” At that point, Kettle, visibly shaking with anger, began shouting:

After the meeting settled down, Kettle said he “respect[ed]” Anderson, but did not apologize for his outburst.

Nelson’s committee will take up the legislation again in February.

City Council, Density, housing, land use, Mayor Harrell

Anti-Housing Activists Hope for Receptive Audience as Council Takes Up Comprehensive Plan Update
The Future Land Use Map shows the level of housing density the city will allow in various areas; Seattle’s single-family neighborhoods, where up to four units are now allowed under state law, are in beige.

By Erica C. Barnett

As the city council prepared for its first meeting to discuss Seattle’s long-delayed comprehensive plan update Monday morning, anti-housing advocates have started at least eight petitions or letter-writing campaigns to urge councilmembers to scale back the modest upzones the new plan would allow. (Ryan Packer, from The Urbanist, covered some of these last week).

So far, residents have created petitions to reduce the amount of housing that will be allowed in north Ballard (“Whittier Neighbors Against Seattle Upzoning Proposal”), West Seattle (the Fauntleroy Community Association); north Queen Anne (“Oppose Proposed Dramatic Up-zoning of 10th Ave W. from McGraw to Fulton”); east Queen Anne (“Queen Anne Neighbors Against Seattle Upzoning Proposal”); Montlake (“Preserve Montlake Neighborhood While Growing”); Greenwood (“Oppose Greenwood Urban Center Up-Zoning in Seattle Mayor Harrell’s One Seattle Plan”); Madrona (“Preserve Madrona’s neighborhood character as we increase in density”; and North Seattle (“Remove Proposed Designation of Maple Leaf as a Neighborhood Center.”)

As we’ve reported, Harrell’s proposal just complies with state law requiring cities to allow at least four units of housing on every residential lot, but otherwise hews to the the city’s longstanding strategy—going back at least to the 1990s—of concentrating apartment housing in a few dense areas along busy arterial roads, while minimizing density in traditional single-family neighborhoods.

The new plan would allow apartments within a block or two of about 30 frequent transit stops across the city, and would expand the boundaries of the areas where apartment-level density is currently allowed.

Proposals to allow more housing, particularly apartments for Seattle’s renter majority, have produced a predictably disproportionate level of outrage among single-family preservationists, who are lobbying the council hard to reduce the amount of housing the new plan would allow across the city.

A petition opposing a new “neighborhood center” between two light rail stations in the Maple Leaf neighborhood, which currently has more than 700 signatures, claims that allowing apartments within two blocks of an existing small commercial area will destroy critical wildlife habitat, eliminate many “large evergreens,” create shadows that will prevent homeowners from gardening (unlike trees, I guess?), and put too much pressure on “wastewater treatment capacity, water supply, electrical supply [and] stormwater treatment.”  As one of the two Queen Anne petitions puts it, “Current infrastructure does not support drastic population increases.”

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This line of opposition, which we’ve often shorthanded as the “concurrency” argument against housing, presumes that Seattle shouldn’t allow new housing until after the region has invested in far more frequent transit, wider streets and sidewalks, bigger sewage pipes, and all kinds of other infrastructure projects that aren’t necessary or justifiable in the city’s current low-density neighborhoods.”Current Infrastructure does not support drastic population increases.”

These cart-before-the-horse propositions are conveniently perennial, because no city or region is going to spend a ton of money expanding services to places that don’t currently need them. King County Metro, for example, isn’t going to dedicate limited resources increasing bus service frequency in neighborhoods where everyone owns a house on a 5,000-square-foot lot, because those kinds of neighborhoods don’t produce enough bus riders to justify stiffing denser areas that want bus service.

Cities do have to provide adequate transportation access as they grow (which is one reason we pass levies to pay for things like buses and sidewalks) but people making this argument often take it to absurd extremes, essentially arguing that if you don’t have access to door-to-door transit, parking directly in front of your house, and streets where you can drive without stopping for cyclists, pedestrians, and buses, you shouldn’t have to “accept” new neighbors.

This stuff can get pretty explicit. One of the Queen Anne petitions, for example, includes a lengthy defense of single-occupancy vehicles that begins by dismissing mass transit as pie-in-the-sky social engineering:

We understand the intent of this plan…  is to encourage use of mass transit. Practically speaking, using the #1 bus would be challenging for those making multiple stops in a day for work related activities, individuals who are responsible to get children to child care or extracurricular activities, and residents who support aging parents for doctor’s appointments and other needs. We use our cars to transport us to the many recreational activities that are essential to our well-being. In short, most people will need a car for a long time to come. And, if they need cars, they will need parking for these cars. Parking that would not be included under this new plan, so cars would be forced onto already crowded streets (with current limited parking and the #1 bus).

Most PubliCola readers probably don’t need to be told that this is a dumb argument—people who don’t have cars can and do get around by bus, and Seattle can’t succeed if it bases all its policies on the preferences of car-driving homeowners—but the Seattle City Council is being inundated by messages like these, and some counterprogramming couldn’t hurt. (Councilmember Joy Hollingsworth, who’s heading up the comp plan process, told the Urbanist in 2023 that she supported the densest comprehensive plan alternative then on the table.)

The council will have a public hearing on the comprehensive plan at 5:00 pm on February 6, but anyone can weigh in before then by sending an email to the council; find the contact information for your citywide and district representatives here.

land use, Mayor Harrell, Tech

Ad Kiosks Could Be Coming to Downtown Seattle. But Are the “Public Benefits” Worth the Tradeoff?
IKE kiosk in Berkeley, one of more than 20 cities that have signed partnerships with the company.

By Erica C. Barnett

The Downtown Seattle Association, an umbrella group for downtown businesses, is asking the city to approve a 30-year permit that would allow a Columbus, Ohio-based advertising company called Orange Barrel Media (through its affiliate, IKE Smart City) to install up to 30 eight-and-a-half-foot-tall digital advertising “kiosks” on sidewalks downtown.

The slides, according to an IKE representative, would “include a mixture of video and static images.”

It’s the second time the city has taken a run at adding kiosks to the downtown landscape. The first proposal, by a Google-affiliated company called Intersection, fizzled in 2018.

The type of permit IKE and the DSA are seeking, known as a term permit, is usually reserved for “significant structures,” like skybridges and tunnels, that need access to city right-of-way on a long-term basis; it’s unusual, if not unprecedented, for the city to grant a long-term permit to dozens of small structures in unspecified locations.

As proposed, the permit would include an option to add another 50 kiosks in the future, including 30 in other neighborhoods, including Ballard.

“We’d like a lot more [kiosks], but we’re comfortable starting with with 30,” DSA CEO Jon Scholes told PubliCola earlier this year.

The kiosks, which will operate 24 hours a day, will scroll through eight ad slots every ten seconds; at least one of the slides will be “proactively curated by the city, organizations like ours, and the community to help people understand what’s happening and what’s available” in the area, Scholes said.

That local programming could include images of Seattle artists’ work, tourist maps, emergency updates, and guides to downtown events. Scholes said people might see an ad for a concert on a kiosk, for example, and say, “‘I’m going to come out for that concert that I didn’t know about’—generating more pedestrian traffic and traffic for events and parks.”

“This level of custom curation provides the City and local stakeholders the ability to curate the content that pedestrians encounter, driving discovery of local and businesses and events, encouraging public transit use, and delivering a platform for non-profits, artists and local businesses who otherwise would never have such an opportunity,” an IKE spokesperson told PubliCola.

According to IKE, cities typically get more like 20 percent of the slides because not all the ad space sells. IKE says its business model is based entirely on ad sales, and that, unlike Intersection and other kiosk companies, it does not sell user data. [Editor’s note: Due to a typo, this story initially said that IKE “does sell user data.”]

A portion of the income from the digital ads—an estimated $1.1 million a year—would go to the DSA to beef up its public programs and events and to fund the business group’s Downtown Ambassador program, Scholes said. Additional revenues could go to the city, a spokesman for Mayor Bruce Harrell, Jamie Housen, said.

“We believe the kiosks would have many public benefits that would complement the goals of Mayor Harrell’s Downtown Activation Plan, including promotion of local businesses and events, WiFi access, wayfinding and mobility tools for visitors, and accessible information on resources like food and shelter for people in need,” Housen said.

“From the city’s interest and our interest, this is a heck of a deal,” Scholes told the city’s Design Commission earlier this week, when it held the second of three meetings to discuss the proposal.

At that meeting, a representative from OBM, Jessica Burton, told commissioners that unlike kiosks operated by other companies, the IKE kiosks won’t include charging stations or built-in tablets—a key distinction from kiosks in other cities, like New York and London, where unhoused people often use the kiosks to charge their devices or get online. Omitting these amenities, Burton, will help “eliminat[e] loitering” and “any type of unnecessary congregating” around the signs, Burton said.

During the commission meeting, officials representing the city’s public safety departments touted the kiosks’ ability to display emergency updates, call 911, and provide real-time public safety information with a single touch. “Let’s be smart, let’s be innovative, let’s be practical, and let’s have the humility to recognize that there are a lot of things working really well in a lot of cities, and the intelligence to look at our own local scoreboard,” CARE (911) Department Chief Amy Smith said. “I’m very excited about these kiosks.”

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But commissioners questioned the value (and equity) of having an emergency alert system that only serves a few blocks of downtown Seattle, and wondered about the usefulness of some of the kiosks’ other features, such QR codes people could use to find local events on their smartphone, or a “Photo Booth” app that allows people to snap a selfie.

Commissioners pressed representatives from OBM and the DSA to explain what public need the vertical billboards would fulfill, and how downtown would be improved by their presence.

“If I try to put this in the context of a magical world in which the city of Seattle has the money to install these themselves, with no advertisement whatsoever, to just provide the public benefits that have been displayed here today, is that desirable?” commissioner Jay Backman said.

A former vice chair of the design commission, Ellen Sollod, said she didn’t think the purported benefits were worth the downsides—”not just the visual clutter of the objects in the landscape, but the visual clutter of the messaging” from illuminated ads all over downtown Seattle.

“I’m very concerned about the continuing homogenization of Seattle, and when I look and I see that this is a program that [has] been used in many cities all over the country, I have to say, maybe the information is specific to Seattle, but it’s a further homogenization of our landscape,” Sollod said.

“If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.”

The city’s sign code prohibits most illuminated and video signs, although there have been many exceptions, including the large flashing sign at Climate Pledge Arena. The reasons for this, historically, have had to do with both driver distraction and Seattle’s general distaste for ads in public spaces—something Paula Rees, a Seattle planner and designer who’s been fighting against all kinds of billboards downtown for years, says the kiosks epitomize.

“I don’t know about you, but when I get on my phone, and I’m scrolling, and it’s throwing ads at me I can’t stand it. It drives me nuts to go outside and have that same thing on a public street,” Rees said. “I just think it’s not appropriate in the public realm. I don’t get up every morning and say, ‘I want to see another Verizon ad.'”

As for driver distraction, a consultant hired to study the kiosks’ impact said she didn’t believe the kiosks will be a problem, since they’ll be located in areas where speed limits were limited, in 2020, to 25 miles an hour. Deaths from auto collisions have steadily increased since 2013, and spiked after the new speed limits went into effect, suggesting that lower speed limits aren’t doing much to inhibit dangerous driver behavior.

Privacy advocates have also raised concerns about the kiosks. Although the signs won’t include security cameras—an optional feature that other cities have chosen to deploy—Tee Sannon, technology policy program director for the ACLU of Washington, said, “my concern is that this is a slippery slope—once the kiosks are out there, you can retrofit them” to include cameras, she said. “At least we have the surveillance ordinance,” Shannon added—a law that requires a formal review of all new surveillance technologies.

The IKE spokesperson confirmed that in cities that have the cameras, “IKE has provided local authorities with necessary video recordings to assist in criminal investigations, but only in select instances and always in accordance with local law.”

Sannon also said it’s unclear exactly what kind of user data IKE collects and retains. According to IKE, the company “does not collect or sell personally identifiable information or any other data of any kind.” However, IKE’s privacy policy says the company does collect “personal information” such as IP addresses, individual device identifiers, geolocation data, and information collected when people voluntarily interact with the kiosk, such as looking up a location on a map.

“Their privacy policy seems to be  riddled with a number of contradictions,” Sannon said. “It says they don’t collect personally identifiable information, but it also says the WiFi does collect MAC addresses, which are unique identifiers [for devices], based on the rationale that it’s to offer WiFi functionality.”

Scholes, from the DSA, said he is sympathetic to privacy concerns, but noted that many technologies people already use involve sharing personally identifiable information with companies. If companies that operate in public spaces couldn’t collect personal data of any kind, he said, “We wouldn’t have bike share, we wouldn’t have scooter share, and we won’t have EV charging provided by private companies. We wouldn’t have public Wi Fi in airports. I think these are legitimate concerns. But we’ve made public policy decisions to balance the public benefits provided by private entities at no cost to the taxpayer [against] a bunch of different interests.”

The Design Commission will hold one more meeting to discuss the DSA and IKE’s proposal before making a recommendation to the city council later this summer.  The mayor’s office reportedly wants to have the kiosks up and running before the FIFA World Cup in 2026, which is expected to bring a flood of tourists to downtown Seattle.

Density, Development, housing, land use, legislature, Mayor Harrell

State Legislator Told Seattle to Get Serious About Density Before Seeking Funds for Fort Lawton Housing Project

Not “even worth responding to as it’s so ridiculous,” a deputy mayor wrote.

By Erica C. Barnett

In an email to Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office, expressing “serious concerns” about the mayor’s status-quo comprehensive plan update, State Rep. Julia Reed suggested that she might be less than supportive of future city requests to help fund its $285 million Fort Lawton redevelopment project if the city didn’t get more serious about increasing density.

“I know the City is hoping for significant state support to deliver on the Mayor’s vision for Fort Lawton next year,” Reed wrote. “I don’t know if that will be possible if the City’s comprehensive plan isn’t seen to be doing everything possible to maximize housing growth in the state’s largest city. It’s already an uphill climb to do any funding packages for Seattle, and if there’s a strong impression the city isn’t doing all it can on its own, it makes the argument that much harder.”

Documents PubliCola obtained through a records request show that Reed’s email sent mayoral staffers into a tizzy. For two days, emails flew back and forth between at least 17 city staffers (plus Harrell’s in-house political consultant, Christian Sinderman) debating how to respond to Reed.

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Some of the emails were snarky (“I am surprised that these legislators had the time to read and analyze our proposed update with just three days left in legislative session,” mayoral spokesman Jamie Housen wrote) while others urged caution. Gael Tarleton, the former state legislator who led the mayor’s lobbying team in Olympia, noted on May 5 that it was the last day of the legislature and “Emotions are running high[.] .. May I suggest that once this letter is sent, we just let things quiet down, let session end, and re-group[?]”

Staffers debated how strongly to respond to Reed’s suggestion that the Seattle delegation’s advocacy for Fort Lawton funding would depend on Harrell’s larger commitment to density. Harrell’s deputy mayor, Greg Wong, responded to a draft response written by Harrell’s chief operating officer Marco Lowe and edited by Sinderman, saying the city shouldn’t even dignify Reed’s reference to Fort Lawton with a response, writing:

“I like Christian’s edits. I personally don’t think the Ft. Lawton piece is even worth responding to as it’s so ridiculous. It’s not the leverage they think it is and their stance doesn’t even make sense given what we’re proposing. But I don’t feel very strong about whether to delete. If you want to say something about it, I wouldn’t feel the need to explain or be defensive about it. Just point out the baseless bluff it is. You could say something like: ‘As to Ft.  Lawton, it is unfortunate to hear you would not support our plan to increase the amount and likelihood of affordable housing in this area. But that is a separate issue, which we are happy to discuss with you as well.'”

Continue reading “State Legislator Told Seattle to Get Serious About Density Before Seeking Funds for Fort Lawton Housing Project” →

homelessness, land use, Mayor Harrell, zoning

At Most, 11 Percent of Encampment Residents End Up Sheltered After Sweeps; City Could Bring Back Neighborhood Corner Stores

1. The city’s Unified Care Team, which removes homeless encampments and informs their displaced residents about open shelter beds, “extended a total of 1,830 offers of shelter” between July and September 2023, converting 587 of those offers into “referrals” to specific shelters, according to a report released earlier this month. Of those referrals, according to the report, only 209 people, or just over 11 percent of the people who received shelter “offers,” actually showed up at a shelter and stayed for at least one night. (This number, the report notes, could be a slight undercount due to incomplete data.)

This means that almost nine in ten people the UCT contacted prior to encampment sweeps did not end up in any form of shelter—a decline from the UCT’s previous report, which showed a 15 percent shelter enrollment rate. The UCT (which includes the Human Services Department’s team of outreach workers) does not make contact with everyone at an encampment, so the official numbers don’t include people who move elsewhere before a sweep or don’t engage with city workers for other reasons, such as a lack of outreach or because they know they don’t want to move into congregate shelter.

The city’s “One Seattle Homelessness Action Plan” website includes the UCT’s offer and referral numbers, but not the much lower number of people who actually ended up in shelter.

The numbers show some geographic differences, and includes some of the reasons people gave for declining the UCT’s offers of shelter. The highest shelter acceptance and enrollment rates were in Northwest Seattle, and the lowest were in West Seattle and the center city, which includes downtown and Capitol Hill. In West Seattle, just 4 percent of people who received shelter offers ended up going to shelter (largely because only 11 percent accepted these offers), while just 8 percent ended up in shelter in central Seattle. Mayor Bruce Harrell has focused a huge amount of attention on “reopening” downtown Seattle, which has included swiftly removing encampments or tents that pop up in the area.

When asked why they didn’t accept a shelter offer, most people told the UCT they didn’t want the specific bed they were being offered. Often, the data indicates, this was because they were only offered an “enhanced shelter bed”—a term that encompasses group shelters that are open 24 hours and offer services—rather than permanent housing or a spot in a tiny house village. Others said they wanted to stay with their partners, family members, or pets; didn’t want to relinquish the car or RV where they were living; or didn’t find the shelter location acceptable. The UCT does not offer transportation to shelter, which may be far away from the communities where unsheltered people live.

The UCT is required to produce quarterly reports on their work under a statement of legislative intent imposed by the City Council in 2022. The council imposed a similar requirement for next year as part of its 2024 budget.

2. As Josh reported in his column last week, Seattle doesn’t have a program to activate or site corner retail in residential areas—yet.

According to Office of Planning Construction and Development director Nathan Torgelson, OPCD is “considering allowing corner stores in [neighborhood residential] zones as part of the Comprehensive Plan Update process.” Torgelson is referring to the city’s Environmental Impact Statement Scoping Report, released last November, which outlined potential policy and zoning changes that should be studied in advance of considering alternatives for Seattle’s 2024 Comprehensive Plan update. The comp plan is a document that guides future growth across the city over a 20-year time span; the plan undergoes a “major” update every eight years.

On its final pages, the 29-page scoping document says that in order to “support City goals such as allowing more people to walk or bike to everyday needs,” the city could consider “Allowing more flexibility for commercial uses such as more retail on arterial streets, home businesses, and corner stores in certain areas” and “Combining the multifamily and mixed-use/commercial designations on the Comprehensive Plan’s Future Land Use Map categories to reflect that commercial space may be reasonable in a wider variety of areas.”

As we’ve reported, the release date for the EIS has been pushed back repeatedly, so there’s no word yet about any substantive corner store proposal.

As Josh noted, Spokane’s planning department identified 95 spaces, including in residential areas, that could be converted to retail. This fall, Vancouver, BC’s planning department surveyed the public in a proactive corner store push to “gather feedback on how residents feel about corner stores and potential opportunities for expanding uses, locations, and building types.”

—Erica C. Barnett, Josh Feit