By Erica C. Barnett

Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office, along with the city’s Office of Planning and Community Development, have rolled out a new zoning map and plan for “phase 1” of Seattle’s updated Comprehensive Plan, updating what was in the draft released earlier this year. The city’s comprehensive plan is the framework that stipulates how the city will grow, and how much housing is allowed in the city’s residential areas, for the next 20 years.

The new version increases the amount of density that will be allowed citywide to the level proposed in the state’s “model code”—allowing slightly more housing in some areas, while adding six new “neighborhood centers” (to the 24 proposed in the previous draft), where apartment and condo buildings as tall as 6 stories would be allowed near intersections and transit stops.

Overall, the new proposal allows tens of thousands more units over the next 20 years than the previous proposal, which housing enthusiasts like state Rep. Julia Reed and the city’s Planning Commission criticized for failing to go big on apartments.

Most of that new capacity, however, comes from implementing a new law that every city in the state is required to follow—House Bill 1110, which mandates new density in former single-family areas. Harrell’s proposal does not go beyond the requirements of HB 1110, but it does include new density bonuses for stacked flats, including larger, family-size units. And it no longer exempts 15 percent of the city—areas at “high risk of displacement,” like parts of Southeast Seattle—from the new density requirements; HB 1110 allows cities to exempt up to 25 percent of their single-family areas from the new rules.

Updating former single-family areas to the state’s recommended density alone (for nerds only: The maximum floor-area ratio for multifamily housing in the new “neighborhood residential” zones would increase from 0.9 to a minimum 1.2, and more for stacked flats) will allow more housing types than the old draft, which effectively limited new density in former single-family areas to townhouses.

The new “neighborhood centers” would be located in North Magnolia, High Point, Beacon Hill, Fremont, and Hillman City; a former “urban village” in South Park would also become a neighborhood center. Notably absent from the new proposal are another 16 potential neighborhood centers the city studied, but rejected—many of them in tony single-family neighborhoods like Laurelhurst and North Capitol Hill.

It’s hard to say exactly how many additional units of housing the new plan would allow compared to the current version, however. During a media briefing on Wednesday, officials with OPCD said a widely publicized estimate of 100,000 new units in the old draft was just a “guesstimate,” since the city hadn’t done a full zoning analysis at the time, and appears to have been low.

The number the city is hyping now—which, according to the city’s fact sheet represents a doubling of the city’s “overall housing capacity”—is 330,000—up to 330,000 new units that will be possible in the next 20 years thanks to this plan. That number is roughly 160,000 units above the city’s existing zoning capacity (the number of units that could currently be built throughout the city if all less-dense housing was razed and replaced). Because the city didn’t do a detailed zoning study of the March draft, that 160,000 may represent a significant increase over the last plan. Or it may not.

Overall, the new plan continues to embrace the city’s longstanding strategy—going back to the 1990s—of concentrating new apartments in a few dense areas (now known as “regional centers”—the densest—and “urban centers”) and along busy, polluted arterial roads, while minimizing density in traditional single-family neighborhoods. Beyond the bare minimum required by HB 1110, the changes (as urbanists, we’ll call them improvements) are fairly modest.

We’ll be digging deeper into the proposed zoning and legislative changes, described in more detail in this summary, as the city approaches its self-imposed December deadline.

Just one quick nitpick, because this drives us nuts (maybe this is how Bruce Harrell feels about graffiti!): The new plan to allow “corner stores” doesn’t merely continue to limit them to actual corner lots—an interpretation of the term so literal it borders on Kafkaesque. It also includes a new stipulation that these corner-based stores can’t be open before 7 or after 10pm, which basically defeats the purpose of allowing bodegas in the first place. A corner store that closes before 10 is almost legally bound to be a bougie “neighborhood market,” not a place to buy laundry detergent in the middle of the night. Seattle should stop calling itself a city if it won’t let us have actual corner stores.