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.
