By Joshua Curtis and John Marchione
In September 2022, after years of study, the City of Seattle finally released a much-anticipated Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS) analysis of proposed changes to the City’s maritime and industrial strategy. That document, released after years of discussion and consideration by the industrial lands task force convened by then-mayor Jenny Durkan, set forward a “Preferred Alternative” that called for allowing a limited amount of affordable workforce housing in the immediate vicinity of Lumen Field and T-Mobile Park.
But because of a behind-the-scenes lobbying push from the Port of Seattle and the Longshore Union, the City Council ended up adopting an industrial lands package that stripped out the housing from the Stadium District. That decision, driven largely by political calculus rather than sound policy, essentially killed a broadly endorsed vision for a vibrant “maker’s zone” in the immediate vicinity of the stadiums that would combine street-level light industrial and artisanal manufacturing uses—think breweries, distilleries, or a clothing manufacturer with a retail storefront—with that housing.
It’s time to correct that mistake.
Council President Sara Nelson introduced legislation last month that would restore the maker’s zone vision and add back the opportunity for about 1,000 mostly affordable housing units to be constructed in the north part of the SoDo neighborhood, providing a real opportunity to address our housing crisis. It would also take a big step toward reinvigorating small maker’s businesses that are slowly being pushed out of the city—like the 700 diverse urban manufacturers and producers represented by Seattle Made, one of the broad coalition of organizations supporting Nelson’s. And it will create greater vibrancy and improved public safety in an area directly adjacent to Pioneer Square and the Chinatown/International District (CID).
All of this can be accomplished while preserving our industrial economy and keeping well-paying blue-collar jobs in Seattle. As the Seattle Office of Planning and Community Development Director’s Report, transmitted to the council along with the industrial lands legislation, clearly stated: “OPCD’s independent analysis leads us to believes that some limited amount of housing would be compatible with the surrounding use pattern and would not cause additional adverse impacts on nearby industrial activities[.]”
The plain fact of the matter is that the transitional area immediately adjacent to the stadiums has changed so much that it no longer makes sense to consider it exclusively industrial. A significant portion of the area around the stadiums, primarily south of the ballpark, is characterized by deteriorating buildings and vacant lots. No actual industrial activity remains, nor will it ever return, because the high value of the land in that area makes industrial uses on those sites cost-prohibitive.
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The area around these public facilities is already zoned for commercial use, including bland mid-rise offices, which, if developed, will actually bring more traffic to the area than a mixed-use maker’s zone would. The area benefits from an expanding transit system: It 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. And it directly abuts the Pioneer Square, Waterfront, and CID neighborhoods. As the environmental study concluded, the opportunity to create a mixed-use district around the public stadiums would ease the transition between Pioneer Square and the CID and the industrial areas to the south. These spaces can help to build employment and entrepreneurial opportunity within communities of color that often face intimidating barriers to entry.
To achieve all this, the inclusion of a threshold level of workforce housing is essential, both to help underwrite projects that include these maker’s spaces and to contribute to the city’s critical housing supply. We know this because an outside, expert analysis jointly commissioned by our two public boards in 2022 found that this sort of maker’s zone would not pencil and would not be developed unless a threshold level of housing was included.
Support for this plan is strong. In a 2021 poll, 87 percent of registered voters favored the inclusion of some residential uses in this area. Earlier this month, an impressive coalition of groups, including unions, small businesses, affordable housing developers, the Mariners, and many others joined with the two public boards stewarding the public ownership of the stadiums to urge the council to pass this important legislation.
There is a once-in-a-generation opportunity here. Reviving the maker’s zone idea would allow the Stadium District to accommodate light manufacturing along with a modest mix of affordable and market-rate housing. This would be a big step toward solving multiple problems, would make much better use of the underutilized land around the stadiums, and would transition well to the maritime and industrial areas of the waterfront.
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Joshua Curtis is the Executive Director of the Washington State Ballpark Public Facilities District. John Marchione is Executive Director of the Washington State Public Stadium Authority.
Are you factoring in the fact that Amtrac will close Holgate Street for their massive maintenance building. There will be no traffic across Hogate Street.
Look, I’m in favor of any upzoning to add housing, but there’s no way I’m going to invest energy in this one in particular. One guy, Chris Hansen, bought all this property in order to push a development on it through the council and make a tidy profit. Sara Nelson is just the latest stooge to let his money talk. Doing a spot upzone as a gift to one rich guy, feels gross.
I’m not gonna put effort into fighting against a housing initiative, but I’m not gonna put effort into supporting this one either. And Nelson doesn’t get any urbanist cred from this.
Yeah, stuff the poors and the service workers in the well-known liquefaction zone. Nothing bad will happen surely. It’s not like useless office space elsewhere around the city could be redeveloped for denser housing. Like maybe Nelson could propose to reclaim the waterfront property in Fremont?
You’re kidding yourself if you think this is anything more than Hansen trying to find some way to increase the value of the land he owns that he didn’t get to build a stadium on. This is all funded by Hansen.
I take different approach to comrade R above but I agree that this is a bad idea. There is a lot of developable land in Seattle in far more salubrious places that SoDo. There are vacant businesses and homes, parking lots, and brownfields/disused land all over the city but of course it can’t be developed unless the nominal owner can reap the benefit of effortless accumulation.
John Stuart Mill is as right today as he was then…”[Land owners] grow rich in their sleep without working, risking or economizing. The increase in the value of land, arising as it does from the efforts of an entire community, should belong to the community and not to the individual who might hold title.”
Speculative investment in land has far too much influence in Seattle. Curbing that through land rents/ground leases, etc would go a long way to unlocking land for development without squeezing people into a liquefaction zone hard by a busy port.
In other words, revolution is preferable to reform? I’m aware that there’s land all over the city that could be used for affordable housing, but I’m far more aware that every single individual place is utterly unacceptable for affordable housing. For some strange reason the great and the good have decided, just this once, to counter that latter natural law, and I can’t bring myself to accept that those who nevertheless argue against this location are doing anything other than the same old same old.
So rather than reform or revolution we’ll just let the Seattle Process have its way.
There are large parcels that could house many families, not 4 or 6-plexes, but go off. Brownfields and graffiti exhibits before solutions to Seattle’s now-normalized “crises.”
Bad idea. Ask the people who it affects if they support it. Of course, people who feel no consequence of this are fine with it. I’ll support a tunnel to Hawaii. People in Spokane, would probably support it. But, you’re providing one sided arguments for placing housing in this area. The off-ramp to the stadium and the parking lot was paid for with tax dollars from the Port for the trucks coming and going.
City government allows the decimation of all low income housing in downtown Seattle so developers can create
high rise condos. They’d rather cater to rich developers and corporate interests then create a livable city. These same developers whine about having to pay enough taxes to support law enforcement and to provide low income housing.