By Lars Turner, Gabriel Prawl, and Chris Voigt
Seattle’s trade-based economy operates like a beating heart at the center of a regional circulatory system that pumps sustainable family-wage jobs, growth opportunities, and economic prosperity into the city as commerce flows out across the US, from Edgar Martinez Way in Seattle all the way to Boston.
The arteries of this system are freight mobility corridors that facilitate ingress and egress around Seattle’s bustling port district. This system will be compromised if the Seattle City Council approves a bill that would allow housing development in the midst of incompatible industrial land uses. The upzoning effort threatens to erode our local maritime economy and would put future residents in harm’s way.
Local governments have invested billions of dollars into our unique deep-water ports, rail corridors, and road infrastructure to ensure transportation networks operate efficiently to supply dozens of trade-dependent sectors, both large and small, with reliable freight transport to and from the Port of Seattle. Our status as a leader in international trade was made possible thanks to forward-thinking industrial land-use policies, which preserve industrial land for a diverse array of industrial uses.
The legislation the council is considering would lift the prohibition on residential properties development within 200 feet of designated Major Truck Streets in the “Stadium Transition Area Overlay District,” (STAOD) which comprises several blocks of land around the SODO arenas. Permanent residents will send more traffic into a small area, with limited transportation capacity, that is already overcrowded during regular stadium events.
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City leaders are on the cusp of putting 58,400 jobs across Washington state at risk—including on the Seattle waterfront. Marine cargo operations along the waterfront create $4.5 billion in annual business output, $1.5 billion in labor outcome, while supporting an additional 30,600 secondary jobs.
Pinching freight thoroughfares in Seattle would impair our state’s thriving agriculture producers as well. Washington’s potato industry, as an example, has the highest yield in the nation—producing 93 million pounds annually. Washington potatoes flow through the Port to major export markets like Japan, Korea, the Philippines, and Taiwan. This activity produces an economic benefit to our state of more than $7.3 billion , and the production supply chains support approximately 32,000 direct jobs.
Although industrially zoned lands make up only 12 percent of the city’s total land, they contribute about 30 percent of the city’s annual tax revenue. It’s clear that maximizing maritime uses in these areas pays off. Port jobs provide sustainable economic benefits that have supported family-wage careers across generations. Maritime workers can still afford to live in the city where they work—an increasingly rare quality in Seattle’s downtown core.
City leaders must also consider the urgent public health and safety issues that would face future residents seeking affordable housing in SODO. In 2022, Seattle’s Industrial & Maritime Strategy Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS) outlined potential harms that could result from siting housing in areas that are adjacent to maritime industrial lands.
The EIS explicitly highlights Seattle’s history of redlining as a motivating framework for the analysis, noting the detrimental impacts of prejudicial land-use policymaking on city residents over time. The SODO subarea where the city is now contemplating residential development is rated lowest on the city’s “Access to Opportunity Index.” By moving forward with this bill, city leaders would be doubling down on residential land use policies that have already failed low-income communities and communities of color.
As the city decides whether to place affordable housing next to a very busy working waterfront, they must be clear-eyed about the significant risks that will face future tenants. Permanent SODO residents would be placed right in the middle of inhospitable maritime industrial land uses. SODO is one of the hottest areas of the city with constant noise and light pollution, complete with a 24-hour average decibel rating that exceeds federal standards for residential noise levels. The proposed development would house residents on top of an earthquake liquefaction zone that could be subject to catastrophic collapse when disaster strikes.
Existing maritime economies and future SODO tenants can’t afford the high-risk tradeoffs inherent in this proposal for the stadium overlay district. Fortunately, city leaders can look to the negotiated alternative that stakeholders, including land developers, agreed on in 2023. Opportunities for mixed-use development in Seattle could be found in the Georgetown neighborhood, where an affordable “makers district” could thrive without similar impacts on residents, or to local maritime operations.
As family-wage jobs and affordable housing opportunities in Seattle continue to contract, we need legislation that invests in the long-term wellbeing of all city residents, not just a few wealthy landowners in SODO. This proposal is a bad deal for Seattle’s working families, and our thriving maritime industry. It risks the viability of scarce maritime industrial lands that we cannot afford to lose.
Lars Turner is the International Secretary-Treasurer of the Masters, Mates, and Pilots, AFL-CIO. Gabriel Prawl is the President of the Seattle Chapter of the A. Philip Randolph Institute. Chris Voigt is the Executive Director of the Washington State Potato Commission
Is this ridiculous idea really an issue beyond the three or four people who will profit massively from this boondoggle, or is it Sara Nelson, extremely unpopular with city voters, wants a distraction from her vast ineptitude, such as tens of millions spent on non-existent cops and various security griftings?
I’m sorry, but these are ridiculous arguments. The areas they are talking about are a few blocks around the stadiums, all of which are serviced by ample public transportation. Almost all heavy freight trucks use arterials to the south, Lander and Spokane for example.
These are the same old, tired arguments you all used to kill the Occidental Street vacation that sunk the basketball arena. Come to find out, no freight trucks used those two blocks ever. Get some new material already!
If you’re really that concerned about extra cars, limit the parking minimums. Of course you wouldn’t support that thanks to melted car brains that can’t envision anything beyond sitting in your two-ton mobile living rooms to get anywhere. This sort of short sided thinking is exactly what got Seattle in the housing mess it’s in.
And I’m sorry, you’re sooooo concerned about low income people that would live in the low income housing that your solution is to… Block the building of low income housing. Make it make sense?!
I’m old enough to remember when the stadiums were being built, parts of the proposals included these rezoned residential neighborhoods. This is in part what many of us voted for and supported. A thriving neighborhood around the stadiums that could support year round use. Thirty years later, and we’re still in fact finding mode. Give me a break!
Oh yeah, the stadium. Now there’s a popular idea. I think the better plan is to just skip the stadium altogether and just put hundreds of millions of tax dollars in the pockets of city oligarchs. Because, Seattle, get with the times.
If it shares space with Pioneer Square, the two stadiums, and adjacent housing towers in the parking lots of the domes, not to mention close to railway station, then it’s ok for housing. Mixed use IS the future.
Remember kidz, the only place in Seattle it is acceptable to dump high density is in middle class neighborhoods. That’s the rule. Anything other than hosing over those middle class scum is (insert your insult here…I suggest “inequitable”, or “unfair”, or in the case of rich neighborhoods “too diggity dang hard to do”).
Why do middle class people hate the middle class people who want to be their neighbors so much? I will never understand the desire for suburbia at all costs in what could be a great city. Land values will get to a point where only the rich can afford to live in Seattle…Atherton North, with minimum lot sizes and lots of accommodation for cars. It’s already happening…homeowners are seeing their home values slashed with the value in the land making it up. Next stop, teardown and redevelop into a modern design everyone will hate, and the surrounding properties will inch closer to the same fate.
Or middle class neighborhood could soak up the demand for housing with modest “missing middle” developments and forestall the teardowns. But these are the same people who won’t ride a bus or train in case they have share space with someone they don’t like so I am not hopeful.
It’s the GIMMES vs the NIMBYS. Go NIMBYS!
I am in agreement with the idea that that area is no place for new housing development, as there is already a lot of existing land in actual residential areas that could be used.
But my eyes glazed over at this, in the second graf…
“The arteries of this system are freight mobility corridors that facilitate ingress and egress around Seattle’s bustling port district.”
I get that it calls back to the heart/circulatory figure of speech in the preceding graf but why not just…
“The arteries of this system are the Major Truck Streets that carry freight into and out of Seattle’s bustling port district.”
And then define Major Truck Streets, which doesn’t happen later when it’s referenced either. That’s really the crux of the argument, that heavy truck traffic and residential development are incompatible. So tell us a. what heavy truck traffic looks like (volume and tonnage per day) and b. the value of that to the local economy that is at risk if this happens. The entire port’s economic impact is shown but what’s happening right where this project is planned?
Eschew sesquipedalian verbiage…as Strunk & White never said. Use words that convey your meaning and don’t try to make a busy port sound like some delicate part of the human anatomy.
So, what is the difference between multifamily housing and the uses already allowed that include hotels, light industry, arenas, and retail? What generates traffic that would interfere with freight? Is freight shifting more to rail; should it?