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.
