By Erica C. Barnett

A process that started with a year-long delay ended in a cascade of votes on more than 100 recently introduces amendments last week, as the City Council adopted “Phase 1” of its 10-year update to the city’s Comprehensive Plan on Friday.

The comp plan, the document that guides how and where Seattle will grow in the future, gets a major update every decade; the one that’s currently in place, Seattle 2035, was launched through a series of open houses in January 2014 and signed into law in October 2016. Outreach and engagement for the latest update, which Mayor Bruce Harrell dubbed the One Seattle Plan, began in January 2022, and the council just adopted the first part of the final proposal in September 2025.

The mayor’s office contributed a year to that extended timeline by repeatedly pushing back the release date for their plan, which was the subject of extensive internal debate over how much new housing the city would allow in traditionally walled-off single-family neighborhoods. (Seattle hasn’t had strict single-family-houses-only zoning for years, but its land use patters are starkly suburban, with one house per lot in the vast majority of the city’s residential land.)

While those internal deliberations were going on, the city did an environmental study of five different versions of the plan, ranging from “no action” to an option that would have allowed modest new density in neighborhoods along with even more rental housing in the places where it’s already allowed—generally, large commercial centers and along busy arterial roads. During their 2023 campaigns, most of the City Council candidates who would go on to win their elections said they supported this option or another, denser alternative crafted by housing advocates, known as Alternative 6, indicating broad support for significantly more housing across the city.

In March 2024, Harrell finally released a first draft of his “One Seattle Plan.” The proposal, a drastically scaled-back version of a more ambitious plan the city’s Office of Planning and Development put forward, was roundly derided by housing advocates, including the city’s own Planning Commission, as woefully inadequate to meet the housing needs of hundreds of thousands of new residents Seattle is expecting over the next 20 years. (Former District 4 council candidate Ron Davis, who was defeated by Maritza Rivera, called it “a 20-year plan to give up on the housing crisis.”)

After that round of backlash, Harrell’s office released a new draft of the plan in October that slightly increased density in a few parts of the city—mostly by restoring six of the 48 “neighborhood centers” that were part of OPCD’s rejected early draft of the proposal. This new version now included 30 neighborhood centers—areas within about 800 feet commercial “nodes” or major transit stops, where future zoning changes could allow 3- to 6-story apartments.

Months of additional outreach and engagement followed. Housing opponents deployed their usual arguments against the modest density updates in the plan, from pleas to protect Seattle’s suburban-style neighborhood character to claims that a handful of small apartment buildings in up to 30 locations would be tantamount to “clearcutting”  Seattle and killing baby orcas and endangered birds. They also rolled out a perennial complaint among people who want Seattle to stay the same: There wasn’t enough outreach. They didn’t feel “heard.”

The council ranged from sympathetic (Cathy Moore, who previously said she supported Alternative 5, said allowing apartments in Maple Leaf would destroy the neighborhood, and Maritza Rivera tried to ensure no apartments could be built in upscale neighborhoods in her district) to unmoved by these arguments.

Mostly, the council wanted to restrict housing in historically single-family areas and continue channeling new apartments to noisy, polluted arterials. Alexis Mercedes Rinck, a Central District renter who doesn’t own a car, was the exception: She consistently argued for more density and would go on to try, unsuccessfully, to restore more of the neighborhood centers Harrell removed from the plan.

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While all this was going on, state legislators forced the city—all cities, in fact—to allow at least four units of housing on every residential lot, or six if two of the units are affordable. The city was supposed to pass legislation to comply with that law, House Bill 1110, as part of the comprehensive plan update; instead, because the plan was so far behind schedule, the council passed “interim” legislation to meet a state-imposed deadline in May.

That gets us, more or less, to the past six weeks, when after months of relative torpor, the city council took up more than 100 amendments to the two pieces of legislation that make up this part of the comprehensive plan update, passing dozens of changes over the course of several days. (The council will take up other aspects of the plan, including changes to parts of the city that are already dense, next year.)

Some of the amendments, like Dan Strauss’ proposal to strip out a planned neighborhood center around the existing Phinney Ridge commercial district and “replace” it by restoring a neighborhood center near the Goodwill store in Ballard, came so late in the process that advocates were scrambling to understand the impact even as the council was voting to approve them.

Others, like Maritza Rivera’s “compromise” amendment giving the director of the city’s planning department new authority to force developers to change their site plans to preserve existing trees and enlarging mandatory “tree protection areas,” were so late-breaking they were only available on paper, hot off the printer, to people present in council chambers. One of the explicit purposes of that amendment, which passed, is to “preserve and enhance the city’s physical and aesthetic character.”

The council’s changes will, generally speaking, decrease the overall size of the city’s neighborhood centers, with the greatest reductions in council districts whose representatives are wary of (or outright oppose) dense housing in areas dominated by single-family houses. Rob Saka (West Seattle), Joy Hollingsworth (Capitol Hill and the Central District) and Maritza Rivera (Northeast Seattle) successfully excised large swaths of their districts from planned neighborhood centers, arguing in each case that “community” in the area opposed new housing and that Harrell’s plan had failed to take into account the unique features that made these areas inappropriate for apartments.

Joy Hollingsworth proposed her own last-minute amendment to preserve the “donut hole” of low density between Capitol Hill, First Hill, and the Central District, but pulled it last week, saying she would reintroduce the exemption as separate legislation in the future.

The council rejected efforts by Alexis Mercedes Rinck to restore some of the neighborhood centers Harrell’s office eliminated in their draft plan, arguing that including any new density would require a lengthy environmental review, making the final comp plan update even later than it already is. Allowing more density, council members like Strauss noted, will likely trigger a review under the State Environmental Policy Act, while preserving existing apartment bans does not. Allowing apartments in these areas also opens the city up to citizen appeals, which tend to happen whenever the city proposes allowing more, or any, apartments in single-family areas.

Citing advice from the city attorney’s office, the council put all of the proposals to increase density or substantially change the, including the last-minute changes Strauss proposed for his district, in a “docketing” resolution for future council consideration.

The council also rejected Rinck’s proposal to eliminate local mandates that require developers to build parking for new apartments across the city, making the familiar argument that allowing apartments without parking would clog streets and make it impossible for existing residents and people patronizing local businesses to park conveniently.

And although they approved an amendment allowing corner stores throughout residential areas (rather than just on literal corners, as Harrell proposed), they rejected a Rinck amendment that would have allowed stores and restaurants to stay open past 10pm, and allowed other types of businesses, such as bars, in neighborhoods. Bob Kettle, in particular, blanched at the idea of bars and late-night bodegas, arguing that they were “a recipe for disaster on the public-safety front.” [Notice of correction: This paragraph originally said the legislation also prohibits restaurants; it allows restaurants as long as they close by 10pm.]

The council did add some modest height and density bonuses for specific types of housing the city wants to encourage, including privately developed stacked flats (small apartment buildings with each unit on a single floor, distinguished from multi-story townhouses and larger apartment buildings) and social housing. But they rejected Rinck’s proposals to make it easier to build accessory dwelling units on existing lots, yanking several amendments that would have provided density bonuses for ADUs after a lengthy executive session on Friday. Those amendments, too, are now part of the docketing resolution for future consideration.

Overall, the new plan continues to embrace the city’s longstanding strategy—going back to the 1990s—of concentrating new apartments in a few already dense areas while minimizing density in traditional single-family neighborhoods and keeping it relatively low in “urban villages” (now rechristened “urban centers”).

The amendments that occupied so much of the council’s time over the past several weeks will serve, on balance, to reduce the amount of new housing allowed in Harrell’s already scaled-back plan, keeping Seattle’s existing zoning patterns firmly in place except in a few, sharply proscribed areas that could see the reintroduction of the kind of small apartment buildings that were once allowed in residential areas across the city.

But urbanists shouldn’t totally despair. The next council will likely include at least two new pro-housing members (Dionne Foster, running against Sara Nelson, has a commanding lead, while both Eddie Lin and Adonis Ducksworth, running to replace appointee Mark Solomon in District 2, have expressed support for density). That could improve the short-term prospects for amendments like Rinck’s, and make future changes to the comp plan (which can be amended every year) more politically palatable.

The full council won’t vote on the final “Phase 1” legislation until October or November, after additional environmental review of the amendments they just approved. They’re supposed to take up “Phase 2,” which includes zoning changes in the new neighborhood centers as well as the denser urban centers and regional centers, is supposed to start in December.