By Erica C. Barnett
As the council takes up the remaining “phases” of Seattle’s latest 10-year comprehensive plan update—which, as a reminder, was subject to repeated delays by the Harrell administration starting in 2023—opponents of new housing are pulling out all the stops to convince the council that allowing renters to live in neighborhoods will destroy urban forests, kill birds and orcas, and make life unbearable for property owners across the city.
Homeowners, including many who made a point of ID’ing themselves as “native Seattleites,” predicated environmental disaster, community fragmentation, and the extinction of various animal species during several hours of public hearings yesterday on the “centers and corridors” portion of the plan, which would establish density limits in new “neighborhood centers” and along major bus lines and rapid transit routes.
The proposed changes, which would leave the overwhelming majority of the city’s residential land untouched, would give more renters access to neighborhoods with ample public trees, safe sidewalks, and quiet streets. Currently, most rental housing is restricted to highways and large arterial roads, which spew pollution directly into apartment windows and are among the city’s most dangerous, noisy, and unpleasant places to live.
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On Monday afternoon, activists even trotted out a group of young children to perform a song-and-dance routine about “lot sprawl”—a concept promoted by Tree Action Seattle, a group that opposes denser housing in neighborhoods on the grounds that new housing often results in the removal of trees on what were formerly private lawns. “Big trees, we need them so,” the children belted. “Lot sprawl has got to go.”
The agenda of most tree activists in Seattle isn’t about adding street trees or maintaining and replacing trees in parks, where a plurality of the city’s tree loss actually occurs. In a recent action alert, Tree Action said explicitly that “street trees are not a solution” to tree loss because there isn’t enough room in public right-of-way to achieve a 30 percent tree canopy citywide. (In reality, development in single-family areas amounts to a tiny fraction of overall tree loss in Seattle.)
As I noted on Bluesky yesterday, little kids don’t understand housing policy, much less arcane concepts like “lot sprawl.” Using children to promote an adult political agenda is particularly ironic in this case, since anti-housing policies will make it impossible for most kids who are six years old today to live in Seattle when they grow up.
You know who can't understand housing policy? Little kids trained to sing a song on behalf of their parents' anti-housing political agendas. You know who won't be able to live in Seattle if we don't allow more housing? People who are little kids today.
— Erica C. Barnett (@ericacbarnett.bsky.social) 2026-04-06T23:02:40.796Z
The fever-pitched backlash is occurring alongside a larger push to go bigger on housing in the remaining phases of the comp plan. This push is coming largely from young Seattleites and others who belong to Seattle’s renter majority, which is getting increasingly fed up with both rising rents and the limited options for people who can’t afford to buy a typical million-dollar house in Seattle.
Last week, Mayor Katie Wilson announced that she wants to accelerate the adoption of the comp plan update, restoring the neighborhood centers Harrell removed from the plan and expanding the frequent transit zones where new apartments will be allowed beyond the (frankly embarrassing) half-block that’s in the current proposal. While Wilson’s proposal isn’t on the council’s agenda yet, it figured heavily in the comments both for and against the “centers and corridors” portion of the plan.
During the recess between the two public hearings, supporters of Wilson’s “taller, denser, faster” agenda rallied outside City Hall for a competing vision of Seattle—one where renters have access to the neighborhoods many homeowners want to keep to themselves.
Wilson herself kicked off the rally by thanking the group for gathering to support a “deeply important, if somewhat esoteric, topic of the day—Seattle’s municipal zoning codes!”
“Last week, you heard me announce my administration’s taller, denser, faster housing program. I guess that’s the official name now,” Wilson said. “What that means is that we’re going to start with a more inviting, optimistic assumption of our growth capacity. … We are going to plan to allow more housing in every neighborhood, creating an equitable distribution and meaningful housing choices. Every neighborhood should be an open, welcoming place for people and families to live.”
The opposition to Wilson’s plan is going to be fierce, as people who bought houses decades ago fight to restrict where housing can go and impose tree planting and retention mandates on apartment developers that do not apply to them. But there was heartening news for housing advocates yesterday, too. After the rally, which also featured disability advocate Cecelia Black, Community Roots Housing leader Colleen Echohawk, and City Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck, pro-housing activists filed upstairs to testify in favor of Wilson’s more inviting, optimistic vision.
One of them, Jason Weill, introduced himself as a longtime Seattle resident and homeowner who was “excited about all the growth and vibrancy happening in our city” but “really concerned about the rising housing costs and the constraints that we have on where we can build housing. I’ve lived in apartments built so close to I-5 I could hear highway noise 24 hours a day, and air pollution was a constant health hazard because I could only cool my apartment by opening the windows.”
Apartment renters across the city can relate to this exact situation—as someone who rented apartments on or within a half-block of three major roadways with nonstop, heavy traffic, I certainly could. The city’s renter majority—a population that includes the mayor herself— is pushing back on the belief, enshrined in our zoning codes, that only homeowners deserve access to the most livable parts of our city. It’s now up to the city council to resist the urge to maintain the unsustainable status quo.
Young children don’t understand sexuality or “gender identity” either and yet progressives have no problems using children to push those policies. Suddenly, when it comes to trees, there is an uproar. Hilarious.
And at the same time the idea of removing mandatory housing affordability requirements in new developments is “gaining traction” on Council to increase development.
So much for affordable housing development.
You must have listened to a different council meeting than I did. I heard tree advocates calling for Dense Forests for Dense Housing. Basically, to prevent 100% hardscape on developments. But clearcutting a lot is much easier and cheaper for developers. You know who won’t be able to live in Seattle if we don’t preserve our canopy? People who are little kids today.
Nearly 18% of Seattle’s rental stock is in single-family homes sprinkled throughout Seattle’s Neighborhoods. In North Seattle, where I live, there were until a few months ago between 12 and 14 rentals within a two block radius of my home on quiet leafy beautiful streets. Most of the houses have affordable rent and they hold anywhere from one to five residents. Four of these homes have now been torn down and replaced with new luxury homes ranging in price from 800k to 2.4 million. The virtually unregulated upzoning of the neighborhood residential zones so that four structures can go on any property has led to a net loss of affordable rentals and net gain of luxury homeownership. The Comprehensive Plan is a plan for displacement and gentrification on steroids.
The constant accusation that the advocates for trees and moderate growth are anti-renter shows little awareness of what the real issues are: compatibility of height and scale with existing neighborhood housing stock. Missing middle housing was sold to us as something that was to be compatible with existing neighborhoods —and that is part of the law (HB 1110). We were shown pictures of lovely, modest duplexes and garden court apartments. When you put a new apartment house next to an existing house and the house is one and a half stories to two stories as in most of the neighborhoods, the existing home loses privacy and light. The yard becomes a fishbowl and their windows look into someone else’s bathroom.
On the other hand, when you have renters living in homes, which is the case all over our existing neighborhoods, most people don’t even know they are living next-door to renters. Renters blend into the community. Capitol Hill shows a graceful and established way of mixing single-family homes and apartments. On many of the lovely streets of North Capitol Hill the apartments are always placed on the corner. They do not take away the light and privacy of more than one home. They are architecturally compatible with the architectural styles on the block. We could have design review and we could have a comprehensive plan that built in compatibility — instead of unnecessarily disrupting the cohesion and beauty that makes the neighborhoods desirable in the first place.
Regarding the terrible fate of someone needing to live in an apartment on a busy street: I rented for much of my life, 23 years. As a renter, I looked for apartments frequently, and I would like to point out that most of the heart of Capitol Hill is apartment buildings, and very few of them are on busy streets. This is similar to large parts of Ballard, Queen Anne, Magnolia, parts of Green Lake and elsewhere. These are beautiful neighborhoods, and there is an enormous amount of housing that is not on the busy arterials where the new buildings are being placed. It simply is not true that renters are forced to live on polluted transit corridors.
It is also not true that we are in a housing crisis for renters. We have finally reached a tipping point and are entering a balanced market. Our average apartment is $800 less per month than in Bellevue. There are over 12,000 rentals available on Zillow, many between $1,000-$1,200 per month. Most of the new buildings are offering two months free and are begging for tenants. Quite a few of the older buildings built in 2021 in the light rail proximities have astonishing numbers of vacancies. These arguments for infinite upzoning need updating.
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As far as I-5 noise, lots of homeowners live near the freeway too. Yes they might have private yards but I appreciate the yards so much everytime I go for a walk. The gardens freshen the air and on hot days it’s so much nicer to walk under trees than in the beating sun. I don’t want to see all the traditional neighborhoods get replaced by large apartments.
Agree, this article is full of some major assumptions about renters and neighborhoods and perhaps would be better off just calling out the real issue: affluent vs poor. (High income renters, and there are many, have tons of options and already served by the market.) Who benefits from existing aging, low density housing stock? Who benefits from a glut of new upscale, high density housing? There are whole neighborhoods of lower value, SFH homes along “undesirable” environments whose owners are happy to have beat the odds and have some housing security and equity. It’s easy to beat up on the types that show up to council chambers, but there is so much more to the story. Thanks for sharing what you see in your own neighborhood, I’m seeing similar in mine.
But, but, if Seattle allows more housing, more people will move here, and homelessness will increase! And if housing were expanded nationwide, homelessness would increase exponentially, right? Because both births and immigration would increase to soak up that housing supply. I mean, it’s proven scientific fact that you can’t solve traffic by building more roads, so presumably it’s also proven scientific fact that you can’t solve the unaffordability of housing by building more of it. Next thing you know, someone will say we’d have more food if we grew more food. Dangerous talk, all this talk of change, because for someone, somewhere, this is the best of all possible worlds.
” for someone, somewhere, this is the best of all possible worlds.”
No notes. This is the Seattle POV.