Category: Affordability

Affordability, City Council, housing, Mayor Wilson, Police, Taxes

Mayor Katie Wilson Says She’s “Doing a Reset” on Housing Agenda, “Very Hopeful” About Police Chief

In Part 2 of our interview, the mayor talks about the police chief and potential cuts to SPD’s budget, the future of the city’s CARE alternative first responder team, and what’s happening with her affordability agenda.

By Erica C. Barnett

PubliCola sat down this week with Mayor Katie Wilson to talk about how her agenda is going at six months in. This is Part 2 of our interview, which took place at City Hall on Tuesday morning. Read Part 1 here.

PubliCola (ECB):  Let’s shift gears to SPD. You decided to keep Police Chief Shon Barnes when you came in. You said you’re going to evaluate his performance and decide how to proceed. Have you made any progress on that evaluation?

Mayor Katie Wilson (KW): I am very hopeful about the relationship that Chief Barnes and I are building, and the work that we’re doing with Chief Barnes and SPD, especially around neighborhood of policing models.

ECB: So are you planning to keep him on as chief?

KW: I’m not making an announcement right now. [Pauses]. Yes, I’m retaining Chief Barnes, and we’re working on a number of things.

ECB: Are you concerned by any of the stuff that has come out on PubliCola and elsewhere about anti-LGBTQ statements and actions by Barnes, his deputies, and SPD officers, and the culture of SPD in general?

KW: Absolutely. And that’s one of the things that we’re working on. I think obviously SPD is a complicated department with a complicated history, and I also don’t think that leadership change changes that. So there’s really deep work that needs to happen within the department, and I’m confident that through a partnership with Chief Barnes, we can make some progress.

ECB: Barnes has said a few times now that he plans to keep hiring at the same pace even though the department’s own budget director said SPD will have to slow down hiring to stay within the budget. Councilmember Bob Kettle has said the same thing. At the same time, I’ve heard that you asked SPD to come up with $20 million in cuts. What would that level of cut look like, and what will you do if the police chief disagrees and keeps hiring?

KW: I’m the mayor. This is ultimately direction that’s coming from my office. We have not directed SPD to slow hiring at this point, and we are working with them very closely with the aim of making sure that they remain within their budget for this year,

ECB: And will there be budget cuts to SPD next year?

KW: We have asked all departments, including SPD, to model cuts, and we’re in that deliberative budget process. There are many things, many variables, but we have asked all departments to model cuts, anticipating that all departments will need to take some kind of cut.

ECB: If you propose an actual cut, conservative media like KOMO are going to scream that you’re defunding the police. How likely is it that we’ll actually see cuts to the police budget?

KW: That’s not just up to me, that’s also up to the council. Big picture, we’re in a very challenging budget situation, where we’re facing a shortfall of $175 million. Plus, JumpStart [tax] revenues are certainly not increasing significantly. And so we’ll have to make some hard decisions across the board.

“It is an option to dig deeper into JumpStart, which means basically cuts to affordable housing. Capital gains tax is an option, but it’s not something where we would see revenue in the short term.  Obviously, raising JumpStart is also an option. We’re still working on other progressive revenue ideas, but we don’t have a silver bullet.”

ECB: Your fire district proposal would have really helped with the budget. Obviously, it’s not happening. So, what else is left? Raiding JumpStart even more?

KW: I mean, yes, it is an option to dig deeper into JumpStart, which means basically cuts to affordable housing. Capital gains tax is an option, but it’s not something where we would see revenue in the short term. It might take a couple years to get that up and running, so that doesn’t [help with] next year’s budget. Obviously, raising JumpStart is also an option. We’re still working on other progressive revenue ideas, but we don’t have a silver bullet.

For me, the bottom line is, we are going to be trying to preserve programs and services that directly serve Seattle residents, that contribute to a city that’s affordable and livable, and support our most vulnerable communities. So there’s definitely values guiding where we might choose to cut. And we’re also in the process now of talking with each council member to understand what their priorities are, the things that they would absolutely want to be preserved, so that we can try to transmit a budget where they see their priorities represented.

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ECB: What’s going to happen to the CARE Team [whose authority was sharply curtailed in the last police contract]? Do you see a way forward for them?

KW: Obviously there are constraints in the police contract, but we’ve been working with the CARE Team and with SPD, and there’s plenty of work out there. There’s plenty of people in crisis, so it’s really a matter of how do we get the CARE team to a place where they’re serving people in crisis. And I think there’s a lot of opportunities to do that, that may be in some cases outside of the 911 dispatch system. So we’re working on making sure that we’re fully utilizing that team.

ECB: CARE is integrated into the 911 dispatch system [911 is known as the CARE Department]—what would it mean to take them out of that system?

KW: I haven’t heard like the latest on what that looks like, but I know that we’ve been working with them and SPD, to try to make sure that they’re not sitting idle.

ECB: If you talk to [CARE Department Chief] Amy Barden, she would say, ‘We’re supposed to be a co-equal department with the fire and police departments, and we can’t go into parking lots‘ [because of the contract].

KW: Yeah, I’m, very, very aware.

ECB: You’ve announced legislation that would ban rental junk fees, and you decided not to move forward with proposals to change the three-day notice requirement for evictions and overturn the roommate law. You’ve also delayed changes to the Mandatory Housing Affordability program that developers say they need to move housing projects forward. The comprehensive plan update is delayed by a lawsuit, which is outside your control. Is there anything else moving forward on affordability this year?

KW: There’s so many pieces to housing. I ran on affordable and abundant housing, and the things that you need to do to advance it are legion. I think what I realized is that for a lot of constituencies on the outside, they want to see more of a vision on housing, and when we’re moving forward with just one piece, then people look at that and they’re like, ‘Oh, that’s your vision on housing, but what about this, what about this, what about this?’ And it kind of accentuates that feeling of, ‘Why weren’t we brought in?’

“In this very difficult budget process, I think the fight is going to be over how to retain funding for existing food security programs at the city. There was a lot that was added in the last budget cycle as one-time, like the expansion of Fresh Bucks, so we are going to have to figure out in this budget how to maintain those.”

So I think what we’re trying to do here is a little bit of a reset, where we can set a table, bring people in, and look at what is it going to take to accelerate housing, from the private market all the way to affordable housing and permanent support housing. Including people’s concerns about displacement, which are totally valid. We’re going to keep it a tight process, but what I’m hoping will come out of that is a little bit more of, ‘Here’s our work plan on housing for the next four years.’ And so that is a process that we’re about to embark on that I think will give us a more coherent vision for housing affordability.

When I think about affordability, housing is core, obviously, but food is a big part of this. Free preschool lunches—I think that’s a really impactful investment that we’re making. Honestly, in this very difficult budget process, I think the fight is going to be over how to retain funding for existing food security programs at the city. There was a lot that was added in the last budget cycle as one-time, like the expansion of Fresh Bucks, so we are going to have to figure out in this budget how to maintain those.

Obviously, the FEPP levy implementation included significant expansions of subsidized child care and preschool program that are certainly affordability investments. I think there’s a larger conversation around child care, which is also not just about subsidy, but also about the supply side, and what it takes to open and operate childcare. We’re working with the business community on what they’re doing to facilitate childcare. That’s a conversation that I think we’re going to be teeing up before the end of the year, but it’s not going to result in policy before the end of the year.

ECB The best thing about the World Cup for me, and I think for a lot of people, has been being able to just walk around in Pioneer Square without cars, and there’s food trucks and there’s excitement and there’s people, and it’s just a vibe. So have you given any thought to taking some of the lessons from that experience, like pedestrianizing the streets, or allowing food trucks, or any of the other things that have made downtown an exciting place to be over these past few weeks?

KW: I think that the last few weeks in Seattle have been amazing, and people are discovering their city anew, and we’ve been doing a lot of thinking about how do we keep that momentum going, how do we do more of this? Obviously, I’m a big fan of pedestrianizing spaces, and I think that the vitality of our city depends on having of people-centered spaces where people can go and hang out and go to restaurants and all that. So yeah, we’re thinking about how we can carry that forward, and I don’t have any specific plans to announce right now, but we’re working on that.

Affordability, housing, Mayor Wilson

Proposal to Temporarily Cut Fees on New Housing Is Dead (For Now), Negotiators Say

By Erica C. Barnett

A proposal that would have given developers an 80 percent break on Mandatory Housing Affordability fees for two years is dead, according to an email to members of the Housing Development Consortium sent by HDC director Patience Malaba yesterday afternoon.

In her message to HDC members,, Malaba wrote, “After careful consideration, I informed the Mayor’s Office that HDC was withdrawing its support for advancing the proposal at this time. Following that decision, the Mayor’s Office chose not to move the legislation forward on a summer, pre-budget timeline and instead will convene a stakeholder workgroup to continue refining the proposal and related policy considerations.”

Wilson’s office confirmed that the proposal isn’t moving forward. “this month,”

Instead, Wilson said in a statement to PubliCola, “we will be setting a table with labor, affordable housing providers, community-driven organizations, and market rate developers to identify shared, collaborative solutions and make sure that our city and region takes every action possible to 1) expedite and encourage housing production 2) support community-driven development, 3) build the critical affordable housing  our city and region needs and 4) prevent displacement of low-income households and Black, Indigenous, and People of Color communities.”

Developers who have been waiting for the legislation say its failure will jeopardize about 30 projects immediately, and make new housing projects far less likely, at a time when market-rate housing development has slowed to a trickle.

The HDC, which represents affordable housing developers, had been negotiating with the mayor’s office for months over the proposal to temporarily reduce MHA fees, which private-market developers must pay as part of the 2016 “grand bargain” that allowed taller buildings in exchange for payments into an affordable housing fund.

Behind the scenes, a number of HDC members and advocacy groups raised concerns over the last several weeks that the MHA “holiday” would lead to the end of the program itself, which is based on the principle that “housing should pay for housing.” New housing, according to this logic, causes displacement and other harms, and MHA fees offset those harms.

Downtown Emergency Service Center Daniel Malone sent an email to Wilson last month expressing “deep concern” about the proposal, which he said would reduce local funding for the kind of housing-first projects DESC builds at a time when federal funding may dry up.

“As we explore solutions and mitigation strategies in preparation for unprecedented federal disinvestment in our existing programs, we will need to rely more on local resources than ever before,” Malone wrote. “Allowing housing developers to receive the benefits of upzoning to only create luxury apartments for the few who can afford them isn’t a solution; it adds to our problems by decreasing the production of affordable housing units.”

Opponents of the temporary fee reduction reportedly sought concessions like a cap on the number of new apartment buildings that could take advantage of the break on MHA fees, along with “backfill” of MHA revenue that would be “lost” due to the fee reduction by other city funding sources.

However, since many of these hypothetical new building projects wouldn’t happen, at least according to the developers who would build them, without the fee reduction, it’s misleading to describe these as “lost” revenues.

Scott Berkley, an organizer with Tech 4 Housing, said the group was “disappointed to see this worthwhile proposal fed to the insatiable maw of the Seattle Process. We encourage the mayor and city council to move beyond a revenue source that demands middle and working class renters fund affordability, while expecting nothing of our city’s wealthiest homeowners and corporations.”

Nicole Macri, a state legislator and deputy director of strategy for the Downtown Emergency Services Center, said there are better ways to reduce costs for developers than slashing MHA fees, even temporarily. The city could, for example, “refund permit fees, or a portion of permit fees, if you deliver the project in X amount of months, or give a partial sales tax exemption for projects” that are finished on time, Macri said. “There are many things the city can control, including the permitting fee,” without giving developers a temporary break on MHA fees, she said.

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The city’s budget process starts in August and ends in November, meaning that any “stakeholder workgroup” process would be delayed until next year, past the point when many developers have said they will have to cancel projects that won’t pencil out with MHA fees attached. The fees range from $6.75 per square foot in the small “urban industrial” zone to $50.46 per square foot in places like north Beacon Hill, with most fees ranging between $10 and $20 a square foot.

In a statement, the leadership of the pro-housing group Seattle YIMBY urged Wilson “to show true leadership on housing by making hard choices to prioritize the homes that can be built right now. Our housing crisis was not caused by having too little process. Seattle has a critical window to show the region we are ready to act, ready to deliver thousands of new homes, millions in new tax revenue, and millions more for affordable housing as we start building again.”

MHA originated at a time before large majorities of Seattle residents agreed that building more housing, not just purpose-built low-income housing, is an urgent need. It also began at a time when development was booming, and for years, it produced tens of millions of dollars of funding for affordable housing projects. But fees have plummeted in recent years, going from a high of $74 million in 2021 to an estimated $22 million last year, because of a precipitous drop in the number of housing projects in the pipeline. UPDATE: Actual MHA revenues last year were $47 million, according to numbers published on July 20, thanks mostly to several large apartment buildings. We’ll have more on this in a separate post.

Emily Thompson, a partner at GMD Development, said a lot of developers are currently in their fifth or six round of “corrections,” which occur just before a permit is issued. “I think that shows the applicant is slow playing it because as soon as you get our permits you have to start” the development process. As for the argument that giving developers a break will reduce MHA proceeds, Thompson says, “Any amount of zero dollars is zero dollars”—that is, if developers don’t build because of MHA fees, there won’t be any MHA proceeds anyway.

Development has slowed precipitously since its peak in 2020 and early 2021. So far this year, developers have only filed permits for 1,134 units of housing. By this time in 2020, in comparison, there were more than 8,600 units in the pipeline, which increased to more than 20,000 units by the end of that year.

Meanwhile, according to data provided by the Housing Roundtable, a group of developers who had been pushing for the MHA “holiday,” more than 50,000 units that were going through the city’s development pipeline between 2023 and 2025 have since been canceled.

PubliCola has reached out to Malaba and Mayor Wilson’s office and will update this post when we hear back.

 

Affordability, Mayor Wilson, Privacy

At City Club Event, Mayor Answers Questions Like “Why Isn’t Pizza Cheap Yet”

 

By Erica C. Barnett

FOX 13 anchor Han Kim interviewed Wilson last night at an event sponsored by City Club Seattle, hitting the mayor repeatedly with bad-faith questions such as “why should we increase the sales tax for transit when so many bus seat are empty” and “why is eating out still expensive when you said you would lower the cost of pizza?”

Kim even posed a couple of questions Wilson has answered ad infinitum at this point: Why did she dismiss the idea that rich people will leave Seattle over the statewide high-earners’ income tax (a story that made international news , thanks largely to nonstop, breathless coverage by right-wing local news outlets in Seattle) and is she still boycotting Starbucks (shortly after the election, Wilson appeared at a workers’ rally and said people shouldn’t buy from the anti-union company)?

Wilson did say she bought a disgusting-sounding “blueberry muffin” coffee drink the other day when she went to the Pike Place Market Starbucks to talk to workers about their labor concerns—hardly breaking news. but now we know.

I live-posted the entire event on Bluesky, including questions from a parade of angry audience members who wanted to know why homelessness and crime haven’t been fixed and seem to have gotten worse. Wilson had some nuanced responses to these perennial rhetorical questions, but she also seemed a bit frustrated with her interrogators, who interrupted her repeatedly mid-answer in a way that—I AM JUST SAYING—I never saw the public address former mayor Bruce Harrell.

Kim also spent several minutes demanding that Wilson respond to comments by former reality TV star and current LA mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt, who claimed recently that a third of LA’s homeless population was “bused in from other states” by “body brokers” and would move 1,200 miles north to Seattle once he cracks down on their ability to access social services. Pratt also wants to force people with addiction into 72-hour mental health holds, which he referred to as “mandatory rehab.” None of this is worth dignifying.

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With the World Cup games just a few days away (and City Councilmember Bob Kettle insisting that the mayor had no right to place a “pause” on the new cameras under the camera expansion legislation the council adopted last year), Wilson was asked again about what circumstances would constitute a “credible threat,” which she has said would trigger the city to turn on cameras already installed in the stadium district.

“A credible threat is if we get information, as our law enforcement agencies often do, that someone has the intention to cause harm to people or property… and it is believable that they might be able to carry it out. That is a credible threat for us,” Wilson said.

The mayor also noted that to the extent that surveillance cameras are useful, it’s generally to provide evidence after a crime has been committed, not to stop crimes in progress. And she pointed out, as PubliCola has, that there are already many city-operated and private surveillance cameras around the stadiums.

Camera proponents have generally been more interested in anecdotes than quantitative data. Last year, Kettle opposed an amendment to the police surveillance plan that would have required an analysis to determine whether the cameras were accomplishing their stated goals before any additional expansions. The council approved new cameras just two weeks after the first set was installed.

 

Affordability, Density, podcasts

Will Dialing Back Fees on Housing Fix Seattle’s Construction Crash?

 

Photo by Joshua T. Garcia, via Wikimedia Commons. Creative Commons CC0 1.0 license.

By Erica C. Barnett

On Seattle Nice this week, Sandeep and I brought on two special guests to explain why developers want a holiday from Mandatory Housing Affordability fees, which are added on to of the cost of every new multifamily residential building in Seattle. The fees pay for affordable housing (or a developer can skip them by building affordable units on sight), but they’re bringing in less money than ever as housing development slows.

Since MHA passed, in 2019, Seattle has undergone a political evolution on housing. Density, which neighborhood activists and most political leaders once saw as having an entirely negative impact on neighborhoods, is increasingly seen as a necessity as Seattle’s renter majority grows. Many people no longer agree that the city should segregate renters from property owners by restricting them to dirty, polluted arterials far from parks, libraries, and tree-lined streets. There’s a growing consensus that to reduce the cost of housing, you have to build more of it.

Our guests this week, land use and housing consultant Natalie Quick and former Seattle Chief Operating Officer Marco Lowe, don’t go so far as to call for a total repeal of MHA, but they do make a strong case for its eventual replacement with an incentive-based approach called funded inclusionary zoning. FIZ, which we’ve covered at PubliCola before provides tax breaks, similar to Seattle’s existing Multifamily Tax Exemption program, in exchange for a requirement that developers build affordable units on site. Instead of charging a fee for housing, which drives up rents, FIZ makes it possible for affordable and market-rate housing to coexist.

As Marco points out, housing slowdowns don’t just lead to a shortage of housing, driving up rents. They also deplete city resources, because when developers decide it’s too expensive to build, the city loses out on all other kinds of non-MHA revenues, from sales taxes on materials to taxes on real estate transactions to property taxes on the housing itself.

This one’s a wonky episode, but one well worth listening to if you want to understand why so little new housing—particularly larger units—is getting built right in Seattle right now and what the city could do to reverse the trend.

Editor’s note: This story originally identified Marco Lowe as the former Office of Economic Development director. This error has been corrected.

Affordability, housing, legislature, Maybe Metropolis

Elevating the Affordable Housing Issue

By Josh Feit

How can we increase affordable housing production? According to Senate Bill 5156, one button we can press is elevator reform. Sponsored by State Sen. Jesse Salomon (D-32, Shoreline), the legislation would allow the state to change current elevator rules that—practically speaking—force builders to buy from an elevator manufacturing oligopoly. His idea: Allow smaller elevators as a way to bring down the cost of housing.

In 2024, a 100-page white paper from the Center for Building in North America outlined how a clutch of firms, including Otis and Kone, have signed onto a binding labor agreement  mandating a set of inflexible elevator specifications that define and limit elevator production in the US and Canada. These specifications, including exclusive propriety installation and repair standards, cut out a bevy of reputable and safe elevator makers that serve the rest of the world.

Prompted by the 2024 report, pro-housing advocates nationwide have been making elevators a YIMBY agenda item. As part of this lift, Sen. Salomon’s aspirational bill would allow changes to Washington state’s building code that could, according the urbanist nonprofit Sightline, increase the production of affordable, smaller-scale multifamily housing: “Apartment buildings with at most six stories and at most 24 units,” specifically, per Salomon’s bill.

The logic goes like this: State-by-state elevator regulations mandate unnecessarily oversized elevators.  As a result, according to the CBNA report,  elevators in North America are more expensive than elevators in the rest of the world. The report found that elevators cost around $50,000 to install in Europe while in the US and Canada, “these installations start at around $150,000.”

As the summary report on Salomon’s bill notes, this means that “currently, buildings either must have large elevators or [developers] are likely not to build them at all.” This second point gets at a cruel irony about opposition to the legislation.

One rationale for the current size standards is to ensure that elevators accommodate disabled tenants who rely on wheelchairs and make it possible for medics to fit stretchers onto elevators in emergencies. And it’s true that the elevator downsize recommended for smaller buildings in Salomon’s bill—they could take up about 17 percent less floor space—could mean elevators wouldn’t be able to accommodate a fully extended gurney. Citing emergency response concerns, the Washington Fire Chiefs and the Washington State Council of Firefighters testified against the bill last year, when it ultimately failed.

However, under Salomon’s recommended changes, elevators would still be ADA-compliant (current state law requires elevators to be much larger than ADA requirements). And, as Sightline notes: The new guidelines would still have enough room to spin a wheelchair around, plus another person, as well as a slightly tilted gurney. More importantly, they say, having a slightly smaller elevator is better than having no elevator at all.

“Perversely,” as the proponents of elevator reform at California YIMBY put it, North American rules actually make buildings less safe for people who need to be transported by gurney and less accessible for those who rely on wheelchairs.

“While larger elevator cabins make it easier to transport patients,” a California YIMBY blog post on the former issue argues, “the high costs the requirement imposes also increases the likelihood that buildings will not have any elevators at all, and that emergency responders will have to carry the patient down multiple flights of stairs.”

The CBNA report made a similar point about wheelchairs. “The United States and Canada now require the largest elevator cars in the world … a perverse disincentive that some developers respond to by simply building walk-ups.” In these buildings, people who are unable to navigate the stairs are restricted to living on the first floor.

Stephen Smith, the author of the elevator-reform report, acknowledges that he doesn’t know how many elevators aren’t getting built that otherwise would if the bespoke regulations didn’t govern the US market. But he stands by his report’s conclusion that “walk-up complexes are … being built, at a scale and to heights that are unique in the developed world.”

He explains: “I spent a lot of time poring over new apartment listings in Germany, Italy, France, and Spain and noticed that virtually all new four-story apartment buildings had elevators, and most new three-story buildings did too. In the US, virtually no new three-story apartment buildings have elevators.”

Smith says that when it comes to four-story apartments, his best guess is that it’s about “50/50” split on new apartments having elevators or not. As for the extremes,” Smith adds: “I have found examples in LA of five-story buildings without elevators, and six-story walk-ups in NYC and Seattle.”

Smith’s report does have telling data comparing elevators per capita in European and Asian countries versus in the U.S. and Canada. The difference is dramatic. Canada and the US come in last with four and three elevator cars per capita, respectively. In comparison, Switzerland, Spain, and South Korea come in at 27, 23, and 15. (Greece tops the list at 41.)

Elevator-free apartments also make housing inhospitable to the broader universe of people who can’t navigate stairs easily or at all and who are looking for affordable housing. Conversely, as I noted, if developers do include the pricey, larger elevators in their projects, it raises building costs. And this too undermines the broader universe of people seeking affordable housing by making the housing too expensive.

Certainly, developers aren’t loopy enough to skimp on elevators in tall buildings. That’s why Salomon’s bill puts the focus on allowing smaller elevators in smaller buildings; changing state guidelines per Salomon’s bill wouldn’t violate any federal rules. (Salomon’s bill doesn’t recommend any changes to bigger buildings; it simply directs the state to “support” efforts to harmonize national and international standards in the hope of beginning a multi-state effort to make North American elevator guidelines line up with the rest of the world’s.)

Fortunately, small-scale multi-family housing such as stacked flats, condos, and small apartments are exactly the kind of housing that urbanists believe will have the biggest impact on supply: Four-and six-story developments are examples of “missing-middle housing” that would fit seamlessly into traditional low-density single-family zones; these are neighborhoods that largely exclude lower-income families, renters in particular.

As Uytae Lee, a pro-city videographer who worked with Sightline to promote elevator reforms, says in his elevator-reform agitprop video: By making more neighborhoods accessible, elevators are “an essential part of our transportation network … a core part of a city’s infrastructure.”

Affordability, City Council, Equity, housing

What That Day-Long Comp Plan Hearing Was About
A public commenter holds up an image of the kind of housing he warns will be everywhere if density proponents get their way.

By Erica C. Barnett

On Friday, hundreds of Seattle residents took time out of their days to comment on proposed updates to the city’s Comprehensive Plan—a document that sets the parameters for growth and development across the city.

Although the plan is supposed to go through a major update every 10 years, Mayor Bruce Harrell released his initial proposal a year behind schedule, and the City Council is currently plodding through the plan in several “phases,” starting with changes to the city’s historically single-family zones, now known as “neighborhood residential” areas.

Some of these changes are designed to implement House Bill 1110, a bill that requires cities to allow up to four housing units on every residential lot, or six if two of the units are affordable. The council, facing a deadline to comply with 111o or accept housing regulations written by the state, passed a short-term bill complying with the law earlier this year, but still has to pass permanent legislation to update zoning rules associated with the new law.

They’re also taking up Harrell’s plan to add 30 new “neighborhood centers”—areas within a 3-minute walk (about 800 feet) of commercial and frequent bus stops where 3-to-6-story apartments would be newly allowed.

Following a pattern that has defined Seattle’s housing debate for decades, last week’s hearing pitted opponents of new housing—who argued that apartments (and the renters who live in them) would destroy the “quaint” character of their neighborhoods and contribute to “clear-cutting” trees on private lawns—against density proponents, who argued that relegating rental housing to polluted, busy arterial roads is inequitable, and that prohibiting apartments in most of the city leads directly to deforestation for suburban sprawl.

Because each person had only one minute to comment, many used some of their time to rattle off a list of amendment numbers—gibberish to anyone who isn’t intimately familiar with the plan. So instead of focusing on the high-level arguments (seriously, though, you NIMBYs need to stop saying housing proponents want to murder “orca babies”), I thought it would be helpful to dive into some of the amendments that came up most frequently.

This isn’t a comprehensive look at the competing changes council members are proposing (I did that here); instead, it’s an attempt to explain the amendments people were praising or complaining about last week, and how they’re hitting with both sides of Seattle’s eternal pro- and anti-housing debate.

Eliminate parking mandates

HB 1110 forced Seattle to get rid of mandatory minimum parking requirements for new housing within a half-mile of major transit stops, making it possible to build apartments with few or no parking spaces; Harrell’s proposal would retain other parking mandates across the city, regardless of demand.

Rinck’s amendment (amendment 7) is the strongest among several that would reduce parking mandates or eliminate them across the city; it would effectively allow developers to add parking based on market conditions and demand, and could result in lower housing construction costs.

Support social housing

Proponents of social housing, which voters overwhelmingly opted to fund using a targeted business tax earlier this year, applauded two amendments incorporating social housing into the comprehensive plan. The first, from Rinck (amendment 17), expresses support for social housing as one of the comprehensive plan’s affordability goals and incorporates it into several sections on affordable housing.

The second (amendment 61), from Kettle, would change existing city law to make it easier to build dense affordable housing in all neighborhood residential (former single-family) areas, and expand the definition of affordable housing to include social housing—a substantive change in law that would take place outside the comprehensive plan itself. A similar amendment, 60, from Sara Nelson would make similar changes to affordable-housing rules but would not apply them to social housing.

Restoring neighborhood centers 

Rinck’s proposal would bring back eight neighborhood centers—those locations within a 3-minute walk of commercial nodes and frequent transit stops where 3- to 6-story apartments would be allowed—that were included in an earlier “Alternative 5” version of the plan and studied as part of a final environmental impact statement for the proposal. As we reported at the time, Harrell’s initial “One Seattle” proposal eliminated half of the 48 proposed neighborhood centers included in alternative, (After widespread blowback, Harrell restored six of the centers his initial plan eliminated).

Rinck’s amendment would restore eight more of the nixed neighborhood centers, bringing the comprehensive plan closer to the alternative that nearly new council member elected in 2023 said they supported.

Single-family activists were overwhelmingly opposed to these changes, saying that they come as a complete surprise, have never been vetted, and would result in—of course—”clearcutting” of trees on existing residential lawns.

“Say no to the city overreach of our community’s character that would destroy the very charm that attracted us to our respective neighborhoods,” one speaker told the council. “Say no to those who have ramrodded this blind-sighted, misguided notion that will result in our neighborhoods being significantly impacted by upzoned, high-density monstrosities.”

On the flip side, both homeowners and renters turned out to speak in favor of the changes, arguing that the city’s renter majority should be allowed to live in more parts of the city. “We spend too much time in the city driving our children around,” one speaker said. “We need more time to walk to neighborhood amenities and also welcome more neighborhood residents into the Seward Park neighborhood with mixed housing types.. … So go as far as you can. We really need it, and if we don’t do that, plenty of trees are going to get chopped down [for] urban sprawl.”

Downsizing neighborhood centers

As I noted in my earlier coverage of the council’s amendments, several proposals would downsize proposed neighborhood centers, while others would increase them. If every single change to neighborhood boundaries passed, they would collectively increase the total size of neighborhood centers across the city, but there’s no guarantee of how each individual vote will go—and the new neighborhood centers would be located, lopsidedly, in the council districts of councilmembers who support expansion.

The downsizing proposals would shrink neighborhood centers in Fauntleroy and Morgan Junction (amendments 35 and 37, Rob Saka), Madrona (amendment 38, Joy Hollingsworth), and Bryant, Ravenna, and Wedgwood (amendments 39, 40, and 41, Rivera).

Dan Strauss’ amendments expanding and redrawing neighborhood centers all over his northwest Seattle district (42 through 49) are the main proposals that would offset these potential losses. If all the amendments were to pass, it would mean that most of the expanded neighborhood centers would be in District 6, which includes parts of Magnolia, Fremont, Wallingford, and Ballard, while most of the reduced neighborhood centers would be in Northeast Seattle, represented by Rivera. (Bob Kettle has also proposed restoring a neighborhood center on Nickerson).

In other words, the neighborhood center-specific amendments are a product of the city’s district council system, in which individual council members have been empowered reshape the density maps in the parts of the city they represent based on their individual opinions about whether more housing is good or bad.

Corner stores, not just for literal corners anymore

A large number of public commenters expressed their support for Rinck’s Amendment 66, which would allow “corner stores” throughout residential areas, rather than just on literal corners, as Harrell’s plan proposes. Rinck’s amendment would also remove a proposed size limit of 2,500 square feet for these businesses, allow bars (not just restaurants), and remove a requirement that new businesses close at 10pm.

“It’s time to let Seattle cook, brew, and create,” one supporter said. Nelson and Strauss have amendments that would remove the “literal corner” requirement but keep all the other restrictions in place.

More transit-oriented development

Rinck’s Amendment 76 would allow denser low-income housing and stacked flats in more parts of the city, by making a technical change to the definition of “major transit” so that it includes areas within a quarter mile of bus stops that have 15-minute service on weekdays. The upshot would be that these types of housing could get a density bonus if they’re near frequent transit; in addition, they wouldn’t be subject to mandatory parking requirements.

One commenter who spoke against this change suggested it would result in “denuding all of Seattle’s neighborhoods” of trees and “subject[ing] nearly the entire city to five- and six-story developments.” Others noted that it went beyond the requirements in HB 1110—which is true; that bill was meant to represent a floor for all cities across the state, not a  maximum density level for the state’s largest city.

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Top-down dictates for new housing

Rivera has a couple of amendments that would create steep hurdles for new housing. The first, Amendment 81, would direct the Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections to write rules dictating the kind of “exterior cladding” allowed on buildings in any local or national historic district, based on “objective design standards,” whatever that means.

Activists have sought and won historic district designations for neighborhoods like Wallingford with the goal of preventing demolition and redevelopment of lots developed in the 1920s and 1930s, but they might balk at HOA-style rules telling them what color they can paint their houses, or what specific type of siding they have to purchase during home renovations.

The second Rivera amendment, 102, is more insidious: It would authorize SDCI’s director, a political appointee, to require developers to come up with alternative site plans, at any point during the development process, “if the Director determines that an alternative site plan could feasibly increase the retention of existing healthy trees.”

In plain language, the amendment would give absolute power to the head of the city’s building department to kill individual housing projects on the grounds that there is some possibility a purely theoretical “alternative site plan” could protect any tree of any size or age—an absurd expansion of the city’s bureaucratic power.

As we’ve reported, neighborhood activists frequently present their own “alternative site plans” that they claim would allow developers to retain trees, usually by reducing the size and value of any future housing on the site.

Developers, who get loans to build housing projects based on future value, generally dismiss these alternative plans as unworkable (if you got a loan to build five 1,500-square-foot units with yards, you can’t pay that loan back by selling five 1,000-square-foot units with no outdoor space); under Rivera’s amendment, the city itself could use similar site plans to effectively stop housing projects from moving forward.

Lawns > housing

Other tree amendments (including 91, from Nelson; 92, from Strauss; 93, from Rivera, which would also establish new tree protection areas) would provide density incentives for developers that preserve existing trees on existing private lawns. One Strauss amendment, 100, would require developers to plant a new tree for every 2,500 square feet of lot area, in addition to other tree requirements, and another, 103, would prohibit removing large trees near the corners of any lot.

Unsurprisingly, many commenters claimed that allowing more density in Seattle’s historic single-family neighborhoods would result in “clear-cutting” the city, by eliminating the trees that homeowners and earlier developers planted in the yards of single-family houses. As one speaker argued, “We risk losing old-growth trees and wetland and bald eagle habitat ecosystems that make this area unique.” In fact, there are virtually no old-growth trees remaining on private property in Seattle, because early developers clear-cut the forest that once occupied the land now known as Seattle in order to build single-family houses.

Two proposals that didn’t come up much, if at all, during the public hearing are also worth flagging. The first, Kettle’s amendment 32, would add an entirely new “public safety element” to the comprehensive plan—effectively adding goals like crime reduction and improved 911 response times to the city’s foundational zoning document.

The second, which spans two amendments (21, from Nelson, and 22, from Saka and Mark Solomon), would “discourage the concentration of human services facilities” for “low-income populations” in downtown Seattle. As the brief staff summaries of these amendments notes, the city frequently has no say in where services for low-income people are located; one reason a lot of services are downtown is because downtown is the city’s most central and transit-accessible neighborhood.

The comprehensive plan committee will take up all the amendments (plus, god help us, any new ones) on September 17 and 18, with a final council vote on the Phase 1 changes likely later this month.