By Erica C. Barnett
Legislation would eliminate an early local appeal process that has delayed land use decisions a year or more drew the usual crowd of longtime Seattle property owners to City Council chambers on Wednesday, where they claimed the proposal would eliminate their “voice” in land use decisions and result in the “clear-cutting” of Seattle.
On the other side were environmentalists and housing advocates who argued that the lengthy delays that routinely bog down efforts to add housing contribute to sprawl, worsens pollution from cars, and exacerbates the affordability crisis that impacts Seattle’s growing renter majority.
In recent years, property owners have shifted away from saying out loud that renters will take away “their” street parking and harm their property values, a view that has become somewhat less acceptable amid a growing affordability crisis. Now, they insist that denser housing for renters will turn Seattle into a treeless desert and kill orcas and salmon.
Many of the opponents’ comments on Wednesday bore little relationship to reality. One speaker, for instance, falsely claimed the legislation would “eliminate environmental appeals on all city land use legislation and any city building project” at a time when the city experiences “heat islands because of clear-cutting thousands and thousands of mature trees” for development, which is also untrue.
Another speaker, who identified himself as a Seattle resident for more than 30 years, called the Ballard neighborhood—which has transformed over the past 20 years from sleepy fishing village to lively urban center with the addition of thousands of new residents—”an environmental disaster. … I lived in the New York City area. I moved from the East Coast to here to get away from that. And when I see Seattle changing into something that resembles New York City, it’s very sad to see that we’re going in that direction,” he said.
Other speakers claimed that eliminating administrative appeals would result in deaths due to heat islands caused by apartment construction, “take away the voice of the people” the same way Trump is trying to take away people’s voting rights, and, yes, kill orcas and salmon.
The actual proposal, which is sponsored by District 2 councilmember and land use committee chair Eddie Lin, is much more benign, though it’s obvious why density opponents are against it: The bill would eliminate their ability to delay changes to the city’s land use code by filing the equivalent of a complaint form with the city.
Currently, anyone can halt a proposed land use change in its tracks by paying $120 and filing an appeal with the city’s hearing examiner. Appeals at this level stop the legislative while it’s still ongoing, cutting off deliberation and debate while the hearing examiner considers whether the city has made the right determination about a proposal’s environmental impact.
This process rarely results in changes to legislation—between 2016 and 2026, just three appeals have even partially succeeded—but it does slow down proposals to allow more density in the city’s historic single-family enclaves: Over the last 10 years, cases have taken an average of 151 days to resolve, with two-thirds of all claims resulting in a dismissal or being withdrawn.
While Seattle has offered this “administrative” appeal process since the 1980s, other local jurisdictions, including King County and Bellevue, do not.
Lin’s legislation would get rid of this “pre-legislative” process, while still allowing appeals to the state’s Growth Management Hearings Board or King County Superior Court, which both occur after the city has adopted actual legislation, rather than while the deliberative process is still going on. Although many of the speakers at Wednesday’s hearing said eliminating hearing examiner appeals would “silence” their “voices,” that’s clearly not true: The city’s long-delayed Comprehensive Plan update is currently stalled indefinitely due to a legal appeal.
House Our Neighbors co-executive director Jeff Paul, one of several public commenters who spoke in favor of Lin’s bill on Wednesday, said he was “remarkably frustrated,” as a lifelong environmentalist, to hear so many people claim that dense housing leads to environmental harm.
“According to every environmental scientist in the world, we have to massively reduce the amount of time that people spend driving in cars,” Paul said. “The only way that we can do that is build densely. Public transit only works when people have dense cities. It’s the most important single drawdown that we can do, and we needed to start five decades ago.” Yet Seattle homeowners are still busy “talking about [how] it’s so important that one person can stop the entire city from making decisions about what is going to happen with our land use and our ability to meaningfully address the climate crisis.”
Lin’s land use committee meets again, and is expected to take up the proposal, on July 15.
