Category: Density

City Council, Density, housing

Council Kills Morales’ Affordable Housing Bill, Arguing for More Process and Delay

By Erica C. Barnett

The Seattle City Council voted 7-2 to kill legislation sponsored by Councilmember Tammy Morales aimed at helping community organizations with “limited development experience” build small-scale affordable housing developments and “equitable development” projects, such as health clinics, day care, and retail space.

Morales had been working on the program, called the “Connected Communities Pilot,” since 2022. The five-year pilot would have helped as many as 35 community organizations build larger, taller buildings, as long as they preserved a third of their rental units for people making 60 percent or less of the Seattle’s area median income (AMI), or built homeownership units for people making 100 percent of Seattle AMI or less.

It would have also allowed community groups to build apartments in areas of the city that have historically been reserved for single-family houses, and exempted certain projects in historically redlined areas from design review and parking minimums, two requirements that can add significant time and cost to projects.

The council’s land use committee, which Morales chairs, voted against her bill last week, citing vague concerns that the bill had been rushed and that there were more appropriate avenues for building affordable housing.

At Tuesday’s meeting, Morales’ new colleagues repeated those claims, suggesting that the city should instead provide affordable housing through the comprehensive plan, the housing levy, or some unspecified future legislative route.

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“After the comp plan process is finalized, we can determine if additional legislation is needed to achieve our housing goals,” Councilmember Maritza Rivera said on Tuesday. “In addition, the city just passed a nearly $1 billion [housing levy] and we do not yet know how these funds will be implemented. … Finally, given our housing shortage and the slowing down of recent development, we need to consider how to incentivize all development, rather than singling out some investments over others.”

In fact, as Morales pointed out, the city does know how the Housing Levy funds will be spent. And the comprehensive plan update is a set of policy guidelines, not legislation—the city can still pass housing legislation and incentives before finalizing the update, which might not happen until next year. “This is just another tool to help us meet our housing shortage, which we all acknowledge we have,” she said. Continue reading “Council Kills Morales’ Affordable Housing Bill, Arguing for More Process and Delay” →

Density, Development, Equity, housing, Mayor Harrell

Planning Commission: Harrell’s Growth Plan Will Worsen Inequities and Keep Housing Unaffordable
Diagram by Matt Hutchins, from Planning Commission letter

By Erica C. Barnett

The city’s Planning Commission, which advises the mayor and City Council on policies related to Seattle’s growth, sent a point-by-point critique of Mayor Bruce Harrell’s proposed 20-year Comprehensive Plan Update to Harrell and Office of Planning and Community Development (OPCD) director Rico Quirondongo last week, echoing many of the issues PubliCola has identified with the status-quo proposal.

As we’ve reported, OPCD originally proposed a plan that would have included significantly more density throughout the city than the anemic version Harrell ultimately introduced, along with an “anti-displacement framework” that deleted dozens of proposals aimed at addressing ongoing harms caused by city policies, like zoning and development rules that prohibit most housing in single-family neighborhoods.

“The [Anti-Displacement] Framework, as drafted, is a list of what the City is already doing to address displacement, yet displacement has already impacted many people and continues to happen,” the commission wrote.

By failing to provide enough housing of all types, especially apartments, in more parts of the city, Harrell’s proposal perpetuates the existing “urban village” strategy, which preserves most of the city for single-family homeowners while concentrating apartments on major arterials and highways. “Upholding this pattern of economic and racial exclusion will do little to reduce disparities in housing affordability, access, and choice,” the commission wrote.

Instead of remedying the existing housing shortage and planning for continued growth in the future, the proposal assumes housing growth will slow down dramatically over the next 20 years, from about 8,000 units a year to just 5,000.

“In order to ensure everyone has a home they can afford in the neighborhood of their choice, we need to plan to increase, not reduce, our current rate of housing production” to allow  “five to eight story multifamily housing in many more areas of the city.” Specifically, the commission recommends expanding “neighborhood centers”—small, isolated where Harrell’s plan would allow three-t0-five-story apartment buildings—to include high-end neighborhoods like Laurelhurst and Seward Park, and allowing higher-density housing further away from “high-volume, high-speed” arterials, so that renters could more easily access amenities like “large parks and quiet streets for recreation” that single-family homeowners enjoy.

“The current housing market locks the most affordable homes, multifamily apartment buildings, into small areas of the city that are often along noisy and polluting major highway corridors or in areas that historically faced disinvestment,” the commissioners wrote. “If the City continues to concentrate affordable housing types like multifamily apartments in the same areas of the city, these long-term patterns of inequity will not change.”

While Harrell’s proposal technically complies with state law by allowing four housing units on all residential lots, the city envisions these units as tall, narrow townhouses, not apartments or “stacked flats,” which are generally more affordable (and accessible to people who can’t climb multiple flights of stairs.) Increasing density in formerly exclusive single-family neighborhoods to allow  small apartment buildings would make it more likely that people with modest incomes could live in these units, the commissioners wrote.

In addition to growth, the comprehensive plan includes strategies related to transportation and parking; these, too, fail to acknowledge 21st-century reality, the Planning Commission argues. Like Harrell’s back-to-office mandate for city of Seattle workers, the plan “overemphasizes centralized employment in Downtown and other Regional Centers,” despite the fact that “daily life and commuting patterns have shifted significantly with many more daily needs being met closer to home.” Acknowledging this reality would mean allowing more neighborhood businesses (not just corner stores on literal corners) and “incorporat[ing] flexibility into land use policies associated with residential and commercial uses,” the commission wrote.

As PubliCola reported, Harrell’s office deleted an OPCD recommendation to get rid of minimum parking requirements throughout the city, a decision the commission recommended reversing “to reduce housing costs and encourage alternative transportation modes.” In addition, the commissioners noted, Harrell’s plan focuses on private vehicle electrification to reduce greenhouse gas emissions—a future in which Teslas, rather than gas-fueled vehicles, clog city streets every morning and afternoon. With Seattle already “leading its peer cities in the number of cars owned per capita,” the commission argued, the city should focus on reducing vehicle trips by investing in alternatives to driving. 

It isn’t too late to weigh in on Harrell’s vision for growth, housing, and transportation in Seattle, but the deadline is approaching. The city will hold its final in-person open house on the comprehensive plan from 6 to 7:30 pm on Tuesday, April 30, at McClure Middle School on Queen Anne, followed by a virtual open house starting at 6:00 on Thursday, May 2. The public has until 5 pm on Monday, May 6, to submit comments on the proposal.

Density, Development, discrimination, housing, Mayor Harrell

Mayor’s Office Removed All New Anti-Displacement Proposals from Draft “Anti-Displacement Framework”

By Erica C. Barnett

As Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office prepared to release the proposed 20-year update to the city’s Comprehensive Plan earlier this year, an advisor sent an email to key staffers at the Office of Planning and Community Development, including OPCD director Rico Quirindongo, raising concerns about an “anti-displacement framework” the office submitted to the mayor’s office last year.

OPCD developed the anti-displacement strategy as part of a proposed comprehensive plan update that included significantly more density throughout the city than the plan the mayor eventually released; that plan, as we’ve reported, reluctantly complies with a new state housing law while preserving the city’s exclusionary housing patterns.

The mayor’s office had already deleted sections of OPCD’s proposal “that would suggest some commitment of new dollars or policy pivots that haven’t been vetted” with his office, the staffer wrote, but OPCD still needed to “really beef[…] up” sections of the plan that highlighted the city’s existing anti-displacement interventions, “with a ton more detail (including the millions we [are] spending on these efforts!)”

For example, the staffer wrote, “We should really be talking up our affordable housing investments—I wouldn’t be surprised i[f] Seattle residents are spending more per capita on this than anywhere else in the country.”

When he announced the draft comprehensive plan in March, Harrell said that his experience growing up in the historically redlined Central District “has informed my belief that we need more housing, and we need to be intentional about how and where we grow, addressing the historic harms of exclusionary zoning and embedding concrete anti-displacement strategies every step of the way.”

But a comparison between the 2023 draft of the plan and the version released in March reveals that the mayor effectively vetoed an ambitious plan to combat displacement and replaced it with a list of laws that are already in effect, including the “record high” $970 million housing levy.

The changes aren’t mere trims or cuts. The August draft, which OPCD finalized after four months of community engagement, described itself as “a toolbox for robust anti-displacement strategies needed to achieve equitable growth” and concluded with an appendix titled “Examples of current City anti-displacement tools.”

In the 14-page version Harrell released, that appendix is the plan.

The changes reflect a dramatic shift in the city’s official strategy for addressing displacement through smart planning and investment strategies. Instead of endorsing policy proposals to prevent displacement in the future, the draft plan repeatedly pats the city on the back for policies adopted years or even decades in the past.

For example, OPCD’s draft included five strategies to “Expand Tenant Protections” in the future, such as expanding access to information about vacancies in affordable housing, expanding tenant protections to more people, funding tenant organizing efforts, and paying for short-term rental assistance to prevent evictions.

In contrast, under a section retitled “Protect Tenants,” the framework released in March summarizes existing tenant protections without proposing any new ones. These include the Just Cause Eviction ordinance (1980),  the Tenant Relocation Assistance Ordinance (1990), the Rental Housing Inspection Ordinance (2010), the Economic Displacement Relocation Ordinance (2021), and the winter and school-year eviction moratoria (2020 and 2021, respectively.)

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Similarly, the unreleased draft suggested the city expand or establish investments in strategies like land banking (buying land for future use), social housing, and right-of-first-refusal laws that would give community-based organizations or tenants the right to buy buildings that house low-income tenants when they go up for sale.

The March proposal eliminates these proposals, instead listing two existing city programs that help homeowners at risk of displacement from historically redlined communities—the Equitable Development Initiative and a density bonus for religious institutions that build affordable housing on their properties, which has been required by state law since 2019.

A spokesperson for OPCD told PubliCola the slimmed-down anti-displacement strategy “reflects many of the existing City policies and programs that were identified, through extensive stakeholder engagement during the summer of 2023, as strategies that collectively play an important and ongoing role in addressing displacement throughout the city.”

“Before assuming new and different policies are needed, the City needs to assess the efficacy of current policies and where there might be gaps. To the extent current policies are effective, the City may want to double down on those,” the spokesperson added.

As with the draft comprehensive plan update released in March, the draft anti-displacement plan avoids discussion the ongoing impacts of explicitly racist past practices like redlining, portraying displacement as the result of market forces rather than ongoing policies the city has the power to change. But market pressures don’t exist in a vacuum, a now-deleted section of the draft plan reads. They are exacerbated by the preservation of “exclusionary zoning” in whiter, wealthier single-family areas, which “limits access for lower-income people and contributes to displacement in other more vulnerable areas as people priced out of these neighborhoods look elsewhere for housing and bid up homes in relatively lower-cost areas”—not in some distant, racist past, but in our present, because of policies in place today.

These deleted sections, which span pages, weren’t just rhetoric; they directly informed city planners’ proposals for the policies they included in the early draft of the plan, including new tenant protections, more apartments all over the city, and “substantial” increases in funding for existing and new anti-displacement strategies. (I’m not referring to the early draft’s pages of historical context, which have been moved to a different part of the plan, but to the sections describing how past discrimination has reverberations in existing city policies.)

A spokesperson for Mayor Harrell’s office pointed out to PubliCola that the draft plan, including the heavily edited anti-displacement strategy, is “not the final plan, and we are still gathering feedback from residents. We see this process as an opportunity to have a conversation with community about how and where our city should grow and will be reviewing every aspect of the plan in the context of the public feedback we receive.”

Based on an earlier round of community feedback, however, there’s little reason to believe the city will change its plan in response to community input now. According to OPCD’s own report on a series of meetings held across the city between November 2022 and February 2023, Seattle residents overwhelmingly said they wanted to see more affordable housing in their neighborhoods, that the city should allow new density, in general, “everywhere” or “spread throughout” the city, and that their favorite thing about where they lived were amenities they could access without leaving the neighborhood, like grocery stores and transit.

Digging into the database of comments, which OPCD links on its website, “density without displacement” is a common theme, with many people identifying the need to allow more housing everywhere while adopting specific strategies to stall displacement in areas that are being rapidly gentrified. OPCD’s original anti-displacement strategy appears to have incorporated many of these concerns by proposing specific policies to address them. But by the time the plan emerged from the mayor’s office, all those proposed policies were gone.

Density, Development, discrimination, housing, Mayor Harrell

Mayor’s Office Edited Ambitious Growth Plan for Seattle to Preserve the Status Quo

By Erica C. Barnett

Last August, Seattle’s Department of Planning and Community Development produced a draft update to the city’s Comprehensive Plan that would have allowed for significantly more density in more parts of the city, including single-family neighborhoods, than the final version Mayor Harrell released in March.

The never-released draft plan, which PubliCola obtained through a records requests, would have allowed more density near bus lines, more apartments in areas historically reserved for single-family houses, and more housing of all types in the city’s most exclusive neighborhoods.

The unreleased plan zeroed in on the city’s history of racist zoning restrictions, and left no question that wealthy, white Seattle residents continue to benefit from exclusionary policies today. Areas that once had explicit covenants banning Black residents “remain disproportionately white, restrictively zoned, and characterized by high-cost detached housing,” according to the original draft, thanks to “facially race-neutral standards like minimum lot size and prohibitions on multifamily housing — both of which remain in Seattle’s zoning today.”

Instead of releasing that plan, Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office spent six months taking their red pens to the document—watering down the density requirements, removing provisions that would have allowed more housing in single-family neighborhoods (such as Laurelhurst, Wallingford, and east Queen Anne) and ensuring that the new comprehensive plan would preserve the status quo while just complying with a new state law designed to allow more density everywhere.

Here, for the first time, is a look at some of the changes Mayor Harrell’s office made to the plan that will guide how and where Seattle grows over the next 20 years. The comp plan is an important document: It sets goals for the coming decades and establishes policies to make them happen; these policies become the framework for future decisions about zoning, land use, greenhouse gas reductions, and much more.

The most obvious and high-impact changes to the plan are reductions in the amount of density the city will allow in every neighborhood, especially historically single-family areas. Many of the reductions in density are fairly subtle, but the first one is glaring: The August version of the plan would have created a new land use designation called “corridors,” where buildings of up to five stories would “generally” be allowed, although “higher heights may be appropriate in areas of mixed-use zoning or other focal points.”

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Urbanists (including PubliCola) have raised issues with the idea that apartments should be restricted to big, busy arterials. But that isn’t an argument against tall apartment buildings on streets with bus routes; it’s an argument for denser housing throughout the city.

The proposal the city released in March completely eliminates the corridor designation, taking large swaths of land surrounding streets like Sand Point Way, Ravenna Ave. NE, and East Madison Street off the table for density. According to a spokeswoman for the city’s Office of Planning and Community Development, Seferiana Day, “the Mayor’s Office considered the corridor option but ultimately decided not to include it as part of its Draft Plan as the other zoning changes contemplated in the Draft Plan can readily accommodate any amount of future growth that does occur.”

According to Day, the city has not calculated how many new apartments and other types of housing including the corridors would have added to the plan.

“[T]his seems to be calling for more housing well beyond what is needed based on projections,” Harrell’s staffer commented. A long-range planner with OPCD responded, “Yes, that is intentional. We have not kept up with past job growth and want to ensure there is a buffer of housing capacity in anticipation of potential future housing demand exceeding the adopted projections (which were low-ball last update).”

For decades, there has been a tension in Seattle between “accommodating” the number of people who are expected to move here—by allowing enough additional housing for a theoretical maximum number of new people—and providing an abundance of options for everyone already living here as well as those who will move here in the future. The comprehensive plan draft the city release in March takes the former approach, creating “capacity” for about 100,000 new homes over a period when at least 200,000 new people are expected to move into a city already facing a critical housing shortage.

Notes between city staff on a draft of the plan show that there was internal debate on this point, and that the mayor’s office prevailed. In one copy of the draft that included staff notes, a staffer for the mayor’s office questioned the plan’s original recommendation to “Plan for expected growth over the next 20 years while also providing additional housing capacity to enable the city to respond to existing unmet needs and potential demand from future employment growth.”

“[T]his seems to be calling for more housing well beyond what is needed based on projections,” Harrell’s staffer commented. A long-range planner with OPCD responded, “Yes, that is intentional. We have not kept up with past job growth and want to ensure there is a buffer of housing capacity in anticipation of potential future housing demand exceeding the adopted projections (which were low-ball last update).” Continue reading “Mayor’s Office Edited Ambitious Growth Plan for Seattle to Preserve the Status Quo” →

Affordability, Density, Guest Contributor, housing, Mayor Harrell

Harrell Throws in the Towel on Housing with a 20-Year Plan to Increase Housing Prices and Worsen Homelessness

By Ron Davis

Mayor Bruce Harrell just released a 20-year plan to give up on the housing crisis. With its proposed update to the city’s comprehensive plan, the administration plans a big slowdown in housing production, and over the course of 20 years, actually aims to make the housing deficit deeper.

This is a stunning surrender from someone who promised he would not play “small ball” and said he wants to embrace “Space Needle Thinking.” Unfortunately, the way state law and the process works, we will be stuck with this feeble framework for quite some time.

Right now, we are tens of thousands of housing units behind, and this plan will take twenty years to make it at least 12,000 units worse, and possibly much more so. It doesn’t improve the housing deficit, and it doesn’t even tread water.

It is literally a plan to fail.

What Is A Comprehensive Plan and Why Do We Have One?

State law requires cities and counties to release a 20-year “comprehensive plan” for how they are going to handle their growth. This includes how much growth, and where it goes. After this plan gets an extensive environmental review, it is much harder to challenge. This makes it expensive, time consuming, and sometimes legally risky to try to change course after the plan is approved. In other words, these plans are hard to unstick.

So the plan to fail will be with us for a while.

The Impact

Failing at housing means prices will climb higher and faster. So unless you have a few million to loan your kids before you die, or a very roomy basement, there is little chance they will be able to afford to live in Seattle. And unless you made around $400,000 a year in your twenties and thirties, people like you will not be able to start a career or raise a family in Seattle.

According to experts, higher housing prices also increase homelessness. This is because when people experience an economic or behavioral crisis in a city with affordable rent, they usually manage to stay housed. But expensive markets like Seattle’s are far less forgiving, so when someone gets into a bad situation, they are far more likely to end up without a roof over their head.

If this all sounds a bit like a certain city by the bay, that’s because it is. San Francisco’s refusal to keep up with housing demand has resulted in $3,200 median rents and people pooping on the sidewalk.

I don’t know about you, but I aspire for more in 2044.

The Numbers, if That’s Your Thing

For those who want to understand the numbers: The slowdown in housing growth relative to population growth over the last few decades created a massive housing debt. Most of the best figures are regional, and address the overall gaps in housing production, production relative to growth (page 20), gaps in affordable housing, even a growing mismatch in the number of jobs homes by one online commentator However you slice the data, the Seattle deficit is tens of thousands of homes, and the regional gap is much larger.

Harrell’s Bizarre Plan To Slow Down Construction

Because of high land prices, stringent zoning and other rules, our ability to add housing is dropping fast. We have built nearly 10,000 units per year in the last five years, but permitting is cratering. If we do nothing, housing production is going to fall off a cliff, to 4,000 units a year for the next 20 years. So the Harrell administration spent a year of staff time and millions of dollars and ignored the overwhelming documented supermajority of feedback they received, and only planned for a little life support to bring it just up to 5,000 units per year. That’s right—we’re going to reach for a sky that is half as high as where we are now.

This plan is likely to yield about 100,000 homes over 20 years, even though King County says Seattle needs 112,000 units just to keep up. The 112,000 unit number comes from the fact that an average rental household in Seattle has 1.85 people, including single family home rentals. Since most of this growth will be apartments, the number of people per unit will be just a bit lower (1.78), which leads to the need for 112,000 homes

In other words, we are planning to fall behind by at least 12,000 homes.

Lest you think no one has thought about sending folks to nearby cities–that’s already baked in. The plan suggests Seattle will add 159,000 jobs, which will support far more than 200,000 people. In other words, the 200,000 person growth target already assumes tens of thousands more commuters from out of town, choking our roads with traffic and paying property taxes somewhere else.

The city says that in the next 20 years, the Seattle population will grow by at least 200,000 people. But if we simply match the growth rates of 2000-2020, we’d grow by 240,000. If we grow at the rate of the 2010s, it will be 363,000 new people. So when they say, “at least” they really mean at least. Those higher rates would increase the housing hole by up an additional 22,000 to 91,000 units!

The plan manages to do all this in especially damaging and clumsy ways.

Racial Inequality

The plan shoehorns a lot of the growth into small areas of the city, an approach Seattle has long called the “urban village” strategy.

And yet the very office responsible for this document called the basic structure of their longstanding urban village strategy racist just a couple years ago. This plan pulls heavily from the same pernicious playbook.

Notably, the plan concentrates poverty, and pushes multifamily housing near large, dangerous, polluted roads. All the while, it shields Bruce Harrell’s neighborhood and other rich neighborhoods with water views, like Laurelhurst and Magnolia, from any real change. And the restricted growth everywhere means higher prices everywhere, which means more displacement for lower-income populations and people of color.

In other words, the city is planning to perpetuate much of the pattern of our openly racist housing history.

Sending Families Somewhere Else

The Harrell administration’s plan is hostile to families.

One of the reasons that family housing is so expensive is our housing deficit, but another is our infinitesimal growth in larger units. Harrell doubles down on this foolish approach, making it much less likely that family housing will be built. For some reason, Seattle seems determined to prevent people from raising kids here.

The state’s “missing middle housing” bill requires cities like Seattle to allow four to six units on normal residential lots. But the plan makes this functionally impossible, especially for family-sized units. If we followed the state’s model code, we could build four 2,000-square-foot homes or six 1,333 square foot homes on a standard lot.

But Seattle cut the square footage allowed by almost 40 percent. Forget decent-sized homes. And in fact, Seattle’s plan also ensures that many more projects won’t pencil out.

In other words, the design is deliberately set up so that that missing middle housing won’t get built at scale, and where it does, the units will be too small for families but still spread around the lot enough to require cutting down lots of trees.

If you think the schools can’t get enough enrollment to stay funded and open now, imagine a future where even fewer families can live here.

Transit, Affordable Housing

The Harrell plan treats taxpayer money with very little respect—notably generating a mere 2,700 units near two new light rail stations, frittering away a billion dollars in taxpayer investment in our regional transit system. It also ignores the overwhelming feedback favoring social housing, as well as the significant margin the social housing initiative passed with. Overall, it fails to tackle the even larger housing gap when it comes to affordable housing of all types.

It plans for less growth than much-smaller Bellevue, much weaker middle housing than Spokane and, and is so bad that state legislators are calling out the BS.

The legislator who led the effort to pass the missing middle housing bill noted that “it barely goes above what new housing production would have been if they did nothing.”

Harrell Gives Up

This is an absurd failure of leadership. Up until now, I’ve wanted to give the mayor the benefit of the doubt. He’s well meaning, and although we disagree about a great deal, he’s not a true conservative like Sara Nelson. He’s just afraid of big business.

But Bruce has lost his touch. Centrist leaders get this. President Joe Biden gets it. Governor Jay Inslee gets it. King County Executive Dow Constantine gets it. Thousands of Seattle residents get it.

Harrell does not.

This article is also available on Rondezvous, Ron Davis’s excellent free Substack newsletter, where you’ll also find details about how to weigh in on the proposed comp plan update.

Ron Davis is is an entrepreneur, policy wonk, and past candidate for Seattle City Council District 4. He lives in Northeast Seattle.

Density, Development, housing, Maybe Metropolis, Mayor Harrell, Uncategorized

Thank You, Seattle Mayor Jessica Bateman!

By Josh Feit

No, you’re not reading the headline incorrectly. If it wasn’t for state Rep. Bateman (D-22, Olympia), who passed pro-housing legislation last year mandating upzones statewide, it’s hard to imagine that Seattle’s actual mayor, Bruce Harrell, would have called for any new density at all in his recently released comprehensive plan update.

“I’m disappointed and underwhelmed with the plan Seattle put forward,” Rep. Bateman told PubliCola. “It barely goes above what new housing production would have been if they did nothing.”

Harrell’s Office of Planning and Community Development, which published the new draft comp plan last week, estimates it will lead to an additional 100,000 new homes in the next 20 years—about 12,000 homes less than the bare minimum Seattle needs to accommodate, according to King County projections.

“They missed the mark. They didn’t aim high enough,” said Bateman, whose legislation requires cities to allow at least four housing units on all residential lots, or six if two of the units are affordable. While Harrell’s “One Seattle” comp plan technically complies, it does so at a minimum with NIMBY caveats and with a proposal that only provides 20,000 more homes than the “no action” option, which assumes developers will build 80,000 new homes under existing zoning rules. Seattle’s own transportation plan, released just a few weeks before the comp plan update, predicts more than 250,000 new people will move here over the same time frame.

Every 10 years, cites statewide are required to update their local comprehensive plans—formal policy documents that govern growth in sync with the state’s sustainability goals.  With the mandate in play, Seattle housing advocates saw this year’s comp plan process as a beachhead for finally addressing the issue that defines Seattle’s affordable housing crisis—the housing shortage.

“Think big,” housing advocates from the social justice, business, environmental, and, labor communities urged OPCD in a joint statement last year. Current Seattle zoning prohibits dense development in roughly two-thirds of the city, its “residential zones,” limiting construction to stand-alone homes and attached or detached units. The advocates asked the city to allow four-story buildings in all residential areas, “remove density limits” in those areas, and eliminate minimum parking requirements citywide. Harrell’s comp plan update does none of those things.

Bateman had to make the density mandates in her bill modest because in order to pass at the state level, she needed to tailor the legislation for cities much smaller than Seattle; the bill’s minimum density applies in cities with populations “of at least 75,000,” or one-tenth Seattle’s size. Rather than capitalizing on Bateman’s starter bill and going with a Seattle-size strategy to create a housing-rich city, Harrell’s comp plan proposal goes small. While pledging to “ensure all neighborhoods are accessible to households with a diverse range of incomes and housing needs,” the proposal does not take the necessary steps to do so.

Besides doing the bare minimum to meet the state mandate, Harrell’s comp plan proposal also draws density away from traditionally single-family zones by regurgitating and re-branding the failed “urban village” zoning policy that helped create our housing shortage in the first place.

Per my New Year’s prediction, Harrell’s proposal undermined the state mandate with devil-in-the-details regulations that make building densely untenable. For starters, the proposal would keep total lot coverage locked at 50 percent, meaning that four or six units would now have to squeeze into the same area originally allotted to one house under Seattle’s old single-family zoning model.

Second, the plan sets the maximum floor-area ratio (FAR), a measure of density, lower than it needs to be to make four- and six-unit developments feasible on Seattle’s typical 5,000-square-foot residential lots. FAR is a ratio that determines how much a developer can build on a lot after taking other requirements, like minimum setbacks and lot coverage requirements, into account.

Seattle’s proposal caps this ratio at 0.9, which works out to a maximum of four 1,125-square-foot units or six 750-square-foot ones—far less, Bateman notes, than the State Department of Commerce’s recommendation for implementing her bill. These units are more likely to be stand-alone townhouses, rather than apartment buildings or “stacked flats,” an OPCD spokesperson told PubliCola, since “we don’t see that type of development occurring” now in areas where four- and six-unit buildings are allowed.

In other words, scrunching more units into a smaller envelope means the kind of projects the bill was supposed to legalize won’t pencil out—and so won’t get built. “If you can’t build fourplexes and sixplexes in the largest city in the state, it’s not a refection of the requirements of HB 1110,” Bateman said.

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Additionally, Bateman said, “We want to have three- or four- bedroom units available,” Bateman said—the kind of housing that would enable families to stay in Seattle. “The whole point was to make it legal to build these housing types.”

Besides doing the bare minimum to meet the state mandate, Harrell’s comp plan proposal also draws density away from traditionally single-family zones by regurgitating and re-branding the failed “urban village” zoning policy that helped create our housing shortage in the first place. Like that exclusionary strategy, Harrell’s plan cordons most new housing into existing commercial districts and along arterials. OPCD estimates that 71 percent of the 100,000 predicted new units) will go where they’ve always gone: Into the city’s densest areas, including “regional centers” (formerly: “urban centers”) and “urban centers” (formerly urban villages.)

The benefit of spreading density citywide, by the way, isn’t merely a matter of creating new opportunities for housing and giving lower-income residents access to more Seattle neighborhoods. It’s also a city planning best practice: Increased density is a prerequisite for an expanded, tentacular, and efficient transit system.

Unsurprisingly, Harrell’s plan falls short when it comes to transit-oriented development, a basic housing tenet that promotes sustainability by up-zoning areas around transit hubs to tie housing, employment, and retail to public transit. Yes, the draft proposal incorporates the long-planned light rail upzone around the future 130th St. station in north Seattle. But a new designation in the plan, “Neighborhood Centers,” is less dense than proposed statewide standards around heavily used bus stops, offering moderate (3- to 6-story) upzones within 800 feet, as opposed to the quarter-mile standard Rep. Julia Reed (D-36, Seattle) proposed in her own transit-oriented development bill this year.

Harrell’s provincial vision amounts to a historic missed opportunity. While we need to build six-plexes and apartment buildings citywide to accommodate our transition into a bona fide big city, Seattle is poised to perpetuate the housing crisis that has metastasized during the last 30 years under our existing, exclusionary zoning rules.

Josh@PubliCola.com