Category: Density

City Council, Density, housing, land use

Cathy Moore Wants to Make it More Expensive to Build Middle Housing

By Erica C. Barnett

In a recent meeting of the Seattle City Council’s special committee on the comprehensive plan, Councilmember Cathy Moore laid out her case for imposing fees on new housing in the city’s traditional single-family areas, where—under a state law passed two years ago, HB 1110—the city is required to allow up to four units on each lot (or six within a quarter-mile of frequent transit stops or when two of the units are affordable.)

The council is gearing up to adopt “interim” zoning changes to comply with HB 1110, which Seattle must do by June; ordinarily, the city would have adopted the new rules as part of the city’s overall comprehensive plan update, but Mayor Bruce Harrell introduced his legislation far behind schedule, leaving the council with little time to consider the plan.

A half-dozen homeowner groups have appealed the plan, arguing that specific new “neighborhood centers”—commercial areas near transit where the proposed plan would allow apartment building—will harm the character of their historically single-family areas.

Simultaneously, the city is considering changes to its Mandatory Housing Affordability (MHA) legislation that would expand MHA to the new neighborhood centers, adding 21 percent to the area of the city that’s subject to MHA, while continuing to exempt the new “neighborhood residential” zones—the new name for the city’s former single-family areas—from the fees.

Moore’s objections boiled down to two main points. First, she argued against the concept of neighborhood centers, noting that the city is already increasing the amount of housing that can be built “throughout the city,” by allowing up to four units on every single-family lot. (Moore specifically opposes a new neighborhood center in Maple Leaf, which she argued would amount to “sacrificing” the entire neighborhood to density.)

Second, and more vociferously, she argued that the city should impose Mandatory Housing Affordability (MHA) requirements on all new housing in former single-family areas, effectively mandating that developers build or fund the construction of at least one affordable unit for every three to five market-rate units they build.

MHA, which has been in place since 2019, allows developers to build more housing in certain parts of the city; in exchange, they agree to build affordable housing on site or pay the city’s Office of Housing, which funds housing elsewhere. The size of the fee varies depending on where in the city the new housing is located, and by how much of a height bonus developers receive. As housing construction slows, so do MHA revenues; currently, the City Budget Office projects that MHA will bring in $22 million in both 2025 and 2026, down from $68 million in 2022 and $59 million in 2023.

“We’re going to open up the city to tremendous development and density, which is good, but we need to make sure that we’re utilizing all our tools,” Moore said, “and MHA is a powerful tool. It can be tweaked, but to simply say it shouldn’t apply across the board, I think, is a missed opportunity. And again, it’s a calibration of, what are the costs that we consider valuable in this society?”

Representatives from the mayor’s office, the Office of Planning and Community Development, and two consultants that looked at the impact of the MHA program on housing in Seattle, BERK and Heartland pointed to 2024 BERK/Heartland study showing that developers of low-rise housing—the townhouses, fourplexes, and other low-density housing types that will be allowed in single-family zones under 1110—opted to build these units outside MHA areas because the additional height bonus didn’t benefit low-rise developers enough to make up for the large fees they would have to pay to build in those areas.

A separate study, from ECONorthwest, showed that “middle housing” developments are extremely sensitive to cost increases, falling off dramatically as the cost to develop each unit increases. That same study found that middle housing is currently feasible in only 19 percent of the proposed new neighborhood residential (former single-family areas), and most of those won’t be redeveloped; imposing new fees on new housing in those areas would make it far less likely that developers would choose to build new housing there.

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OPCD planning manager Geoff Wentlandt noted that by adding new neighborhood centers to the city’s zoning maps, the city will be increasing the areas of the city subject to MHA requirements by 21 percent. But imposing MHA fees on small developments in former single-family areas, Wentlandt said, would reduce the amount developers would make on projects below levels that most developers would be willing to accept. “We really want to prioritize seeing the production of middle housing in the new neighborhood residential zones. Everyone agrees that middle housing is a high priority, and want to make sure it comes to fruition,” Wentlandt said.

Moore pushed back on this, arguing that developers should be willing to accept lower profit margins in exchange for the ability to build in new areas. “My understanding is, in the past, when they were building, they expected 15 to 20 percent return on investment, and they’re still seeking those kinds of high level [returns],” Moore said.

“If you talk to some of the smaller for-profit developers… they’re not looking to make more than 10 percent return on investment. And so things do actually pencil out. When we talk about penciling out, are we talking about we’re penciling out at 15 percent profit, or are we talking about penciling out at 10 percent profit? Nobody’s really answered that question, what does it truly mean to pencil?”

Moore also suggested that OPCD was arguing that “six dollars”—the difference between a typical $22-per-square-foot MHA fee when the program was introduced and the $28 it costs today—is making it so that projects don’t pencil out. “I think we need a policy discussion about whether we think $6 to ensure that we continue to have affordable housing in the city is a cost that we think is appropriate for our developers to absorb and reduce their return on investment a little bit,” Moore said. “I guess I’m unconvinced that the $6 is really, across the board, going to be the thing that prevents affordable housing.” (The $6 change reflects an annual inflation adjustment, not an increase in real terms.)

Christa Valles, a senior advisor in the mayor’s office, pushed back on this, saying, “I would just like to be really clear we do not consider our position on this as backing away from MHA. …  This is a really difficult environment right now for housing development, and we want to make sure that the infill that we hope to see under HB 1110 has the support that it needs to happen.”

According to the BERK study, the MHA fee itself makes up a small percentage of overall development costs; but, as costs for other elements of development increase, the fee can be a deciding factor in whether a project gets built. In real dollars, building four 1,250-square-foot units would add $140,000 to the cost to develop a property, using the current $28 “typical” fee. Even if a developer decided it was worth it to pay an extra $140,000 to build those four units, the fee would get passed on to future renters or buyers, making the housing less affordable.

Moore also suggested “carving out an exemption” to MHA requirements “for people, families, who are wanting to develop their lot,” as opposed to developers building the same type of housing for new residents.

Implementing the changes Moore suggested—that is, eliminating at least some neighborhood centers and imposing fees on all new development in the city’s traditional single-family neighborhoods—would make it far more expensive, less feasible, and less likely that middle housing would be built in neighborhoods across Seattle. Developers would reasonably opt out of building in places where they would make less money, choosing either not to build in Seattle or to concentrate new housing in areas where it has always been allowed—along large, busy arterial roads where Seattle’s renter majority is currently concentrated.

Density, housing, legislature, Maybe Metropolis

Seattle Should Follow State’s Lead on Inclusionary Zoning—By Funding It
Rep. Julia Reed (D-36, Seattle)

By Josh Feit

With little fanfare, state house legislators passed a game-changing housing affordability bill out of committee last week. The bill, HB 1491, would require more housing density around rail and bus rapid transit stops and mandate on-site affordable housing as part of new developments in those areas. The bill tanked during the last two legislative sessions. But this session, it includes a change that represents a tectonic shift in how affordable housing advocates are thinking about the issue of inclusionary zoning, a policy that requires developers to include affordable housing in new projects.

I’ll get to that big shift momentarily, but first, a little history. Known as transit-oriented development, or TOD, housing around transit stops is a longtime priority for pro-density urbanists. In Washington State, I trace its origin back to the 2009 (!) legislative session, when the housing advocates at Futurewise first took up the cause.

At that time, their nascent pro-housing movement unwittingly stirred up a hornets’ nest of anti-development opposition from both the homeowner right (who are touchy about “neighborhood character”) and the social justice left (who often equate new housing with developer “giveaways” and displacement).

Thankfully, a lot has changed since then. First of all, gentrification has escalated exponentially under Seattle’s low-density status quo, a trend that calls b.s. on the NIMBY thesis that denser zoning is the cause of gentrification. If anything, the last 10 years under single-family protectionist policies show that it’s the opposite: Sequestering multifamily housing into a minuscule slice of the city’s residential areas causes gentrification.

And, more importantly: The pro-density “Yes In My Backyard” (YIMBY) movement of the past decade has re-framed the density debate in a way that has attracted social-justice lefties. YIMBYs now talk about municipal land use regulations in the context of  historic redlining and current exclusionary zoning laws that wall off huge portions of cities like Seattle from lower-income families and renters. As a result, lefties no longer stand in lockstep with wealthier “neighborhood character” obstructionists like they used to.

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Certainly, knee-jerk opposition to developers (along with real issues like displacement) persist, but 1491’s sponsor, Rep. Julia Reed (D-36, Seattle) let go of the orthodox left’s antipathy toward for-profit developers by accepting a Republican amendment from Rep. April Connors (R-8, Kennewick) that includes a new tax exemption to make the housing mandate pencil out. Thanks to Connors’ amendment, Reed’s inclusionary zoning bill, which passed the housing committee 9-5 with two GOP votes, is now a funded inclusionary zoning bill, or FIZ.

“The goal of this bill,” Reed said before last week’s vote, “is to try to address the urgent housing needs in our state, to ensure some public value capture for opening up new areas to development, but also to ensure that builders are incentivized to build, and that cities have the flexibility they need to manage this development effectively.”

Funded inclusionary zoning is exactly what it sounds like. Rather than simply making developers include affordable housing in a portion of their new developments, FIZ also helps pay for the affordable housing. In this instance, the amendment authorizes a 20-year property tax exemption on the development, and provides two options for affordability; a developer who builds in a FIZ zone can either make 10 percent of the project affordable to people making 60 percent or less of area media income (AMI), or 20 percent for people making 80 percent of AMI.

This is a classic compromise: Developers don’t like inclusionary zoning, but were willing to go along with it if it was subsidized; and lefties don’t like giving tax breaks to developers, but they like affordable housing. “This is a supply bill that ensures affordability while offsetting the costs for new development,” said Futurewise executive director Alex Brennan, who is encouraged by the sudden momentum for his group’s longstanding TOD bill.

The funded inclusionary zoning compromise, something I advocated for in this column a year ago, combines two well-intentioned, but limited, affordable housing policy tools: First, traditional inclusionary zoning, which requires developers to add affordable housing if they want to build a project, and second, the state’s existing Multifamily Tax Exemption (MFTE) program, which gives developers a tax break if they choose to include affordable housing in a project. By combining the two tools, 1491 makes the prospect of actually adding affordable housing to the state’s housing stock more likely.

Seattle has had its own (unfunded) inclusionary zoning program, Mandatory Housing Affordability, since 2019. MHA requires developers to either include some affordable housing in new developments or pay into an affordable housing fund. Reed’s bill exempts cities that have their own inclusionary zoning programs from following the new TOD affordable housing mandate. However, let’s hope Reed’s smart bill, which is likely to encourage more housing starts thanks to the tax exemption, prompts Seattle to consider a FIZ program of its own.

Similarly, the increased zoning 1491 contemplates wouldn’t have a big effect around Seattle’s light rail stations, because Seattle has already upzoned those station areas to the same or greater density as what the bill would allow. But the legislation could increase density around many Seattle bus lines where its upzones are greater than Seattle’s current requirements. Seattle’s Office of Planning and Community Development hasn’t done a full analysis, but a spokesperson said, “There is a larger difference between existing zoning around BRT stations in the city and the potential new requirements than there is for zoning in the light rail station areas.”

And the legislation could add more density to Seattle in another way. The bill defines transit areas as locations within a half-mile of rail stops or quarter mile of bus rapid transit. This geographical definition of TOD would overrule the current minimalist “Neighborhood Centers” proposal in Seattle’s pending comprehensive plan, which would limit new density to developments that are just 800 feet from major bus stops. Seattle’s slow-growth council is actually trying to scale back that already-timid TOD plan. Thankfully, if HB 1491 becomes law, Seattle will get more housing and more affordable housing despite intransigence from City Hall.

The funded inclusionary zoning TOD bill is currently in the house appropriations committee.

Josh@publicola.com

City Council, Density, housing, legislature, Maybe Metropolis, Mayor Harrell

Council’s Fight to Scale Back List of Neighborhood Centers is a NIMBY Canard

By Josh Feit

Calling Mayor Bateman, calling Mayor Bateman! We need your help. Again!

Bateman, of course, is pro-housing Olympia-area state senator Jessica Bateman, whose 2023 HB 1110 forced the slow growth Harrell administration and even slower-growth city council to actually allow some multifamily housing in this year’s comprehensive plan.

First off, thank you for forcing us to allow four-unit multifamily housing in all residential zones; although Mayor Bruce Harrell scaled back his own planning department’s original proposal to fully embrace your model for growth, it’s a start.

We need another favor, though. There’s a transit-oriented housing bill at play in the state legislature right now that, if you passed it, would stop the Seattle City Council’s latest NIMBY crusade against another minor upzone that’s in the city’s comp plan proposal.

The comp plan would create new “Neighborhood Centers,” allowing 3- to 6-story apartment and condo buildings within a 3-minute walk (about 800 feet) of 30 commercial centers and bus stops with frequent service. The state TOD bill, HB 1491— sponsored by your colleague from Seattle, state Rep. Julia Reed—would actually do better than that by allowing multifamily housing within a half mile of light rail and within a quarter mile of bus rapid transit. That would mean upzones for apartments all along the new G Line through Madison Valley, for example!

In its quest to stop the “floodgates of unlimited development,” as North Seattle City Councilmember Cathy Moore put it at a recent briefing on the plan, the council is cuing up its push to remove several of these neighborhood centers from the plan, reducing them even further from a list the Harrell administration already pared down from almost 50 in the original plan.

What I love about the council’s high-pitched opposition to adding a small amount of tightly controlled density is that it exposes the mendacious reasoning behind a core NIMBY argument: “Concurrency.” Concurrency is the obstructionist idea that you can’t add density to neighborhood until you first add bus routes and other infrastructure. It’s actually the reverse—and I’ll get to that in a second—but for starters: It’s disingenuous to claim, as the anti-housing (homeowning) contingent did at a January 29 public hearing, that you oppose density in your neighborhood because your neighborhood lacks transit—and then come out against a plan to target density along transit lines.

If the argument against adding density is that we don’t have the transit to support it, then why are council members like Moore intent on taking Maple Leaf off the list of new neighborhood centers?  The area of concern for Moore that’s slated for the upzone, between NE 85th and NE 91st, sits on a frequent bus line (the 67) between two light rail stops, Roosevelt and Northgate. (Moore called this workhorse route the “one little bus” that serves the neighborhood.)

To be clear, the “concurrency” argument is illogical in the first place.  Consider: At another hearing on the comp plan earlier this month, Councilmember Moore reasoned: “People seem to believe that if you build all this multifamily housing, transit will come. Let me tell you, it will not come. That’s not how it works.” (As Erica pointed in her reporting on that hearing, that’s exactly how it works.)

Dressing up obstructionism as logic, Moore seems to be saying that an upzone will bring thousands of new people overnight. But in reality, population growth happens over time. Asking Metro to run empty buses through currently sparse street as a prerequisite for future density is a comically inefficient use of Metro dollars. The smarter way to do things is precisely the way Metro does it today: When a neighborhood reaches the point at which buses make sense, they meet the need concurrent with new growth—not before the growth arrives.

With a single-family zone protectionist mayor who shredded his own Office of Planning and Development’s original pro-growth proposal, and with a half-baked council now parroting anti-housing tropes, I’m sending a pro-housing SOS from Seattle: Don’t let Seattle strike down this opportunity to build more units. These minimal, cordoned-off neighborhood center transit-oriented development zones won’t exactly qualify us for a Jane Jacobs city-building award, but you’ve helped us get started before. Please help us again.

Josh@PubliCola.com

City Council, Density, housing

Councilmembers Claim City Didn’t Do “Broad Engagement” on Comprehensive Plan

By Erica C. Barnett

The city council’s comprehensive plan committee, chaired by Joy Hollingsworth, spent much of its two-hour meeting on Wednesday morning lambasting staffers from the city’s Office of Planning and Community Development, who were there to describe the past three years of public engagement on the comp plan, for purportedly failing to do the right kind of public outreach (flyers in mailboxes) to the right kind of people (property owners).

At various points in Wednesday’s meeting, council members claimed OPCD had ignored advocates for “neighborhood character” in favor of “fringe policy wonk types” (Rob Saka); said existing residents weren’t consulted about the new neighbors they will have “to live with” if the plan goes through through (Cathy Moore); and argued that homeowners who’ve decried the plan in public comment don’t oppose housing, they’re just upset at the “lack of broad engagement” about the plan (Maritza Rivera).

“We need to do a better job of bringing in public comment,” Moore said. “My takeaway is that when you actually manage to get broader engagement, you actually found that there was a lot less buy-in to the plan that had been put forth,” she continued. “And what troubles me is that when it became clear that there was less buy-in from the people that are going to have to live with this development on the ground, there’s still no willingness to truly engage and refashion this” plan.

Later that evening, the council would take public comment for five and a half hours. The first several hours, starting at 5pm, were dominated by longtime homeowners arguing that housing would destroy the environment and make Seattle unlivable. As they had at previous meetings on the plan, many of the public commenters complained that no one had told them about the public meeting where they were giving public comment.

The comprehensive plan update aligns the city with a new state law requiring all cities to allow up to four units of housing, such as a duplex and two accessory units, on every residential lot. It also includes 30 new “neighborhood centers”—small nodes of density within 800 feet, or a three-minute walk, of existing commercial areas or frequent transit stops. These neighborhood centers, where modest three- to six-story apartment buildings would be allowed, have become a flash point in the comp plan discussions. Ironically, or predictably, a majority of the new council members—including Saka, Moore, Joy Hollingsworth, and Bob Kettle—explicitly endorsed a comp plan alternative during their campaigns that included 18 more neighborhood centers than the plan many of them are objecting to as too dense now.

For the second time in several weeks, Moore railed against potential neighborhood centers inside and outside her district, claiming the change would “open the floodgates to… unlimited development” everywhere in the city. Moreover, she said, it makes no sense for the council to give up a key bargaining chip against future density by approving neighborhood centers in areas where the current residents don’t want apartments anyway.

Addressing OPCD director Rico Quirindongo, Moore said he appeared to be saying that OPCD would allow the city council to designate the zoning details of each neighborhood center in future legislation, which is true. But what Moore said she was “hearing” from Quirindongo was “‘You give us a [neighborhood center] designation, then we’ll negotiate the height.’ My position is, why bother negotiating the height? Because I think down the road, we are looking at keeping the door open to putting up five- and six-story buildings, because we’ve zoned it that way. So that is not a sufficient response.”

To which housing advocates might say: Yeah. Allowing more housing, whether it’s three stories or six, is the entire point of increasing density in places where people want to live, like neighborhoods with easy access to transit. The proposed Maple Leaf neighborhood center, at 90th and Roosevelt, is one mile away from two light rail stations—Northgate and Roosevelt—and has frequent bus service serving both. It’s hard to conceive of a more favorable spot for modest transit-oriented development.

Moore wasn’t done. She wanted to know why, “if we can send out a flyer about social an initiative on social housing, we ought to be able to send out a flyer about a comprehensive plan that is going to completely remake the way the city looks for the next 10 and 20 years—not only looks, but operates.” (Again, we’re talking about 30 neighborhood nodes that stretch a block or two into Seattle’s low-density urban sprawl). Moore appeared to be referring to a political flyer paid for by the campaign for Proposition 1B, a private political effort that received no funding from the city.

At another point, Moore also claimed the comprehensive plan would “remov[e] parking”—using “we’re not going to have any parking” as a reason to doubt that the city will really plant new trees in public parking strips. In fact, the plan would roll back current minimum parking mandates for new housing. It would neither remove existing parking nor restrict developers from building it.

Maritza Rivera agreed with Moore that there has been “a lack of broad engagement” on the plan, and added that many of her Northeast Seattle constituents do support “more housing,” but want an opportunity to express their concerns about trees, parking, and where that housing should be allowed. “I have a lot of constituents who have kids who can’t afford to come back and live where they grew up,” she noted. Rivera’s district includes the University District, home to many thousands of young renters, yet her example of a “constituent” concerned about housing prices is a homeowner whose kids can’t afford a house here.

Moore’s complaint about a lack of “broad engagement” is interesting, because the city has never failed to engage with anti-density property owners, who organize themselves politically in groups with names like “Tree Action Seattle,” “Seattle Fair Growth,” and “The Queen Anne Community Council.” What’s different this time is that the city also made a concerted effort to reach groups that have historically been excluded from the process of deciding where housing will go and how much there will be. As OPCD’s outreach summary notes, the city reached out to “specific racial, cultural, and other- marginalized communities,” contracting with community groups that “serve communities—particularly BIPOC populations—that have been historically left out of the City’s engagement processes.”

Actions that promote equity can feel like discrimination to people who are used to being the only voices in the room. Twenty years ago, you didn’t hear homeowners complaining that renters were getting too loud and uppity, because renters didn’t have a voice at city hall—they just weren’t a factor. Now that they are, the BANANA lobby is trying to turn YIMBY into a dirty word.

Will it work? A majority of the council seems poised to remove at least some of the neighborhood centers from the plan, rolling back potential housing in some of the areas where it makes the most sense. Then again, there’s a chance that some council members may back away from some of Moore’s more radical ideas, such as requiring that anyone who wants to build four units on their property must make two of the units affordable to low-income people. The poison-pill requirement would ensure that no such housing gets built, effectively end-running the new state mandate that cities allow up to four housing units per lot.

On Wednesday, Moore said that contrary to what some seem to believe, it isn’t true “that we’re going to solve all the problems for renters by just building a lot of housing,” adding, “you’re not going to get stabilized rent.” No one is claiming that more housing is the unitary solution to the city’s housing crisis (nor has anyone said brand-new apartments will be either cheap or rent-controlled), but it is a necessary condition. In the future,  Moore might consider spending less time listening to homeowner complaints about the people they might  “have to live with” and more hearing from constituents who just want more places where they’re allowed to live.

City Council, Density, housing, neighborhoods, This Week on PubliCola

This Week on PubliCola: January 11, 2025
Cathy Moore says she won’t “sacrifice” her neighborhood to three-to-five-story apartments around an intersection Maple Leaf (circled on map)

Cathy Moore Says Young People Want Yards, Bob Kettle and Rob Saka Test Blast Balls, and PubliCola Predicts the Future

Monday, January 6

Anti-Housing Activists Hope for Receptive Audience as Council Takes Up Comprehensive Plan Update

As the city considers density increases so modest that its own planning commission called them utterly inadequate, single-family preservationists are creating petitions to oppose any changes in “their” neighborhoods, especially those that allow more renters to live in more parts of Seattle.

Tuesday, January 7

SPD Fires Officer Who Struck and Killed Pedestrian Jaahnavi Kandula Two Years Ago

Kevin Dave, the police officer who struck and killed 23-year-old student Jaahnavi Kandula while driving almost three times the speed limit, finally got fired after spending two years on SPD’s payroll after killing Kandula, whose family is suing the city for more than $110 million.

Wednesday, January 8

It’s Time to Appoint Another New Councilmember!

Tammy Morales’ resignation opens a spot for yet another new council appointment. The appointment process, which should wrap up before the end of this month, will result in a council with only one member, Dan Strauss, who has served for more than three years, including seven members who have served one year or less.

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“I’m Not Prepared to Sacrifice My Neighborhood”: Councilmember Cathy Moore Takes Hard Line Against Apartments

One of those recently council members, Cathy Moore, came out hard against a proposal to allow apartments along the periphery of single-family neighborhoods, saying that allowing three-to-six story apartments within 800 feet of 30 transit stops across the city would destroy neighborhood character, denude the landscape, and produce “unstable” housing occupied by renters, who, she said, aren’t “engaged socially and politically” the way property owners are. About six in ten Seattle residents rent their homes.

Thursday, January 9

Seattle Nice: Bob Kettle Talks Public Safety, Density, Why He Opposed the Capital Gains Tax, and More

The Seattle Nice podcast sat down with City Council public safety committee chair Bob Kettle to talk about his priorities for 2025, how much density the city should allow in single-family neighborhoods like Queen Anne, and at what point the new council will stop blaming their predecessors for the real and perceived public safety challenges in Seattle.

Afternoon Fizz, SPD Edition: Councilmembers Test-Drive Blast Balls, SPD Sued Over Records Violations, and More

Four stories in this week’s afternoon Fizz: Bob Kettle and Rob Saka take a field trip to SPD’s firing range to test blast balls for themselves; the Community Police Commission proposes changes to SPD’s proposed policy allowing the use of “less lethal” weapons, which is moving forward at breakneck speed; the Seattle Times sues SPD for violating an agreement over public records requests; and former police chief Adrian Diaz loses his longtime attorney.

Friday, January 10

PubliCola’s Seattle Predictions for 2025

PubliCola’s founders give you our predictions for 2025. Sandeep thinks Seattle will fail to break out of its political inertia; Josh says you’ll start to hear more open MAGA rhetoric in public places in Seattle (which, he also predicts, will still be riddled with dogs), and I predict that new, even more stringent tree protections will be used to prevent housing for renters in the name of the environment (despite the fact that car-oriented sprawl, which results from insufficient housing in cities, is an existential environmental risk.)

Also, despite a $2 million budget setaside, I predict that SDOT will find reasons not to remove an 8-inch traffic safety curb that prevents dangerous left turns into the parking lot of the preschool Rob Saka’s kids attended, which Saka claimed his constituents found “triggering” and “extremely traumatizing” because it reminds them of Trump’s border wall.

City Council, Density, housing, land use, Mayor Harrell

Anti-Housing Activists Hope for Receptive Audience as Council Takes Up Comprehensive Plan Update
The Future Land Use Map shows the level of housing density the city will allow in various areas; Seattle’s single-family neighborhoods, where up to four units are now allowed under state law, are in beige.

By Erica C. Barnett

As the city council prepared for its first meeting to discuss Seattle’s long-delayed comprehensive plan update Monday morning, anti-housing advocates have started at least eight petitions or letter-writing campaigns to urge councilmembers to scale back the modest upzones the new plan would allow. (Ryan Packer, from The Urbanist, covered some of these last week).

So far, residents have created petitions to reduce the amount of housing that will be allowed in north Ballard (“Whittier Neighbors Against Seattle Upzoning Proposal”), West Seattle (the Fauntleroy Community Association); north Queen Anne (“Oppose Proposed Dramatic Up-zoning of 10th Ave W. from McGraw to Fulton”); east Queen Anne (“Queen Anne Neighbors Against Seattle Upzoning Proposal”); Montlake (“Preserve Montlake Neighborhood While Growing”); Greenwood (“Oppose Greenwood Urban Center Up-Zoning in Seattle Mayor Harrell’s One Seattle Plan”); Madrona (“Preserve Madrona’s neighborhood character as we increase in density”; and North Seattle (“Remove Proposed Designation of Maple Leaf as a Neighborhood Center.”)

As we’ve reported, Harrell’s proposal just complies with state law requiring cities to allow at least four units of housing on every residential lot, but otherwise hews to the the city’s longstanding strategy—going back at least to the 1990s—of concentrating apartment housing in a few dense areas along busy arterial roads, while minimizing density in traditional single-family neighborhoods.

The new plan would allow apartments within a block or two of about 30 frequent transit stops across the city, and would expand the boundaries of the areas where apartment-level density is currently allowed.

Proposals to allow more housing, particularly apartments for Seattle’s renter majority, have produced a predictably disproportionate level of outrage among single-family preservationists, who are lobbying the council hard to reduce the amount of housing the new plan would allow across the city.

A petition opposing a new “neighborhood center” between two light rail stations in the Maple Leaf neighborhood, which currently has more than 700 signatures, claims that allowing apartments within two blocks of an existing small commercial area will destroy critical wildlife habitat, eliminate many “large evergreens,” create shadows that will prevent homeowners from gardening (unlike trees, I guess?), and put too much pressure on “wastewater treatment capacity, water supply, electrical supply [and] stormwater treatment.”  As one of the two Queen Anne petitions puts it, “Current infrastructure does not support drastic population increases.”

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This line of opposition, which we’ve often shorthanded as the “concurrency” argument against housing, presumes that Seattle shouldn’t allow new housing until after the region has invested in far more frequent transit, wider streets and sidewalks, bigger sewage pipes, and all kinds of other infrastructure projects that aren’t necessary or justifiable in the city’s current low-density neighborhoods.”Current Infrastructure does not support drastic population increases.”

These cart-before-the-horse propositions are conveniently perennial, because no city or region is going to spend a ton of money expanding services to places that don’t currently need them. King County Metro, for example, isn’t going to dedicate limited resources increasing bus service frequency in neighborhoods where everyone owns a house on a 5,000-square-foot lot, because those kinds of neighborhoods don’t produce enough bus riders to justify stiffing denser areas that want bus service.

Cities do have to provide adequate transportation access as they grow (which is one reason we pass levies to pay for things like buses and sidewalks) but people making this argument often take it to absurd extremes, essentially arguing that if you don’t have access to door-to-door transit, parking directly in front of your house, and streets where you can drive without stopping for cyclists, pedestrians, and buses, you shouldn’t have to “accept” new neighbors.

This stuff can get pretty explicit. One of the Queen Anne petitions, for example, includes a lengthy defense of single-occupancy vehicles that begins by dismissing mass transit as pie-in-the-sky social engineering:

We understand the intent of this plan…  is to encourage use of mass transit. Practically speaking, using the #1 bus would be challenging for those making multiple stops in a day for work related activities, individuals who are responsible to get children to child care or extracurricular activities, and residents who support aging parents for doctor’s appointments and other needs. We use our cars to transport us to the many recreational activities that are essential to our well-being. In short, most people will need a car for a long time to come. And, if they need cars, they will need parking for these cars. Parking that would not be included under this new plan, so cars would be forced onto already crowded streets (with current limited parking and the #1 bus).

Most PubliCola readers probably don’t need to be told that this is a dumb argument—people who don’t have cars can and do get around by bus, and Seattle can’t succeed if it bases all its policies on the preferences of car-driving homeowners—but the Seattle City Council is being inundated by messages like these, and some counterprogramming couldn’t hurt. (Councilmember Joy Hollingsworth, who’s heading up the comp plan process, told the Urbanist in 2023 that she supported the densest comprehensive plan alternative then on the table.)

The council will have a public hearing on the comprehensive plan at 5:00 pm on February 6, but anyone can weigh in before then by sending an email to the council; find the contact information for your citywide and district representatives here.