Category: Density

Density, Economy, homelessness, housing, Mayor Wilson, Police, Urbanism

A 14-Point Plan for Mayor Wilson

The Bench Agenda: Let the people sit!

Channeling the original Wilsonian 14 Points, we offer 14 policy suggestions for incoming mayor Wilson.

By Erica C. Barnett and Josh Feit

Seattle Mayor-Elect Katie Wilson doesn’t fit the old-school Seattle leftist stereotype personified by avenger socialists and NIMBYs who have historically aligned in a reactionary nativist coalition to oppose new housing. Wilson is too 21st century for such hokey self-righteousness. She’s more AOC than Bernie Bro—a nerd who examines the numbers, facts, and human consequences of city policies. We are confident her measured MO will guide her inspirational affordability agenda.

Channeling the original version of Wilsonianism, we hope the mayor-elect will consider the aspirational PubliCola agenda we’re laying out below with our 14-Point manifesto.

1. Reopen the Comprehensive Plan

The city’s comprehensive plan—the document that governs future growth in Seattle—was supposed to be finished in 2024, but got delayed again and again by the torpid Harrell administration, which revised the plan repeatedly to lower (then slightly increase from that nadir) density limits. The city council still hasn’t passed the entire plan, pushing the zoning details off until 2026, along with the fate of urbanist amendments that died this year,.

A “docketing resolution” for next year will take up proposals to restore nine neighborhood centers—central nodes in neighborhoods where apartments will be allowed. (Harrell had city planners remove these higher-density areas from his proposal, so the city never fully studied them). Other proposals the council punted this year include the elimination of minimum parking requirements and a proposal to allow apartment buildings taller than six stories in neighborhood centers near frequent transit stops.

We think these changes are necessary and that the council should pass them as soon as possible next year. But since the comp plan is already delayed, why not take some more time with it and get the right plan for this urbanist moment?

Our modest—if aspirational—proposal: Wilson should send down legislation to allow allow six-story apartment buildings everywhere—and use her organizing chops to drum up support for the idea among renters, who’ve been the loudest voices opposing Harrell’s plan to preserve Seattle’s exclusionary status quo.

Maritza Rivera is going to fume that there hasn’t been enough “outreach and engagement” to single-family homeowners no matter what you do, so you might as well go big.

Oh, and while you’re at it? Allow bars and restaurants, not just small convenience and grocery stores, in every neighborhood—and let them stay open past 10pm!!—ECB

2. Funded Inclusionary Zoning (FIZ)

The problem with the noble policy of forcing developers to include affordable housing in any new multifamily development is that the projects often don’t pencil out. In turn, nothing gets built at all. Seattle’s mandatory housing affordability program (MHA), an inclusionary zoning mandate that requires developers to either include affordable units in new buildings or pay into a fund to support affordable housing construction, has actually contributed to a drop-off in new housing development.

Taking a cue from Portland, where a successful inclusionary zoning program recently saw projects worth hundreds of new units opt in during its first six months, Wilson should do the unthinkable: Give developers a property tax break to make the mandate pencil out. In other words, we shouldn’t tax things we want (affordable housing) by raising the cost of building it. We should encourage it by making affordable housing profitable to build.

Before you gasp at the idea of giving developers a tax break for building affordable housing, consider: We have a longstanding program, the state’s multifamily tax exemption (MFTE) program, that does just that. The problem is: That program isn’t a mandate. Developers don’t have to build affordable housing if they don’t want to.

FIZ, Funded Inclusionary Zoning, would combine the two affordable housing housing programs the city already relies on, MHA and MFTE—coupling the mandate to include affordable housing and the tax break to build it. —JF

3. The Night Mayor

The City’s Office of Economic Development has a Nightlife Business Services Advocate. Their job is to help after-dark venues like nightclubs and bars navigate licensing and compliance. Under Mayor Wilson, the role should be expanded beyond entertainment to support a full-blown evening ecosystem. Let’s have a well-staffed Office of the Night Mayor to promote, coordinate, and support a city that not only has vibrant nighttime businesses (tax breaks to help daytime businesses stay open later, please), but also weaves social services, night owl buses and shuttles, and vital commerce like drugstores into a thrumming evening environment that serves and supports everyone from night shift workers to 9-to-5ers who need to get shit done in the evening.

First initiative the Office of the Night Mayor: Identify murky streets and make them safer and more navigable with new lighting. Light it up, Mayor Wilson. —JF

4. Let CARE do their jobs

The city council is preparing to rubber-stamp the latest contract with the Seattle Police Officers Guild, which has already been effectively approved by the five-member council majority who sit on the city’s contract negotiating team. We’d be happy—and impressed—to see the council reject and reopen the contract to add some real accountability measures in exchange for paying new officers $126,000 a year, but we’re not holding our breath.

One thing that can be reopened without a huge political lift, however, is the memorandum of understanding SPD signed with CARE—the Community Assisted Response and Engagement Team. While Harrell touted the fact that the new agreement will allow CARE to respond to low-risk 911 calls without a police escort, the MOU imposes new rules on the team that will make it hard to respond to most crisis calls.

Under the new rules, CARE responders can only respond to people who are physically outdoors, not inside a vehicle or any indoor space, and must abort the response effort if they see any indication a person has been using drugs or has committed any type of crime. They’re also banned from responding to encampments or if a person appears to be having a serious mental health crisis, among many other new restrictions.

These rules, which prohibit CARE from responding in most of the situations where they would be most useful, are untenable and will harm CARE’s ability to provide an alternative to sending armed officers to deal with people in crisis.

Given that the city just added $7 million to the budget to expand the CARE Team to 48 responders, it’s critical that the city allows them to do their jobs, even if the police union opposes it. —ECB

5. The Urban Pass

Inspired by NYC’s successful congestion pricing program (which has dramatically reduced car traffic, increased travel speeds, decreased greenhouse gas emissions, and is on track to raise $500 million its first year), Wilson should institute an Urban Pass for Seattle.

The Urban Pass would riff on the basic congestion pricing concept: Drivers could buy the pass for a monthly fee, which would give them discounted parking in the city’s 32 paid parking zones—districts that correspond to the highest-demand destinations in the city, such as Capitol Hill, Ballard, and South Lake Union.

Unlike NYC’s congestion pricing revenue, however, the money wouldn’t go to the transportation budget. Instead, it would fund multi-family housing in the low-density neighborhoods where many of the visitors to these high-demand areas live—including outside the city of Seattle. Clearly, the people who drive in to visit popular neighborhoods are fond of density too. So let’s give them some.

Adding more housing in low-density neighborhoods would also make frequent transit more sustainable in these parts of our city and the region. (As for the loss to the city on parking fees, SDOT should raise those base prices in concert with the Urban Pass discounts.) During her campaign, Wilson praised NYC’s congestion pricing model. Now that she’s in office, we hope she was in earnest. —JF

6. Make City Government Transparent Again

In recent years, we’ve seen the city moving to limit access to public information on every front, a trend that only accelerated during and after the pandemic. While the mayor can’t take direct action against individual public information officers who use their city positions to dissemble and mislead, she can set a tone of transparency with a few simple, immediate actions.

Start with the department that has the greatest aversion to transparency, SPD, by revising the 2017 city rule that the police department has been using to justify sitting on public disclosure requests for years. Under this rule, public disclosure officers are allowed to “group” multiple requests into a single request and to consider records requests from the same person or outlet consecutively rather than simultaneously. SPD has interpreted this rule to mean they are allowed to add any new requests from the same person into one giant mega-request, considering one sub-request at a time and putting any new requests at the back of the line. Instead of waiting for the Seattle Times to prevail in litigation (the Times is suing SPD over its anti-disclosure practices), just get rid of grouping altogether and make SPD’s public disclosure unit live up to its name.

Second: Hold open press briefings. Mike McGinn had his issues (and we reported on them), but one of his best moves was to periodically hold open meetings for the press with nothing specific on the agenda. Sitting at the table, rather than standing behind a rostrum, McGinn would take questions on just about any topic—a practice that not only made it possible for non-mainstream outlets to talk to the mayor directly on a regular basis, but that gave McGinn credibility as a mayor who valued transparency and was capable of answering detailed policy questions without a press staffer hovering nervously nearby to redirect and cut off questions. (The visually boring format also cut down on TV reporters with gotcha questions). The non-mainstream press will love you for having real conversations with us after four years of scripted responses, and the public will appreciate your commitment to open and transparent dialogue.

Third: Bring back the city directory! Former mayor Jenny Durkan removed the directory of city employees’ phone numbers and email addresses from the city’s website in July 2021, saying the underlying database was out of date. A promised “replacement solution” for this resource, which was the only place the public could access contact information for most people who work at the city, never materialized, and PubliCola has been periodically updating our own public database of city employees ever since. (It’s currently out of date because the city has been dragging its feet on my latest records request for the information, which I filed in June.). Restoring the directory—and bringing Seattle in line with state agencies and King County, whose employee directories are public—would signal transparency and bring back a resource many Seattle residents seeking to reach the right person at the city directly once found indispensable. —ECB

7. You’ve Heard of Transit Oriented Development (TOD). It’s Time for Parks and Schools Oriented Development—POD and SOD.

Since Erica is calling on Wilson to re-open the Comprehensive Plan (and rightfully so, given Mayor Harrell’s years of disinterest at best and outright sabotage at worst), let me propose two comp plan amendments: Upzones around parks and upzones around schools. The city’s highest-performing schools and most salubrious parks seem to serve more affluent and lower-density neighborhoods, meaning a privileged economic class has better access to them. Let’s make it so more people, including renters, can live near parks and schools by building more apartments nearby. —JF

8. Shady Zones

NIMBYs have successfully weaponized tree canopy as a tool for stopping new development.

For the record: Urbanists are pro-tree canopy.  Instead of building single homes on single lots (which required sprawl and deforestation in the first place) urbanists are for building more densely, which by definition houses more people—leaving more room for greenery.

But as the Anthropocene accelerates into potential catastrophe, cities will need more sources of shade than tree canopy alone. YIMBYs should flip the script and weaponize development as shorthand for shade. To counter the shadows-are-bad mantra that has dominated building permit debates for decades, pro-development voices need to point out that the built environment can be a source of protection and cooling.

Ever find yourself choosing the shady side of the street on downtown sidewalks, seeking refuge in the cover of buildings? To fashion a truly resilient city, we need to start thinking in terms of awnings, walls, gazebos, park shelters, and yes, buildings themselves as vital cover from the extreme impacts of climate change.

We’re looking to Mayor Shady Wilson to add cooling infrastructure to the city’s resiliency agenda. —JF

9. Close the Sweeps Loophole

Another rule that’s ripe for revisiting is a city policy that has empowered Harrell’s Unified Care Team, a 116-member group of city employees that removes encampments, to sweep people and tents from public spaces with little or no notice and no referrals to shelter or other services.

The rule was designed to guarantee 72 hours’ notice and a referral to shelter before the city sweeps an encampment.  But it contains a loophole previous mayors have exploited to sweep people from place to place for years. The rule allows sweeps with no notice or offer of shelter or services if an encampment constitutes a hazard or “obstruction”—a term Durkan and Harrell both interpreted broadly to include anyone located on public property. Editing this legislation to define “hazards” and “obstructions” narrowly will reduce the number of pointless sweeps, like the ones that have been going on for months Ballard, and make it less common for encampment residents to lose everything, including contact with their case managers, when they have to move. Pitching a tent in the middle of a heavily used playfield is an obvious obstruction, while sleeping in a secluded area of a public park obstructs nothing.

Homelessness will be a defining issue of Wilson’s tenure, so this is just one of many necessary steps. We think it’s a prerequisite for ending the kind of indiscriminate sweeps Wilson campaigned against.—ECB

10. Transit Validation

Just as big employers subsidize ORCA cards, so should big destinations: Lumen Field. T-Mobile Park. Climate Pledge Arena. Benaroya Hall. McCaw Hall. All these spots—particularly Benaroya, which is literally a stop on the Link light rail line—should zap a discount back into your ORCA card when they scan your ticket. (Three cheers to Pacific Science Center, one institution that already does a version of this. And I know Climate Pledge has its own Kraken app that includes free transit, but it’s the opposite of user-friendly and should just be rolled in with the ORCA pass).

As her first agenda item as a Sound Transit board member, Mayor Wilson, the former Transit Riders Union leader, should champion a program to subsidize rides to our city’s cultural destinations. —JF

11. Free the street vendors!

The city and county have made a very big deal recently about their efforts to crack down on street food vendors who lack the proper permits, but haven’t exactly made our city a hospitable place for licensed food vendors to operate legally in the first place. The city currently requires food trucks and street vendors to navigate a byzantine maze of rules and restrictions. For example, if you want to sell food near a residential area or public park, that requires a whole secondary approval process. This approach treats vendors like industrial polluters that should be kept away from people and each other rather than amenities that improve neighborhoods and commercial districts.

Launch a full assessment of the city’s street vending rules and get rid of unnecessary red tape that keeps people in most parts of Seattle from enjoying tacos, soft serve, kebabs, and all other kinds of portable food. The people want to eat! —ECB

12. The Bench Agenda

You know how the former Bloomberg administration in NYC is famous for building more than 300 miles of bike lanes? The Wilson administration should seek a similar legacy by flooding Seattle with benches. Start with a bench at every bus stop, complete with shelter to dovetail with the shade zones. But we also need benches dotting parks, in commercial hubs, in residential areas. And no—correlation fallacy!—benches don’t increase the homeless population. Homelessness already exists. Benches can simply make it more visible. Giving homeless people a place to rest isn’t such a bad thing. —JF

13. Defund (parts of) the Police

Wilson’s detractors, including the $1.8 million pro-Harrell PAC, tried to claim she plans to defund the police (and is responsible for the entire police defunding movement), an absurd but inflammatory claim that probably alarmed some people into supporting the incumbent. In a recent interview with Seattle Nice, Wilson reiterated that she supports hiring more officers and has no interest in defunding the police themselves, but is open to looking closely at spending on nonessential functions.

Our proposal, to paraphrase centrist city council members elected in 2023: Audit the fucking police budget (that is, examine discretionary spending and recent adds), and pare back spending on stuff we don’t need and that is actively harming communities.

One easy target: SPD’s Real Time Crime Center and surveillance cameras, which, under Harrell, have begun to proliferate in neighborhoods across the city. Harrell and SPD tried to ease civil liberties concerns by claiming it’s essentially impossible for the federal government to get hold of footage from the 24/7 cameras. But all the Trump Administration really needs is a subpoena—or a cop with access to the footage and an axe to grind against immigrants or people seeking abortions or gender-affirming care.

Police surveillance cameras have been around for decades, and there’s little evidence that they make a meaningful impact on crime. The cops dispute this, as do Harrell and other pro-surveillance officials around the country. But even if the cameras do occasionally provide evidence that SPD couldn’t get another way (such as the vast network of private cameras they’ve always used in investigations), that isn’t a worthwhile tradeoff for expanding surveillance in the age of Trump. We don’t have to build the panopticon! —ECB

14. Hang Out with State Sen. Jessica Bateman

Mayor Wilson: As you fill up your calendar with important get-to-know-you meetings, please set aside some time to meet with Olympia’s pro-housing, pro-density, pro-city rock star state Sen. Jessica Bateman (D-22). Bateman, of course, is the mastermind behind HB 1110, which forced foot-dragging cities like Seattle to allow four-unit multi-family housing (up to six-units if two of the units are affordable) anywhere single-family housing is allowed.

Mayor Harrell spent his time in quibbling obstructionism with 1110. Our suggestion to make Bateman your besty is our way of telling you to support rather than subvert the state’s progressive housing agenda, which has lapped Seattle’s progress toward density over the last decade.

Word is the upcoming session will come with pro-housing ideas like a land value tax, which would target low and underused properties like parking lots, prompting land owners to do more useful things like build housing. Seattle should be at the forefront supporting these efforts. —JF

That’s it for our Wilsonian 14 Points. Now, here are some low-hanging quick hits:

  • Tax new pickleball facilities to expand public access to youth sports.
  • Instead of pouring millions into “graffiti rangers” and other nonsense, create a fund that provides small grants to business owners for removing graffiti on their property.
  • Figure out this scooter and e-bike stuff—you can start by banning Class 2 e-bikes with throttles, which are just small electric motorcycles, from shared trails used by cyclists and pedestrians. (Washington Bikes is working at the state level to regulate higher-powered “e-motos,” which can go faster than the speediest e-bikes.)
  • Seize the opportunity (instead of “grabbing the ball”): Don’t speak in sports metaphors.
City Council, Density, Mayor Harrell, public safety, Taxes

Seattle Nice: CARE Team Expansion and a Missed Opportunity for Neighborhood Businesses

By Erica C. Barnett

Gearing up for Seattle’s 2025 budget season on the latest episode of Seattle Nice, we discussed Mayor Bruce Harrell’s proposal to increase the local sales tax rate by 0.1 cent to pay for an expansion of the city’s CARE Team and 911 department, backfill $20 million in spending that currently comes from other sources, and add funding for firefighters, addiction treatment, and the fire department’s Health 99 overdose response team.

Governor Bob Ferguson gave cities and counties the authority to hike sales taxes to pay for public safety programs in his budget last year, effectively punting his promise to spend $100 million on police to local jurisdictions and forcing cities and counties to use a regressive sales tax increase if they wanted more public safety funding. King County already passed its 0.1-cent tax in June; assuming Harrell’s proposal passes, the total sales tax in Seattle will rise to nearly 10.6 percent.

We dug into what the new tax will pay for, as well as why CARE Team expansion is happening now, after a lengthy stalemate between the Seattle Police Officers Guild and CARE over what responsibilities SPD is willing to hand over to unarmed social workers.

Since 2023, a memorandum of understanding between CARE and the police department requires cops to go out with CARE on every call, limits the kind of calls CARE’s first responders are allowed to respond to, and restricts the size of the team to 24 people. That MOU expires at the end of the year.

Although new SPOG contracts typically drag on for years (the most recent contract, covering the years 2021 through 2023, passed in April 2024), that may not be the case this time, as we discussed, thanks to the recent primary election results, which had Katie Wilson leading incumbent Harrell outright.

In short, SPOG appears to be racing (relatively speaking) to wrap up their latest contract this year, betting that Katie Wilson might win the mayor’s race and be less willing than Harrell to provide concessions to the union without corresponding improvements to police accountability.

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This goes far beyond CARE, of course, but the new urgency around the contract seems to have produced a new willingness to give the team some of what it’s been asking for almost since its inception, including expansion from 24 to 48 tea members, the ability to go out on calls without a police escort and to respond to more types of calls where a social worker can do more good than officers with guns.

Harrell’s sales tax proposal, part of the 2025 budget he announced today, includes funding for CARE expansion, which suggests the MOU language may already be settled. As Sandeep put it, “The specter of Katie Wilson has scared SPOG into actually making the deal to allow alternative dispatch.”

Also this week, the guys gave me a lot of time to geek out over the council’s amendments to legislation implementing “phase 1” of the city’s comprehensive plan, which just passed last week.

Did they go into a boredom-induced fugue state? Who knows, but I did get an opportunity to talk about why I’d be thrilled to have bars, restaurants, and late-night corner stores in my own residential neighborhood. Unfortunately, the council foreclosed that possibility when they voted to restrict new businesses in neighborhoods to stores and to make them close no later than 10pm—a missed opportunity to give more people access to the kinds of things that make a city a city.

City Council, Density, housing

City’s Growth Plan Update Maintains Seattle’s Suburban Character, Including Mandatory Parking

By Erica C. Barnett

A process that started with a year-long delay ended in a cascade of votes on more than 100 recently introduces amendments last week, as the City Council adopted “Phase 1” of its 10-year update to the city’s Comprehensive Plan on Friday.

The comp plan, the document that guides how and where Seattle will grow in the future, gets a major update every decade; the one that’s currently in place, Seattle 2035, was launched through a series of open houses in January 2014 and signed into law in October 2016. Outreach and engagement for the latest update, which Mayor Bruce Harrell dubbed the One Seattle Plan, began in January 2022, and the council just adopted the first part of the final proposal in September 2025.

The mayor’s office contributed a year to that extended timeline by repeatedly pushing back the release date for their plan, which was the subject of extensive internal debate over how much new housing the city would allow in traditionally walled-off single-family neighborhoods. (Seattle hasn’t had strict single-family-houses-only zoning for years, but its land use patters are starkly suburban, with one house per lot in the vast majority of the city’s residential land.)

While those internal deliberations were going on, the city did an environmental study of five different versions of the plan, ranging from “no action” to an option that would have allowed modest new density in neighborhoods along with even more rental housing in the places where it’s already allowed—generally, large commercial centers and along busy arterial roads. During their 2023 campaigns, most of the City Council candidates who would go on to win their elections said they supported this option or another, denser alternative crafted by housing advocates, known as Alternative 6, indicating broad support for significantly more housing across the city.

In March 2024, Harrell finally released a first draft of his “One Seattle Plan.” The proposal, a drastically scaled-back version of a more ambitious plan the city’s Office of Planning and Development put forward, was roundly derided by housing advocates, including the city’s own Planning Commission, as woefully inadequate to meet the housing needs of hundreds of thousands of new residents Seattle is expecting over the next 20 years. (Former District 4 council candidate Ron Davis, who was defeated by Maritza Rivera, called it “a 20-year plan to give up on the housing crisis.”)

After that round of backlash, Harrell’s office released a new draft of the plan in October that slightly increased density in a few parts of the city—mostly by restoring six of the 48 “neighborhood centers” that were part of OPCD’s rejected early draft of the proposal. This new version now included 30 neighborhood centers—areas within about 800 feet commercial “nodes” or major transit stops, where future zoning changes could allow 3- to 6-story apartments.

Months of additional outreach and engagement followed. Housing opponents deployed their usual arguments against the modest density updates in the plan, from pleas to protect Seattle’s suburban-style neighborhood character to claims that a handful of small apartment buildings in up to 30 locations would be tantamount to “clearcutting”  Seattle and killing baby orcas and endangered birds. They also rolled out a perennial complaint among people who want Seattle to stay the same: There wasn’t enough outreach. They didn’t feel “heard.”

The council ranged from sympathetic (Cathy Moore, who previously said she supported Alternative 5, said allowing apartments in Maple Leaf would destroy the neighborhood, and Maritza Rivera tried to ensure no apartments could be built in upscale neighborhoods in her district) to unmoved by these arguments.

Mostly, the council wanted to restrict housing in historically single-family areas and continue channeling new apartments to noisy, polluted arterials. Alexis Mercedes Rinck, a Central District renter who doesn’t own a car, was the exception: She consistently argued for more density and would go on to try, unsuccessfully, to restore more of the neighborhood centers Harrell removed from the plan.

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While all this was going on, state legislators forced the city—all cities, in fact—to allow at least four units of housing on every residential lot, or six if two of the units are affordable. The city was supposed to pass legislation to comply with that law, House Bill 1110, as part of the comprehensive plan update; instead, because the plan was so far behind schedule, the council passed “interim” legislation to meet a state-imposed deadline in May.

That gets us, more or less, to the past six weeks, when after months of relative torpor, the city council took up more than 100 amendments to the two pieces of legislation that make up this part of the comprehensive plan update, passing dozens of changes over the course of several days. (The council will take up other aspects of the plan, including changes to parts of the city that are already dense, next year.)

Some of the amendments, like Dan Strauss’ proposal to strip out a planned neighborhood center around the existing Phinney Ridge commercial district and “replace” it by restoring a neighborhood center near the Goodwill store in Ballard, came so late in the process that advocates were scrambling to understand the impact even as the council was voting to approve them.

Others, like Maritza Rivera’s “compromise” amendment giving the director of the city’s planning department new authority to force developers to change their site plans to preserve existing trees and enlarging mandatory “tree protection areas,” were so late-breaking they were only available on paper, hot off the printer, to people present in council chambers. One of the explicit purposes of that amendment, which passed, is to “preserve and enhance the city’s physical and aesthetic character.”

A page from Maritza Rivera’s “compromise” amendment 102, handed out in the room at city hall and not available online when the council approved it.

The council’s changes will, generally speaking, decrease the overall size of the city’s neighborhood centers, with the greatest reductions in council districts whose representatives are wary of (or outright oppose) dense housing in areas dominated by single-family houses. Rob Saka (West Seattle), Joy Hollingsworth (Capitol Hill and the Central District) and Maritza Rivera (Northeast Seattle) successfully excised large swaths of their districts from planned neighborhood centers, arguing in each case that “community” in the area opposed new housing and that Harrell’s plan had failed to take into account the unique features that made these areas inappropriate for apartments.

Joy Hollingsworth proposed her own last-minute amendment to preserve the “donut hole” of low density between Capitol Hill, First Hill, and the Central District, but pulled it last week, saying she would reintroduce the exemption as separate legislation in the future.

The council rejected efforts by Alexis Mercedes Rinck to restore some of the neighborhood centers Harrell’s office eliminated in their draft plan, arguing that including any new density would require a lengthy environmental review, making the final comp plan update even later than it already is. Allowing more density, council members like Strauss noted, will likely trigger a review under the State Environmental Policy Act, while preserving existing apartment bans does not. Allowing apartments in these areas also opens the city up to citizen appeals, which tend to happen whenever the city proposes allowing more, or any, apartments in single-family areas.

Citing advice from the city attorney’s office, the council put all of the proposals to increase density or substantially change the, including the last-minute changes Strauss proposed for his district, in a “docketing” resolution for future council consideration.

The council also rejected Rinck’s proposal to eliminate local mandates that require developers to build parking for new apartments across the city, making the familiar argument that allowing apartments without parking would clog streets and make it impossible for existing residents and people patronizing local businesses to park conveniently.

And although they approved an amendment allowing corner stores throughout residential areas (rather than just on literal corners, as Harrell proposed), they rejected a Rinck amendment that would have allowed stores and restaurants to stay open past 10pm, and allowed other types of businesses, such as bars, in neighborhoods. Bob Kettle, in particular, blanched at the idea of bars and late-night bodegas, arguing that they were “a recipe for disaster on the public-safety front.” [Notice of correction: This paragraph originally said the legislation also prohibits restaurants; it allows restaurants as long as they close by 10pm.]

The council did add some modest height and density bonuses for specific types of housing the city wants to encourage, including privately developed stacked flats (small apartment buildings with each unit on a single floor, distinguished from multi-story townhouses and larger apartment buildings) and social housing. But they rejected Rinck’s proposals to make it easier to build accessory dwelling units on existing lots, yanking several amendments that would have provided density bonuses for ADUs after a lengthy executive session on Friday. Those amendments, too, are now part of the docketing resolution for future consideration.

Overall, the new plan continues to embrace the city’s longstanding strategy—going back to the 1990s—of concentrating new apartments in a few already dense areas while minimizing density in traditional single-family neighborhoods and keeping it relatively low in “urban villages” (now rechristened “urban centers”).

The amendments that occupied so much of the council’s time over the past several weeks will serve, on balance, to reduce the amount of new housing allowed in Harrell’s already scaled-back plan, keeping Seattle’s existing zoning patterns firmly in place except in a few, sharply proscribed areas that could see the reintroduction of the kind of small apartment buildings that were once allowed in residential areas across the city.

But urbanists shouldn’t totally despair. The next council will likely include at least two new pro-housing members (Dionne Foster, running against Sara Nelson, has a commanding lead, while both Eddie Lin and Adonis Ducksworth, running to replace appointee Mark Solomon in District 2, have expressed support for density). That could improve the short-term prospects for amendments like Rinck’s, and make future changes to the comp plan (which can be amended every year) more politically palatable.

The full council won’t vote on the final “Phase 1” legislation until October or November, after additional environmental review of the amendments they just approved. They’re supposed to take up “Phase 2,” which includes zoning changes in the new neighborhood centers as well as the denser urban centers and regional centers, is supposed to start in December.

City Council, Density, housing

Late-Breaking Comp Plan Change Would Restore Low-Density “Donut Hole” Between Capitol Hill and Central District

By Erica C. Barnett

The city council’s comprehensive plan committee will spend the rest of this week debating and voting on amendments to the zoning template that sets the bar for how much housing can be located in neighborhoods across the city. As of this week, the potential changes include a late-breaking proposal from committee chair Joy Hollingsworth to exempt nearly 50 blocks in the middle of the city from zoning changes that would allow more housing there.

Earlier this week, Hollingsworth introduced her “chair’s packages” (first one here, second one here) of potential changes to the plan proposed by Mayor Bruce Harrell earlier this year. The two lists—46 amendments, whittled down from the 110 proposals the council discussed last week—are designed to move forward together as a “consent” package, unless any councilmember asks to pull one out for an individual vote.

Two additional lists, totaling 45 amendments, aren’t included in the consent package, and will each come up for individual discussion and potential vote. (First one here, second one here.)

That second group includes Hollingsworth’s new amendment, which would preserve a 173-acre area of low density, commonly known as the “donut hole,” between Capitol Hill and the Central District. The area is currently mix of neighborhood residential (former single-family), low-rise, and institutional zoning. Under Mayor Bruce Harrell’s comprehensive plan proposal, the western half of this area would become part of the the First Hill regional center, and the eastern would link up to the District urban center.

Regional centers and urban center allow significantly more housing than neighborhood residential or low-rise areas.

Hollingsworth’s amendment would restore the donut hole, preserving existing prohibitions on dense housing in the middle of some of Seattle’s densest neighborhoods. A half-dozen bus routes run through or directly adjacent to the area, including the new RapidRide G route on Madison, which skirts the northern (Capitol Hill) section of the donut hole.

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Another last-minute Hollingsworth proposal would change the name of the Judkins Park Urban Center to the South Central District Urban Center, in order “to reflect the area’s connection to the Central District,” according to a summary of the amendment.

Hollingsworth’s proposed consent package includes density bonuses for stacked flats and social housing, an amendment to allow corner stores throughout neighborhood residential areas, and a new section of the comprehensive plan on public safety. It does not include proposals to lift mandatory parking minimums for new development, a proposal to allow bars and restaurants in residential neighborhoods, or any of the proposals to shrink or increase the size of specific neighborhood centers—a new zoning designation that will allow 3- to 6-story apartments within 800 feet of about 30 locations around the city.

Notably, not one Councilmember Maritza Rivera’s amendments ended up in Hollingsworth’s consent package. (Every other council member has multiple amendments in the package.) Many of Rivera’s amendments would impose extreme limitations on new housing, including an out-there proposal to empower city planning officials to stop any development that would result in the removal of any tree.

A council central staff memo notes that “Additional environmental review may be required for amendments” to both of the comprehensive plan bills, such as amendments from Alexis Mercedes Rinck that would restore eight neighborhood centers that were stripped from the plan before it went through a final environmental review. Removing areas of density from the plan does not require any environmental review, even if it results in a loss of housing that drives people to move into car-dependent suburbs.

The committee has meetings planned today and tomorrow, starting at 2:00 this afternoon.

 

City Council, Density, Opinion, The C Is for Crank

Cathy Moore’s Opinions on Growth and Housing Aren’t New. What’s New is That Most Voters Disagree With Them.

By Erica C. Barnett

On Wednesday, City Councilmember Cathy Moore lashed out at members of the public who she said attacked her personally over her support for legislation (which Ryan Packer covered in detail at the Urbanist) that would have required Sound Transit to create bespoke Community Outreach Plans for every light rail-related project that requires the city to approve a master use permit, about 60 projects in all. The original proposal, sponsored by Maritza Rivera, would have added more process, delay, and cost to the already delayed, over-budget light rail expansion to Ballard and West Seattle.

Moore—whose comments I quoted at length in yesterday’s post about the latest episode of the Seattle Nice podcast, and which you can view above—said people were directing “hate” and “personal attacks” at her over the legislation. She spoke at length about her long record of public service, suggesting that her critics were unfairly maligning someone who has “dedicated 30-plus years to improving the lives of people who don’t have a voice and have chosen to put myself out here,for all this love that I get every day.” Prior to her 2023 election, Moore served in many different judicial roles, including five years as a King County Superior Court judge.

It’s true that Moore didn’t get much love from the public for supporting proposals that would slow down or prevent housing from being built, and that hundreds of people mobilized to write emails to Moore and other councilmembers urging them to vote against the amendment.

Ultimately, the legislation—a bill from the mayor’s office that was actually supposed to speed up permitting for light rail-related projects in the city—moved out of the council’s land use committee without the red-tape amendment—not because the public was mean to council members, but because it didn’t have majority support. Instead, the committee considered and passed an unpublished walk-on amendment from Rivera that requires Sound Transit to produce a report about its public outreach for each project that requires a permit.

One thing that was striking about Moore’s comments yesterday, and comments she’s made about other hot topics like tree preservation requirements and proposals to allow more apartments in her district, is that she isn’t proposing anything new. Rather, she’s calling for a return to policies that the council and mayor generally supported 20 years ago. But those policies are no longer in step with the majority in Seattle, which is why most of them have failed to pass. This is how democracy is supposed to work. The fact that people are calling Moore a NIMBY—for “not in my backyard”—reflects dramatic changes in public opinion about housing in recent decades. NIMBY isn’t a slur—it’s a description.

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Having covered City Hall in the old NIMBY days—back when councilmembers openly used terms like “protecting neighborhood character” and neighborhood activists denigrated renters as “transients” who had no right to comment on land use or housing—I can tell you that pro-housing advocates used to be pariahs at city hall. (Hell, I remember being called a “clueless little twit” by a West Seattle homeowner because I argued that renters deserved a voice at City Hall). The very idea that we should allow duplexes, much less apartments, in single-family areas would get you shouted down by homeowners furious that renters thought they had any right to encroach on the sanctified character of “their” neighborhoods. Think of the shadows those huge new three-story buildings would cast on their tomato plants!

Things have changed; public opinion in Seattle has shifted. The views of people who bought their houses for five-figure sums in the ’60s and ’70s are no longer massively overrepresented on the city council. Even as a body made up overwhelmingly of homeowners (the job pays well enough that renters who join the council can usually buy at least a condo, and do), the council now represents renters’ perspectives better than it ever has in the past, and that trend is unlikely to reverse.

Bottom line: We’re a bigger city now than we were in the old “lesser Seattle” days, and the people who live here—Moore’s constituents—generally want to do away with “not in my backyard” policies, including red tape and design review requirements that slow down and prevent housing and transit. Moore wouldn’t have gotten much pushback for her views if she’d been on the council in 2001, but in 2025, she represents a minority perspective, and she’s facing inevitable criticism for policy proposals that are broadly unpopular.

I empathize with the pain Moore is clearly feeling as the result of public opposition; being attacked and called names is unpleasant and can be very upsetting. But the fact is, calling someone a NIMBY isn’t an expression of “hate.” It’s just a description of a once-dominant perspective that most of the Seattle public no longer holds.

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.