Category: Density

City Council, Density, legislature, Police, Transit

Friday Fizz: A Timid TOD Bill; Plus, More Committee Shakeups for the New City Council

1. Upzoning property adjacent to transit stations to promote walkability and maximize housing, AKA Transit Oriented Development (TOD), has become a basic tenet of sustainable city planning.

However, per Josh’s New Year’s prediction, state Rep. Julia Reed (D-36, Seattle) proposed a TOD bill this week that allows cities to go small, with zoning requirements well below the standard for adding the number of units our housing-shy region needs. Reed’s bill sets the minimum allowable “Floor Area Ratio”—an equation that determines the amount of housing it’s possible to build on a lot—at 3.5 within a half-mile of a stop on a light rail and 2.5 within a quarter-mile of bus rapid transit lines.

An easy way to visualize this: Under a 3.5 FAR, you could have a 3.5 story building that completely covers one lot, or a seven-story building that covers half the lot. Since cities have all kinds of requirements for setbacks, landscaping, and maximum lot coverage, it typically takes a FAR of 4 or more to make a modest six-story apartment building feasible. Seattle, for example, uses a FAR of 4.5 to allow six-story apartments, and Redmond is already building six-story buildings adjacent to the coming light rail.

Last year’s more aggressive TOD proposal, which won support from a broad coalition, including the Housing Development Consortium, Futurewise, the Washington State Labor Council AFL-CIO, and Transportation Choices Coalition, went with a FAR of 4 in the station area and 6 around the station “hub,” a designation Reed’s bill doesn’t mention.

In other words, Reed’s bill is not an upzone for a city and region that’s currently in the process of building and planning the largest light rail expansion in the country. And it will allow cities that implement mass transit (like bus rapid transit) in the future to limit housing to densities far below what the Seattle region is already building.

By the way, Josh also predicted that this bill would come with “steep affordability requirements that will chill development.” Et voilà: Reed’s bill would require every new building in a station area to include 10 percent of units affordable to people making 60 percent or less of the area median income, a requirement that goes well beyond Seattle’s Mandatory Housing Affordability law. It would also allow up to a 5 FAR for a building that’s 100 percent affordable.

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2. We reported earlier this week on the emerging shape of the new Seattle City Council, whose new president, Sara Nelson (citywide Position 9), wrote an op/ed in the Seattle Times this week laying out her priorities, including a vow to “break our reliance on new revenue (taxes) to pay our bills.” But council members also serve on a number of important regional committees, helping shape policy on homelessness, transportation, mental health care, and more. Here’s a summary of those regional assignments.

City Councilmember Dan Strauss (D6) will take over the seat formerly held by ex-city councilmember Debora Juarez on the Sound Transit Board, King County Executive Dow Constantine announced Friday afternoon. Juarez, who was council president, held the position for the past four years. Strauss was the vice-chair of the council’s transportation committee, but never led it. The council’s new transportation chair is Rob Saka (D1).

On the King County Regional Homelessness Authority (KCRHA) governing board, Nelson and new councilmember Cathy Moore (D5) will replace Lisa Herbold and Andrew Lewis. Nelson hasn’t weighed in that much on homelessness directly from the council dais (and wasn’t a member of the homelessness committee, which—along with the renters’ rights committee—no longer exists), but the brewery she owns, Fremont Brewing, uses illegally placed concrete “eco-blocks” to prevent homeless people from parking around its location off Leary Way. The company also worked actively to remove people living in tents on a piece of city-owned land immediately adjacent to its production facility.

Nelson championed legislation empowering City Attorney Ann Davison to prosecute people who use drugs in public spaces, who are mostly unhoused. (People who possess or use illegal drugs in their houses are not subject to the law).

Nelson has also expressed skepticism (verging on outright opposition) to harm-reduction approaches to drug use and homelessness, such as Let Everyone Advance With Dignity (LEAD), which diverts people from arrest and prosecution and does not make sobriety a condition for shelter. On that note: Kettle, who vowed to hire more police and end the culture of “permissiveness” toward drug use and crime in Seattle, will replace Lisa Herbold on the LEAD policy coordinating group, which oversees the program.

Joy Hollingsworth (D3), Kettle, and Nelson will take over on the King County Board of Health for Lisa Herbold, Tammy Morales, and Teresa Mosqueda. Mayor Bruce Harrell will serve as an alternate “representing the city council” on the health board—an unusual, and possibly unprecedented, comingling of the legislative and executive branches on a regional committee with influence over major decisions about public health.

The board of health makes policy recommendations relating to  mental health and addiction, as well as communicative diseases like COVID.

Teresa Mosqueda, who attended some meetings from home, chided Nelson last year when she made a point of noting that she was present at one particular meeting “in person”; in her op/ed, Nelson said “coming in to work in person” will help spark a “major reset in tone and direction at City Hall.”

—Erica C. Barnett, Josh Feit

City Council, Crime, Density, Drugs, homelessness, housing, Mayor Harrell, Renters, State of Washington, zoning

Nine PubliCola Predictions for 2024

PubliCola columnist Josh Feit and PubliCola’s hoary original publisher (and Seattle Nice contrarian) Sandeep Kaushik are joining Erica here to kick off the year with some soothsaying.  Specifically tailored for PubliCola’s policy obsessed readership, these aren’t prognostications about 2024’s headlining concerns (like the threat of Trump II), but rather, as you’ve come to expect from the most in-depth local news site in Seattle, this is deep political wayfinding for the year in local politics ahead —The Editors

Sandeep Kaushik:

1. The Real Change, House Our Neighbors crowd announced just before Christmas they will put a measure on the Seattle ballot in 2024 to establish a permanent funding source for I-135, the social housing measure they passed in February. I will take the bait and predict that funding measure will fail.

I say this because I have yet to see any evidence House Our Neighbors has an actual, serious, and detailed proposal (you know, one that includes actual, vetted numbers) to build such mixed-income public housing in a way that is going to be operationally viable and fiscally self-sustaining (which was part of the original promise)—much less one that’s better than the well-established existing model for building affordable housing.

It’s one thing to ask voters to support a gauzily intersectional dream of a new, supposedly self-sustaining form of socialistic self-governing housing when there’s no price tag attached (57 percent of Seattle voters supported I-135), quite another when they’re asking for an endless stream of money before any proof of concept. It also doesn’t help that in developing I-135, its backers spent infinitely more time and thought on calibrating the mix of marginalized identities that are represented on the governing board than on an actual plan showing how this sort of housing would pencil.

Maybe House Our Neighbors will prove me wrong, and come forward in January with a viable proposal rather than just a leap-of-faith money ask. It’s quite possible that famously generous, progressively-inclined Seattle voters will pass the funding even if they don’t. And if that happens, maybe they’ll actually deliver on their dreams and promises. If so, fantastic! I would love to be proven wrong, and would be thrilled to see a new, viable, fiscally defensible model of public housing take root in Seattle. But I’m not holding my breath, and I going to predict that if they don’t have a real plan, Seattle voters won’t hand them a blank check.

2. The King County Regional Homelessness Authority (KCRHA) will die a whimpering death in 2024. It pains me to make this prediction. In theory, a regional approach to homelessness policy makes enormous sense. In practice, though, the promise of regionalizing our homelessness response has—at least so far–face planted.

When KCRHA’s CEO, the charismatic and energetic Mark Dones, came on board in April 2021, and when KCRHA’s signature Partnership for Zero initiative to end visible homeless downtown was announced in February 2022, I was one of the cheerleaders for this promising new model.

But it was all downhill from there.

It soon became apparent that KCRHA had deep problems that seriously curtailed its effectiveness. To begin with, suburban buy-in to the idea of handing off and consolidating homelessness efforts in the KCRHA was nominal at best. Moreover, KCRHA had no independent funding source, and instead relied on pass-through funding from the city and King County, and that funding model quickly became fraught when some of the policies Dones advocated (no sweeps, opposition to tiny homes) ran counter to what some of their funders wanted.

The region’s key agency for dealing with its most serious problem will remain largely rudderless for more than a year, as staff and talent continue to decamp for greener pastures.

The governing structure of KCRHA, with multiple boards and committees, turned out to be an unwieldy mess, and the powers that be made things much worse by ingraining some of the most chuckleheaded aspects of cultural progressivism—for example, the fixation on centering “lived experience” as opposed to, say, prioritizing actual experience running large organizations implementing complex policies—into that governance, leading to several high profile, avoidable scandals. Internal, back office operations were chaotic, and staff turnover high, leading to further credibility-sapping problems.

It all came to a head when Dones announced their resignation in May, and then when KCRHA admitted failure and threw in the towel on Partnership for Zero in September. A huge amount now rests on the search for a new CEO for the organization, and word on the street is there isn’t likely to be a hire for that critical position until the second half of 2024, if it even turns out that anyone with the requisite experience and skill sets wants the job. That means the region’s key agency for dealing with its most serious problem will remain largely rudderless for more than a year, as staff and talent continue to decamp for greener pastures.

Under that sort of slow death spiral circumstances, writing off KCRHA as a misfire—perhaps triggered by the CEO search producing underwhelming candidates—might be best option. Of course, pulling the plug would be a spectacular embarrassment, so maybe the powers that be will allow to KCRHA to limp along in some sort of awful twilight state for at least another year. But I’m going to go out on a limb and bet the end is in sight.

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3. The 2024 governor’s race will be the closest since Jay Inslee won his first term in 2012 by narrowly besting Republican Attorney General Rob McKenna, 51-48. First, Washington State voters are in a pretty sour mood, and Inslee, now exiting after his third term, has middling-to-underwhelming approval ratings. There was even a recent poll showing (relatively) moderate Republican Dave Reichert nipping presumed Democratic frontrunner Bob Ferguson in a head-to-head matchup.

To be clear, I don’t think it’s likely Reichert will actually win, given that he’s strongly anti-choice, but if he gets through the August primary —not at all a sure thing, since he faces a semi-serious challenger on the MAGA right in Semi Bird, and moderate Democrat Mark Mullet is also making a play to consolidate a cross-party middle coalition to leapfrog Reichert in the primary—he could (at least conceivably) make a race of it, particularly if Ferguson veers too far left. Anyway, if it is Reichert in the general, this is a race Democrats can’t take for granted the way they have the last couple of gubernatorial races, even if (as is also likely) Trump is the Republican presidential nominee this November.

Josh Feit:

1. Last year at this time, I predicted that after booting single-family-zone preservationist Rep. Gerry Pollet (D-46, North Seattle) from his powerful position as chair of the local government committee earlier that month, the new wave of young Democrats in the state legislature would finally be able to pass some Yes-in-My-Backyard legislation.

Here’s me on December 22, 2022 writing about Rep. Jessica Bateman’s (D-22, Olympia) plan to authorize fourplexes in residential areas anywhere detached single-family homes were allowed: “With much better odds of passing their bills intact out of [new chair] Rep. Strom Peterson’s (D-21, Everett) committee than under Pollet’s provincialism, pro-housing legislators could bring some necessary state governance to Seattle’s failed local policies.”

Bam, they passed it. I was actually a little surprised. Bateman’s legislation made it legal in places like density-phobic Seattle to build four units per lot in residential zones, six units per lot within a quarter-mile walking distance of a major transit stop; and six units per lot in residential zones if at least two units are affordable housing.

Unfortunately, that’s way too progressive for Seattle. So, here’s my prediction for 2024 as the city updates the document that governs local zoning policy, its Comprehensive Plan: The newly elected slow-growth city council (I’m thinking of Joy Hollingsworth, Bob Kettle, and Rob Saka joining incumbent anti-growther Sara Nelson, along with Mayor Harrell himself) will use the Comp Plan update as an opportunity for undermining urbanism. First, they will come up with rules to minimize lot coverage, require setbacks, and establish height limits, along with levying hefty affordable housing fees that will keep housing developers from building any apartments in Seattle’s touchy neighborhood residential zones.

There’s also a provision that anxious city lobbyists statewide forced into Bateman’s bill that allowed local governments to limit the upzones to 75 percent of single-family areas.  I can see Seattle’s anti-housing faction using that “neighborhood character” card to stall density in hand-picked neighborhoods as well.

2. Speaking of pro-housing bills going awry: Watch for an attempt by state legislators to re-do last year’s stalled Transit-Oriented Development bill—legislation that would upzone land around light rail stations and bus lines—to disappoint pro-housing urbanists this year.

With the original senate TOD champion, Sen. Marko Liias (D-21, Everett), deciding not to sponsor the bill this year—I’m guessing he was frustrated by the overemphasis on inclusionary zoning (mandatory affordable housing quotas) that House Democrats tried to work into the bill last year—anti-developer lefties like Rep. Julia Reed (D-36, Seattle) are now in control of the legislation. Count on minimal upzones near transit (say five stories as opposed to eight) and steep affordability requirements that will chill development.

TL;DR: The very thing the lefties say they want, lots of housing, won’t get built.

3. I’m going to be vague about this one, but here’s what I will say: Even though Mayor Bruce Harrell got the conservative council he wanted, look for new D-3 council member Joy Hollingsworth—who appears to share Harrell’s brand of homily populist politics (even more so than the others)—to begin clashing with him behind the scenes. By year’s end, her frustrations with Harrell will be evident at City Hall.

Erica C. Barnett: 

1. The pundit class (looking at you, Sandeep) may have convinced voters that a local law governing minor drug offenses, like using drugs in public, was the most critical issue in the 2023 election, when moderate candidates denounced lefties who opposed it. But 2024 will prove that the impact of the drug law will be minimal.

As we’ve reported, the city’s new law does not actually criminalize low-level drug offenses; the state legislature did that already, when it passed the so-called “Blake fix” earlier this year. Instead, it empowers City Attorney Ann Davison to prosecute people for using or possessing drugs in public; without the new law, only the King County Prosecutor’s Office could do so, and they have historically shown little interest in spending scarce county resources on these relatively minor offenses.

While Davison has reportedly been eager to prosecute drug users, the jail isn’t booking people on misdemeanor drug charges alone, making it hard for Seattle’s Republican city attorney to pursue this law-and-order approach to addiction. Meanwhile, as we predicted, putting drug offenders on the “diversion” track—which was supposed to appease progressives— has just meant that other people who would have received help through the city’s main diversion program, LEAD, are being displaced by people who get arrested first.

Seattle always rolls out supposedly transformative (but, in this case, totally unfunded) new initiatives with a big burst of energy, only to let them fizzle—remember “Operation New Day”?

It’s notable, too, that the city has done exactly one big, flashy event to show off its new authority to arrest people for using drugs in public, then send them immediately to LEAD, with no public follow-ups since October. The mainstream press dutifully reported on the event, noting that it resulted in ten people going to jail on outstanding felony warrants (my question: Given that SPD could have located, interrogated, and arrested this group for their serious offenses at any point, why didn’t they?) and 13 entering diversion.

The biggest reason you haven’t seen a spate of similar headlines about drug arrests leading to diversion since that initial push is that the city didn’t provide any additional funding for diversion; as we’ve reported, LEAD—which is no longer accepting community referrals, just referrals from arrests—will run out of money to accept new clients by May. A secondary reason is that Seattle always rolls out supposedly transformative (but, in this case, totally unfunded) new initiatives with a big burst of energy, only to let them fizzle—remember “Operation New Day”? We don’t either.

2. One area where the new council may throw its weight around is by reversing outgoing council members’ renter protection laws, including the $10 maximum late fee, 180-day notice for rent increases, bans on winter and school-year evictions, and the “first-in-time” law that requires landlords to rent to the first qualified applicant. As I reported this week, small landlords complained about the first-in-time law more than any other renter protection. The law, sponsored by outgoing Councilmember Lisa Herbold, was intended to help reduce the potential for landlords to discriminate against prospective tenants based on factors like race, gender, and sexual orientation.

Although most of the city’s renter protections passed before his term, Harrell opposed the $10 maximum late fee, allowing it to pass into law without his signature earlier this year.

3. We may be entering a newly cozy era of mayor-council relations (with Harrell’s picks triumphing in nearly every 2023 council race), but camaraderie alone won’t solve the structural problems facing the city: Fentanyl addiction, a city budget deficit of nearly $220 million, the city’s inability to hire police despite generous financial incentives and a homelessness crisis for which Seattle is on the hook, at least financially.

The candidates who won this year talked a lot about resetting the culture at City Hall, finding fat in the budget and cutting it, letting police know they’re valued and trusted, and using a carrot (diversion) and stick (arrest and jail) approach to the addiction crisis. But the problems these platitudes purport to address are structural, and don’t respond readily to legislation: Every dollar of “waste” in the budget has a constituency (want to cut back on permitting times? Good luck doing that and instituting a hiring freeze) and many of the issues councilmembers brought up during their campaigns are structural and even nationwide, like police hiring. It’s one thing to denounce people for supporting proposals to reduce police funding three years ago, and quite another to solve a nationwide lack of interest among young people in becoming cops.

Density, Development, land use, Maybe Metropolis, zoning

The Invasion of the Corner Stores

Activating residential neighborhoods one poppyseed bagel at a time.

By Josh Feit

The line stretched 25 people deep along the sidewalk on a recent Friday on Capitol Hill. I wasn’t waiting to get into a club. Nor was I anywhere near the thumping Pike-Pine corridor. I was a mile away in an NR3 zone, a city zoning designation that not only forbids apartment buildings (while requiring all the surrounding single-family homes to be built on roomy 5,000-square-foot lots), but also prohibits retail businesses.

Mt. Bagel, where I was eagerly queueing up to get a bag of six fresh poppyseed bagels, is on the corner of 26th Ave. E. and E. Valley St., tucked up against the Arboretum, far afield from any commercial action.

“How did you folks pull this off?” I asked the woman working the cash register.

“It used to be a neighborhood grocery store,” she said. “I guess they never changed the zoning, and we got grandfathered in.” Then, perhaps worrying that I didn’t approve of such mischief, she added, “The neighbors love it!” King County records show that the two-story, three-bedroom, 2,000 square foot building was built in 1910 and sold for $91,000 in 1985 to its current owners; Seattle’s Department of Construction & Inspections notes that “it was built originally as a mixed-use building” meaning apartments on the top floor and commercial on the bottom.

“Of course the neighbors love it,” I said. “And there should be more of it.” Far from creating an unwelcome disturbance on an otherwise serene street, lines around the block constitute a political win for any city.

If we’ve learned anything from the pandemic, it’s that the traditional notion of concentric-circle cities where commercial action is relegated to downtown cores—and eased out of existence the further you move from the center—is an outdated and awkward contemporary city planning conceit. Twenty-first century approaches to zoning need to be altered to prioritize commerce in neighborhoods across the city. Similarly, as I’ve argued in this column many times: density should be shared across the city as well.

The fact that Mt. Bagel was a corner grocery in bygone days hints at an era before cities were reconfigured for the automobile; a time when outer-tier neighborhoods prioritized community needs as opposed to isolation.

Seattle needs to shift away from its carbon-heavy, suburbanized model and create networks of neighborhoods with dense housing that have immediate access to mass transit, parks, schools, and commercial spaces.

Seattle should take advantage of the public’s appetite for post-pandemic urban experimentation by redistributing density and commerce throughout the city’s neighborhoods, including in our neighborhood residential zones. Re-activating spaces in residential zones that are already zoned for business is a logical and easy first step.  Seattle’s Department of Construction & Inspections doesn’t have a catalog of spaces—like Mt. Bagel—that would fit the bill. But it would be a promising pursuit for the city to locate these spaces and start a program to promote reactivation. For example, Spokane has identified 95 such spaces.

In fact, Spokane’s planning department has an official initiative to allow property owners to convert any former commercial space, including spaces located in residential-only zones, back into commercial use.  The city, which is about a third the size of Seattle, established its “Activate Existing Neighborhood Commercial Structures” policy well before the pandemic, back in 2017.

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“In the past, Spokane enjoyed numerous small retail and commercial stores peppered throughout the neighborhoods, selling the small sundries and supplies needed by nearby residents,” said Kevin Freibott, a senior city planner for the city of Spokane. Freibott noted that “the presence of corner shops and small neighborhood retail in traditionally residential-only areas, can help activate a neighborhood, provide for greater use of pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure, and create a sense of place and community that can be missing in more homogenous neighborhoods.”

Of course, not all of Spokane’s 95 properties were ripe for redevelopment, Freibott said. Meanwhile, and unfortunately, the city has not reached out directly to any of the eligible property owners to see if they’re interested in converting their property to non-residential use. So far, the program has very few examples—just three—of commercial reactivation. However, cool examples of conversions on quiet residential intersections include one vacant residence that was converted into a coffee and fresh baked pastry shop called The Meeting House (it was a corner grocery in 1925), and a vacant house that was converted to a bakery and brewery called the Grain Shed (it was originally a small shop.)

As our affordable housing crisis (a cry for more housing) combines with the climate crisis (a cry for sustainable land use policies), Seattle needs to shift away from its carbon-heavy, suburbanized zoning model which severely segregates housing types and cordons off commercial use. Instead, we need to create intertwined networks of neighborhoods with dense housing that have immediate access to mass transit, parks, schools, and commercial spaces. Re-introducing commercial occupants into the swaths of Seattle’s developable land that’s currently off limits to neighborhood shops could be a popular first step toward meeting this urgent goal.

As the line of people stretching down 26th Ave. E. upset the placid morning with a giddy jolt of human activity, it became clear that Seattle is ready to embrace this change. Let the full-scale invasion of corner stores begin.

Josh@PubliCola.com

Density, Development, Guest Contributor, housing

Ten Questions to Ask About the City’s Draft Comprehensive Plan Update
A satellite view shows a typical suburban-style north Seattle neighborhood, with one detached single-family home per lot.

By Andrew Grant Houston

It’s December 2023, and as a local architect and housing advocate, I—along with many  other Seattleites—have now been waiting more than eight months since the city’s initial April release date for the Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) on the Housing Element of Seattle’s Comprehensive Plan Update. 

The DEIS currently identifies five possible paths for Seattle’s growth over the next 20 years and how that growth—or lack thereof—will impact our urban and natural environment.

Although the Comprehensive Plan is a complete vision that includes a number of elements (as defined by the state’s Growth Management Act), typically the most contentious and complex of these elements is the Housing Element, which sets the upper limit for how many housing units Seattle will plan for in the next 20 years. This element, and the public engagement that will come with it, is a once-in-a-decade opportunity for Seattle residents to voice our views about whether that the number of homes in Seattle is sufficient or insufficient for us as well as future Seattleites, and to weigh in on where new homes should be added. 

The city of Seattle has delayed releasing the draft statement multiple times, which should tip you off as to just how critical the Housing Element update is. But if you aren’t the sort of person who spends their time either wishing Seattle looked more like Paris or hoping your neighborhood will be preserved in amber until the end of time, what are the questions you should be asking yourself as you attempt to engage with such an important topic? There are certainly a multitude, but here are my top 10.

Population Growth

In May, the Seattle Times reported that, according to census data, Seattle is the fastest-growing large city in the United States. How does this news change the proposed number of housing units in the EIS draft, given that people are moving here faster than new homes are being produced?

Planned Growth vs. Actual Growth

How does the housing allocation proposed in the previous Comprehensive Plan, compared to actual housing production since that time, influence the proposed number of units in the Draft EIS, given our current housing deficit?

Zoning Capacity vs. What is Actually Built

New buildings typically have a lifespan of 50 to 100 years, meaning that there are tracts of land that have been developed since the previous Comprehensive Plan that may see zoning changes but will not see any actual increases in housing over the next 20 years. Are these parcels included in calculations around achieving increased housing capacity as part of the Draft EIS, or are they excluded?

Mandatory Housing Affordability

How is the Mandatory Housing Affordability (MHA) program being factored into the number of proposed housing units, given that the Community Indicators Report (September 2020) released by the City’s Equitable Development Initiative identified a need for 68,000 “affordable” units at all income levels below 80 percent of Seattle’s area median income, as well as the latest numbers from the city on MHA showing that just 7 percent of all housing units created over the last year qualify as “affordable?”

Homelessness

King County’s Point in Time count showed an increase in unsheltered individuals in 2022 compared to 2020, from 11,751 to 13,368. How does this increase in unsheltered homelessness influence the types of housing allowed as part of the Comprehensive Plan, as well as the allowed uses across Seattle?

The Urban Village (UV) Strategy

The Seattle Planning Commission’s 2020 paper “Evolving Seattle’s Growth Strategy” noted that the current Urban Village strategy perpetuated inequities that have existed in Seattle land use patterns since the creation of the city. A focus on equality would allow more homes in all neighborhoods, whereas a focus on equity would allow more homes in areas where historic redlining prohibited people of color from living and neighborhoods that have seen little to no change in zoning since the implementation of the Urban Village strategy in 1994. Does the draft EIS address this and if so, how? 

The 15-Minute City

How does the concept of creating a “15-Minute City” influence where the city will allow commercial or non-residential uses in each neighborhood? How does this inform the minimum number of homes we will allow on every lot in Seattle?

Climate Refugees

In 2023, we’ve seen a massive increase in heat waves across the US and in other countries. Given Seattle’s relatively mild climate, as well as the city’s status as a sanctuary city, how does the potential increase in climate refugees over the next 20 years the plan covers influence the number of proposed housing units across the city?

Trees

What methodology is being used to ensure that the tree canopy across the city is preserved or increased while also taking into account reductions in the buildable area on individual lots that may be necessary to achieve this goal?

The Climate Future of South Park

At the beginning of this year, South Park experienced a king tide, which flooded the neighborhood. Given that climate change will increase instances of this kind of phenomenon, including rising sea levels, does the Comprehensive Plan consider any forms of managed retreat and the impact climate change will have on proposed housing and development capacity in South Park and around the Duwamish floodplain?

 

The questions I’ve outlined above may appear intimidating, but I share them because, just as an informed voter is the best kind of voter, an informed citizen is the best kind of citizen. Seattle must change the way we do business in order to become the city we all wish it was for every resident—a place where everyone can work, live, and play safely and in community together. 

But in order to get there we must first map the difficult road ahead. We must recognize that we are in a tumultuous time but that by working together we make overcoming the major issues our city faces that much easier for all of us. The Draft EIS must be the first plan for how we move forward, toward a Seattle for everyone. And if the city tries to turn away from this path, whether due to fear or a delusional sense of nostalgia, it’s up to us to collectively reject that false future.   

When the draft plan is released, I encourage everyone in Seattle to take just five minutes to make one comment on the plan. That comment can simply say “we need to be more ambitious in how many homes we’re planning for” or “we need to be honest about how many people want to live here.” The amount of good each comment could do for our city would mean a lot less time having to write op-eds like this and a lot more time spent out enjoying all the best aspects of what it means to live here. 

Andrew Grant Houston, also known as Ace the Architect, is the Founder and Head of Design of House Cosmopolitan, an architecture and urban design practice focused on celebrating culture and creating places where people belong. A former candidate for Mayor of Seattle in 2021, he also serves on the board of Futurewise.

City Council, Density, Historic Preservation

Muckleshoot Tribe Opposes Pedersen’s Last-Ditch Tree “Protection” Plan
Many common trees, the Muckleshoot Tribal Council’s letter noted, will reach 12 inches’ diameter within a couple of decades. “”This not a standard to determine whether a tree was a tree that was historically modified by native people in the Seattle area.” Image via City of Seattle.

By Erica C. Barnett

The Muckleshoot Tribe came out strongly this week against a proposal from City Councilmember Alex Pedersen that would require state approval for the removal of any tree larger than 12 inches in diameter. The new regulation is necessary, according to Pedersen, to ensure housing developers aren’t destroying trees that were culturally modified by indigenous people before Seattle was developed.

“Most trees will become more than 12 inches in diameter in 20 to 30 years,” the letter, signed by Muckleshoot Tribal Council chair Jaison Elkins, says. “This not a standard to determine whether a tree was a tree that was historically modified by native people in the Seattle area.”

Pedersen, who has frequently used “tree protection” to justify proposals that limit housing density in single-family neighborhoods, said this latest proposal was necessary to protect culturally modified trees, or CMTs, which include trees whose branches were bent to mark important locations. Earlier this year, the developer agreed to reduce the number of units in a housing project in northeast Seattle in order to preserve a large Western red cedar tree the state designated as a CMT after consultation with the Snoqualmie Tribe.

“Rather than enacting this proposed bill, the City Council instead, should fund and the City hire professional archaeological staff as the other major cities in the State of Washington have done. This would be a better, and more effective and efficient way of assuring that cultural resources in the City are not adversely impacted.”

Noting that Pedersen’s proposal was limited to trees, Elkins said it “does not deal with the fundamental problem of the City’s failure to meaningfully deal with potentially impacted cultural resources of all types. The bill also seeks to prevent the City from carrying its duties by, instead, relying on a state agency that has no obligation to do the City’s work.” As we reported last week, the state Department of Archaeology and Historic Preservation (DAHP) says it does not have the capacity to examine every medium- and large-diameter tree slated for removal in Seattle to see if it was culturally modified in the past.

“Rather than enacting this proposed bill, the City Council instead, should fund and the City hire professional archaeological staff as the other major cities in the State of Washington have done,” Elkins wrote. “This would be a better, and more effective and efficient way of assuring that cultural resources in the City are not adversely impacted.”

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DAHP director Allyson Brooks told PubliCola last week that reviewing potentially thousands of trees in Seattle for cultural significance “doesn’t seem realistic—what I told [the city] was, you need a city archaeologist,” not a law passing the responsibility on to a state agency, she said.

A memo from City Council central staff notes that the new requirement “is likely to be administratively burdensome for [the Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections], DAHP, and affected Tribes. It could also lengthen permit processing times and increase costs for applicants.”

During the city council’s meeting on Tuesday, Pedersen said he had seen the letter from the Muckleshoot Tribe and that the city’s Office of Intergovernmental Relations “was engaged” with the tribe.

Elkins did not respond to a request for an interview, and Pedersen did not respond to questions about his proposal, which he will have to formally introduce next week for the council to consider it before the end of the year.

City Council, Density, Development, housing

Pedersen Plan Would Require State Approval to Remove Any Tree Larger than 12 Inches

 

Screengrab via Councilmember Alex Pedersen’s official Facebook page.

By Erica C. Barnett

City Councilmember Alex Pedersen, who’s leaving at the end of the year, may get one parting shot at developers after his proposal to advance “impact fees” on new housing (co-sponsored with another departing councilmember, Lisa Herbold) failed last week.

Just before budget deliberations began earlier this fall, Pedersen proposed legislation that would require a state archaeological agency to sign off on the removal of any tree larger than 12 inches in diameter—a class of trees that is already explicitly protected by the city’s new tree ordinance, which added new protections to about 48,000 trees, largely by making it more difficult to remove smaller trees. According to the legislation, the new regulations are necessary, in part, because the a new state law exempts “missing middle” housing, such as fourplexes, from state environmental review.

Pedersen’s proposal would require the Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections (SDCI), the agency responsible for review tree removal applications, to notify the Washington State Department of Archaeology and Historic Preservation (DAHP) about every request to remove a “Tier 2” or “Tier 3” tree (those 12 inches in diameter or greater) and to “receive confirmation” from the department about “whether the tree is part of an archaeological site”—that is, whether it is a culturally modified tree. Put another way, the city would assume that every tree larger than a foot in diameter is culturally modified until proven otherwise.

“I’m not an attorney, I’m an archaeologist. But I don’t see how a local government can pass a law that binds a state agency.”—Department of Archaeology and Historic Preservation director Allyson Brooks

Asked about the potential impact of the proposed new regulations, a spokesman for SDCI said that although the agency “is committed to identifying workable protections to preserve Culturally Modified Trees, we believe this proposal would cause significant delays in permits for new housing… create resourcing issues, and cause delays on permit approvals including Master Use Permits, construction permits, and simple over-the-counter permits.”

Generally speaking, “culturally modified trees” are trees that were altered by indigenous residents in the past to serve a cltural purpose, such as peeling bark for baskets and construction materials, marking important locations, or wayfinding. Earlier this year, a developer agreed to preserve large Western red cedar tree in the Wedgwood neighborhood that the Snoqualmie Tribe said had been culturally modified to “mark a trail system that predated the city, and settlers in the area,” according to KUOW. The developers’ own analysis concluded that the tree was around 85 years old, but supporters claimed it was 200 or older, which would make it an ancient outlier among other Western red cedar trees in Seattle.

The decision to save the tree, which Wedgwood residents named “Luma,” on cultural modification grounds paved the way for Pedersen’s legislation, which would make it more difficult and expensive to remove any medium-to-large tree in Seattle.

It’s unclear, however, if the city has the authority to require a state agency to do anything—especially a small agency like the DAHP, which has just six staff to review around 16,000 federal and state projects every year.

“I don’t know how we would do this and on what timeline,” DAHP director Allyson Brooks said. “We don’t even have any staff in Seattle. It’s not realistic.”

“I’m not an attorney, I’m an archaeologist,” Brooks added. “But I don’t see how a local government can pass a law that binds a state agency.”

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Neither Pedersen nor SDCI responded to questions last week, and a spokesman for the City Attorney’s Office said he couldn’t comment on whether the city attorney had offered advice to Pedersen’s office on the legality of his proposal. The Snoqualmie Tribe also did not respond to questions last week.

In its stage-setting “whereas” section, the legislation argues that a state law allowing more density in previously exclusive single-family neighborhoods could threaten the existence of many “previously unidentified culturally modified trees” in Seattle, including trees “of particular importance to the Indigenous peoples who have resided in the Puget Sound area… since time immemorial.”

Similarly, despite Pedersen’s lofty language about cultural preservation, his efforts to “save the trees” have long been inextricable from his opposition to new apartments, and he and other density opponents have relied on many different arguments to push for legislation that makes housing harder to build.

Wedgwood, where the median home price is now well over $1 million, was founded as a whites-only outpost in the 1930s, when a builder dredged and cleared the area for development. Today, according to the to the University of Washington, the neighborhood is still “overwhelmingly White,” and its residents have vociferously opposed changes that would alter its suburban character. In 2018, the neighborhood opposed (and ultimately killed) a bike lane that would remove parking spaces along one side of 35th Ave. NE. Initially, the residents focused on the loss of parking, but eventually pivoted to claim that bike lanes were only for “the privileged.”

Similarly, despite Pedersen’s lofty language about cultural preservation, his efforts to “save the trees” have long been inextricable from his opposition to new apartments, and he and other density opponents have relied on many different arguments to push for legislation that makes housing harder to build.

Brooks, from the DAHP, says the need to identify and protect culturally modified trees and other Indigenous archaeological resources is great, but that if Seattle wants to make it a priority, they should hire a city archaeologist, rather than asking the state to come out every time a property owner wants to cut down a mature tree. Seattle City Light and Seattle Public Utilities, whose work often involves digging, have their own archaeological experts, but they deal with utility projects, not tree removal on private property.