Category: Development

Development, neighborhoods

Activists Want to Save “Grandma Brooks’ Cedar.” Her Family Says They’re Misrepresenting Their Mother’s Wishes

By Erica C. Barnett

UPDATE: On Monday morning, police intervened as protesters attempted to block construction at the site. According to the Instagram account PhotogSteve81, posting at about 10:15 Monday morning, “arrests are being made” at the site. Video posted by the account showed protesters skirmishing with police officers and a man and woman lying on the ground, surrounded by police.

Erich Armbruster, of Ashworth Homes, told PubliCola that protesters showed up at the site last night and occupied an area behind a fence set up by the Seattle Department of Transportation; at some point, one broke onto the property itself and refused to leave until police arrived last night. This morning, protesters returned and re-occupied the site as well as the street in front of the property, with at least one person lying down in the street and refusing to leave, while others stood inside the fencing itself. Police came out and attempted to deescalate, eventually arresting at least one protester.

Look back for more updates later today.

Original story follows: 

On February 9, several dozen people gathered outside a construction site in northeast Seattle to rally around a large Western red cedar tree, which is slated for removal as part of a new development that will replace a one-story bungalow with four new townhouses. The city had recently posted a notice that the tree could come down as February 10, so neighbors who wanted to save the tree scrambled to respond.

“We were shocked because it was too close [in time],” said Saraswati Sunindyo, who lives down the street. “We didn’t have enough time to do much of anything.”

Tree Action Seattle, a group that has pushed for revisions to Seattle’s tree ordinance that would make it harder to remove trees for development, quickly got to work, organizing the rally and creating an action page for the tree, which is located just off busy NE 65th Street, between two apartment buildings and across the street from a drive-through coffee stand.

Formerly one of several anonymous large trees on the block, the cedar now had a name—Grandma Brooks’ Cedar—and a backstory: According to Tree Action Seattle, the previous homeowner, Barbara Brooks, “lovingly cared for” and “cherished” the tree for for more than 70 years. “On hot summer days, she would carry a bucket of water to the tree to water it,” according to the website, and even swept the driveway of the neighboring apartment complex until she was almost 90.

When the apartment complex owner offered to buy her house, the site continues, Brooks refused, because he said his plans would require cutting down the tree. “Barbara passed away at 103, and requested her family only sell the property to a buyer that would preserve the tree.”

According to Tree Action, Legacy Capital Partners, the real estate firm brokered the deal, “offered to save the tree,” but “immediately filed plans to remove the cedar” once the land was in their hands. A representative from Legacy did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and the owner of the apartment building did not return a call last week.

According to Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections spokesman Bryan Stevens, developers are allowed to remove “Tier 2” trees—those with a diameter of 24 inches or more—if retaining the tree would reduce the amount of developable land on a lot to less than 85 percent of its total area. Anyone who removes a tree for development must replace the tree with a tree or trees that will result in a similar or greater tree canopy once they mature.

Those trees, however, will take a long time to grow to full height—longer than many of the people mourning the loss of the cedar will be alive.

“The whole neighborhood really loves the tree,” Sunindyo said. There are other Western red cedars in the area, she acknowledged, but “they’re not as big as that one. My kids grew up with that tree. A neighbor who is 70 years old said, ‘When I was little, it was already big.’ So everyone is attached to that tree.”

 

Not everyone.

“Mom hated that tree,” said Beverly Brooks, who grew up in the house and lived with her mother for the last seven years of her life. “My mother never took buckets of water to water the tree. She was 101, not 103, [when she died], and she never told any neighbor that she loved that tree. We all hated that tree.”

As for protesters’ claims that their family told Legacy they had to keep the tree in place, Beverly said, “We never said anything to anybody about that tree.”

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“Our mother hated that tree,” Beverly’s sister Barbara confirmed. “It’s a huge tree, and it sheds all the time.” Her mother maintained the tree to the best of her ability, removing piles of needles from the roof, gutters, and sidewalk, but she certainly didn’t “cherish” or “lovingly care for” it, the sisters said.

“My mom would cut back the branches and clean it up just constantly,” Barbara said. “We didn’t have a lot of money growing up. Mom always said, ‘If I could afford to get rid of this tree, I would.'”

“That tree was a burden to my mom for years and years,” Beverly said. Eventually, it became her burden as well. For 30 years, into her 70s, Beverly climbed up on the roof to remove needles from the house and gutters, then cleared the sidewalk. “I didn’t want anybody to fall and get hurt,” she said. In all that time, “Not one of the neighbors asked if they could help or nothing. They saw me up on the roof and every man turned the other way.”

“They call my mom ‘Grandma Brooks.’ I don’t like that,” Beverly added. “Her name was Mrs. Brooks. She wasn’t a grandma to any of them.”

Both sisters recall that a neighbor across the street told their mother she needed to put a covenant on the property so that any future buyer would have to keep the tree, but their mother said no. They were surprised at the vitriol the new owner, Legacy, has received for their plans to remove the tree. “In our minds, we just thought ‘let’s get rid of it’ because it’s going to cause the next people problems,” Barbara said.

Today, the Brooks’ house is gone, reduced to a pile of rubble. After the city received an anonymous complaint about potential groundwater pollution from asbestos, the new owner, Ashworth Homes, stopped demolition to do a second asbestos remediation on what’s left of the house, stopping work on the project.

Remnants from the recent protest, including a circle of rose petals surrounded by a wreath of cedar boughs, remained visible on the ground as of last week. The tree, which towers over the three-story apartment complex next door, is now surrounded by protective fencing that neighbors have festooned with signs reading “SAVE THIS TREE!!!” and “MAKE AMERICA AN ENDLESS EXPANSE OF OLD-GROWTH FOREST WITH NO CERTAIN BORDERS AGAIN.”

There is no old-growth forest remaining in Seattle neighborhoods, although isolated old-growth trees can be found in a few local parks. Western red cedars like the one in the Brooks’ former yard take about 50 years to reach their mature height of 80 feet or more, and were part of the landscaping planted to replace the old-growth forest that was destroyed to develop single-family neighborhoods across what is now Seattle.

Tree Action Seattle argues that it would be a simple thing to keep the tree in place and redesign the site plan, by shifting around the buildings and converting two of the four proposed garage spaces into surface parking spots. “I showed the plan to two architects,” Tree Action’s Sandy Shettler said over email. “One of them laughed and said there are so many ways to design the site with the same amount of housing around this tree you’d have to go out of your way to remove it.”

Ashworth Homes president Erich Armbruster agrees it might be technically possible to keep the tree–but not on the site plan he purchased the plans for the property based on a layout that has more value because of the size and floor plans of the homes that can be built there, including garages and more usable ground-floor space than Tree Action’s proposed site plan would allow.

“Had I been presented that plan, presuming it was possible, might I have purchased it? Yes, I might have, but not for the price I paid,” Armbruster said. Tree Action’s plan, he said, lowers the value of the finished development by replacing garages with less desirable surface parking and changing the layout of the building next to the tree to make the first floor “harder to lay out for any sort of meaningful use.”

Property records show the Brooks sold the property to Ashworth for a little more than $1 million.

“A bank would have required it to be less because the finished value isn’t as high,” Armbruster said. “I purchased a permitted site plan that was all negotiated according to the rules in place today.” Renegotiating the plan now would be like buying a car, driving it off the lot, and getting a call from the dealer asking you to pay more for the tires. “We can’t renegotiate it, because I’ve already purchased it.”

A rendering of the approved townhouses on the site of the Brooks’ former property.

Armbruster said that after tree activists began protesting the removal of the cedar, the tree service provider he hired to remove the tree backed out and he had to hire a new one—an event that’s reflected in city records. Once they’ve completed asbestos remediation and received a permit to remove the tree, work can move forward again, Armbruster said.

There is one way for homeowners to prevent future developers to remove a tree on their property: Before selling a property or passing it on to heirs, an owner can place a covenant on the land to protect the tree. Although both sisters recalled a neighbor telling her mother repeatedly to protect the tree with this kind of covenant, she didn’t. “He would tell my mom, ‘When you sell this house, put it in writing that this tree has to stay,’ and she said, ‘No, don’t tell me what to do,” Beverly recalled.

The sisters say the pressure from neighbors has made them feel uncomfortable returning to their old neighborhood. But Barbara did stop briefly by the recent protest. “I went to their little event,” she recalled, “and said ‘Don’t homeowners, after they pay taxes for 75 years, have the right to sell the place?”

“I’ll be honest with you,” Barbara said, “It’s just like killing my mom over and over. … It’s been three years. Can’t that poor woman just be left alone?”

 

City Council, Development, labor, land use

Proposal to Allow Affordable Housing Near Stadiums Reignites a Familiar Debate Over Industrial Land
City Councilmember Bob Kettle yells at building trades union leader Monty Anderson. Remember when this council came into office, promising to restore “civility” and bring a new era of “collaboration” to City Hall?

By Erica C. Barnett

City Council President Sara Nelson has reintroduced a proposal, shelved in 2023 to secure the Port of Seattle’s support for an overhaul of the city’s industrial zoning, that would allow up to 990 units of “industry-supportive housing” —half of them affordable to people making 90 percent or less of Seattle’s median income—on two blocks of land just south of Lumen Field.

Although the city’s original “preferred alternative” industrial lands policy included this housing, the final version adopted in 2023 excluded housing from the area.

While the Port has argued that allowing housing near industrial areas will permanently harm Seattle’s maritime and industrial sectors, housing advocates point to an environmental impact statement done specifically for the industrial lands update that concluded housing is compatible with the kinds of businesses that are now allowed around the stadiums, like breweries, art spaces, and retail stores attached to clothing manufacturers.

In last week’s meeting of Nelson’s governance and accountability committee, representatives from the Port and maritime unions squared off against affordable housing advocates (the Housing Development Consortium), neighborhood business groups (the Alliance for Pioneer Square), and the Seattle Building and Construction Trades Council, which argued the zoning change would bring thousands of new jobs to the area.

Port Commissioner Fred Felleman said the Port had agreed to allow hotels around the stadiums, but “long-term housing in industrial zone without basic amenities is unacceptable and compromises our ability to attract new tenants. Please don’t put housing in conflict with job growth.”

Former Redmond mayor John Marchione, who now heads up the Washington State Public Stadium Authority, countered that the zoning change would create a “new, fully formed community with “jobs, housing, transportation and entertainment.” The area is less than a mile from two light rail stations, which currently have the lowest and third-lowest ridership of the 19 stations on Sound Transit’s north-south 1 Line—largely because almost no one lives near them.

Panel members told the council they agreed to put off the housing question until a later date in order to ensure that the industrial lands policy—which had been in the works for years—would pass with the backing of the Port, which had threatened to withhold support for the plan if it allowed housing near the stadiums. The new policy barred housing in a small area called the Stadium Overlay District, which includes two blocks just south of T-Mobile Field and a long, skinny strip of land next to Terminal 46, known as the WOSCA site for its former owner, WOSCA Terminals.

As part of the 2023 deal, Washington State Public Stadium Authority consultant Lizanne Lyons told the council, Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office told  the housing advocates to come back in the future to seek zoning change to allow housing in the two blocks south of the stadiums. (The WSPSA owns Lumen Field.)

“It was frankly at the 11th hour that we were informed that the deal we thought we had, that we had been told we had, [to allow up to] 990 units of housing in the stadium district were taken out,” Lyons said. “We were told that the timing was sensitive … ‘Come back in a year and get the zoning change you need to enact the housing that we have repeatedly told you you could have.'”

The Port and longshore union argue that allowing apartments in the area would create traffic bottlenecks for trucks and make it impossible for Terminal 46—which currently serves as storage space for imported cars—to be used for container shipping in the future. Before the council can take up any proposal to allow housing near the stadiums, Councilmember Dan Strauss said, they must first make sure they know how that terminal will be used in the future, what kind of development will take place at the WOSCA site (a decision that won’t happen until after the World Cup games next year), and how any new housing will impact freight traffic in the future.

“There are other ports to the north and south that could just as easily take this traffic, and it would be a shame if they start taking our cargo because I- 90, that connects Seattle to the heartland of America, into Boston, can’t get through that last half-mile at the end to meet the port,” Struass said.

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The city’s final Environmental Impact Statement concluded that while housing growth can increase car traffic, it could also lead to better infrastructure for transit, pedestrians, and cyclists in “areas with histories of long-term underinvestment” like SoDo. The FEIS did also found that there would be no “significant adverse environmental impacts” from adding 990 new housing units in the area.

As Mike Merritt, a former senior executive policy advisor at the Port of Seattle, recently wrote in Post Alley, low shipping volumes—not traffic on and around I-90—have led to slowdowns and closures at several Seattle terminals, including Terminal 46, which has not had container service since 2019.

Housing opponents have also argued that the city has failed to consider the potential impacts of natural disasters or an emergency that requires the military to access Seattle by sea.

Channeling these arguments, Kettle said the city had failed to consider the possibility of several types of potential disaster on people living in the area. “There’s not been any talking about Love Canal-type considerations for this location,” Kettle said. Moreover, “SODO is between two fault lines [and sustained] great damage from earlier earthquakes, like in 2001 … These considerations have not been talked about— liquefaction zones, tsunami, in terms of the elevation, the inundation of the water. … We look at the LA fires right now, we look at the hurricanes in the Gulf, in Florida. These are major considerations.”

Instead of standing for “Final Environmental Impact Statement,” Kettle quipped, FEIS should have stood for “Flawed Environmental Impact Statement” because “it didn’t really address some of the unique circumstances” in the two-block area.

In fact, the EIS did consider geological hazards, traffic impacts, and the other potential issues Kettle and Strauss identified. In a section about geologic hazards, the EIS notes that “modern building codes” are designed to mitigate against risks associated with earthquakes in historically industrial areas across the city, including in existing residential neighborhoods like Pioneer Square, Ballard, and Georgetown.

“With mitigation, all these impacts together would not be considered significant,” the EIS concluded. If the Big One hits, of course, it won’t really matter if you live near the stadiums or elsewhere in the city; all of Seattle, but especially areas near waterfronts, will face catastrophic destruction.

Panel member Monty Anderson, head of the Seattle Building & Construction Trades Council, said he was familiar with all the arguments against housing near the stadiums—particularly the ones about future uses for the WOSCA site and Terminal 46.  “‘What if the Coast Guard comes? What if they build an arena? What if we get offshore wind?'” Anderson said. “Everybody knows that it’s just delay.”

Lyons, from the stadium authority, noted that it’s been decades since the two blocks south of Lumen Field have been used for industrial purposes. “It’s a lot of vacant buildings and deteriorating warehouses and vacant lots,” she said, plus “some good development on First Avenue South.”

Apparently responding to public commenters who argued that having more street-level activity would improve public in the area, Kettle said that wasn’t true—just look at downtown, Belltown, and the Chinatown-International District, which have lots of people but also lots of crime. “If residence was the determining factor of public safety, those should be the three safest places in the city. But they’re not.” Legislation the council passed last year, including surveillance cameras, higher pay for police, and “stay out” zones for people who use drugs in public, create “the conditions for safety,” Kettle said; “housing itself will not.”

Later in the meeting, Kettle lost his temper at Anderson after the union leader commented that some people had been “fed lines” and  “talking points” by opponents of the housing proposal. “We all do that,” he said. Although the remark seemed to be aimed at the longshoremen who testified earlier, Kettle seemed to take  it as a personal attack.

Cutting Anderson off, Kettle said his views on industrial land policy are based on his “service as a naval officer, an international security expert [who] understands international trade,” as well as his “studies,” “academic experience,” and time on the Queen Anne Community Council. “I’m not being a mouthpiece for anybody that’s out here, and I just want to make that point clear,” Kettle said.

That prompted this dramatic exchange, which began when Anderson responded to Kettle:, “Since you’re so intelligent and smart and I’m just a stupid Mexican construction worker, I’ll bide down to what you think I should—” At that point, Kettle, visibly shaking with anger, began shouting:

After the meeting settled down, Kettle said he “respect[ed]” Anderson, but did not apologize for his outburst.

Nelson’s committee will take up the legislation again in February.

City Council, Development, homelessness, housing, immigration, Mayor Harrell, Opinion

PubliCola’s Seattle Predictions for 2025

By Erica C. Barnett, Josh Feit, and Sandeep Kaushik

The three co-founders of PubliCola—that’s me, PubliCola columnist Josh Feit, and my Seattle Nice sparring partner Sandeep Kaushik—have put together our annual list policy-obsessed, 100-percent accurate Seattle predictions for 2025. Each of us gave the assignment our own spin—I’m going out on a limb by boldly predicting things that will definitely happen in Seattle next year; Josh is predicting things that shouldn’t happen but will; and Sandeep has a list of things that won’t happen, but should. – ECB

Erica’s Predictions: Things that definitely will happen

Predictions are vibes. By that I mean: Even when they don’t come true, a good prediction captures the zeitgeist of the year, whether or not it’s correct in all the details.

One reason I believe this, probably, is because I’m notoriously terrible at making specific, particularly political predictions. This goes way back, to at least 2003, when I referred to a city council candidate as a “formidable” challenger to the incumbent, Peter Steinbrueck—less than three months before he dropped out of the race because he couldn’t raise any money. (Steinbrueck went on to win with nearly 83 percent of the vote.)

But another reason I think this is because it’s basically true. No, my 2024 prediction that the new council would move quickly to reverse renter protections like the winter eviction ban didn’t pan out—but only because the council wasted months getting up to speed on what the city does, and the repeals got pushed to this year, when they’ll likely happen.

And yes, I was technically wrong when I said the council would find it harder than expected to close a $250 million budget deficit—but only because I didn’t anticipate that council members who campaigned on making “hard choices” would practically trample each other to endorse a cynical short-term fix—using revenues from the dedicated JumpStart payroll tax to fill the entire budget gap.

As for my prediction that the then-new drug law wouldn’t have much of an impact? Well, the city failed to invest adequately in new diversion or treatment programs, so the people who are getting arrested for using drugs in public are still largely ending up back where they started—on corners like 3rd and Pine and 12th and Jackson, where police stage occasional raids that only push people to the next neighborhood over.

So with those caveats out of the way, here’s my list of specific, measurable predictions that will definitely come true in 2025. At least in spirit.

Big picture stuff: 

Federal funding cuts will hit Seattle because of our status as a “sanctuary city,” and we won’t be remotely prepared.

Monday, January 6 marked the first time a council member (Cathy Moore) publicly raised serious concerns about the incoming Trump Administration’s promise to cut federal funding to cities that refuse to participate in mass deportations of undocumented immigrants. But the city has done little to plan for what happens when we no longer have access to federal emergency response dollars (pretty critical during COVID), federal housing funds, which come  in the form of tax credits as well as direct subsidies that make our housing levy pencil out, and federal transportation funds, without which we would have no functioning transit system.

If Seattle really is going to do its part to protect immigrants from racist deportations (and people seeking reproductive and gender-affirming care from prosecution and jail), the time to start planning was last November. But the mayor and council have shown little inclination to discuss what losing funds will mean, much less come up with a plan to deal with this near-inevitability.

The city council will amend the tree ordinance to prevent even more new apartments, all in the name of environmental protection. 

The comprehensive plan isn’t the only policy area where council members are likely to weaponize the city’s environmental goals to prevent new housing in the city’s single-family enclaves. Last year, the city council passed a comprehensive tree protection ordinance that requires property owners to navigate a labyrinth of new restrictions (and pay thousands of dollars) if they want to remove a tree larger than 12 inches in diameter. (We called it byzantine and pointed out that most of Seattle’s tree loss occurs in city parks, not on privately owned lawns). But so-called tree advocates, whose transparent (and often explicit) goal is preventing development in the single-family neighborhoods where they own houses, have argued that these new rules don’t go far enough.

During the council’s first two meetings of 2025, on Monday, Councilmember Cathy Moore accused housing advocates of dismissing trees as a “NIMBY issue” (again, I’ll point readers to the piece I wrote about why the focus on trees in people’s private yards won’t actually protect the city’s tree canopy, while tree planting requirements would), and said she plans to do something to stop the “indiscriminate cutting of trees relating to development” that she claimed is allowed under the current tree law.

Expect a tree code update this year that hews closely to the demands of groups like Don’t Clearcut Seattle, which has misrepresented city regulations to argue for expanded tree requirements for multifamily housing along with dramatic increases in tree removal fees. (They also want to create permanent, legally binding tree covenants for private residential properties). These policies are designed to prevent the housing council members claim they want, but they’ll pass as long as the rest of the neighborhood-based council members go along with Moore and Northeast Seattle Councilmember Maritza Rivera, who has also cited trees as a reason not to allow new housing in her low-density district.

Elected officials will take the wrong lessons from the ongoing uptick in police hiring.

As Sandeep notes below, the Seattle Police Department has started to reverse a trend that began during the 2020 pandemic, when police officers began retiring and quitting en masse, in some cases to avoid COVID vaccine requirements. However, the new hires will not come close to meeting Seattle’s (already scaled-back) version of the nationwide 30 by 30 initiative, which calls for three out of ten new police recruits to be women by 2030. Recruiting women to become officers will turn out to be more complicated than just hiring the former chief of a department that hit that goal; it will require deep changes to a culture of misogyny and actions to remedy past and current gender discrimination in the department.

The city council will continue to take its cues—and legislation—from the mayor, further blurring the gap between the legislative and executive branches.

Although the council did exercise initiative this year by reversing many progressive policies—reinstating special “stay out” zones for drug users and sex workers, expanding the city’s use of jail beds for misdemeanor offenders, and bringing back the old prostitution loitering law, to name a few—much of the legislation they passed this year came prewritten from the mayor’s office, from legislation to increase the city’s control over the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, to a proposal to remove restrictions on SPD’s use of “less lethal weapons” for crowd control.

Hell, the entire 2025 budget radically shifted the way the city funds general government services, and no one protested except Tammy Morales, who cited bullying by her colleagues as the reason she resigned last year. Sure, individual council members will occasionally butt heads with specific  departments (for Rob Saka, that’s SDOT; for Moore and Maritza Rivera, the city’s planning and land use departments), but they won’t oppose the mayor who helped most of them get elected.

Even major appointments now play out like faits accomplis: Harrell chose Madison, Wisconsin police chief Shon Barnes as the city’s new police chief without any public process or even a list of finalists. It’s hard to overstate what a break this is from longstanding practice; I went back 25 years, to the appointment of Gil Kerlikowske, and could find no examples in which a mayor appointed a permanent police chief without publicly vetting multiple candidates.

The council would be wise to question Harrell’s judgment when it comes to police chiefs. Just last year, Harrell defended disgraced former police chief Adrian Diaz as a “fine leader” whose “integrity is above reproach.” (Diaz, who was facing allegations that he had sexually harassed and discriminated against his female subordinates, announced he was gay on a right-wing talk show the following day. Seven months later, Harrell fired him for having, and lying about, an inappropriate relationship with a woman he hired.)

But they won’t. The head of the city council’s public safety committee, Bob Kettle, has already offered Barnes a “warm welcome” to his new job in a Harrell press release, and the council will almost certainly follow suit, approving the mayor’s pick after a perfunctory hearing process.

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And some quick hits: 

Despite near-unanimous support from the council she helped get elected, Sara Nelson will face a serious reelection challenger and could lose her seat.

Despite a lackluster first term (see Sandeep’s predictions, below), Mayor Bruce Harrell will not face a serious challenger and will win reelection, after a shakeup that involves the appointment of two, if not three, new deputy mayors.

Despite the city council’s successful push to place the social housing funding measure, I-137, into a low-turnout February election slot (more on that underhanded effort here), the proposal will pass, because the concept is broadly popular.

Despite overwhelming public support for turning Pike Place Market into a pedestrian-only zone, the streets around the Market will still be choked with cars at the end of 2025.

Rob Saka will still have to look at his nemesis—that fucking curb!—every time he drives to or from his downtown office, as SDOT finds reasons not to spend $2 million removing it.

Continue reading “PubliCola’s Seattle Predictions for 2025” →

City Council, Development, housing, Opinion

“I’m Not Prepared to Sacrifice My Neighborhood”: Councilmember Cathy Moore Takes Hard Line Against Apartments
Cathy Moore says she won’t “sacrifice” her neighborhood to three-to-five-story apartments around an intersection in Maple Leaf (the lavender blocks inside the circle above)

By Erica C. Barnett

Councilmember Cathy Moore came out swinging against the extremely modest, geographically limited density increases Mayor Bruce Harrell proposed in his comprehensive plan update on Monday, taking aim at straw “urbanists” who, she claimed, believe the “lie” that brand-new housing is affordable and that new apartments automatically lead to frequent transit.

“Too many of our young people cannot afford to live in this city, and this is what’s driving a lot of this. And yet they are told, ‘Well, if you just let us have a free rein and build, you’ll be able to have the housing.’ It’s not true,” Moore fulminated. “Allowing free-range zoning is not going to get you into the home that you want. It’s not going to create the homeownership opportunity that you need to grow your wealth [and] create a stable society where people are engaged socially and politically.”

Moore’s specific objection to the plan was Harrell’s refusal to eliminate a small node of density in her neighborhood, Maple Leaf, where the current comp plan proposal would allow apartments within one to two blocks of a small commercial center at 90th and Roosevelt. The intersection, she noted, is still “slated for a neighborhood center, despite my two formal requests to the mayor’s office to remove it.”

“I’m not prepared to sacrifice this particular—my particular—neighborhood, and the reason that I live here and support this neighborhood, so that we can just throw a bunch of townhouses up that start at $700,000,” Moore said.

The planned neighborhood center includes eight and a half blocks around an existing commercial district around 90th and Roosevelt, where apartments between three and six stories would be allowed. The location is smack between two light rail stations and on a frequent bus route that arrives every 15 minutes, which Moore referred to as the “one little bus” that serves the neighborhood.

An example (from the proposed comp plan) of a neighborhood center.

Density is code for rental housing, Moore continued, and “rental housing isn’t working. … When I talk to young people, they want a place of their own. They want a little garden. They want the amenities that us current homeowners have, and we’re creating a false promise what we’re putting out here and what the urbanist people are telling us.”

Moreover, Moore said, “people seem to believe that if you build all this multifamily housing, transit will come. Let me tell you, it will not come. That’s not how it works.”

Phew. OK. It’s hard to fully capture to the condescension in Moore’s comments about renters and “young people,” but let’s start here: Sixty percent of the people who live in Seattle—young, old, and in between—rent their homes, and it’s pretty insulting to dismiss all of them as naifs who don’t understand basic realities about the cost of housing in Seattle. Nor, frankly, is it the place of homeowners in their 60s, 70s, and 80s—including those who showed up in the middle of the morning on Monday to argue that apartments don’t belong next to houses—to talk about what working renters need or want.

Maple Leaf’s planned neighborhood center already has a commercial district that includes bars, coffee shops, restaurants, and businesses.

Much like the idea that most current renters will ever be able to afford a house in Seattle, Moore’s straw urbanist is a fiction. Real-world urbanists have never argued that brand-new rental housing is cheap; rather, they point out that in cities with acute housing shortages like Seattle, artificial scarcity—the kind city governments create by imposing sweeping prohibitions on new housing—pushes non-wealthy people out. “Rental housing isn’t working” because too many renters are paying half their income to live far away from their jobs, not because they don’t understand that what they really want is a mortgage. (Note to the “buy a house like I did” crowd: Given that at least half of all renters pay more than they can afford on rent, how exactly are they supposed to save up for the $462,000 downpayment they’ll need to qualify for a home loan in Seattle?)

Second, she’s actually wrong about how transit decisions work—King County Metro makes bus planning decisions precisely based on housing density—the more people live in an area, the more demand there is for bus service, which is why you don’t see frequent transit in places like west Magnolia or Laurelhurst. “If you build it, they will come” is literally how it works.

Moore and Councilmember Maritza Rivera represent some of the wealthiest, lowest-density areas of the city; although Moore’s district includes Northgate, Lake City, and other urban hubs, it also encompasses vast swaths of single-family urban deserts, represented by the beige areas in the northeast corner of the map above. Seattle has always concentrated density and growth along large arterials,

The council is discussing the comprehensive plan over several meetings in January and February. Because Harrell took so long to finalize the plan (amending it repeatedly to decrease, then slightly increase, the amount of housing it would allow), the council has a hard deadline: If a new plan isn’t in place by June, the state’s model code, which would increase density citywide, will go into effect.

Density, Development, housing, Mayor Harrell, Urbanism

Harrell’s Latest Zoning Plan Modestly Increases Density Compared to Previous, Widely Criticized Draft

By Erica C. Barnett

Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office, along with the city’s Office of Planning and Community Development, have rolled out a new zoning map and plan for “phase 1” of Seattle’s updated Comprehensive Plan, updating what was in the draft released earlier this year. The city’s comprehensive plan is the framework that stipulates how the city will grow, and how much housing is allowed in the city’s residential areas, for the next 20 years.

The new version increases the amount of density that will be allowed citywide to the level proposed in the state’s “model code”—allowing slightly more housing in some areas, while adding six new “neighborhood centers” (to the 24 proposed in the previous draft), where apartment and condo buildings as tall as 6 stories would be allowed near intersections and transit stops.

Overall, the new proposal allows tens of thousands more units over the next 20 years than the previous proposal, which housing enthusiasts like state Rep. Julia Reed and the city’s Planning Commission criticized for failing to go big on apartments.

Most of that new capacity, however, comes from implementing a new law that every city in the state is required to follow—House Bill 1110, which mandates new density in former single-family areas. Harrell’s proposal does not go beyond the requirements of HB 1110, but it does include new density bonuses for stacked flats, including larger, family-size units. And it no longer exempts 15 percent of the city—areas at “high risk of displacement,” like parts of Southeast Seattle—from the new density requirements; HB 1110 allows cities to exempt up to 25 percent of their single-family areas from the new rules.

Updating former single-family areas to the state’s recommended density alone (for nerds only: The maximum floor-area ratio for multifamily housing in the new “neighborhood residential” zones would increase from 0.9 to a minimum 1.2, and more for stacked flats) will allow more housing types than the old draft, which effectively limited new density in former single-family areas to townhouses.

The new “neighborhood centers” would be located in North Magnolia, High Point, Beacon Hill, Fremont, and Hillman City; a former “urban village” in South Park would also become a neighborhood center. Notably absent from the new proposal are another 16 potential neighborhood centers the city studied, but rejected—many of them in tony single-family neighborhoods like Laurelhurst and North Capitol Hill.

It’s hard to say exactly how many additional units of housing the new plan would allow compared to the current version, however. During a media briefing on Wednesday, officials with OPCD said a widely publicized estimate of 100,000 new units in the old draft was just a “guesstimate,” since the city hadn’t done a full zoning analysis at the time, and appears to have been low.

The number the city is hyping now—which, according to the city’s fact sheet represents a doubling of the city’s “overall housing capacity”—is 330,000—up to 330,000 new units that will be possible in the next 20 years thanks to this plan. That number is roughly 160,000 units above the city’s existing zoning capacity (the number of units that could currently be built throughout the city if all less-dense housing was razed and replaced). Because the city didn’t do a detailed zoning study of the March draft, that 160,000 may represent a significant increase over the last plan. Or it may not.

Overall, the new plan continues to embrace the city’s longstanding strategy—going back to the 1990s—of concentrating new apartments in a few dense areas (now known as “regional centers”—the densest—and “urban centers”) and along busy, polluted arterial roads, while minimizing density in traditional single-family neighborhoods. Beyond the bare minimum required by HB 1110, the changes (as urbanists, we’ll call them improvements) are fairly modest.

We’ll be digging deeper into the proposed zoning and legislative changes, described in more detail in this summary, as the city approaches its self-imposed December deadline.

Just one quick nitpick, because this drives us nuts (maybe this is how Bruce Harrell feels about graffiti!): The new plan to allow “corner stores” doesn’t merely continue to limit them to actual corner lots—an interpretation of the term so literal it borders on Kafkaesque. It also includes a new stipulation that these corner-based stores can’t be open before 7 or after 10pm, which basically defeats the purpose of allowing bodegas in the first place. A corner store that closes before 10 is almost legally bound to be a bougie “neighborhood market,” not a place to buy laundry detergent in the middle of the night. Seattle should stop calling itself a city if it won’t let us have actual corner stores.

City Council, Development, Elections, housing, Mayor Harrell

Friday Fizz: Council Advances “Alternative” to Social Housing, Design Review to End (Temporarily) Downtown

1. On Thursday, the city council held a special meeting to place their “social housing alternative,” along with the original social housing measure, Initiative 137, on the February 2025 ballot. The council’s alternative would use existing funds from the JumpStart payroll expense tax, most of which is currently earmarked for other affordable housing projects, to pay for traditional affordable housing limited to people making 80 percent or less of Seattle’s area median income.

The social housing measure proposes a tax of 5 percent, paid by businesses, on employee compensation over $1 million a year.

The council’s plan would slash funding for new housing from around $50 million to a maximum of $10 million a year over five years, drastically reducing the number of units could be built or purchased every year. Because the money would come from an existing tax, rather than a new tax on excess compensation, several affordable housing nonprofits have spoken against the plan—arguing, reasonably enough, that the plan would take JumpStart funding away from their own projects.

The council’s preferred option would not create social housing, a mixed-income housing model in which wealthier tenants (making up to 120 percent of Seattle’s median income) would subsidize rents for those making less, with rents permanently capped at 30 percent of residents’ income. Traditional affordable housing is designed to require ongoing rent subsidies, because the model does not allow any higher-income residents to live in the buildings.

Nonetheless, council members who supported the traditional affordable-housing “alternative” described it as a “proof of concept” for social housing before they voted on Thursday. (The special meeting was necessary because the council has been dragging its feet on putting I-137 on the ballot for months since the campaign submitted enough signatures to get the measure on the November ballot back in early July.) ”

The council alternative, sponsor Maritza Rivera said, “balances the need for innovation with the need for accountability” without giving “a blank check to yet another new agency that does not have the experience creating housing.” Councilmember Rob Saka said having two competing measures on the ballot was “simply good governance. … Given that both initiatives will be presented together, we’re centering choice [and] optionality.”

2. Also this week, the council’s land use committee voted unanimously in favor of a proposal to temporarily do away with design review for housing, hotel, and life sciences project in the greater downtown Seattle area. Design review, as we’ve reported, is an often lengthy process in which volunteer boards can require changes to the appearance of a building; developers say the process can add hundreds of thousands to the cost of projects because of construction delays, the need to hire architects to redesign projects, and the cost of aesthetic changes imposed by the boards.

The legislation moves on to the full council with an amendment requiring the city’s Office of Planning and Community Development to come back with a report next May detailing projects that are moving forward under the new rules. Although Councilmember Rivera pointed out that there won’t be much data available by then, a council staffer said the evaluation would still be helpful as the city decides how it plans to comply with a state law, passed last year, designed to streamline design review and prevent design review boards from delaying development based on subjective aesthetic preferences.