Category: Development

City Hall, Development, housing, Renters, Uncategorized

Council Amendments to Comprehensive Plan Reveal Competing Priorities
Maritza Rivera’s amendments would shrink neighborhood centers—areas where 3-to-6-story apartments would be newly legal—across her northeast Seattle district.

The comprehensive plan sets rules for how Seattle develops in the future, including where the city will allow its renter majority to live.

By Erica C. Barnett

After nearly a year of delays, the city council is finally getting ready to put its stamp on Mayor Bruce Harrell’s proposed 10-year Comprehensive Plan—a document Harrell has branded with his campaign slogan as the “One Seattle Plan.” The council has been meeting for months to discuss elements of the plan, including the creation of a few dozen new “neighborhood centers” where apartments will be allowed for the first time in decades, but this week was the council’s first opportunity to propose tweaks to the plan—107 amendments in all.

The comprehensive plan sets policies for growth and development, designating where new housing, transportation, and other infrastructure should go and placing limits on housing density in the city’s neighborhoods. It’s updated every 10 years, with periodic amendments, and inevitably reflects the political priorities of whoever is in office at the time.

We’ve reported previously on the Harrell Administration’s reluctance to allow significantly more housing in Seattle’s traditional single-family neighborhoods as part of the plan.

After killing an early draft of the plan that would have allowed significantly more density, Harrell released a plan last year that fell far short of the changes necessary to create enough housing for new and current residents—including renters—to live in Seattle affordably. After intense criticism of that proposal—the city’s Planning Commission said it upheld exclusionary policies rooted in redlining and failed to provide the housing Seattle needs—the mayor came back with a new plan that allowed slightly more housing, though still less than the proposal most members of the current city council said they supported when they ran for election in 2023.

The council’s proposed amendments are a mixed bag. Several proposals would collectively shrink the size of the proposed “neighborhood centers”—areas within 800 feet of certain frequent transit stops where 3-to-6-story apartments would be allowed—by hundreds of acres, in a blatant retreat to old single-family zoning patterns that benefit people who already own property and don’t want renters living in “their” neighborhoods.

Others would impose new restrictions on any new development that requires removing trees, including one that would give the city free rein to force builders to redo projects if even one tree, of any size, was threatened.

Still others would provide new incentives for developers to build dense housing, serving as a counterpoint to other councilmembers’ proposals to shrink the areas of the city where people who can’t afford to buy a house in Seattle are allowed to live.

Breaking the substantive amendments down into broad categories, we have:

Expanded Neighborhood Centers

On balance, the proposed amendments that make it easier to build housing—including everything from density bonuses for affordability to expanded and brand-new neighborhood centers—outweigh NIMBY proposals to restrict housing, although some of the proposals are probably nonstarters—or negotiation starters—in their current forms.

Harrell’s final comprehensive plan proposal included 3o neighborhood centers—down from 48 in an early draft, but more than the 24 included in an early version of the plan. Since then, though, there’s been intense pressure on the council to further reduce the number of neighborhood centers in the plan, coming primarily from incumbent  homeowners in neighborhoods like Wedgwood, Madrona, and Maple Leaf.

Although several council members did end up proposing amendments that would scale down the size of neighborhood centers, in some cases dramatically, the amendments to add new areas of potential density outweigh those proposals, meaning that if every proposed change to the neighborhood centers was adopted, the amount of land in designated neighborhood centers would increase significantly.

Council members who proposed new or expanded neighborhood centers included Dan Strauss (who proposed a new East Ballard neighborhood center and called for expanding the boundaries of five others, including in Magnolia), Bob Kettle (who proposed a new North Queen Anne/Nickerson Neighborhood Center) and Alexis Mercedes Rinck, who’s proposing eight new neighborhood centers, one in each council district.

“Seattle needs more housing,” Rinck said. “Seattle also needs full and thriving communities, and we’ve heard an overwhelming call from constituents to achieve these goals with more housing, especially in high-opportunity neighborhoods which haven’t seen proportional growth.”

Build This, Not That

Other proposed amendments would add density bonuses and incentives for different types of housing, such as stacked flats and affordable apartments.

Kettle, for instance, proposed getting rid of an “amenity area” requirement for new housing in neighborhood residential zones, freeing up more land for housing.

Under the current proposal, 20 percent of the space around new apartment buildings in the city’s traditional single-family areas would be reserved for open space, typically a yard, for residents to “recreate on site”—as if what apartment dwellers in cities really want is a tiny lawn where they can all hang out together.

An amendment from Sara Nelson would retain a requirement that residential buildings, including new apartments in all parts of the city, be exempt from environmental review under the State Environmental Policy Act (SEPA); that exemption is otherwise set to expire next month, making housing harder to build.

Other amendments, from Hollingsworth, Nelson, Kettle, and Rinck, would provide bonus density for developers who agree to build specific types of housing, including social housing, accessory dwelling units, and low-income or affordable housing. Several proposals would create incentives for developers to build stacked flats—apartments spread out across a single story of a building—including density bonuses for retaining trees and amendments that would allow stacked flats to be denser than other types of apartments in neighborhood residential (former single-family) zones.

Rob Saka also has an amendment that would give a density bonus for one- or two-story “cottage” apartments surrounding a large common area, a style that resembles single-family housing more than the three-to-six-story apartments that will be allowed in the new neighborhood residential zones under the current plan.

Strauss proposed an amendment that would increase the maximum height in these areas from six to seven or eight stories immediately next to a major transit stop, and Rinck proposed changing the definition of “major transit stop” to include high-frequency buses.

15-Minute City

Several amendments would reduce or remove mandatory parking requirements. The most ambitious, from Rinck, would “remove parking requirements citywide for all land uses in all zones,” a phrase that brings joy to my car-hating little heart. (Yes, I own a car. No, I don’t think the city should socially engineer car culture, as it currently does.)

Builders wouldn’t be barred from including parking in their developments, but they wouldn’t be forced to do so, as they are in many places under the city’s current code.

Another amendment from Rinck, essentially a backup if her first parking proposal fails would reduce parking mandates to comply with a statewide parking reform bill that requires cities to eliminate some of their parking mandates by 2028. Another proposal, from Strauss, would establish parking maximums in the city’s regional centers—the densest areas, including downtown, Capitol Hill, and Strauss’ home turf of Ballard. In a concession to the tree-preservation lobby, Rinck’s amendments also include one that would eliminate parking mandates for developments that preserve trees.

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A proposal to allow corner stores in neighborhoods could also see some meaningful changes.

In the past, we’ve dunked on Harrell’s proposal to allow corner stores in neighborhoods, because it would only allow new stores and restaurants  on literal corner lots, with restrictions that don’t apply to other businesses in the city, such as a mandatory 10pm closing time. Several amendments attempt to remedy those issues. The amendments range from extremely modest (a Nelson amendment that would remove the literal-corner requirement but retain restrictions on business type, size, and closing hours) to ambitious, by Seattle standards (a Rinck proposal that would remove the corner requirement, allow businesses to be open past 10pm, and add bars to the list of businesses that are legal in neighborhoods.

Three amendments, from Rinck, Strauss, and Nelson, would make it easier to open stores and restaurants in residential neighborhoods where they’re currently banned. As we’ve reported, Harrell’s comp plan proposal would allow corner stores in neighborhoods, but only on literal corners, with additional restrictions such as mandatory 10pm closures and a stipulation that they can include restaurants, but not bars.

The amendments range from modest (amendments from Strauss and Nelson to allow stores throughout residential zones, not just on corners) to ambitious (a Rinck proposal that would allow restaurants and bars throughout these areas, eliminate a requirement that businesses be closed from 10pm to 6am, and ditch a 2,500-square-foot size restriction included in the mayor’s proposal). Allowing bars in neighborhoods, a policy that works fine in big cities across the country, may be a bridge too far for censorious Seattle, but a compromise between these proposals could be a first step toward creating more 15-minute neighborhoods in Seattle.

Homeowners vs. Renters

Of course, it wouldn’t be a zoning update without some NIMBY poison pills. Although no one, including newly appointed District 5 Councilmember Debora Juarez, has proposed reviving former D5 councilmember Cathy Moore’s quixotic effort to remove an entire neighborhood center from Maple Leaf, several councilmembers have proposed reducing the amount of land in their districts where people who rent apartments can live.

Maritza Rivera, who has frequently claimed that the city did insufficient outreach to single-family neighborhoods before allowing apartments near frequent transit stops, has three amendments to shrink neighborhood centers in Bryant, Ravenna, and Wedgwood. Her proposal to scale back the Wedgwood center is the most radical of the three, in that it would reduce the size of the center by about 40 percent, limiting apartments to 35th Ave. NE, already a busy arterial, and prohibiting them in the adjacent blocks. (In contrast, one of Rinck’s amendments would expand the Wedgwood neighborhood center to the south; expect strong objections from Rivera to that one).

“Based on months of feedback from community members who live in and near the proposed neighborhood centers, my amendments modify the boundaries of the neighborhood centers in the D4, including Wedgwood, Bryant and Ravenna, to reflect resident concerns….  around the ability of local neighborhood streets to handle increased growth and the infrastructure,” Rivera said.

A Rivera amendment for Ravenna traces a similar line to carve single-family houses in a designated historic district (itself a way for older neighborhoods to oppose density) out of the proposed neighborhood center around Third Place Books, leaving the commercial area but ensuring that there would be no apartments in the neighborhood surrounding the commercial center.

Separately, Rivera proposed an amendment that would give the city the HOA-like authority to dictate what kind of external siding would be allowed on buildings within designated national or local historic districts, based on factors like the “historic character” of an area; this extraordinary new power would also apply to historic districts that might be designated in the future, including those proposed by house owners who oppose new development in their neighborhoods.

Joy Hollingsworth wants to cut the Madrona Neighborhood Center by about seven blocks, concentrating new housing into a smaller area that already includes parks, schools, and other areas where housing can’t be built.

Joy Hollingsworth has proposed shrinking down another controversial neighborhood center in Madrona, whose homeowning residents showed up en masse to oppose the zoning change in their neighborhood. Hollingsworth’s amendment would shrink the Madrona center by nearly 40 percent, slicing off big chunks of current single-family areas on the east and west sides of the proposed center and concentrating any new housing around an existing commercial stretch that includes an elementary school, library, and playfield where housing can’t be built.

Finally, it wouldn’t be a conversation about housing in 2025 without hand-wringing over trees—not planting or maintaining trees in public spaces, which are actions the city could take at any time, or encouraging property owners to plant new trees themselves, but preserving trees that already exist, generally at the expense of new development.

In addition to the tree preservation incentives I mentioned earlier, there’s an amendment from Strauss to “recognize the importance of the natural environment and native species, including trees, bees, salmon, orca, and herons,” plus several from Rivera to make it harder to develop housing if trees are on site.

The most extreme proposal from Rivera—and the one that made Rinck confirm with council staff that the amendment really would do what it appeared to do—would allow the city to require developers to come up with a completely new alternative plan if it turned out their housing proposal would require the removal of any tree, no matter its size, age, or viability.

It’s easy to see how this could grind development in traditional single-family areas to a halt. If someone planted a sapling on a property slated for development, or if there was already unremarkable small tree on site, the city could stop the project and require the developer to start from scratch.

Housing is already tremendously expensive to build in Seattle, and construction permits are declining as developers pull out of the city. Empowering unelected city staffers to force full project redesigns around every existing tree would exacerbate the housing crisis, adding costs to projects that are already financed while reducing the amount of housing that could be built in every project with a tree on site. And forget about expanding the city’s tree canopy—who would plant a new tree on a property they may want to sell in the future, knowing it would instantly reduce their property value?

Development, housing

After Protesters Block Street and Occupy Building Site, Dubiously Named “Grandma Brooks’ Cedar” Comes Down
A crew member removes limbs from the tree late Monday morning.

By Erica C. Barnett

Between 20 and 25 protesters blocked a tree service company that was trying to reach a construction site in the Ravenna neighborhood on Monday morning, where residents and activists from outside the area have been protesting the removal of a western red cedar since earlier this month. About 10 police officers came out later to remove protesters from the development site, arresting at least one who refused to leave. PhotogSteve81, on Instagram, captured the chaotic scene.

The tree stood on the corner of a lot where a builder, Ashworth Homes, plans to replace a single-family house with four new townhomes—and where Barbara Brooks, the former owner, lived for more than 70 years until she died three years ago at the age of 101.

Although Tree Action Seattle claimed, on its action page for “Grandma Brooks’ Cedar” (later changed to “Grandma’s Cedar”) that Brooks “cherished” and lovingly cared for the tree, Brooks’ daughters said the opposite was true—in fact, they said, their mother “hated” the tree because it shed constantly and was so work to maintain.

The sisters, Barbara and Beverly, said no one in the neighborhood offered to pitch in as their mother, and later Beverly, struggled to keep the roof, sidewalk, and gutters clear of debris from the tree. “My mom would cut back the branches and clean it up just constantly,” Barbara recalled. “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.'”

Although Tree Action and others have suggested that the property developer promised the Brooks family they would keep the tree, both the developer and the builder who bought the property say that wasn’t true. Roque de Herrera, a representative for property developer Legacy Group Capital, said “there were no conversations, promises made, or agreements regarding the tree” when Legacy signed on as the site developer. Erich Armbruster, the president of Ashworth Homes, said no one brought up the tree at any point during the sale.

By 11:00 on Monday morning, the truck the protesters blocked earlier had made its way onto the property, and a crew member was busy limbing the tree from a bucket two stories above the ground. Despite the wind and rain, a handful of people watched from across the street as a pile of branches accumulated on the ground and a swirl of sawdust spun through the air.

One, Lynnwood horticulturist Gabriel Kearns, walked across the street periodically to film the workers and yell at them for removing the tree. She said her biggest issue was that developers were killing healthy trees to build “million-dollar crap” and creating “mini-deserts,” with dead soil and no shade, in the city. Gesturing at an apartment building next to the property, she said, “Those apartments are going to be 100 degrees this summer—they will not have shade. … Trees provide a livable community.”

Kearns said she wanted to see Seattle tighten its tree code to make it more difficult to remove trees, perhaps by imposing a waiting period between when developers remove a tree and when they can begin development.

Another person didn’t want to be quoted but told me they heard I was being paid by developers.

Michelle Tanco, who lives nearby and spent part of the previous night at the protest, told me she has no problem with new housing—”we really need new houses”—but was sad to see the tree cut down. “I spend a lot of time walking up and down with my kids, learning the names of the local trees, and this was the first one one my kids learned—western red cedar,” she said.

Standing with her was Kim Butler, who lives about a mile away. She said that when she heard the tree was going to be removed, she reached out to Armbruster to see if he would agree to keep the tree if advocates could come up with a different site plan that would keep it in place without reducing the value of the final development. As PubliCola reported yesterday, the site plan proposed by Tree Action would have substantially reduced the size of one unit and eliminated two garage parking spaces, lowering the value of the site plan to less than Armbruster paid for it.

“He said he was willing to work with me… to consider keeping the tree, but he couldn’t have it interfering with his development timeline and he couldn’t have any additional expense, so it had to be net neutral,” Butler said. “We were getting there, but it wasn’t ever going to be fast enough—it just wasn’t going to happen.”

Armbruster, who was standing on the site across the street from Butler on Monday, said that even though Butler and other advocates weren’t able to come up with a workable alternative site plan on extremely short notice, he found Butler “a little different” than most of the people who have protested his project, because “she asked a question—’What would it take? Help me understand this from your perspective.'”

Butler said that even though her efforts didn’t save the tree, her conversations with Armbruster gave her hope that the new development, which will include six new on-site trees and one new street tree, will be better. “That’s what I’m doing to honor this tree,” she said. “This line of communication that opened up is integral to having a better process in the future.”

Tanco said one thing she learned during the protests is that the most effective way to ensure trees don’t get cut down is for the property owner to place a protective covenant on the property. (Covenants are a tough sell because they generally lower a property’s resale value.) “This brought a lot of neighbors together,” Tanco said. “It’s good to know more community members, so we can come together and look at other trees in the neighborhood, and reach out to the people who own them to see what they want to do and help them with that process.”

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.