Category: Development

Density, Development, housing, Maybe Metropolis, Mayor Harrell, Uncategorized

Thank You, Seattle Mayor Jessica Bateman!

By Josh Feit

No, you’re not reading the headline incorrectly. If it wasn’t for state Rep. Bateman (D-22, Olympia), who passed pro-housing legislation last year mandating upzones statewide, it’s hard to imagine that Seattle’s actual mayor, Bruce Harrell, would have called for any new density at all in his recently released comprehensive plan update.

“I’m disappointed and underwhelmed with the plan Seattle put forward,” Rep. Bateman told PubliCola. “It barely goes above what new housing production would have been if they did nothing.”

Harrell’s Office of Planning and Community Development, which published the new draft comp plan last week, estimates it will lead to an additional 100,000 new homes in the next 20 years—about 12,000 homes less than the bare minimum Seattle needs to accommodate, according to King County projections.

“They missed the mark. They didn’t aim high enough,” said Bateman, whose legislation requires cities to allow at least four housing units on all residential lots, or six if two of the units are affordable. While Harrell’s “One Seattle” comp plan technically complies, it does so at a minimum with NIMBY caveats and with a proposal that only provides 20,000 more homes than the “no action” option, which assumes developers will build 80,000 new homes under existing zoning rules. Seattle’s own transportation plan, released just a few weeks before the comp plan update, predicts more than 250,000 new people will move here over the same time frame.

Every 10 years, cites statewide are required to update their local comprehensive plans—formal policy documents that govern growth in sync with the state’s sustainability goals.  With the mandate in play, Seattle housing advocates saw this year’s comp plan process as a beachhead for finally addressing the issue that defines Seattle’s affordable housing crisis—the housing shortage.

“Think big,” housing advocates from the social justice, business, environmental, and, labor communities urged OPCD in a joint statement last year. Current Seattle zoning prohibits dense development in roughly two-thirds of the city, its “residential zones,” limiting construction to stand-alone homes and attached or detached units. The advocates asked the city to allow four-story buildings in all residential areas, “remove density limits” in those areas, and eliminate minimum parking requirements citywide. Harrell’s comp plan update does none of those things.

Bateman had to make the density mandates in her bill modest because in order to pass at the state level, she needed to tailor the legislation for cities much smaller than Seattle; the bill’s minimum density applies in cities with populations “of at least 75,000,” or one-tenth Seattle’s size. Rather than capitalizing on Bateman’s starter bill and going with a Seattle-size strategy to create a housing-rich city, Harrell’s comp plan proposal goes small. While pledging to “ensure all neighborhoods are accessible to households with a diverse range of incomes and housing needs,” the proposal does not take the necessary steps to do so.

Besides doing the bare minimum to meet the state mandate, Harrell’s comp plan proposal also draws density away from traditionally single-family zones by regurgitating and re-branding the failed “urban village” zoning policy that helped create our housing shortage in the first place.

Per my New Year’s prediction, Harrell’s proposal undermined the state mandate with devil-in-the-details regulations that make building densely untenable. For starters, the proposal would keep total lot coverage locked at 50 percent, meaning that four or six units would now have to squeeze into the same area originally allotted to one house under Seattle’s old single-family zoning model.

Second, the plan sets the maximum floor-area ratio (FAR), a measure of density, lower than it needs to be to make four- and six-unit developments feasible on Seattle’s typical 5,000-square-foot residential lots. FAR is a ratio that determines how much a developer can build on a lot after taking other requirements, like minimum setbacks and lot coverage requirements, into account.

Seattle’s proposal caps this ratio at 0.9, which works out to a maximum of four 1,125-square-foot units or six 750-square-foot ones—far less, Bateman notes, than the State Department of Commerce’s recommendation for implementing her bill. These units are more likely to be stand-alone townhouses, rather than apartment buildings or “stacked flats,” an OPCD spokesperson told PubliCola, since “we don’t see that type of development occurring” now in areas where four- and six-unit buildings are allowed.

In other words, scrunching more units into a smaller envelope means the kind of projects the bill was supposed to legalize won’t pencil out—and so won’t get built. “If you can’t build fourplexes and sixplexes in the largest city in the state, it’s not a refection of the requirements of HB 1110,” Bateman said.

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Additionally, Bateman said, “We want to have three- or four- bedroom units available,” Bateman said—the kind of housing that would enable families to stay in Seattle. “The whole point was to make it legal to build these housing types.”

Besides doing the bare minimum to meet the state mandate, Harrell’s comp plan proposal also draws density away from traditionally single-family zones by regurgitating and re-branding the failed “urban village” zoning policy that helped create our housing shortage in the first place. Like that exclusionary strategy, Harrell’s plan cordons most new housing into existing commercial districts and along arterials. OPCD estimates that 71 percent of the 100,000 predicted new units) will go where they’ve always gone: Into the city’s densest areas, including “regional centers” (formerly: “urban centers”) and “urban centers” (formerly urban villages.)

The benefit of spreading density citywide, by the way, isn’t merely a matter of creating new opportunities for housing and giving lower-income residents access to more Seattle neighborhoods. It’s also a city planning best practice: Increased density is a prerequisite for an expanded, tentacular, and efficient transit system.

Unsurprisingly, Harrell’s plan falls short when it comes to transit-oriented development, a basic housing tenet that promotes sustainability by up-zoning areas around transit hubs to tie housing, employment, and retail to public transit. Yes, the draft proposal incorporates the long-planned light rail upzone around the future 130th St. station in north Seattle. But a new designation in the plan, “Neighborhood Centers,” is less dense than proposed statewide standards around heavily used bus stops, offering moderate (3- to 6-story) upzones within 800 feet, as opposed to the quarter-mile standard Rep. Julia Reed (D-36, Seattle) proposed in her own transit-oriented development bill this year.

Harrell’s provincial vision amounts to a historic missed opportunity. While we need to build six-plexes and apartment buildings citywide to accommodate our transition into a bona fide big city, Seattle is poised to perpetuate the housing crisis that has metastasized during the last 30 years under our existing, exclusionary zoning rules.

Josh@PubliCola.com

Density, Development, housing, Mayor Harrell

Draft Comprehensive Plan Would Increase Housing Less Than Needed to Accommodate 250,000 New Residents
Left image: Previous Alternative 5, with neighborhood centers represented by purple circles. Right image: Proposed One Seattle Comprehensive Plan, with neighborhood centers represented by blue circles.

By Erica C. Barnett

Mayor Bruce Harrell finally released a draft Comprehensive Plan for the next 20 years this week, outlining a growth plan for the city that continues to concentrate housing around busy arterial streets while allowing some four-unit buildings in most areas—an upgrade of one unit from what’s currently allowed in Seattle’s “neighborhood residential” areas. Developers could build six units in these areas if two of the units are affordable, or if the location is within a quarter-mile of a frequent transit stop.

According to the city, the plan would make it possible to build at least 100,000 new homes in Seattle between now and 2044—a period when the city itself estimates about 250,000 new people will move here. Unless those new residents live in households that average 2.5 people—defying current trends toward smaller household sizes and solo living—those units will not be enough to accommodate everyone who wants to live here.

Seattle is already experiencing a well-documented housing shortage—one data point: You now have to earn $214,000 a year to afford a house here—so the plan, if implemented as-is, will also do little to address the current shortage by relieving upward pressure on housing prices. If you can’t afford to live here now, you probably won’t be able to do so in the future.

Importantly, none of the changes to formerly single-family areas were optional; legislation passed last year requires all cities, including Seattle, to allow up to four units per lot in formerly single-family areas. (Currently, Seattle allows up to three—a single-family house plus one attached and one detached accessory unit.) And there’s a real question about whether four-unit buildings will pencil out; other cities that have allowed this kind of extremely low-density multifamily housing have found that developers aren’t interested in building it.

Compared to the old Alternative 5, the new map nixes potential new density near Alki Beach, Fauntleroy, North Capitol Hill, Magnolia, and Laurelhurst, along with Harrell’s own neighborhood, Seward Park. None of these areas is on the city’s list of neighborhoods with a high risk of displacement or low access to opportunity.

The plan would also re-legalize corner stores and some home-based businesses, but only on corner lots—a hyper-literal interpretation of the colloquial term “corner store.”

Harrell’s proposal, which remains light on certain details, would exempt up to 15 percent of the city from the new zoning rules—less than the 25 percent HB 1110 allows. In areas where  there is a “high risk of displacement,” including parts of Southeast Seattle, the plan would adopt new zoning that effectively preserves the current three-unit limit, preventing new housing as an anti-displacement strategy for existing property owners. The plan does not identify all the areas the city plans to exempt from the new density mandates, so it’s unclear exactly how much of the city would remain under existing “neighborhood residential” zoning rules.

The proposal also modestly expands the areas where apartments (renters) are allowed, creating a new “neighborhood center” category in all areas within 800 feet of frequent transit stops, where developers could buildings between three and six stories tall. These “centers” are tiny compared to a 2022 proposal from Sen. Marko Liias (D-Edmonds), which would have allowed up to six-story buildings within three-quarter of a mile of major transit hubs, and within a half-mile of frequent bus stops. According to the plan, they were chosen based on “local conditions” and intended to provide more. housing within a three-minute walk of transit.

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Comparing the proposal to the five options the city put forward for discussion last year, Harrell’s proposed comprehensive plan update is most similar to Alternative 5, although it reduces potential density in many areas by eliminating a significant number of “neighborhood centers,” and not just in areas whose residents are at high risk of displacement.

For example, the new map nixes potential new density near Alki Beach, Fauntleroy, North Capitol Hill, Magnolia, and Laurelhurst, along with Harrell’s own neighborhood, Seward Park. None of these areas is on the city’s list of neighborhoods with a high risk of displacement or low access to opportunity; in fact, the majority of the neighborhoods that would have received modest upzones under Alternative 5 but will retain Seattle’s lowest-density zoning under Harrell’s proposal are in wealthy areas with low displacement risk, as defined in the city’s Housing Affordability and Livability plan.

Like the existing comprehensive plan, Harrell’s proposal would place most density along busy arterial streets and highways, renaming the city’s “urban villages” but preserving the same basic residential patterns the city has followed since the 1990s, when the city adopted the urban village strategy. In these areas, now known as “urban centers,” buildings will continue to be capped at eight stories, with potential exceptions near light rail lines.

The plan also adds a new urban center around the 130th Street future light rail station and slightly expands the boundaries of other existing urban villages. The term “urban center” previously referred to the city’s densest areas, like downtown and First Hill, where greater density is allowed; these areas will be rebranded as “regional centers,” and a new one—Ballard—will be added to the list. According to the plan, Ballard is expected to gain 5,000 new housing units over the next 10 years.

Seattle is supposed to adopt the comprehensive plan update this year, a process that will require the new city council (whose six new members all said on the campaign trail that they would support some version of Alternative 5) to approve it. Before that happens, the city will hold seven open houses—one in each council district—beginning on March 14 in North Seattle.

Affordability, Development, housing, Maybe Metropolis

Seattle’s MHA Program Should Come with a Tax Break, Not a Fee
We’ll never have Portland-style density if we don’t have Portland-style incentives. Photo by M.O. Stevens, CC-by-SA 3.0 license

by Josh Feit

I have repeatedly argued in this column—and long before— that liberalizing our land use code is the best way to address Seattle’s housing affordability crisis. Summary: We need to allow apartments in the vast majority of the city where they’re currently banned. Thankfully, there’s a recent glimmer of hope. The state passed a new law last year, HB 1110, that will upzone Seattle’s neighborhoods. Thank you state Rep. Jessica Bateman (D-22, Olympia); her legislation requires cities with populations of 75,000 or more to allow four-unit buildings wherever single-family homes are allowed, and up to six units if two of the units are affordable.

This encouraging uzpone goes into effect statewide after the cities update their local comprehensive plans, as Washington cities are required to do every 10 years; Seattle’s Comprehensive Plan update is on the docket for 2024.

I have to admit, though: The fact that the bill is tied to Seattle’s Comprehensive Plan update makes me nervous. Readers may recall that we started the year with some 2024 PubliCola predictions, including my pessimistic prognostication about how Seattle will sabotage Rep. Bateman’s upzone requirement through our comp plan update.

Here’s what I wrote on January 1 (italics added this time around): Undermining the new state mandate for increasing density in traditionally single family zones, Seattle “will come up with lot coverage minimums, setback requirements, and height limits along with hefty affordable housing fees that will keep housing developers from building any apartments in Seattle’s touchy neighborhood residential zones.”

As our comp plan update gets underway behind the scenes, I’m hearing affordable housing fees are already in play at City Hall. It’s hardly surprising. One thing that unites all political stripes in Seattle—lefties and NIMBYs alike—is a call to tax developers, everyone’s favorite scapegoat. Why has pickleball colonized traditional tennis courts? Evil developers!!

Call it Funded Inclusionary Zoning, or FIZ. How would we pay for it? Portland has a smart model. Under their IZ program  they give developers a property tax break.

Seattle’s gut instinct to tax housing production to pay for housing production is a political pathology. And it stalls development, leading, ironically, to less affordable housing. It’d be like targeting Swedish, Virginia Mason, UW Medical Center, and Seattle Children’s with a special tax to pay for local health clinics even though these institutions help reduce greater health care costs down the line.

Let me be clear, I’m all for government intervention to create affordable housing. It’s precisely what governments are supposed to do: Regulate essential marketplaces. Like all good governance, ensuring universal access to life’s fundamentals—such as housing and health care—not only promotes equity, it also benefits society as whole by preventing things such as spiking health care costs en masse through widespread upstream care. Or, per UW real estate prof Greg Colburn’s 2022 book Homelessness is a Housing Problem, here’s a more germane example: Building more affordable housing helps address homelessness.

Unfortunately, when it comes to the swath of land that HB 1110 opens up to new housing development, Seattle is likely to tax it. Watch for the comp plan update to expand Seattle’s Mandatory Housing Affordability program, a quasi-inclusionary zoning program the city created in 2019. Inclusionary zoning, or IZ, is housing policy that requires developers to include affordable units in their projects. MHA isn’t classic IZ because there’s also an option to pay into an affordable housing fund rather than building on-site. But either way, MHA puts the cost of building affordable housing on developers.

Certainly, requiring developers to contribute to affordable housing stock in the city is an important step, but mandates aren’t going to create affordable housing on their own. Progressive governments also need to help pay for that housing. Otherwise, as projects become financially untenable, developers are going to build less. The best affordable housing policy would require developers to include affordable housing in projects (or an in lieu program) while also providing government subsidies to help the program pencil. Additionally, as I already mentioned, we need to upzone to allow dense housing citywide,  ending our restrictive zoning policies that perpetuate classist and racist policies of the past.

MHA, which also came with an upzone, including peripherally around the edges of single-family zones, was an earnest attempt to address the ugly legacy of Seattle’s restrictive zoning, and it got off to a good start, raising tens of millions for affordable housing (about $68 million in 2020). However, we may have already hit peak MHA; while MHA payments raised more than $70 million annually in both 2021 and 2022, the 2022 number represented a slight drop—a 1.5 percent decline in cash along with a drop in the number of affordable units developers committed to include in new buildings, from 107 to 66.

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Showing the same downward trend, and perhaps even more worrisome, as Erica reported, production of in-fill housing like townhomes has dropped in the MHA era with permits shrinking from more than 1,800 permits filed in 2018 to just 165 in the first nine months of 2023. And the Seattle Times reported that overall apartment and townhouse construction permits dropped 42 percent  and 27 percent, respectively, between 2021 and 2022.

We need more evidence to see if MHA requirements are squelching development, but these are not good signs. The drag on development (and the related drop in affordable housing dollars) makes sense in an Econ 101 way—and highlights the irony I called out above: We’re taxing, thus discouraging, something we want.

Rather than discouraging affordable housing production, let’s make it easier for developers to meet the inclusionary zoning mandate by funding it. Call it Funded IZ, or FIZ. How would we pay for it? Portland has a smart model. Under their IZ program, which requires developers to include affordable housing in projects that include 20 or more units (or pay a steeper version of an MHA-style fee), they give developers a property tax break on all the units in a building. The program was initially limited to Portland’s downtown core, but the data showed it was working so well at creating affordable housing that their city council voted unanimously to expand it citywide last month.

Coupling IZ with property tax breaks is a logical next step here. Seattle  already has an optional incentive zoning program, known as the Multi-Family Tax Exemption credit, that rewards property owners with a 12-year tax break if they choose to make units affordable. There are currently 6,300 affordable MFTE subsidized units citywide, according to the most recent data.

Now that we’ve decided, as demonstrated by our MHA inclusionary zoning program, that affordable housing production is no longer optional, let’s also make sure that funding isn’t optional.

However, now that the city has decided, with MHA, that creating affordable housing should no longer be optional, let’s also make sure funding is no longer optional. A property tax exemption—for all buildings whose developers participate in the expanded program, including those where developers opt to pay a fee—would do just that by making affordable housing pencil out for developers.

There’s one asterisk. Government intervention requires more than just funding. Witness our famed Housing Levy, a property tax that’s been dedicated to affordable housing production for more than 40 years; the latest seven-year iteration will raise $970 million. Clearly, given that the root of our current housing crisis is a scarcity of affordable units, the levy is not delivering enough.

While we’re paying to build where we can, there’s not enough opportunity to build in general. Bateman’s zoning reform legislation could change that, adding substantially to the housing pipeline by allowing apartments in historically off-limits single-family zones. IZ would also help. If it’s funded!

Zoning changes in isolation won’t solve the housing problem; mandating affordable housing production in isolation won’t solve the housing problem; and funding affordable housing in isolation won’t solve the housing problem. Rather than defaulting to MHA’s unfunded mandate in our comp plan update, let’s seize the opportunity to combine all three approaches—housing production mandates, funding, and allowing citywide development—to properly address our affordable housing crisis.

josh@publicola.com

Density, Development, legislature, Police, Transit

State Rep Says Inclusionary Zoning Near Transit Will Prevent Displacement, SPD General Counsel Filed Initial Complaint Against Laughing Cop

1. State Rep. Julia Reed (D-36), who’s sponsoring legislation (HB 2160) that would mandate on-site affordable housing in new developments near some transit stops in exchange for modest increases in density, spoke with PubliCola last week about her bill, which we called a “timid transit-oriented development bill” compared to last year’s more ambitious proposal.

Reed’s bill would allow low-density multifamily housing within a quarter mile of officially designated bus-rapid transit stops (like the RapidRide in Seattle), and larger apartment buildings within a half-mile of rail stations—a smaller radius than last year’s transit-oriented development bill, which would have allowed greater density in more areas that are not currently dense. Reed said she fought to widen the geographic scope of the bill and to include bus stops with frequent service, as opposed to official BRT routes, but was shot down. “I’m one vote out of 98,” she said.

As with last year’s bill, which  died shortly before the end of session, Reed’s proposal wouldn’t impact areas that are already dense.

In addition to enabling some transit-oriented development, Reed’s is also an inclusionary zoning bill—for every new housing development near transit, the bill would require 10 percent of units be affordable to low-income people. Developers oppose such mandates, arguing that they prevent housing from being built. Low-density buildings like row houses and fourplexes, for example, would have to have one affordable unit each, which developers have said would require them to make the market-rate units too expensive to rent or sell.

In addition to enabling some transit-oriented development, Reed’s is also an inclusionary zoning bill—for every new housing development near transit, the bill would require 10 percent of units be affordable to low-income people.

Reed disputes this. “I think it’s curious that affordability is always held up as the killer of development and never interest rates, or labor costs, or material costs, or the fees that cities themselves are charging on top of development regulations,” Reed said. “I’ve asked them to work with us on a compromise that ensures that we will have some affordability built in and they haven’t been willing to present one.”

2. In response to a records request, PubliCola has received a copy of the initial complaint against Seattle Police Officers Guild vice president Daniel Auderer, caught on body camera footage laughing and joking about the killing of pedestrian Jaahnavi Kandula by a speeding officer, Kevin Dave, last January. The complaint, submitted on August 2 by SPD general counsel Rebecca Boatright, confirms (again) that Auderer’s claim to have proactively “self-reported” himself to the Office of Police Accountability, filing a request for rapid adjudication of the case, was false.

Jason Rantz, a conservative commentator for KTTH radio, first reported Auderer’s self-serving version of events as a so-called “Rantz exclusive,” saying Auderer filed a complaint against himself before anyone else could because he feared his comments would be “taken out of context to attack the Seattle Police Department (SPD).” Rantz never corrected his inaccurate reporting, which was regurgitated by right-wing media around the country.

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Boatright became aware of Auderer’s shocking comments, made just hours after Kandula was struck and killed by SPD officer Kevin Dave while Kandula was walking in a marked and lighted crosswalk, from another SPD employee reviewing video footage from that night. Boatright’s complaint, filed at 11 am on August 2, quoted Auderer’s side of the conversation with Solan, in which he said “She [Kandula] is dead,” then laughed and, responding to something Solan said, added: “Yeah, just write a check. $10,000 – she was 26 anyways, she had limited value” before laughing again.

“These allegations, if proven, would violate” SPD’s policy on professionalism, Boatright wrote.

Dozens of other people, including the Consul of India in San Francisco, filed complaints against Auderer, which were rolled into Boatright’s initial complaint. That complaint is still pending.

 

Density, Development, land use, Maybe Metropolis, zoning

The Invasion of the Corner Stores

Activating residential neighborhoods one poppyseed bagel at a time.

By Josh Feit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Josh@PubliCola.com

Density, Development, Guest Contributor, housing

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

By Andrew Grant Houston

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

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

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

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

Population Growth

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

Planned Growth vs. Actual Growth

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

Zoning Capacity vs. What is Actually Built

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

Mandatory Housing Affordability

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

Homelessness

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

The Urban Village (UV) Strategy

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

The 15-Minute City

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

Climate Refugees

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

Trees

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

The Climate Future of South Park

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

 

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

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

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

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