Category: Maybe Metropolis

housing, land use, legislature, Maybe Metropolis, Urbanism

Turning Park-and-Rides Into Housing
Aerial view of Shoreline Park-and-Ride via Google Maps.

By Josh Feit

We (Ed: Actually, Erica) gladly paid $7 an hour on a recent Friday afternoon for a  street parking spot behind Capitol Hill’s Stoup Brewing. The reasonable fee is part of SDOT’s data-driven demand management program, which puts an appropriate price on parking, recognizing—sort of like NYC’s congestion pricing program—that popular destinations should be subsidized by the car-centric culture their urban density offsets. After all, density makes Capitol Hill’s go-to clubs, bars, restaurants, and shops possible in the first place.

Applauding the high cost of parking was on point because the event we were attending was a happy hour thrown by Sightline Institute, where more than 50 people crowded in to celebrate, I kid you not, a parking reform bill.  Sightline, which has become an incubator of green metropolis legislation in Olympia, helped draft the bill, which had just passed the state legislature the day before.

Demand management is well and good. But the Sightline bill takes the next step: It prevents cities from requiring too much parking in the first place. The bill, which was sponsored by urbanist rock star Sen. Jessica Bateman (D-22, Olympia), caps parking mandates statewide. For example, the bill says cities can’t require more than one parking space for every two units in new multifamily housing. Developers could still build more parking, but they’ll no longer have to.

There were free stickers on the tables proclaiming, in the style of parking signs: “End Parking Mandates.” And when Sightline’s parking reform guru Catie Gould jumped up on a table with a handful of drink tickets to thank everyone for coming—identifying herself as “the one who wrote” SB 5184—the crowd feted her like she was Bernie or AOC behind the mic on the “Fighting Oligarchy” tour.

Certainly, three cheers for the parking caps; I grabbed one of the free stickers. But it’s another bill that sets my war-on-cars heart aflutter. Where the Bateman/Sightline bill limits new parking, the one I’m giddy about actually nukes existing parking infrastructure—parking infrastructure that (unsurprisingly to those who have been predicting a transit future for years) is sitting largely empty.

According to King County Metro spokesman Jeff Switzer, only about 30 percent of the parking spaces in park-and-rides across the system are full on a typical day—and the most heavily used lots, at Northgate and on the Eastside, are only 60 to 70 percent full.

King County lobbied for a change in state law to allow for a different use at these properties: Affordable housing. Appropriately enough, the reform—which authorizes  Metro to overhaul three pilot sites for now—came as an amendment to state Sen. Julia Reed’s (D-36, Seattle) transit-oriented development bill, broader legislation that’s about incentivizing affordable housing near transit hubs. (I wrote about Reed’s bill and its innovative funded inclusionary zoning progam earlier this session.)

 

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The un-pave paradise amendment, a friendly add from state Sen. Yasmin Trudeau (D-27, Tacoma), says WSDOT can select up to three park-and-ride facilities in King County so Metro can conduct a pilot affordable housing program that “releases [Metro from] any covenant imposed for highway purposes and replace it with a covenant requiring affordable housing.” “Gaining this flexibility,” Metro spokesman Switzer said, “would be really important to help both the state and King County Metro achieve their shared goals around transit oriented development and building housing conveniently near frequent and reliable transit service.”

You don’t have to convince me, Jeff. Turning parking into housing is an urbanist’s version of turning swords into ploughshares.

Switzer declined to specify which park-and-rides are being liberated, but the legislation specifies three large surface parking lots—each with between 300 and 1,000 parking spaces—in Kirkland, Shoreline, and South King County.

Go figure. Parking lots with 300 to 1,000 stalls are going underutilized. Props to King County Metro for turning those empty stalls into an opportunity for fulfilling the potential of transit infrastructure as a prompt to build affordable housing. Transit policy is land use policy. And King County needs more land use policy like this that authorizes affordable housing.

Josh@PubliCola.com

Density, housing, legislature, Maybe Metropolis

Seattle Should Follow State’s Lead on Inclusionary Zoning—By Funding It
Rep. Julia Reed (D-36, Seattle)

By Josh Feit

With little fanfare, state house legislators passed a game-changing housing affordability bill out of committee last week. The bill, HB 1491, would require more housing density around rail and bus rapid transit stops and mandate on-site affordable housing as part of new developments in those areas. The bill tanked during the last two legislative sessions. But this session, it includes a change that represents a tectonic shift in how affordable housing advocates are thinking about the issue of inclusionary zoning, a policy that requires developers to include affordable housing in new projects.

I’ll get to that big shift momentarily, but first, a little history. Known as transit-oriented development, or TOD, housing around transit stops is a longtime priority for pro-density urbanists. In Washington State, I trace its origin back to the 2009 (!) legislative session, when the housing advocates at Futurewise first took up the cause.

At that time, their nascent pro-housing movement unwittingly stirred up a hornets’ nest of anti-development opposition from both the homeowner right (who are touchy about “neighborhood character”) and the social justice left (who often equate new housing with developer “giveaways” and displacement).

Thankfully, a lot has changed since then. First of all, gentrification has escalated exponentially under Seattle’s low-density status quo, a trend that calls b.s. on the NIMBY thesis that denser zoning is the cause of gentrification. If anything, the last 10 years under single-family protectionist policies show that it’s the opposite: Sequestering multifamily housing into a minuscule slice of the city’s residential areas causes gentrification.

And, more importantly: The pro-density “Yes In My Backyard” (YIMBY) movement of the past decade has re-framed the density debate in a way that has attracted social-justice lefties. YIMBYs now talk about municipal land use regulations in the context of  historic redlining and current exclusionary zoning laws that wall off huge portions of cities like Seattle from lower-income families and renters. As a result, lefties no longer stand in lockstep with wealthier “neighborhood character” obstructionists like they used to.

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Certainly, knee-jerk opposition to developers (along with real issues like displacement) persist, but 1491’s sponsor, Rep. Julia Reed (D-36, Seattle) let go of the orthodox left’s antipathy toward for-profit developers by accepting a Republican amendment from Rep. April Connors (R-8, Kennewick) that includes a new tax exemption to make the housing mandate pencil out. Thanks to Connors’ amendment, Reed’s inclusionary zoning bill, which passed the housing committee 9-5 with two GOP votes, is now a funded inclusionary zoning bill, or FIZ.

“The goal of this bill,” Reed said before last week’s vote, “is to try to address the urgent housing needs in our state, to ensure some public value capture for opening up new areas to development, but also to ensure that builders are incentivized to build, and that cities have the flexibility they need to manage this development effectively.”

Funded inclusionary zoning is exactly what it sounds like. Rather than simply making developers include affordable housing in a portion of their new developments, FIZ also helps pay for the affordable housing. In this instance, the amendment authorizes a 20-year property tax exemption on the development, and provides two options for affordability; a developer who builds in a FIZ zone can either make 10 percent of the project affordable to people making 60 percent or less of area media income (AMI), or 20 percent for people making 80 percent of AMI.

This is a classic compromise: Developers don’t like inclusionary zoning, but were willing to go along with it if it was subsidized; and lefties don’t like giving tax breaks to developers, but they like affordable housing. “This is a supply bill that ensures affordability while offsetting the costs for new development,” said Futurewise executive director Alex Brennan, who is encouraged by the sudden momentum for his group’s longstanding TOD bill.

The funded inclusionary zoning compromise, something I advocated for in this column a year ago, combines two well-intentioned, but limited, affordable housing policy tools: First, traditional inclusionary zoning, which requires developers to add affordable housing if they want to build a project, and second, the state’s existing Multifamily Tax Exemption (MFTE) program, which gives developers a tax break if they choose to include affordable housing in a project. By combining the two tools, 1491 makes the prospect of actually adding affordable housing to the state’s housing stock more likely.

Seattle has had its own (unfunded) inclusionary zoning program, Mandatory Housing Affordability, since 2019. MHA requires developers to either include some affordable housing in new developments or pay into an affordable housing fund. Reed’s bill exempts cities that have their own inclusionary zoning programs from following the new TOD affordable housing mandate. However, let’s hope Reed’s smart bill, which is likely to encourage more housing starts thanks to the tax exemption, prompts Seattle to consider a FIZ program of its own.

Similarly, the increased zoning 1491 contemplates wouldn’t have a big effect around Seattle’s light rail stations, because Seattle has already upzoned those station areas to the same or greater density as what the bill would allow. But the legislation could increase density around many Seattle bus lines where its upzones are greater than Seattle’s current requirements. Seattle’s Office of Planning and Community Development hasn’t done a full analysis, but a spokesperson said, “There is a larger difference between existing zoning around BRT stations in the city and the potential new requirements than there is for zoning in the light rail station areas.”

And the legislation could add more density to Seattle in another way. The bill defines transit areas as locations within a half-mile of rail stops or quarter mile of bus rapid transit. This geographical definition of TOD would overrule the current minimalist “Neighborhood Centers” proposal in Seattle’s pending comprehensive plan, which would limit new density to developments that are just 800 feet from major bus stops. Seattle’s slow-growth council is actually trying to scale back that already-timid TOD plan. Thankfully, if HB 1491 becomes law, Seattle will get more housing and more affordable housing despite intransigence from City Hall.

The funded inclusionary zoning TOD bill is currently in the house appropriations committee.

Josh@publicola.com

City Council, Density, housing, legislature, Maybe Metropolis, Mayor Harrell

Council’s Fight to Scale Back List of Neighborhood Centers is a NIMBY Canard

By Josh Feit

Calling Mayor Bateman, calling Mayor Bateman! We need your help. Again!

Bateman, of course, is pro-housing Olympia-area state senator Jessica Bateman, whose 2023 HB 1110 forced the slow growth Harrell administration and even slower-growth city council to actually allow some multifamily housing in this year’s comprehensive plan.

First off, thank you for forcing us to allow four-unit multifamily housing in all residential zones; although Mayor Bruce Harrell scaled back his own planning department’s original proposal to fully embrace your model for growth, it’s a start.

We need another favor, though. There’s a transit-oriented housing bill at play in the state legislature right now that, if you passed it, would stop the Seattle City Council’s latest NIMBY crusade against another minor upzone that’s in the city’s comp plan proposal.

The comp plan would create new “Neighborhood Centers,” allowing 3- to 6-story apartment and condo buildings within a 3-minute walk (about 800 feet) of 30 commercial centers and bus stops with frequent service. The state TOD bill, HB 1491— sponsored by your colleague from Seattle, state Rep. Julia Reed—would actually do better than that by allowing multifamily housing within a half mile of light rail and within a quarter mile of bus rapid transit. That would mean upzones for apartments all along the new G Line through Madison Valley, for example!

In its quest to stop the “floodgates of unlimited development,” as North Seattle City Councilmember Cathy Moore put it at a recent briefing on the plan, the council is cuing up its push to remove several of these neighborhood centers from the plan, reducing them even further from a list the Harrell administration already pared down from almost 50 in the original plan.

What I love about the council’s high-pitched opposition to adding a small amount of tightly controlled density is that it exposes the mendacious reasoning behind a core NIMBY argument: “Concurrency.” Concurrency is the obstructionist idea that you can’t add density to neighborhood until you first add bus routes and other infrastructure. It’s actually the reverse—and I’ll get to that in a second—but for starters: It’s disingenuous to claim, as the anti-housing (homeowning) contingent did at a January 29 public hearing, that you oppose density in your neighborhood because your neighborhood lacks transit—and then come out against a plan to target density along transit lines.

If the argument against adding density is that we don’t have the transit to support it, then why are council members like Moore intent on taking Maple Leaf off the list of new neighborhood centers?  The area of concern for Moore that’s slated for the upzone, between NE 85th and NE 91st, sits on a frequent bus line (the 67) between two light rail stops, Roosevelt and Northgate. (Moore called this workhorse route the “one little bus” that serves the neighborhood.)

To be clear, the “concurrency” argument is illogical in the first place.  Consider: At another hearing on the comp plan earlier this month, Councilmember Moore reasoned: “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.” (As Erica pointed in her reporting on that hearing, that’s exactly how it works.)

Dressing up obstructionism as logic, Moore seems to be saying that an upzone will bring thousands of new people overnight. But in reality, population growth happens over time. Asking Metro to run empty buses through currently sparse street as a prerequisite for future density is a comically inefficient use of Metro dollars. The smarter way to do things is precisely the way Metro does it today: When a neighborhood reaches the point at which buses make sense, they meet the need concurrent with new growth—not before the growth arrives.

With a single-family zone protectionist mayor who shredded his own Office of Planning and Development’s original pro-growth proposal, and with a half-baked council now parroting anti-housing tropes, I’m sending a pro-housing SOS from Seattle: Don’t let Seattle strike down this opportunity to build more units. These minimal, cordoned-off neighborhood center transit-oriented development zones won’t exactly qualify us for a Jane Jacobs city-building award, but you’ve helped us get started before. Please help us again.

Josh@PubliCola.com

Maybe Metropolis

Separated at Birth: “In this House” Seattle Liberals and Project 2025
Photo by Lauri Shaull, via Wikimedia Commons

By Josh Feit

Seattle’s pro-housing activists used to rightly call out the hypocrisy of “In This House” Wallingford liberals whose exclusionary zoning politics seemed too ideologically close for comfort with Donald Trump’s Build the Wall politics.

This was circa 2017, when local progressives were pointing to Seattle’s history of housing-covenant racism as a way to expose the ugliness of Seattle’s single-family zoning paradigm. Still campaigning for universal housing access (sigh), local YIMBYs now have the receipts on the philosophical similarity between Trumpism and Seattle’s angry zoning rules, which make it impossible to build apartments in most neighborhoods. May I point you to page 511 of Project 2025 which says the future Trump “Administration should oppose any efforts to weaken single-family zoning.” There you have it, Alki, Magnolia, Queen Anne, Laurelhurst, and Seward Park: Seattle is a Trumpist safe space. (The housing section of Project 2025 was written by Ben Carson, Trump’s former Department of Housing and Urban Development director.)

As Erica and I have documented here, here, here, and here, the Harrell administration had to be dragged kicking and screaming to minimally comply with new state zoning requirements, proposed by State Rep. Jessica Bateman (D-22, Olympia), that allow more housing in traditional single-family zones. While the Harrell administration’s new 10-year Comprehensive Plan proposal makes a nod to the state mandate for fourplexes—it includes new density bonuses for stacked flats, including larger, family-size units, and no longer completely exempts 15 percent of the city from the new mandates—the mayor’s governing conceit remains bullish on the same old failed 1994 model of “neighborhood planning” that sequesters density onto busy arterial roads.

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Sadly, cordoning off density not only artificially inflates housing prices by putting a cap on development, but it undermines effective transit and saddles lower-income people with the environmental and safety hazards of car-choked streets. In Seattle, it also segregates low-income kids from the best schools and makes it impossible to run out and buy a frozen pizza or laundry detergent after 10:00 pm.

A closer look at Project 2025’s reasoning for opposing more flexible housing rules tracks to Seattle homeowners’ own familiar arguments against adding density. You just have to translate the national context to the local context to hear the “neighborhood character,” local-control pathology in Trump’s go-to document.

Again, quoting Project 2025: “American homeowners and citizens know best what is in the interest of their neighborhoods and communities. Localities rather than the federal government must have the final say in zoning laws and regulations.” Sub in “individual neighborhoods” for “localities” and city government for “the federal government,” and I could be quoting any anti-renter homeowner testifying at city hall or writing on the butcher paper at an Office of Planning and Community Development outreach meeting.

Project 2025 goes on to mirror Seattle’s “lefty” housing opponents, with another classic reactionary canard: That the real answer to the housing crisis is preserving existing houses.

“Along the same lines,” the document continues, “Congress can propose tax credits for the renovation or repair of housing stock in rural areas so that more Americans are able to access the American Dream of homeownership.” Not only does that Project 2025 logic echo the Seattle NIMBY argument that there’s no need for new housing, but it’s hard to miss the similarities between Trump’s idealization of “rural areas” and Seattle’s preservationist mentality, which says we don’t need more development in our neighborhoods, we simply need to make do with what we’ve got. Of course, what Seattle NIMBYs are trying to preserve is a idealized mid-20th-century version of the city that excludes renters, low-income people, and new buildings that don’t conform to the current “neighborhood character.”

While blue cities like Chicago and Denver have announced they will not cooperate with the Trump administration’s nativist agenda, Seattle’s leaders have remained largely mum on MAGA’s looming assault. In the immediate wake of Trump’s 2016 win, then-mayor Ed Murray announced that Seattle “would not be bullied by this administration into abandoning our core values” and went on to sue the Trump administration in defense of sanctuary cities. Fast forward: Current Seattle Mayor Harrell is taking the olive branch approach, saying, “I’m not going to D.C. with my fist balled. That’s just not how I lead. I look for opportunities … no matter who’s in the White House.”

Given Harrell’s grumpy response to a state mandate to allow more density in single family zones, the opportunity to partner with the Trump administration on the NIMBY aspirations spelled out in Project 2025 should be popular in Seattle.

Josh@PubliCola.com

Maybe Metropolis, Trump

Three Things I’m Worried About: Trickle-Down Bullying; Martial Law; and Acquiescence
The grim electoral map, via NYT.

By Josh Feit

1. Trickle-down Bullying

Trump’s progenitor, Ronald Reagan, gave us trickle-down economics. Donald Trump is going to give us trickle-down bullying.

Trump’s recurring temper tantrums—often misogynistic or racist, but at their core, always about intimidation rather than discourse—have empowered his MAGA faithful. Aggrieved bros are now free to scoff at longstanding civic standards that have traditionally helped many Americans (though, admittedly, by no means all) go about their daily lives with a sense of safety and belonging.

It’s already begun in the immediate wake of Trump’s election victory with an anonymous racist text message campaign aimed at African Americans. And soon enough, you’re going to see widespread, flippant and aggressive unchecked macho hysterics out in the open—at the grocery store; on the bus; at the bank; on airplanes; in the park; at restaurants; at the workplace; on college campuses; and in high-school hallways (teen boys this week are already taunting: “your body, my choice.”)

This represents one of the true nightmares about Trump’s looming return to power, and also one of the glaring ironies: Under Trump, “law and order” will actually mean lawlessness. Trumpism will officially remove the legal guardrails against abusive social behavior.

In the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, a civil rights and civil liberties agenda bloomed in America. After Congress enshrined a series of universal protections into law, this humanist expansion of rights defined late 20th-century and early 21st-century jurisprudence. (You can read about my own father’s Supreme Court-level contribution here.) The resulting civil rights infrastructure, such as workplace safety and consumer protection, is about to be ignored, gutted, and reversed.

From police brutality to your kid getting bullied at school; from gender discrimination in the workplace to corruption in the marketplace; from hate crimes to casual mistreatment during everyday interactions, there will be no avenue for recourse or accountability.

Now that Trumpism has made it socially acceptable to bully, gaslight, and hate your neighbor, the courts will follow the zeitgeist. Longstanding legal protections will soon be cast aside by Trump-appointed judges. Right-wing legal firms are certainly already lining up cases aimed at officially striking down much of the mid-to-late 20th century’s civil rights legacy. We’ve already witnessed the end of national abortion rights, affirmative action, and much of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

In the meantime, now that voters have signed off on an anti-democratic backlash against egalitarianism, the world of bullying with impunity is upon us.

A small personal example that certainly pales in comparison to what’s about to crash down on immigrants and trans people, but in the Summer of 2022, XDX and I stopped at a diner on Interstate 84 on our way back from a wedding in Boise, Idaho. We were an interracial couple; she’s Chinese, I’m white and look (and am) Jewish. Bad vibe in there, and we hustled out pretty quickly after lunch under some unfriendly glares. Again, hardly comparable to what’s in store for other targeted groups, but I wouldn’t feel comfortable sitting down in that Idaho diner today.

2. Military Rule Coming to a City Near You

Take no comfort in the fact that you live in a blue state—or, more specifically, in a city. America’s metro islands of pluralism are about to become the beachheads of our tragic future.

Trump’s mass deportation agenda will begin in cities. Federal troops will sync with local police (and with Proud Boys vigilante “patriots” rushing in to help), immediately weakening local autonomy and setting the stage for standoffs between citizens and law enforcement. The ensuing civil unrest will give Trump the “Reichstag fire” excuse he needs to cue general clampdowns and martial law in the “crime-ridden” cities he already demonized on the campaign trail.

This is 1939 Nazi playbook stuff.

In 2025, Hitler’s Jews are Trump’s immigrants– “poisoning the blood of the nation.”

3. Acquiescence

I learned about the Holocaust in middle school in Ms. Clemmer’s class. Stunned to find out that Adolf Hitler came to power through legitimate means rather than through some violent takeover, we asked “How could this happen?” Ms. Clemmer told us about Germany’s staggering inflation and taught us about scapegoating (Jews and Berlin elites). Eighth-grade reading level and all, this was hardly difficult to comprehend.

The top reasons Trump won? Persistent inflation, scapegoating immigrants, and pointing at cultural elites. Yet, rather than continuing to ring alarm bells about the terrifying historic parallel at hand as they did during the election (calling out how Trump’s language directly sampled Hitler’s, for example), the news media are suddenly treating Tuesday’s results as a basic election postmortem story. They are pretending we still live in a normal electoral setting as they obliviously do traditional election analysis pieces.

Worse, the analysis itself is playing into Trump’s hands by parroting the MAGA POV: Liberal media elites are now blaming the liberal elites for not listening to “real” Americans, and … Hey, stop condescending to MAGA voters, maybe their complaints about immigrants have merit. I mean, you know, immigrants may not actually have been eating dogs, but Trump was just joking, and there’s a larger point here …

Never mind that MAGA voters have consistently condescended to “libtards” too, liberals are now solicitously adopting a politicized version of the facile Hallmark Channel narrative of America, where the hard-charging city girl returns to her small hometown and realizes she’s lost touch with what’s important in the world as she falls in love with a “regular” guy. In short: People who choose to live in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Seattle (as well as in Chicago, Minneapolis, Denver, Houston, Dallas, and Atlanta) are the bad guys. We aren’t real Americans, we’re Trump’s “enemy within.”

I’m not saying there isn’t (a lot of) truth in the notion that the establishment has hurt the working class. That’s 100 percent correct, though it’s GOP policies like tax cuts for the wealthy, anti-union laws, and eviscerating corporate regulations that have helped capitalism run amok.

And there’s a big difference between condescension and calling out racism and bigotry; denouncing misogyny and transphobia; exposing corporate fraud; fact-checking and correcting conspiracy theories; and defending science and the rule of law.

I’d add that plenty of “regular” folks, not just liberal snobs, have called BS when their neighbors lean into bigotry—fighting against transphobia for one inspiring example, here.

People who voted for Trump are grownups. Treating people as grownups means not giving them a pass on supporting a shoddy demagogue who has been found guilty of fraud and sexual abuse, who issues racist statement after racist statement, who shamelessly lies. Sorry New York Times, I’m not interested in putting the MAGA voter under a microscope as if they’re some magical species that I fail to understand.

I understood them in 2016, and, having listened to Trump’s grievances about pet-eating immigrants, I understand them in 2024.

Ceding the post-election narrative to the Trumpist talking point that liberals have somehow deeply offended “authentic” Americans is the first step of acquiescence that allows the winners (MAGA, in this case) to write the history.

When you write the history, you control the future. The notion of a MAGA future is a grim one.

Flash back to November 8, 2016: Late in the night after Trump won the election, angry and emotional crowds gathered for impromptu and noisy protests in Seattle’s urban epicenter, Capitol Hill.

Fast forward to this past Tuesday night in the same neighborhood. Acceptance and fatigue have apparently set in. After it was clear Trump was going to win the election, Capitol Hill was relatively empty and totally subdued. I left an election night event at 8:45 and sat at a bar drinking a whiskey in morose silence while a smattering of folks, including a couple who seemed to be on a successful first date, chatted amiably.

josh@publicola.com

Continue reading “Three Things I’m Worried About: Trickle-Down Bullying; Martial Law; and Acquiescence” →

Density, housing, legislature, Maybe Metropolis, Mayor Harrell

The Backlash to Harrell’s Comp Plan Proves We’re All YIMBYs Now

by Josh Feit

There’s actually some good news for density advocates in Harrell’s slow-growth comp plan proposal: It’s being widely panned.

I take this backlash as a sign of progress. Consider: Nine years ago, when then-mayor Ed Murray floated the unthinkable in his own housing initiative—universal neighborhood upzones to promote growth, density, and housing—the NIMBY backlash against him, led by the Seattle Times, was swift and furious. Murray was immediately forced to backpedal, and eventually the city only allowed more housing along the margins of the 75 percent of Seattle that’s otherwise off-limits to apartments.

While it’s certainly disappointing that Mayor Harrell is still committed to an old-fashioned planning model that relegates density to busy arterial streets, it’s noteworthy that this time around, the backlash is an outcry for more density, not less.  Critics are calling Harrell out for failing to go beyond the minimum statewide requirements established in last year’s House Bill 1110, which requires cities to allow at least four units on every residential lot, and for promoting a status quo that led to the current affordability crisis.

It’s not 2015 anymore. With a keener sense of the racism encoded in Seattle zoning rules, a pressing housing affordability and homelessness crisis, and an urgency about environmental catastrophe all informing the debate, a whole new generation of pro-housing advocates has dislodged the anti-growth, Seattle-politics-as-usual attitudes that Harrell’s comp plan proposal regurgitates.

It’s not just the usual suspects—armchair planners and YIMBYs on social media—either. Mainstream Seattle state legislators have formally joined the fray. Not only did they champion and help pass HB 1110, but they’re pushing back on Harrell for doing the bare minimum to comply with its density mandate. In a letter to Harrell’s office on March 5, the day the mayor released the plan, Seattle state Rep. Julia Reed (D-36) expressed “serious concerns about the Mayor’s comprehensive plan,” calling it “disappointingly modest, particularly as it relates to the [density] floor, middle housing zoning, and breadth of exemptions.” (PubliCola obtained Reed’s letter through a records request).

The two most recent takedowns of Harrell’s non-comprehensive comp plan—a 19-page letter from the Seattle Planning Commission and an in-depth analysis from the progressive Sightline think tank—both lay out the basic problem with Harrell’s proposal: It doesn’t call for density in enough of the city, providing for just 100,000 new units over the next 20 years. That’s 20,000 less than the bare minimum the city will need, as the Planning Commission put it, to “help us climb out of the existing housing deficit.”

Additionally, in the areas where Harrell’s plan actually does call for more housing, it doesn’t allow enough housing types, excluding apartments in favor of tall, skinny townhomes. Critiquing Seattle’s longstanding “strategy of confinement” for density, Sightline goes all in on advocating for apartments, writing: “Seattle’s plan could rise to the moment by allowing highrise towers in all regional centers and near all light rail stations, eight-story buildings in all urban centers, and six-story buildings near frequent transit stops and other community amenities like parks. It could also designate more and larger neighborhood centers with apartment zoning.”

And as everyone—even the Seattle Times—has pointed out, while Harrell says his plan follows the new state mandate to allow fourplexes wherever detached single-family homes are allowed, his reluctant proposal renders such development merely theoretical with restrictive caps on floor area ratio (a key measure of density) that prevent construction from actually penciling out.

Of course, Harrell may simply dismiss the negative reviews as grousing from a gaggle of liberal elites. And certainly, on cue,  Erica and I both registered our disappointment  in his proposal here on PubliCola wondering if it was written by AI, with a prompt from the minutes of a mid-90s neighborhood council meeting.

However, Harrell (who deleted density and equity goals proposed by his own Office of Planning and Development (OPCD) shouldn’t take comfort in his single-family comfort zone. Seattle is now skewed heavily toward renters—a change that’s reflected by this city’s new slate of leaders. Indeed, the people who were most outraged by Harrell’s timid plan were not think tanks and bloggers, but the squad of progressive populists who now officially represent Seattle in Olympia, including Reed—pro-density voices that helped pass the statewide fourplex rule last year. Demonstrating this changing of the guard, they passed that rule in part by first ousting longtime slow-growth Seattle Rep. Gerry Pollet (D-46) from his powerful position as chair of local government committee.

“Frankly, we were expecting to see the City take meaningful advantage of the additional flexibilities provided in HB 1110 and other tools that the state has made available,” Rep. Reed wrote in her letter criticizing Harrell’s plan, adding that she was “not the only member from the Seattle delegation with these major concerns.”

This spring, OPCD met with members of the Seattle delegation, including Sen. Noel Frame, (D-36) to respond to “the questions [and] concerns we’re hearing from our constituents,” Reed told PubliCola. Reed said OPCD staffers were informative and answered their questions, and that she and her fellow Seattle reps “want to work with the city so that the final plan reflects a shared vision of abundance, affordability, and unified belonging for the entire city.”

According to a spokesperson for Frame, the senator is also “a critic” of Harrell’s proposal “and says it ‘falls far short of what we should be doing’ as the biggest city in the state, who should be leading on the housing crisis.” Frame and other legislators plan to send a letter to Harrell’s office in the next few days, the spokesperson said.

PubliCola has been covering the density debate for 15 years. It’s only been in the past few years that pro-housing voices, now represented by a contingent of Seattle lawmakers with a new state law in hand, are part of the fight. And—as opposed to the days when anti-density homeowners ruled the public process—legislators like Reed are working in concert with an organized YIMBY movement that’s amplified by a sympathetic urbanist media infrastructure which regularly fact checks and pushes back against the Seattle Times’ NIMBY narrative.

Thank you, Mayor Harrell, for formally and finally revealing where you stand in the housing debate; Erica’s earlier reporting on Harrell’s drastic re-write of OPCD’s initial pro-housing draft proposal wasn’t surprising, but it was clarifying. The current backlash against Harrell’s plan is clarifying as well.

Josh@PubliCola.com