Tag: comprehensive plan

City Council, Density, housing

On Narrow Vote, Council Gets Rid of Local Appeal Process that Delays Land Use Legislation

 

Opponents of Seattle land-use legislation will still be able to appeal to King County Superior Court or the Growth Management Hearings Board.

By Erica C. Barnett

On the narrowest possible vote, the Seattle City Council approved legislation yesterday that will eliminate one of several avenues for opponents to appeal land-use legislation, such as the city’s comprehensive plan. The bill, sponsored by Councilmember Eddie Lin, eliminates pre-legislative appeals to the city’s hearing examiner while still allowing people to appeal legislation to the state Growth Management Hearings Board or to King County Superior Court after it passes.

Currently, hearing-examiner appeals are one of many tools that people and organizations opposed to apartment construction use to delay or stop development.

Yesterday’s four-hour meeting, which I covered live on Bluesky, featured the kind of over-the-top rhetoric that has long characterized debates about housing in Seattle. Public commenters who opposed new housing, mostly older white homeowners, argued that denser housing harms the environment by removing individual trees when homeowners sell their houses to developers (opponents refer to these lawn-based tree removals as “clear-cutting”), and contribute to climate change that kills salmon, orcas, and birds.

Although opponents have repeatedly raised the specter of Seattle turning into New York City (the horror!) the comprehensive plan, currently delayed indefinitely by an appeal that began at the hearing examiner’s office, would in fact allow modest new density in a few dozen small areas citywide, all within a block or two of major transit stops.

One speaker suggested that the city just convert all the vacant commercial buildings downtown into housing and let renters live there. (This isn’t really a new idea: “Solutions” that involve moving all renters into segregated areas are exactly what we have now, with new rental housing mostly confined to highways and busy arterial roads). Another said councilmembers who supported Lin’s appeal reform bill are just like Trump, because they’re taking away the civil rights of local density opponents the same way Trump is taking away the civil rights of Black voters and immigrants.

Councilmember Rob Saka, a former Facebook attorney and Air Force veteran who proposed an amendment to Lin’s bill that would have restored the appeals the underlying legislation sought to eliminate, also invoked “civil rights” in a speech excoriating his colleagues for violating “fundamental due process rights, free speech rights, the right of people to petition their government for redress of grievances. These rights form the bedrock of our democracy, and these rights are enshrined in our Constitution,” Saka said.

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Later, after Lin confirmed with a staffer that there’s no Constitutional right to appeal land-use legislation to a hearing examiner in Seattle, Saka said, “Even if it’s not a right, we heard dozens of people today say, from their perspective, that it is a right.” As I noted yesterday, that is not actually a point—just because a political faction uses highfalutin language about “rights” and “democracy,” that doesn’t mean their feelings trump the law. Allowing property owners to endlessly delay housing for renters by appealing land-use changes is arguably pretty anti-democratic in itself, especially when it halts legislation before the public legislative process can begin.

After Saka’s amendment failed (even Maritza Rivera voted against it), the final vote ended up being a nail-biter. Rivera, the council’s most consistent opponent of pro-housing legislation, said she of course wants to see more housing, but doesn’t support “taking something away” from her constituents. Debora Juarez, a former elected councilmember who was appointed to serve out Cathy Moore’s term last year, said she wanted to “err on the side of giving a little bit more… because that’s due process, and that’s what the people want.”

Bob Kettle, who represents downtown, Queen Anne, and Magnolia, ended up casting the surprise swing vote (Joy Hollingsworth, who abstained from voting in committee, voted no), but not before chiding housing proponents, mostly younger renters, for using rhetoric he called inappropriate.

Kettle says it's not "right to declare our neighbors are weaponizing" the appeals process because of the war in Iran and the gun violence epidemic. Of course he is only chiding people on the pro-housing side. The anti-housing folks have been vitriolic, but he isn't tone policing them.

— Erica C. Barnett (@ericacbarnett.bsky.social) 2026-07-29T00:35:34.683Z

Lin, who’s emerging as a pro-housing star on the council, said little before the final vote, which took place at nearly 6:30pm. Earlier in the meeting, however, he did take a moment to respond to commenters who likened new housing to toxic waste and highway expansions. “I don’t think housing and future residents are toxic waste or pollution that need to be studied for years and years and years on end,” Lin said. “I believe housing is a human right.”

Although yesterday’s 5-4 vote to eliminate hearing examiner appeals won’t prevent housing opponents from challenging land use changes in court or to the state Growth Management Hearings Board, the change will allow the legislative process to move forward during appeals, and puts Seattle in line with Bellevue, Everett, King County, Tacoma, King County, and many other local jurisdictions that don’t allow this kind of pre-legislative appeal.

City Council, Environment, housing, land use

“Ballard is an Environmental Disaster”: Opponents Rail Against Plan to Eliminate One Avenue for Land Use Appeals

By Erica C. Barnett

Legislation would eliminate an early local appeal process that has delayed land use decisions a year or more drew the usual crowd of longtime Seattle property owners to City Council chambers on Wednesday, where they claimed the proposal would eliminate their “voice” in land use decisions and result in the “clear-cutting” of Seattle.

On the other side were environmentalists and housing advocates who argued that the lengthy delays that routinely bog down efforts to add housing contribute to sprawl, worsens pollution from cars, and exacerbates the affordability crisis that impacts Seattle’s growing renter majority.

In recent years, property owners have shifted away from saying out loud that renters will take away “their” street parking and harm their property values, a view that has become somewhat less acceptable amid a growing affordability crisis. Now, they insist that denser housing for renters will turn Seattle into a treeless desert and kill orcas and salmon.

Many of the opponents’ comments on Wednesday bore little relationship to reality. One speaker, for instance, falsely claimed the legislation would “eliminate environmental appeals on all city land use legislation and any city building project” at a time when the city experiences “heat islands because of clear-cutting thousands and thousands of mature trees” for development, which is also untrue.

Another speaker, who identified himself as a Seattle resident for more than 30 years, called the Ballard neighborhood—which has transformed over the past 20 years from sleepy fishing village to lively urban center with the addition of thousands of new residents—”an environmental disaster. … I lived in the New York City area. I moved from the East Coast to here to get away from that. And when I see Seattle changing into something that resembles New York City, it’s very sad to see that we’re going in that direction,” he said.

Other speakers claimed that eliminating administrative appeals would result in deaths due to heat islands caused by apartment construction, “take away the voice of the people” the same way Trump is trying to take away people’s voting rights, and, yes, kill orcas and salmon.

The actual proposal, which is sponsored by District 2 councilmember and land use committee chair Eddie Lin, is much more benign, though it’s obvious why density opponents are against it: The bill would eliminate their ability to delay changes to the city’s land use code by filing the equivalent of a complaint form with the city.

Currently, anyone can halt a proposed land use change in its tracks by paying $120 and filing an appeal with the city’s hearing examiner. Appeals at this level stop the legislative while it’s still ongoing, cutting off deliberation and debate while the hearing examiner considers whether the city has made the right determination about a proposal’s environmental impact.

This process rarely results in changes to legislation—between 2016 and 2026, just three appeals have even partially succeeded—but it does slow down proposals to allow more density in the city’s historic single-family enclaves: Over the last 10 years, cases have taken an average of 151 days to resolve, with two-thirds of all claims resulting in a dismissal or being withdrawn.

While Seattle has offered this “administrative” appeal process since the 1980s, other local jurisdictions, including King County and Bellevue, do not.

Lin’s legislation would get rid of this “pre-legislative” process, while still allowing appeals to the state’s Growth Management Hearings Board or King County Superior Court, which both occur after the city has adopted actual legislation, rather than while the deliberative process is still going on. Although many of the speakers at Wednesday’s hearing said eliminating hearing examiner appeals would “silence” their “voices,” that’s clearly not true: The city’s long-delayed Comprehensive Plan update is currently stalled indefinitely due to a legal appeal.

House Our Neighbors co-executive director Jeff Paul, one of several public commenters who spoke in favor of Lin’s bill on Wednesday, said he was “remarkably frustrated,” as a lifelong environmentalist, to hear so many people claim that dense housing leads to environmental harm.

“According to every environmental scientist in the world, we have to massively reduce the amount of time that people spend driving in cars,” Paul said. “The only way that we can do that is build densely. Public transit only works when people have dense cities. It’s the most important single drawdown that we can do, and we needed to start five decades ago.” Yet Seattle homeowners are still busy “talking about [how] it’s so important that one person can stop the entire city from making decisions about what is going to happen with our land use and our ability to meaningfully address the climate crisis.”

Lin’s land use committee meets again, and is expected to take up the proposal, on July 15.

 

City Council, Density, housing, Mayor Wilson, Opinion

Seattle Council Hears from Renters Who Want Quality of Life and Homeowners Who Want to Keep Neighborhoods to Themselves

By Erica C. Barnett

As the council takes up the remaining “phases” of Seattle’s latest 10-year comprehensive plan update—which, as a reminder, was subject to repeated delays by the Harrell administration starting in 2023—opponents of new housing are pulling out all the stops to convince the council that allowing renters to live in neighborhoods will destroy urban forests, kill birds and orcas, and make life unbearable for property owners across the city.

Homeowners, including many who made a point of ID’ing themselves as “native Seattleites,” predicated environmental disaster, community fragmentation, and the extinction of various animal species during several hours of public hearings yesterday on the “centers and corridors” portion of the plan, which would establish density limits in new “neighborhood centers” and along major bus lines and rapid transit routes.

The proposed changes, which would leave the overwhelming majority of the city’s residential land untouched, would give more renters access to neighborhoods with ample public trees, safe sidewalks, and quiet streets. Currently, most rental housing is restricted to highways and large arterial roads, which spew pollution directly into apartment windows and are among the city’s most dangerous, noisy, and unpleasant places to live.

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On Monday afternoon, activists even trotted out a group of young children to perform a song-and-dance routine about “lot sprawl”—a concept promoted by Tree Action Seattle, a group that opposes denser housing in neighborhoods on the grounds that new housing often results in the removal of trees on what were formerly private lawns. “Big trees, we need them so,” the children belted. “Lot sprawl has got to go.”

The agenda of most tree activists in Seattle isn’t about adding street trees or maintaining and replacing trees in parks, where a plurality of the city’s tree loss actually occurs.  In a recent action alert, Tree Action said explicitly that  “street trees are not a solution” to tree loss because there isn’t enough room in public right-of-way to achieve a 30 percent tree canopy citywide. (In reality, development in single-family areas amounts to a tiny fraction of overall tree loss in Seattle.)

As I noted on Bluesky yesterday, little kids don’t understand housing policy, much less arcane concepts like “lot sprawl.” Using children to promote an adult political agenda is particularly ironic in this case, since anti-housing policies will make it impossible for most kids who are six years old today to live in Seattle when they grow up.

You know who can't understand housing policy? Little kids trained to sing a song on behalf of their parents' anti-housing political agendas. You know who won't be able to live in Seattle if we don't allow more housing? People who are little kids today.

— Erica C. Barnett (@ericacbarnett.bsky.social) 2026-04-06T23:02:40.796Z

The fever-pitched backlash is occurring alongside a larger push to go bigger on housing in the remaining phases of the comp plan. This push is coming largely from young Seattleites and others who belong to Seattle’s renter majority, which is getting increasingly fed up with both rising rents and the limited options for people who can’t afford to buy a typical million-dollar house in Seattle.

Last week, Mayor Katie Wilson announced that she wants to accelerate the adoption of the comp plan update, restoring the neighborhood centers Harrell removed from the plan and expanding the frequent transit zones where new apartments will be allowed beyond the (frankly embarrassing) half-block that’s in the current proposal. While Wilson’s proposal isn’t on the council’s agenda yet, it figured heavily in the comments both for and against the “centers and corridors” portion of the plan.

During the recess between the two public hearings, supporters of Wilson’s “taller, denser, faster” agenda rallied outside City Hall for a competing vision of Seattle—one where renters have access to the neighborhoods many homeowners want to keep to themselves.

Wilson herself kicked off the rally by thanking the group for gathering to support a “deeply important, if somewhat esoteric, topic of the day—Seattle’s municipal zoning codes!”

“Last week, you heard me announce my administration’s taller, denser, faster housing program. I guess that’s the official name now,” Wilson said. “What that means is that we’re going to start with a more inviting, optimistic assumption of our growth capacity. … We are going to plan to allow more housing in every neighborhood, creating an equitable distribution and meaningful housing choices. Every neighborhood should be an open, welcoming place for people and families to live.”

The opposition to Wilson’s plan is going to be fierce, as people who bought houses decades ago fight to restrict where housing can go and impose tree planting and retention mandates on apartment developers that do not apply to them. But there was heartening news for housing advocates yesterday, too. After the rally, which also featured disability advocate Cecelia Black, Community Roots Housing leader Colleen Echohawk, and City Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck, pro-housing activists filed upstairs to testify in favor of Wilson’s more inviting, optimistic vision.

One of them, Jason Weill, introduced himself as a longtime Seattle resident and homeowner who was “excited about all the growth and vibrancy happening in our city” but “really concerned about the rising housing costs and the constraints that we have on where we can build housing. I’ve lived in apartments built so close to I-5 I could hear highway noise 24 hours a day, and air pollution was a constant health hazard because I could only cool my apartment by opening the windows.”

Apartment renters across the city can relate to this exact situation—as someone who rented apartments on or within a half-block of three major roadways with nonstop, heavy traffic, I certainly could. The city’s renter majority—a population that  includes the mayor herself— is pushing back on the belief, enshrined in our zoning codes, that only homeowners deserve access to the most livable parts of our city. It’s now up to the city council to resist the urge to maintain the unsustainable status quo.

City Council, housing, Mayor Wilson, podcasts

Seattle Nice: Mayor Wilson Wants to Expand Housing Faster; Councilmember Rivera Wants to Audit Human Services

By Erica C. Barnett

Mayor Katie Wilson is a renter on Capitol Hill, giving her a unique perspective that differentiates her from any previous mayor, and she plans to keep renting through her term. On this week’s episode of Seattle Nice, we discussed how Wilson’s personal experience renting in Seattle (and struggling to afford escalating rent) may have impacted her decision to go “bigger, taller, and faster” on what’s left of the city’s comprehensive plan update.

In Wilson’s tree-lined neighborhood, single-family houses and apartment buildings mingle effortlessly with newer townhouses and condos, all within a short walk of multiple bus routes and a light rail station. In other words, this mayor has actually experienced the benefits of renting in a neighborhood with lots of trees, walkable amenities, and frequent transit, making her less susceptible to NIMBY arguments that apartments destroy neighborhood “character” or make neighborhoods unlivable.

As Sandeep pointed out, public opinion in Seattle has moved consistently in a YIMBY (yes in my backyard) direction for at least the past decade. That’s good news for Seattle’s renter majority—brand-new housing, though not affordable in itself, takes pressure off Seattle’s acute housing shortage—and bad news for NIMBYs who want Seattle to stay the same as it was when they bought their houses for $23,000 in the ’70s.

We also discussed Councilmember Maritza Rivera’s still-vague proposal to “audit Human Services Department contracts.” Sandeep and David think it seems like a pretty good idea in light of an audit at the county’s equivalent department that found widespread problems among “high-risk” contracts—why not “look under the rock” and see what’s there? “From my side, we’d want to make that a campaign issue,” Sandeep said—perhaps previewing what Rivera’s reelection campaign will look like?

 

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I countered that as with the Equitable Development initiative, Rivera seems to be fixating on contracts in one specific area (the DCHS contracts were largely first-time contracts with small Black- and brown-led nonprofits) rather than considering which type of contracts across all city departments are worth scrutinizing for waste, fraud, and abuse. (I also noted that the smaller contractors targeted in the DCHS audit do not generally contract with the city.) Sandeep said these kinds of contracts came out of the “peak woke period” after COVID and so should be subject to greater scrutiny.

As I reported, auditing $300 million in human services contracts is far more complex than the kinds of audits Seattle’s auditor typically does, and would tie up resources for years at a small office with just five audit staff. Just as a factual matter, I’ll stand by what I said on the podcast: No matter how much we agree that it would be great for all public contracts to face close scrutiny (no one supports waste, abuse, or fraud), given that the city will never have the resources to audit every contract, the city has to make choices. If that choice is always to audit human services providers and never audit police spending, for instance, that’s an expression of priorities, not an objective assessment of what kind of city spending merits extra scrutiny.

Density

Mayor Wilson Says She’ll Accelerate Comprehensive Plan and “Go Bigger” on Density
Why is “no rezone proposed” always the biggest area?

By Erica C. Barnett

Mayor Katie Wilson wants to accelerate the remaining phases of Seattle’s comprehensive plan update by one year, add more density within a “reasonable walk” of transit stops, and revisit the neighborhood centers—nodes of density inside traditional single-family areas that already have major transit stops or commercial areas—to restore the nine centers her predecessor Bruce Harrell removed from the plan and potentially add more.

On Thursday, Wilson announced that the city’s Office of Community Planning and Development (OPCD) is starting an environmental review process that will wrap up next year, with final land use and zoning legislation around June 2o27.

Wilson previewed the announcement at a Housing Development Consortium fundraising event earlier this week. “As a renter, I think this is very exciting,” she said. “You don’t have to live right along a busy, noisy, dirty street.”

In an interview Thursday morning, Wilson said her plan would compress Phases 3 and 4 of the update (adding neighborhood centers and increasing density near transit and in regional centers, respectively) into a single phase, reducing the timeline by a year while slightly delaying neighborhood centers so that everything can get done at once. On Thursday, Wilson announced that she’ll launch an environmental review process hoping to wrap up environmental review and have final legislation ready to go by June 2027.

“Basically, we inherited this comp plan process, and … we were looking at ways we can really accelerate and go bigger,” Wilson said.

Currently, the city council’s comprehensive plan committee is considering upzones in the neighborhood centers and urban centers—denser areas within neighborhoods that were previously known as “urban villages”—and within a half-block of certain frequent transit routes. Land use and comp plan committee chair Eddie Lin did not immediately respond to an interview request on Thursday.

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Wilson’s plan is to go beyond those limits in a revamped Phase 3, adding back and potentially expanding nine neighborhood centers that the council placed on a “docketing amendment” last year, while also considering new ones the city hasn’t studies yet. The city’s original plan contemplated nearly 50 neighborhood centers, a number that was eventually scaled back to 30 after the council heard complaints from homeowners in areas like Magnolia, Maple Leaf, and Laurelhurst.

“I’m open to new neighborhood centers,” Wilson said. “I certainly want to go back and consider the ones the previous administration cut out, and if there are additional ones that weren’t considered but made sense, I’m happy to consider that too. We’re going to do an efficient but hopefully effective stakeholder process to decide what we want the scope to be, but in general, my bias is to go big.”

Wilson also called the city’s current plan to allow new housing within just a half-block of rail and frequent transit stops “pretty darn stingy.” As a renter in Capitol Hill, she said, she lives within a ten-minute walk of light rail and much closer to several frequent bus routes, so her “instinct” is to change the requirement to allow more housing within “a reasonable walk”—somewhere between a couple of blocks and half a mile. “How long do you walk to get to a bus stop? That’s more than half a block,” she said.

Legislation passed last year, House Bill 1491, imposes new density requirements near transit and restricts parking mandates, which force developers to build parking even in dense areas where fewer people own cars. With a compressed timeline to finish the comp plan, the city should be able to “comply or exceed compliance with state law” before the 2029 deadline, Wilson said.

City Council, housing, Mayor Wilson, zoning

With a Year of Zoning Changes Ahead, Mayor Wilson Can Still Put an Urbanist Stamp on the “One Seattle Plan”

By Erica C. Barnett

The city’s Office of Planning and Community Development rolled out legislation this week that will implement “Phase 2” of the city’s 10-year update to its comprehensive plan, the document that guides density and zoning in Seattle. Former mayor Bruce Harrell officially dubbed the proposal the “One Seattle Plan,” in keeping with his campaign and mayoral catch phrase.

The legislation complements the comp plan updates City Council adopted last year by increasing the density of housing allowed in 30 new Neighborhood Centers—areas within about 800 feet of existing commercial “nodes” or major transit stops—and expanding Urban Centers, where significantly more apartments are allowed.

The new plan will simplify the requirements for developers to build apartments in midrise areas. OPCD staff said apartments rarely get built in the existing midrise zone, because the four-story height restriction is too low to justify building and because Midrise has the most complex requirements of any zone in the city.

“Today, every single project that is built in a midrise zone has to come in and get a departure [from the standards because these are so complicated,” OPCD strategic advisor Brennon Staley said during a briefing on the legislation last week.

The legislation was finalized under former mayor Bruce Harrell, so it doesn’t bear Mayor Katie Wilson’s stamp. Wilson ran an explicitly urbanist campaign, with a commitment to allowing more housing in more places—something she’ll have a chance to demonstrate in later phases of the comprehensive plan.

Under Harrell, the city delayed the comprehensive plan update repeatedly, which is one reason it’s now broken up into four separate phases; the first phase, which got Seattle into compliance with a state law passed in 2023 requiring more density in former single-family areas, passed in December.

The zoning update also increases the amount of housing that’s allowed along “corridors”—areas directly adjacent to streets with frequent transit routes. As Doug Trumm at The Urbanist reported last week, OPCD reduced the size of some corridors in response to incumbent residents’ complaints about allowing too many apartments near single-family houses.

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“Today in the city, there are really very, very different viewpoints about housing,” Staley said. “There are people who own their home for a very long time. It’s been a great investment. … There are other people who think they will need to leave Seattle because they can’t afford a place to live.” The final legislation, he said, is an attempt to “recognize that both those types of opinions are valid.”

Efforts to accommodate homeowner complaints about apartments—that is, renters—have long been a centerpiece of Seattle politics. The result has been decades of anti-growth policies. Some, like exclusive single-family zoning, have only been eroded by outside intervention—it’s unlikely that Seattle would have allowed up to six units on every residential lot if the state legislature hadn’t passed House Bill 1110, which forced the city’s hand. Others, like the longstanding practice of segregating apartment buildings from single-family areas by concentrating them on busy, polluted arterials, remain in effect and are baked into the comp plan update.

Within those constraints, the remaining phases of the comp plan leave plenty of room for the new mayor (and progressive urbanists on the council, like Alexis Mercedes Rinck, Dionne Foster, and Eddie Lin) to allow more housing in other parts of the city.

After Phase 2—the “centers and corridors” legislation—the city will rezone the existing regional and urban centers, which include downtown, Northgate, and Capitol Hill. That will happen later this year and early next year, as will consideration of of nine more neighborhood centers, which require additional review because Harrell removed them from his plan.In  Phase 4, in 2027, the city will upzone areas around frequent transit stops—another density gift from the state legislature, which forced cities to add more housing near transit through House Bill 1491 last year.

Editor’s note: The original version of this story incorrectly described the city’s midrise zones as allowing six-story apartment buildings. That describes one of the city’s lowrise zones; midrise zones allow taller buildings. The story also misstated when the city will consider adding new neighborhood centers to the plan; that will be later this year, not in the first quarter of this year.