Tag: comprehensive plan

City Council, Density, housing, land use

Cathy Moore Wants to Make it More Expensive to Build Middle Housing

By Erica C. Barnett

In a recent meeting of the Seattle City Council’s special committee on the comprehensive plan, Councilmember Cathy Moore laid out her case for imposing fees on new housing in the city’s traditional single-family areas, where—under a state law passed two years ago, HB 1110—the city is required to allow up to four units on each lot (or six within a quarter-mile of frequent transit stops or when two of the units are affordable.)

The council is gearing up to adopt “interim” zoning changes to comply with HB 1110, which Seattle must do by June; ordinarily, the city would have adopted the new rules as part of the city’s overall comprehensive plan update, but Mayor Bruce Harrell introduced his legislation far behind schedule, leaving the council with little time to consider the plan.

A half-dozen homeowner groups have appealed the plan, arguing that specific new “neighborhood centers”—commercial areas near transit where the proposed plan would allow apartment building—will harm the character of their historically single-family areas.

Simultaneously, the city is considering changes to its Mandatory Housing Affordability (MHA) legislation that would expand MHA to the new neighborhood centers, adding 21 percent to the area of the city that’s subject to MHA, while continuing to exempt the new “neighborhood residential” zones—the new name for the city’s former single-family areas—from the fees.

Moore’s objections boiled down to two main points. First, she argued against the concept of neighborhood centers, noting that the city is already increasing the amount of housing that can be built “throughout the city,” by allowing up to four units on every single-family lot. (Moore specifically opposes a new neighborhood center in Maple Leaf, which she argued would amount to “sacrificing” the entire neighborhood to density.)

Second, and more vociferously, she argued that the city should impose Mandatory Housing Affordability (MHA) requirements on all new housing in former single-family areas, effectively mandating that developers build or fund the construction of at least one affordable unit for every three to five market-rate units they build.

MHA, which has been in place since 2019, allows developers to build more housing in certain parts of the city; in exchange, they agree to build affordable housing on site or pay the city’s Office of Housing, which funds housing elsewhere. The size of the fee varies depending on where in the city the new housing is located, and by how much of a height bonus developers receive. As housing construction slows, so do MHA revenues; currently, the City Budget Office projects that MHA will bring in $22 million in both 2025 and 2026, down from $68 million in 2022 and $59 million in 2023.

“We’re going to open up the city to tremendous development and density, which is good, but we need to make sure that we’re utilizing all our tools,” Moore said, “and MHA is a powerful tool. It can be tweaked, but to simply say it shouldn’t apply across the board, I think, is a missed opportunity. And again, it’s a calibration of, what are the costs that we consider valuable in this society?”

Representatives from the mayor’s office, the Office of Planning and Community Development, and two consultants that looked at the impact of the MHA program on housing in Seattle, BERK and Heartland pointed to 2024 BERK/Heartland study showing that developers of low-rise housing—the townhouses, fourplexes, and other low-density housing types that will be allowed in single-family zones under 1110—opted to build these units outside MHA areas because the additional height bonus didn’t benefit low-rise developers enough to make up for the large fees they would have to pay to build in those areas.

A separate study, from ECONorthwest, showed that “middle housing” developments are extremely sensitive to cost increases, falling off dramatically as the cost to develop each unit increases. That same study found that middle housing is currently feasible in only 19 percent of the proposed new neighborhood residential (former single-family areas), and most of those won’t be redeveloped; imposing new fees on new housing in those areas would make it far less likely that developers would choose to build new housing there.

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OPCD planning manager Geoff Wentlandt noted that by adding new neighborhood centers to the city’s zoning maps, the city will be increasing the areas of the city subject to MHA requirements by 21 percent. But imposing MHA fees on small developments in former single-family areas, Wentlandt said, would reduce the amount developers would make on projects below levels that most developers would be willing to accept. “We really want to prioritize seeing the production of middle housing in the new neighborhood residential zones. Everyone agrees that middle housing is a high priority, and want to make sure it comes to fruition,” Wentlandt said.

Moore pushed back on this, arguing that developers should be willing to accept lower profit margins in exchange for the ability to build in new areas. “My understanding is, in the past, when they were building, they expected 15 to 20 percent return on investment, and they’re still seeking those kinds of high level [returns],” Moore said.

“If you talk to some of the smaller for-profit developers… they’re not looking to make more than 10 percent return on investment. And so things do actually pencil out. When we talk about penciling out, are we talking about we’re penciling out at 15 percent profit, or are we talking about penciling out at 10 percent profit? Nobody’s really answered that question, what does it truly mean to pencil?”

Moore also suggested that OPCD was arguing that “six dollars”—the difference between a typical $22-per-square-foot MHA fee when the program was introduced and the $28 it costs today—is making it so that projects don’t pencil out. “I think we need a policy discussion about whether we think $6 to ensure that we continue to have affordable housing in the city is a cost that we think is appropriate for our developers to absorb and reduce their return on investment a little bit,” Moore said. “I guess I’m unconvinced that the $6 is really, across the board, going to be the thing that prevents affordable housing.” (The $6 change reflects an annual inflation adjustment, not an increase in real terms.)

Christa Valles, a senior advisor in the mayor’s office, pushed back on this, saying, “I would just like to be really clear we do not consider our position on this as backing away from MHA. …  This is a really difficult environment right now for housing development, and we want to make sure that the infill that we hope to see under HB 1110 has the support that it needs to happen.”

According to the BERK study, the MHA fee itself makes up a small percentage of overall development costs; but, as costs for other elements of development increase, the fee can be a deciding factor in whether a project gets built. In real dollars, building four 1,250-square-foot units would add $140,000 to the cost to develop a property, using the current $28 “typical” fee. Even if a developer decided it was worth it to pay an extra $140,000 to build those four units, the fee would get passed on to future renters or buyers, making the housing less affordable.

Moore also suggested “carving out an exemption” to MHA requirements “for people, families, who are wanting to develop their lot,” as opposed to developers building the same type of housing for new residents.

Implementing the changes Moore suggested—that is, eliminating at least some neighborhood centers and imposing fees on all new development in the city’s traditional single-family neighborhoods—would make it far more expensive, less feasible, and less likely that middle housing would be built in neighborhoods across Seattle. Developers would reasonably opt out of building in places where they would make less money, choosing either not to build in Seattle or to concentrate new housing in areas where it has always been allowed—along large, busy arterial roads where Seattle’s renter majority is currently concentrated.

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

City Council, Density, housing

Councilmembers Claim City Didn’t Do “Broad Engagement” on Comprehensive Plan

By Erica C. Barnett

The city council’s comprehensive plan committee, chaired by Joy Hollingsworth, spent much of its two-hour meeting on Wednesday morning lambasting staffers from the city’s Office of Planning and Community Development, who were there to describe the past three years of public engagement on the comp plan, for purportedly failing to do the right kind of public outreach (flyers in mailboxes) to the right kind of people (property owners).

At various points in Wednesday’s meeting, council members claimed OPCD had ignored advocates for “neighborhood character” in favor of “fringe policy wonk types” (Rob Saka); said existing residents weren’t consulted about the new neighbors they will have “to live with” if the plan goes through through (Cathy Moore); and argued that homeowners who’ve decried the plan in public comment don’t oppose housing, they’re just upset at the “lack of broad engagement” about the plan (Maritza Rivera).

“We need to do a better job of bringing in public comment,” Moore said. “My takeaway is that when you actually manage to get broader engagement, you actually found that there was a lot less buy-in to the plan that had been put forth,” she continued. “And what troubles me is that when it became clear that there was less buy-in from the people that are going to have to live with this development on the ground, there’s still no willingness to truly engage and refashion this” plan.

Later that evening, the council would take public comment for five and a half hours. The first several hours, starting at 5pm, were dominated by longtime homeowners arguing that housing would destroy the environment and make Seattle unlivable. As they had at previous meetings on the plan, many of the public commenters complained that no one had told them about the public meeting where they were giving public comment.

The comprehensive plan update aligns the city with a new state law requiring all cities to allow up to four units of housing, such as a duplex and two accessory units, on every residential lot. It also includes 30 new “neighborhood centers”—small nodes of density within 800 feet, or a three-minute walk, of existing commercial areas or frequent transit stops. These neighborhood centers, where modest three- to six-story apartment buildings would be allowed, have become a flash point in the comp plan discussions. Ironically, or predictably, a majority of the new council members—including Saka, Moore, Joy Hollingsworth, and Bob Kettle—explicitly endorsed a comp plan alternative during their campaigns that included 18 more neighborhood centers than the plan many of them are objecting to as too dense now.

For the second time in several weeks, Moore railed against potential neighborhood centers inside and outside her district, claiming the change would “open the floodgates to… unlimited development” everywhere in the city. Moreover, she said, it makes no sense for the council to give up a key bargaining chip against future density by approving neighborhood centers in areas where the current residents don’t want apartments anyway.

Addressing OPCD director Rico Quirindongo, Moore said he appeared to be saying that OPCD would allow the city council to designate the zoning details of each neighborhood center in future legislation, which is true. But what Moore said she was “hearing” from Quirindongo was “‘You give us a [neighborhood center] designation, then we’ll negotiate the height.’ My position is, why bother negotiating the height? Because I think down the road, we are looking at keeping the door open to putting up five- and six-story buildings, because we’ve zoned it that way. So that is not a sufficient response.”

To which housing advocates might say: Yeah. Allowing more housing, whether it’s three stories or six, is the entire point of increasing density in places where people want to live, like neighborhoods with easy access to transit. The proposed Maple Leaf neighborhood center, at 90th and Roosevelt, is one mile away from two light rail stations—Northgate and Roosevelt—and has frequent bus service serving both. It’s hard to conceive of a more favorable spot for modest transit-oriented development.

Moore wasn’t done. She wanted to know why, “if we can send out a flyer about social an initiative on social housing, we ought to be able to send out a flyer about a comprehensive plan that is going to completely remake the way the city looks for the next 10 and 20 years—not only looks, but operates.” (Again, we’re talking about 30 neighborhood nodes that stretch a block or two into Seattle’s low-density urban sprawl). Moore appeared to be referring to a political flyer paid for by the campaign for Proposition 1B, a private political effort that received no funding from the city.

At another point, Moore also claimed the comprehensive plan would “remov[e] parking”—using “we’re not going to have any parking” as a reason to doubt that the city will really plant new trees in public parking strips. In fact, the plan would roll back current minimum parking mandates for new housing. It would neither remove existing parking nor restrict developers from building it.

Maritza Rivera agreed with Moore that there has been “a lack of broad engagement” on the plan, and added that many of her Northeast Seattle constituents do support “more housing,” but want an opportunity to express their concerns about trees, parking, and where that housing should be allowed. “I have a lot of constituents who have kids who can’t afford to come back and live where they grew up,” she noted. Rivera’s district includes the University District, home to many thousands of young renters, yet her example of a “constituent” concerned about housing prices is a homeowner whose kids can’t afford a house here.

Moore’s complaint about a lack of “broad engagement” is interesting, because the city has never failed to engage with anti-density property owners, who organize themselves politically in groups with names like “Tree Action Seattle,” “Seattle Fair Growth,” and “The Queen Anne Community Council.” What’s different this time is that the city also made a concerted effort to reach groups that have historically been excluded from the process of deciding where housing will go and how much there will be. As OPCD’s outreach summary notes, the city reached out to “specific racial, cultural, and other- marginalized communities,” contracting with community groups that “serve communities—particularly BIPOC populations—that have been historically left out of the City’s engagement processes.”

Actions that promote equity can feel like discrimination to people who are used to being the only voices in the room. Twenty years ago, you didn’t hear homeowners complaining that renters were getting too loud and uppity, because renters didn’t have a voice at city hall—they just weren’t a factor. Now that they are, the BANANA lobby is trying to turn YIMBY into a dirty word.

Will it work? A majority of the council seems poised to remove at least some of the neighborhood centers from the plan, rolling back potential housing in some of the areas where it makes the most sense. Then again, there’s a chance that some council members may back away from some of Moore’s more radical ideas, such as requiring that anyone who wants to build four units on their property must make two of the units affordable to low-income people. The poison-pill requirement would ensure that no such housing gets built, effectively end-running the new state mandate that cities allow up to four housing units per lot.

On Wednesday, Moore said that contrary to what some seem to believe, it isn’t true “that we’re going to solve all the problems for renters by just building a lot of housing,” adding, “you’re not going to get stabilized rent.” No one is claiming that more housing is the unitary solution to the city’s housing crisis (nor has anyone said brand-new apartments will be either cheap or rent-controlled), but it is a necessary condition. In the future,  Moore might consider spending less time listening to homeowner complaints about the people they might  “have to live with” and more hearing from constituents who just want more places where they’re allowed to live.

City Council, Elections

Six Applicants Make Their Case to Become the City Council’s Newest Member
The six city council candidates hesitate before holding up cards in response to Rob Saka’s question: “Yes or no, would you definitively rule out running this year, 2025, if appointed?”

By Erica C. Barnett

The city council is about to choose a new council member to fill Tammy Morales‘ old District 2 seat, after narrowing down the field of 20 qualified candidates to six men.

After a chaotic public forum that focused primarily on how much the applicants seat support cops, cars, and keeping Sound Transit out of Chinatown, Seattle residents got one last chance to hear from the applicants on Thursday, when each finalist delivered a prepared 3-minute speech and answered questions from all eight current council members.

But if viewers were hoping to learn more about how each of the candidates would handle the primary responsibilities that will face them over the next nine and a half months—updating the city’s comprehensive plan, overseeing the council’s land use committee, addressing ongoing budget shortfalls amid the likelihood of federal funding cuts—the council often undercut that goal. Rob Saka went on forever. Dan Strauss asked everyone where they went to middle school. Joy Hollingsworth asked, “What about the children?” And Cathy Moore requested commitments to revisit the tree code to place more restrictions on tree removal to prevent density in single-family areas.

Each council member had ten minutes to address the finalists, and most of them gave each applicant at least a minute or so for a short answer to each question. The exception was Saka, who spent more than six minutes winding up to a confusingly worded yes or no question (basically: would the candidates run for election or be a “caretaker”)? and took several more minutes to ask a second question about the comprehensive plan. As a result, the six men  had just two minutes, altogether, to explain their priorities and goals for the city’s comprehensive plan, a complex land use document that governs how and where the city will grow over the next 20 years. As Saka’s time wound down, two of his colleagues could be heard, on the Seattle Channel live stream, snickering and saying “oh my god,” respectively, and council president Sara Nelson gave them a few extra minutes so they could all say a few words.

For the record: Chukundi Salisbury and Mark Solomon, who have both previously said they would not run for election, were the only two who raised their green check mark cards.

Two quick notes: As in the public forum last Tuesday, many of the applicants’ answers were about issues or proposals the council has little or no control over, like specific Seattle Department of Transportation projects or how police officers should be deployed. To me, this suggests a misunderstanding (or misrepresentation) of what the council does, which has sometimes been a problem with the current council (see, for example, Saka’s frustration that he can’t just order SDOT to remove a curb that prevented him from turning left into a parking lot.)

Second, the new council member will chair the land use committee, so they ideally should have some land-use expertise; while experience as a neighborhood advocate is useful for a district council member, they’ll also be making decisions on technical issues that impact the whole city.

Finally, the fact that all six finalists are men is noteworthy, perhaps especially so because some of Morales’ colleagues and detractors dismissed her stated reasons for resigning—feeling bullied, gaslit, and excluded from important conversations—by suggesting she just wasn’t “tough” enough for the job, a common criticism of women who complain about workplace mistreatment. In modern history, there has never been another all-male panel of finalists for an open council seat.

Hong Chhuor

Nominated by: Sara Nelson

Chhour, the Chief Development and Communications Officer at Friends of the Children and co-owner of King Donuts, emphasized his ties to the immigrant and Asian American/Pacific Islander community and his commitment to improving public safety in Little Saigon. Like finalists Mark Solomon, Adonis Ducksworth, and Eddie Lin, Chhuor said his top priority on the would be to “address the travesty that is occurring at 12th and Jackson in Little Saigon.”

Quote: In response to a question from Dan Strauss about how he would “approach the dichotomy of our city need for housing and density with neighbors’ concerns that they don’t want their neighborhoods to change,” Chhour said: “I want to ask, why do we limit ourselves to that dichotomy? Could we take a moment to consider that the narrative around changing the character of our neighborhoods is a form of gatekeeping, and are we really a society in this city that wants to default to, ‘I got here first, and therefore I get to make the rules’?”

Adonis Ducksworth

Nominated by: Dan Strauss

Ducksworth, a Seattle Department of Transportation employee since 2016 (and transportation policy advisor to Mayor Bruce Harrell since 2023), talked about his experience volunteering with recovery-based groups like the Union Gospel Mission and his efforts to get a skate park in Rainier Beach, which he identified as one of his top priorities.

Quote: In his introductory comments, he said there were “five things I will be prioritizing for the district over the next 10 months, and these are things that I know can be done. Number one, address the state of emergency in the CID and Little Saigon. Number two, make Rainier Avenue safer. Number three, adopt a resolution that outlines a framework for how the city should be engaging with the community. Number four, host SPD recruiting and outreach fairs in every District Two, neighborhood. And number five, we need to give kids a different path. That’s why I want to break ground on the Rainier Beach skate park this year.”

Mark Solomon

Nominated by: Maritza Rivera

Solomon, a crime prevention coordinator for the Seattle Police Department since 1990, said he would prioritize building generational wealth by promoting Black homeownership and keeping Black homeowners in their houses, noting that he can only afford to live in the city because he lives in the house his grandparents built. He also said he’s prioritize traffic safety in Southeast Seattle and building more sidewalks.

Quote: In response to a question from Rinck about what the city should to do respond to federal retaliation, such as the withdrawal of funds, against sanctuary cities like Seattle, Solomon said, “Just looking at the executive orders that have flown out of the past couple days does give me pause, and it made me think—’Okay, if you’re going to deny us money because we’re a sanctuary city, I’m going to go find my own money? I’m going to go find different sorts of funds, so I don’t have to rely on you.’ That’s one of the reasons I’ve been advocating for us to explore a public bank…. where we can set this up to borrow against our own assets to fund our own projects, so we don’t have to rely on the feds for [that] funding.”

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Chukundi Salisbury

Nominated by: Rob Saka

Salisbury, a longtime Seattle Parks Department employee and founder of the group Black Legacy Homeowners, touted his volunteer experience and emphasized his long history in Seattle. (His mother, former Community Police Commission co-chair Harriet Walden, spoke in his favor during public comment). In response to the sanctuary city question, Salisbury said he would look at “leaning in to private industry, not just taxing them, but asking them to really protect us as a sanctuary city.”

Quote: “My number one priority … would be strengthening the anti-displacement framework in the comp plan. We know that if we do not strengthen this anti-displacement framework, 20 years from now, there will not be a Black community, and many of our other BIPOC neighbors and the like who are most at risk for displacement will not exist here. And so this is one of the most important things to me. We got to be here to even work on these things.

Thaddeus Gregory

Nominated by: Joy Hollingsworth

Gregory, a land use attorney the son of Municipal Court Judge Willie Gregory, came across as the candidate with the most direct knowledge about land use. He also ticked several urbanist boxes—supporting safe bike infrastructure, supporting neighborhood corner stores (which are currently illegal), and revisiting minimum parking requirements, which can dramatically increase the cost of new housing.

Quote: In response to Moore’s litmus-test question about trees, Gregory responded: “Our tree code works to a certain extent, but sometimes more flexibility needs to be allowed. When that flexibility is there, we need to make sure that, as we develop, if any trees are taken away, we replant—twofold, threefold, fourfold. We have a goal of having a 30 percent tree canopy. It’s something that I think Seattle should absolutely aspire to and achieve. We can do it using the comprehensive plan, using the tree code. I think that we should revisit the tree code examine how we can both incentivise development and to use new development to spur more trees in our communities.”

Edward Lin

Nominated by: Alexis Mercedes Rinck

Lin, an assistant city attorney who previously worked as a private-sector land use attorney, emphasized the need to accommodate growth while preventing displacement through programs like the Equitable Development Initiative and “gentle density—duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes, where somebody can age in place, and we can really build wealth within the community and not just have it go to outsiders.”

Quote: “Our schools are struggling, and educational inequality in Seattle is some of the worst in the nation. And what I’ve realized is a lot of things that happen outside our communities, whether it’s housing and homelessness or gun violence, those have huge impacts in our schools. And the [Families and Education] levy, things like kindergarten readiness, wraparound services, providing food and summer programs—those are huge ways that we can make a real difference in D2. … I’d love to lean into things like high school internships and, connecting our youth to the enormous wealth and job opportunities in our region, whether that’s the trades or tech companies or maritime industries or police.”

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story misattributed a quote to Lin. We’ve replaced the quote with something Lin actually said, and we regret the error.

City Council, Density, housing, neighborhoods, This Week on PubliCola

This Week on PubliCola: January 11, 2025
Cathy Moore says she won’t “sacrifice” her neighborhood to three-to-five-story apartments around an intersection Maple Leaf (circled on map)

Cathy Moore Says Young People Want Yards, Bob Kettle and Rob Saka Test Blast Balls, and PubliCola Predicts the Future

Monday, January 6

Anti-Housing Activists Hope for Receptive Audience as Council Takes Up Comprehensive Plan Update

As the city considers density increases so modest that its own planning commission called them utterly inadequate, single-family preservationists are creating petitions to oppose any changes in “their” neighborhoods, especially those that allow more renters to live in more parts of Seattle.

Tuesday, January 7

SPD Fires Officer Who Struck and Killed Pedestrian Jaahnavi Kandula Two Years Ago

Kevin Dave, the police officer who struck and killed 23-year-old student Jaahnavi Kandula while driving almost three times the speed limit, finally got fired after spending two years on SPD’s payroll after killing Kandula, whose family is suing the city for more than $110 million.

Wednesday, January 8

It’s Time to Appoint Another New Councilmember!

Tammy Morales’ resignation opens a spot for yet another new council appointment. The appointment process, which should wrap up before the end of this month, will result in a council with only one member, Dan Strauss, who has served for more than three years, including seven members who have served one year or less.

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“I’m Not Prepared to Sacrifice My Neighborhood”: Councilmember Cathy Moore Takes Hard Line Against Apartments

One of those recently council members, Cathy Moore, came out hard against a proposal to allow apartments along the periphery of single-family neighborhoods, saying that allowing three-to-six story apartments within 800 feet of 30 transit stops across the city would destroy neighborhood character, denude the landscape, and produce “unstable” housing occupied by renters, who, she said, aren’t “engaged socially and politically” the way property owners are. About six in ten Seattle residents rent their homes.

Thursday, January 9

Seattle Nice: Bob Kettle Talks Public Safety, Density, Why He Opposed the Capital Gains Tax, and More

The Seattle Nice podcast sat down with City Council public safety committee chair Bob Kettle to talk about his priorities for 2025, how much density the city should allow in single-family neighborhoods like Queen Anne, and at what point the new council will stop blaming their predecessors for the real and perceived public safety challenges in Seattle.

Afternoon Fizz, SPD Edition: Councilmembers Test-Drive Blast Balls, SPD Sued Over Records Violations, and More

Four stories in this week’s afternoon Fizz: Bob Kettle and Rob Saka take a field trip to SPD’s firing range to test blast balls for themselves; the Community Police Commission proposes changes to SPD’s proposed policy allowing the use of “less lethal” weapons, which is moving forward at breakneck speed; the Seattle Times sues SPD for violating an agreement over public records requests; and former police chief Adrian Diaz loses his longtime attorney.

Friday, January 10

PubliCola’s Seattle Predictions for 2025

PubliCola’s founders give you our predictions for 2025. Sandeep thinks Seattle will fail to break out of its political inertia; Josh says you’ll start to hear more open MAGA rhetoric in public places in Seattle (which, he also predicts, will still be riddled with dogs), and I predict that new, even more stringent tree protections will be used to prevent housing for renters in the name of the environment (despite the fact that car-oriented sprawl, which results from insufficient housing in cities, is an existential environmental risk.)

Also, despite a $2 million budget setaside, I predict that SDOT will find reasons not to remove an 8-inch traffic safety curb that prevents dangerous left turns into the parking lot of the preschool Rob Saka’s kids attended, which Saka claimed his constituents found “triggering” and “extremely traumatizing” because it reminds them of Trump’s border wall.

City Council, Development, housing, Opinion

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

By Erica C. Barnett

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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