Tag: design review

City Council, Development, Elections, housing, Mayor Harrell

Friday Fizz: Council Advances “Alternative” to Social Housing, Design Review to End (Temporarily) Downtown

1. On Thursday, the city council held a special meeting to place their “social housing alternative,” along with the original social housing measure, Initiative 137, on the February 2025 ballot. The council’s alternative would use existing funds from the JumpStart payroll expense tax, most of which is currently earmarked for other affordable housing projects, to pay for traditional affordable housing limited to people making 80 percent or less of Seattle’s area median income.

The social housing measure proposes a tax of 5 percent, paid by businesses, on employee compensation over $1 million a year.

The council’s plan would slash funding for new housing from around $50 million to a maximum of $10 million a year over five years, drastically reducing the number of units could be built or purchased every year. Because the money would come from an existing tax, rather than a new tax on excess compensation, several affordable housing nonprofits have spoken against the plan—arguing, reasonably enough, that the plan would take JumpStart funding away from their own projects.

The council’s preferred option would not create social housing, a mixed-income housing model in which wealthier tenants (making up to 120 percent of Seattle’s median income) would subsidize rents for those making less, with rents permanently capped at 30 percent of residents’ income. Traditional affordable housing is designed to require ongoing rent subsidies, because the model does not allow any higher-income residents to live in the buildings.

Nonetheless, council members who supported the traditional affordable-housing “alternative” described it as a “proof of concept” for social housing before they voted on Thursday. (The special meeting was necessary because the council has been dragging its feet on putting I-137 on the ballot for months since the campaign submitted enough signatures to get the measure on the November ballot back in early July.) ”

The council alternative, sponsor Maritza Rivera said, “balances the need for innovation with the need for accountability” without giving “a blank check to yet another new agency that does not have the experience creating housing.” Councilmember Rob Saka said having two competing measures on the ballot was “simply good governance. … Given that both initiatives will be presented together, we’re centering choice [and] optionality.”

2. Also this week, the council’s land use committee voted unanimously in favor of a proposal to temporarily do away with design review for housing, hotel, and life sciences project in the greater downtown Seattle area. Design review, as we’ve reported, is an often lengthy process in which volunteer boards can require changes to the appearance of a building; developers say the process can add hundreds of thousands to the cost of projects because of construction delays, the need to hire architects to redesign projects, and the cost of aesthetic changes imposed by the boards.

The legislation moves on to the full council with an amendment requiring the city’s Office of Planning and Community Development to come back with a report next May detailing projects that are moving forward under the new rules. Although Councilmember Rivera pointed out that there won’t be much data available by then, a council staffer said the evaluation would still be helpful as the city decides how it plans to comply with a state law, passed last year, designed to streamline design review and prevent design review boards from delaying development based on subjective aesthetic preferences.

City Council, housing, labor, Mayor Harrell

Effort to Repeal Gig Worker Wages Appears Dead; Design Review Chair Says City Should Get Rid of Design Review

1. The massive lobbying effort to reduce the minimum wage for “gig” delivery workers who drive for companies like UberEats, Doordash, and Instacart appears to be over, after Council President Sara Nelson’s aggressive efforts backfired earlier this year. The Washington, D.C.-based lobbying firm that spent more than $1 million over ten months lobbying on behalf of Doordash had stopped spending money in Seattle by the end of July and reportedly has no plans to renew efforts.

The reprieve (or defeat) is no huge surprise, given how unpopular the proposal was to begin with. Gig workers, unlike regular employees, are independent contractors and must pay for all their own expenses, including gas, both employer and employee taxes, and mandatory business insurance, among many other costs.

The app companies are required to partially reimburse gig workers for costs that they would have to pay if they were regular employers; Nelson’s bill would have slashed reimbursement almost in half and would have allowed companies to pay workers less than Seattle’s minimum wage as long as their hourly pay averaged out, across a two-week pay period, to the minimum. (The app companies’ bill would have also charged workers $5 if they wanted their money before their pay period was up—even though each driver is ostensibly running their own business.)

In all, Doordash alone spent well over $1 million lobbying the council to cut workers’ wages. Working Washington spent just over $200,000 in five months in an effort to defeat the minimum wage repeal.

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2. This afternoon, the city council’s land use committee will take up a proposal from Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office that would temporarily exempt new residential, hotel, and life sciences buildings in the downtown area from design review—a lengthy process in which volunteer review board members judge the appearance and design of proposed new buildings and, more often than not, require aesthetic changes that add costs and delay development.

Earlier this month, the legislation gained an unlikely proponent: Christopher Bendix, the chair of the Downtown Design Review Board and the project developer at Mercy Housing. In an email to land use committee chair Tammy Morales, Bendix wrote, “The design review program, while well-intentioned, results in little public benefit at substantial cost, in the form of increased housing costs and unpredictability in the development process. …

“While I will personally miss the opportunity to comment on the design of new projects, as an affordable housing developer focused on ensuring every Seattle resident has access to a home they can afford, I am happy to take a back seat and find a different avenue for public involvement, outside the design review program.

Design review has been used both to remove housing units and renter amenities and to dictate details as minute as the shade of brick and the orientation of open space.

At a committee meeting earlier this month, Morales expressed concerns about the proposal, saying there was “really no evidence” that the design review process increases costs because developers haven’t provided financial projections to the council. Morales also said the downtown-only proposal was a kind of “spot rezone” that was taking up a huge amount of staff time, when the city still needs to overhaul the design review process in general; a new state law requires cities to streamline design review and use “clear and objective development regulations” to guide design review, rather than individual aesthetic preferences.

 

Development, housing

Seattle Nice: Is Design Review Dying In Seattle?
Look at all those CGI people enjoying their beautiful outdoor space!

By Erica C. Barnett

This week’s Seattle Nice takes on one of the wonkiest, yet most contentious, issues facing Seattle: Design review!

Specifically: Should the city exempt housing, hotels, and life sciences buildings in the downtown core from design review, a protracted process in which panels of architects and activists (yes, activists) get to raise objections, and force changes, to new buildings. Historically, design review has been weaponized to delay the development of new housing.

In neighborhoods across the city, design review has forced housing developers to change details as picayune as the color of exterior brick and the orientation of exterior landscaping. It has also been used to reduce the number of housing units available to renters (requiring additional setbacks from the street, for instance, or forcing “wedding cake”-style tiered buildings) as well as dictate what kind of amenities a building must have.

In one example I covered several years ago, the Northwest Design Review Board delayed a 57-unit, four-story apartment building on Greenwood Ave., an arterial street, because neighbors insisted that each of the 57 studio apartments should have its own washer and dryer and central air conditioning; they were also furious that the building would have a common space on the roof, because you know how THOSE kind of people get with their wild parties. (Seriously: They wanted to kill the outdoor space because people would, quote, “party.”)

 

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Design review can add hundreds of thousands of dollars and months, sometimes years, of delay to a project—costs that get passed on directly to the renters who will ultimately live in the building. Still, advocates (including our own devil’s advocate on the podcast, David) argue that if we didn’t have it, Seattle would be chock full of ugly buildings.

Um… Have they looked around Seattle lately? I would argue that design review, which focuses intensely on “neighborhood character,” has contributed greatly to the homogenization of the city, shaving off any and all unique design elements in pursuit of the sameness we see in new developments all around us. After agonizing for months over whether a building’s brick cladding should be dark brown or brown, or whether some apartment should be removed to achieve a curvilinear exterior wall that gestures toward the riparian history of blah blah blah, design review still spits out ugly buildings—at significant cost to the people who will ultimately have to foot the bill.

Listen to Seattle Nice on Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.

 

City Council, Development, housing

Back from Recess, Council Takes Up Design Review Downtown, Continues Delay on Social Housing Measure

By Erica C. Barnett

In a surprise cameo, former city councilmember Kshama Sawant showed up at the council’s first post-recess meeting Tuesday to denounce the “council Democrats” for a shelved proposal—which was not on the agenda—to adopt a sub-minimum wage for tipped workers. The plan, proposed by Sawant’s District 3 council replacement Joy Hollingsworth, would allow restaurant and bar owners out of an agreement they made a decade ago to start paying the full minimum wage by next year.

In response to pushback, Hollingsworth pulled her legislation and announced that she’s working on a “balanced solution.” The last time that happened, Council President Sara Nelson quietly dropped her proposal to reduce the mimimum wage for “gig” delivery drivers.

The meeting also included a perfunctory, unilluminating discussion of Initiative 137, which would fund the city’s social housing developer by increasing business taxes on employee compensation above $1 million a year. Before going on break, the council delayed a vote to put the initiative on the November ballot, ensuring that it will appear in a low-turnout February special election rather than the general election in a Presidential election year; they’re required to discuss the measure at the beginning of every council meeting until they take action.

The delay is already lengthy by recent historical standards. In 2014, the city council delayed a vote on the preschool levy on the ballot by one week; in that case, the city proposed a tax increase to pay for affordable preschool, but also placed a competing a union-backed measure that require a higher minimum wage for preschool workers, without new funding, on the ballot alongside it.

During the meeting, Morales tried to ask whether the council was working on an alternative ballot measure, but was shot down by Councilmember Dan Strauss, who said he could respond to that question privately or in a closed executive session.

“The point of having this as an information item is so that we can share with the public what we’re contemplating, and if we’re contemplating
an alternative, I think the public deserves to know that we’re contemplating an alternative,” Morales responded, then Nelson cut off the discussion, ordering the audience, “Do not speak!” when they shouted their opposition to the opaque process. (It’s becoming a familiar move.)

Earlier this month, the Seattle Chamber was polling on an alternative to I-137 that would siphon money away from the housing levy to pay for social housing, rather than raising taxes. One possibility is that the city attorney’s office is still wordsmithing the council’s alternative, which has to be on the same topic as the original initiative.

On Wednesday, the council’s land use committee held an initial public hearing on a proposal that would temporarily exempt residential, hotel, and life sciences buildings in the downtown area from design review—a lengthy process in which volunteer review board members look at the aesthetic aspects of a development and, more often than not, require developers to change their buildings.

Design review has been used to require changes to materials and brick colors, reduce the number of apartment in multifamily developments, and mandate specific retail footprints, often in the interest of making new buildings conform to the existing scale and “character” of nearby single-family areas. According to a Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections memo on the proposal, which would last three years, design review for residential projects currently takes between 10 and 25 months.

The proposal, billed as part of Mayor Bruce Harrell’s Downtown Activation Plan would also give the OPCD director more authority to approve some specific variances from the land use code for developments that are exempt from design review downtown—like setbacks, the location of mandatory open space and landscaping, and the type of street-level uses that are allowed.

Somewhat unusually, several councilmembers took issue with the conclusions of a memo from the council’s central staff that seemed to argue against the temporary exemptions.

“It is unclear what problem [the bill] seeks to solve,” the memo says. “Greater downtown, the general planning geography subject to the proposal, is not capacity constrained. The City’s development capacity dashboard, which was last updated in 2022, indicates that greater downtown has zoned capacity for approximately 110,000 additional jobs and 41,000 additional housing units.”

Ketil Freeman, the staffer who wrote the memo, added Wednesday that the city could make other decisions to encourage a more residential vibe for downtown, such as creating more “green streets” like Bell Street in Belltown.

Nelson—not always a supporter of new development—pushed back on the “zoned capacity” argument, citing data that shows a decline in the number of units permitted and under construction the downtown area. (The “plenty of zoned capacity” argument is more commonly used by anti-growth activists pointing out that the city has sufficient zoning to build more than enough housing already—always failing to note that most of this “capacity” isn’t accessible, because it’s under people’s current homes).

Bringing more receipts, Nelson noted that while there may be capacity to build 41,000 more housing units downtown, that isn’t translating into actual housing: According to current data, development permits and construction starts downtown declined over the last year. Finally, she said the green street in Belltown “does have a lot of complaints surrounding it around public safety, and it’s clear that that eyes on the street, more people circulating downtown, is a better way of of ensuring more public safety.”

Several public commenters argued that the legislation would give too much authority to unelected experts, rather than the city council, to—as one speaker put it—”zone the city.” What the legislation would actually do is take away some authority from the unelected design review boards, and the city’s unelected hearing examiner, to delay projects because board members don’t like the brick color, think the exterior walls aren’t “curvy” enough, or decide a new building looks “too historic”—all real examples we covered last year.

The land use committee didn’t vote on the proposal on Wednesday, but could do so at its next meeting on September 18.

Development, land use, legislature

State Legislature Deals a Blow to Seattle’s Dysfunctional Design Review Process
This proposed apartment building, anchored by a Safeway, spent three years in design review.

By Ryan Packer

In addition to requiring modest upzones across the state and streamlining environmental review, the state legislature took aim this year at a process that has become infamous for slowing down new housing in Seattle: Design review. 

Under Seattle’s current system,  eight volunteer boards, each focused on a different geographic area, review new developments and have the power to dictate design changes if they don’t like the way a proposed building looks. Design review has been used to reduce the scale of developments, mandate specific colors and materials, and even dictate the location and size of private outdoor space for apartment residents. The process can add months or years to a project’s timeline.

House Bill 1293, sponsored by Rep. Mark Klicker (R-16, Walla Walla), and signed into law by Governor Jay Inslee Monday, requires cities and counties that engage in design review to evaluate only “clear and objective development regulations”, as opposed to aesthetic opinions, and limits design review to one public meeting. Before the bill passed in February, Rep. Andy Barkis (R-1, Olympia) called the new standards “clear and objective,” without all the “redundancies” produced by holding hearing after hearing on a development.

David Neiman, a partner at Neiman Taber Architects, is very familiar with how design review works in Seattle, having watched the program transform from a well-intentioned opportunity for citizens to influence projects in their neighborhoods to the bureaucratic behemoth it is today. “It’s become this thing that takes an enormous amount of effort and time for every project that has to go through it. It’s a significant distortion of how we spend our time and energies in getting a project permitted,” Neiman said. 

“I think it’s fair to say the things you have to do to respond to design review also make the building more expensive,” architect David Neiman said, but “one of the things design review gives us is flexibility.”

In 2021, the design review board for Seattle’s Queen Anne neighborhood approved a design for a new Safeway-anchored apartment complex that will replace the existing grocery store—a one-story Safeway with a large surface parking lot. The process stalled for three years while the review board debated minute details of the project—everything from how many storefront entrances the store must have to the precise color of brick used in the project. The Safeway saga epitomized the elements of Seattle’s design review process that HB 1293 is supposed to correct.

“We probably spend about $100,000 [worth] of time on the design review and [Master Use Permit] process … and it [typically] adds about a year to the process,” Neiman said. “I think it’s fair to say the things you have to do to respond to design review also make the building more expensive.”

But Neiman doesn’t want to discard design review entirely. For one thing, he said, design review boards have the power to approve variances from city codes that can be rigid. “One of the things design review gives us is flexibility. It’s very, very rare that we can design a building according to all of the code requirements,” Neiman said. “Nine times out of ten, boards will agree, and give us that flexibility, and we’re able to design better buildings.”

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If the design review process becomes too inflexible, Neiman worries, architects won’t be able to take a broader view of what city codes are trying to achieve. “In a world where you take away design review, the only tool that you’ll have to try and control the design environment is to just start writing rules.”

In 2017, Seattle expanded its administrative design review program, in which city planners review and sign off on projects without input from the volunteer boards. Affordable-housing projects can now skip the full design review process, as can some smaller market-rate projects. The new state law could lead the city to expand that program even more.

Matt Hutchins, a principal with CAST Architecture and a former design review board member himself, is skeptical that putting design review in the hands of city staffers will definitely result in quicker project approvals. “Objective is only in the eyes of the beholder, and setting up a bureaucratic regimen that produces objective judgements is quite difficult,” he said.

“The benefit with the current design review process is that there’s maybe a little bit more visibility and flexibility, and we really can’t hold the planners’ feet to the fire … the same way” when the process isn’t public, Hutchins said.

City Councilmember Dan Strauss, chair of the city council’s land use committee and sponsor of a 2021 resolution creating a task force to look at how to improve design review (which is still deliberating), said it’s still too soon to know how the change in state law will impact the city.

“While the solutions to fixing design review are not necessarily clear right now, what is clear is that design review is broken,” Strauss said, adding that the process “is being weaponized to stop projects that are important to our community.”

Seattle will have to adhere to the new restrictions on design review by mid-2025. Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections spokesperson Bryan Stevens said it’s still too soon to say how the changes will impact the city’s design review process.

Development, housing, legislature

State Proposal Would Ban Design Review—Except for Historic Buildings and Districts
Wallingford Historic District map
Under one amendment, proposals for new housing in the “Wallingford-Meridian Historic Streetcar District” would still be subject to strict aesthetic review.

By Ryan Packer

Last week, the state House housing committee approved a bill that would effectively prohibit cities, including Seattle, from subjecting housing developers to design review—a controversial process in which a group of volunteers make aesthetic judgments about, and require often minute changes to, proposed developments.

These boards can subject architectural firms to multiple rounds of tweaks, adding unpredictability to project timelines, with potential new homes frequently held up for months based on highly subjective aesthetic criteria.

The bill would upend that process. But a proposed amendment could leave a large loophole by preserving design review for projects in so-called historic districts.

House Bill 1026, introduced by Rep. Amy Walen (D-48, Kirkland), would restrict design review for proposed housing developments to “administrative” review, conducted by city staff who would would be limited to considering whether a project adheres to guidelines established by the city.

The amendment added last week by Rep. Mari Leavitt (D-28, University Place) would allow cities to keep design review boards for buildings, and entire neighborhoods, that are listed on a local, state, or national historic register.

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Historic districts within the City of Seattle, like Pioneer Square, Columbia City, and the International District, have boards that review proposals to build or modify housing and other buildings in those areas. Leavitt’s amendment would not only allow this review process to continue while other design review boards elsewhere are being phased out, but expand this enhanced review process to all neighborhoods on the National Register of Historic Places. In Seattle, that would include neighborhoods like Montlake, Roanoke Park, and a broad swath of Wallingford, which was added to the federal register, despite significant opposition, last year. These districts include many non-historic buildings alongside arguably historic ones.

Immediately after the housing committee unanimously adopted the amendment, lawmakers started talking about walking it back. “I do have concerns. I think we can refine the language to make sure that entire neighborhoods…aren’t said to be historic for the purpose of limiting opportunities to increase housing and increase density,” Rep. Strom Peterson (D-21, Edmonds), who chairs the housing committee, said.

Peterson is now proposing an amendment that would only require design review for individual structures, not entire historic districts. It’s not clear how this would impact historic districts like the International District, where every structure is not a city landmark, or whether cities could skirt the restrictions by landmarking every single building in a neighborhood. Legislators will vote on that amendment on the House floor before the bill proceeds to the Senate.