Tag: Eddie Lin

City Council, Density, homelessness, podcasts, Police

Seattle Councilmember Eddie Lin: “Go As Big As We Can” On Growth in Comp Plan
Image via Seattle.gov

By Erica C. Barnett

This week on Seattle Nice, we talked to City Councilmember Eddie Lin, who’s serving his first term representing Southeast Seattle’s District 2. He’s the third council member to represent this district since 2025, when Tammy Morales resigned just one year into her second term; she was replaced by Mark Solomon, a crime prevention coordinator for SPD who served until Lin was elected in November.

As head of the council’s land use and comprehensive plan committees, Lin will oversee the work of updating the plan that guides the city’s growth and density for the next 10 years, as well as zoning and land use decisions like whether to grant developers a temporary break from the Mandatory Housing Affordability program that allowed taller, denser housing in some areas in exchange for fees that fund affordable housing.

We talked to Lin about those fees and whether they’re working as designed. While MHA has brought in tens of millions a year for affordable housing, developers argue it has increasingly squelched development, by adding significant costs at a time when market-rate housing developments barely pencil out. Lin talked (favorably but cautiously) about a different concept called Planned Inclusionary Zoning, which requires developers to build affordable housing but offers them tax breaks, rather than charging a fee, to make it more feasible for them to build.

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“We absolutely want to go as big as we can” in the remaining parts of the comp plan, Lin said, by expanding the areas where housing is allowed (as The Urbanist pointed out recently, the city’s planning department actually reduced density along several arterials in wealthy neighborhoods). Lin said “we need to be going deeper into the neighborhoods” with density, as well as restoring the neighborhood centers former mayor Bruce Harrell removed from the plan, nodes of density where modest apartment buildings will be allowed.

We also asked Lin about the new dynamics on the council, Mayor Wilson’s new plan to build tiny house villages all over the city, and police surveillance cameras, a program Wilson once opposed and now seems likely to expand.

After pointing out that many people want cameras in their neighborhoods, including people who live in the Chinatown-International District, Lin said he’s still not happy that the cameras were expanded without any analysis of whether the “pilot” program launched last year (and immediately expanded) was effective and protected people’s privacy. His outstanding concerns, Lin added, have to do with the potential for the footage to end up in the hands of the Trump Administration, which could use it for immigration enforcement or to target people seeking gender-affirming or reproductive care. That’s the focus of an audit Wilson has commissioned, but hardly the only reason to question mass surveillance by local police.

City Council, housing, land use

City Council Proposal Would Repeal Law That Allowed Housing Near Stadiums

By Erica C. Barnett

Seattle City Councilmember Eddie Lin will introduce legislation later this week to repeal a law that would have allowed apartments in the Stadium District just south of downtown, undoing a longstanding priority of housing developers and handing a significant win to the Port of Seattle and unions representing port workers.

The legislation, sponsored by former councilmember Sara Nelson, would have allowed more than 900 new housing units in the area (half of them affordable “workforce” units), which is largely occupied by warehouses, vacant lots, and businesses like the Showbox and a Showgirls strip club. It’s also home to the current (and future second) SoDo light rail station, which gets minimal use because the area has few businesses and very little housing.

Opponents of the bill argued it would irreparably harm the city’s industrial businesses, and said the city should not build housing near busy, polluted freight corridors; proponents countered that the stadium district hasn’t been in industrial use for many years, and said the city needs more housing everywhere, including near the stadiums.

The Port sued the city, and late last year, the state’s Growth Management Hearings Board invalidated the ordinance as written on both substantive and procedural grounds. Among other “procedural” findings, the board ruled that the city had done a sloppy job of reviewing the proposal, failing to conduct a separate environmental analysis and bypassing public feedback requirements to push the zoning change through last year. The city appealed on the substantive issues but not the procedural ones.

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Lin told PubliCola the ruling effectively gives the city no choice other than repealing the ordinance; to do otherwise, he said, could put the city at risk of being found out of compliance with the Growth Management Act, threatening transportation and housing funds as well as the city’s Comprehensive Plan. “In my opinion, we have a Growth Management Hearings Board order and there were procedural and substantive issues that they invalidated our ordinance on,” Lin said.

The city, Lin conceded, could try to fix the issues the hearings board identified by a May deadline for compliance. Lin suggested the current council has little interest in taking on that battle, which was contentious enough the first time. The council could also include language in the city’s ongoing comprehensive plan update that leaves the door open to more housing in areas with “urban industrial” zoning, a kind of mixed-use zoning that underlies the stadium overlay.

Lin, who chairs the council’s land use committee, said he’s “open to having that discussion later, although I’m not sure how much anybody else wants to have that discussion,” adding, “It’s not my first priority to put housing [in the stadium district.] I think we should be focused on centers and corridors.” The council will start working to upzone those two types of areas—”neighborhood centers” where lower-density apartments will be allowed within 800 feet of existing commercial nodes or frequent transit stops, and “corridors” where apartments can be built directly on arterial roads—this year.