By Josh Feit
No, you’re not reading the headline incorrectly. If it wasn’t for state Rep. Bateman (D-22, Olympia), who passed pro-housing legislation last year mandating upzones statewide, it’s hard to imagine that Seattle’s actual mayor, Bruce Harrell, would have called for any new density at all in his recently released comprehensive plan update.
“I’m disappointed and underwhelmed with the plan Seattle put forward,” Rep. Bateman told PubliCola. “It barely goes above what new housing production would have been if they did nothing.”
Harrell’s Office of Planning and Community Development, which published the new draft comp plan last week, estimates it will lead to an additional 100,000 new homes in the next 20 years—about 12,000 homes less than the bare minimum Seattle needs to accommodate, according to King County projections.
“They missed the mark. They didn’t aim high enough,” said Bateman, whose legislation requires cities to allow at least four housing units on all residential lots, or six if two of the units are affordable. While Harrell’s “One Seattle” comp plan technically complies, it does so at a minimum with NIMBY caveats and with a proposal that only provides 20,000 more homes than the “no action” option, which assumes developers will build 80,000 new homes under existing zoning rules. Seattle’s own transportation plan, released just a few weeks before the comp plan update, predicts more than 250,000 new people will move here over the same time frame.
Every 10 years, cites statewide are required to update their local comprehensive plans—formal policy documents that govern growth in sync with the state’s sustainability goals. With the mandate in play, Seattle housing advocates saw this year’s comp plan process as a beachhead for finally addressing the issue that defines Seattle’s affordable housing crisis—the housing shortage.
“Think big,” housing advocates from the social justice, business, environmental, and, labor communities urged OPCD in a joint statement last year. Current Seattle zoning prohibits dense development in roughly two-thirds of the city, its “residential zones,” limiting construction to stand-alone homes and attached or detached units. The advocates asked the city to allow four-story buildings in all residential areas, “remove density limits” in those areas, and eliminate minimum parking requirements citywide. Harrell’s comp plan update does none of those things.
Bateman had to make the density mandates in her bill modest because in order to pass at the state level, she needed to tailor the legislation for cities much smaller than Seattle; the bill’s minimum density applies in cities with populations “of at least 75,000,” or one-tenth Seattle’s size. Rather than capitalizing on Bateman’s starter bill and going with a Seattle-size strategy to create a housing-rich city, Harrell’s comp plan proposal goes small. While pledging to “ensure all neighborhoods are accessible to households with a diverse range of incomes and housing needs,” the proposal does not take the necessary steps to do so.
Besides doing the bare minimum to meet the state mandate, Harrell’s comp plan proposal also draws density away from traditionally single-family zones by regurgitating and re-branding the failed “urban village” zoning policy that helped create our housing shortage in the first place.
Per my New Year’s prediction, Harrell’s proposal undermined the state mandate with devil-in-the-details regulations that make building densely untenable. For starters, the proposal would keep total lot coverage locked at 50 percent, meaning that four or six units would now have to squeeze into the same area originally allotted to one house under Seattle’s old single-family zoning model.
Second, the plan sets the maximum floor-area ratio (FAR), a measure of density, lower than it needs to be to make four- and six-unit developments feasible on Seattle’s typical 5,000-square-foot residential lots. FAR is a ratio that determines how much a developer can build on a lot after taking other requirements, like minimum setbacks and lot coverage requirements, into account.
Seattle’s proposal caps this ratio at 0.9, which works out to a maximum of four 1,125-square-foot units or six 750-square-foot ones—far less, Bateman notes, than the State Department of Commerce’s recommendation for implementing her bill. These units are more likely to be stand-alone townhouses, rather than apartment buildings or “stacked flats,” an OPCD spokesperson told PubliCola, since “we don’t see that type of development occurring” now in areas where four- and six-unit buildings are allowed.
In other words, scrunching more units into a smaller envelope means the kind of projects the bill was supposed to legalize won’t pencil out—and so won’t get built. “If you can’t build fourplexes and sixplexes in the largest city in the state, it’s not a refection of the requirements of HB 1110,” Bateman said.
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Additionally, Bateman said, “We want to have three- or four- bedroom units available,” Bateman said—the kind of housing that would enable families to stay in Seattle. “The whole point was to make it legal to build these housing types.”
Besides doing the bare minimum to meet the state mandate, Harrell’s comp plan proposal also draws density away from traditionally single-family zones by regurgitating and re-branding the failed “urban village” zoning policy that helped create our housing shortage in the first place. Like that exclusionary strategy, Harrell’s plan cordons most new housing into existing commercial districts and along arterials. OPCD estimates that 71 percent of the 100,000 predicted new units) will go where they’ve always gone: Into the city’s densest areas, including “regional centers” (formerly: “urban centers”) and “urban centers” (formerly urban villages.)
The benefit of spreading density citywide, by the way, isn’t merely a matter of creating new opportunities for housing and giving lower-income residents access to more Seattle neighborhoods. It’s also a city planning best practice: Increased density is a prerequisite for an expanded, tentacular, and efficient transit system.
Unsurprisingly, Harrell’s plan falls short when it comes to transit-oriented development, a basic housing tenet that promotes sustainability by up-zoning areas around transit hubs to tie housing, employment, and retail to public transit. Yes, the draft proposal incorporates the long-planned light rail upzone around the future 130th St. station in north Seattle. But a new designation in the plan, “Neighborhood Centers,” is less dense than proposed statewide standards around heavily used bus stops, offering moderate (3- to 6-story) upzones within 800 feet, as opposed to the quarter-mile standard Rep. Julia Reed (D-36, Seattle) proposed in her own transit-oriented development bill this year.
Harrell’s provincial vision amounts to a historic missed opportunity. While we need to build six-plexes and apartment buildings citywide to accommodate our transition into a bona fide big city, Seattle is poised to perpetuate the housing crisis that has metastasized during the last 30 years under our existing, exclusionary zoning rules.
Josh@PubliCola.com