Google image of the site before demolition; the “million dollar house” is the white house in foreground, with the closest tree to the property visible on the right.
1. More than 400 people have signed a Change.org petition imploring the city to “Save Three Sisters Park in Ballard,” which the petition page describes as “a trio of trees that must be over 100 years old” that, the petition claims, are now threatened by development.
“What was once a quiet refuge could soon be overshadowed by development. Someone’s living room window will be mere feet away from what was once a community space. All for what? So that some corporate entity can replace the existing million dollar home with SEVEN million dollar homes. Lining the pockets of capitalism.”
Just a few problems with that description. First, there’s no park called “Three Sisters Park”—as with other campaigns to whip up opposition to new housing, the petitioners have anthropomorphized the trees. (See also: “Luma,” “Kaia,” “Astra,” and of course, “Grandma’s Cedar.” Second, the “park” isn’t even a park—it’s a stand of three Western Red Cedars on what’s known as an “unopened street end,” like a planting strip that functions as a barrier to traffic, owned by the Seattle Department of Transportation. (The trees’ age is unknown).
Third, and most important: The trees aren’t threatened by the development next door. According to an SDOT spokesperson, “There are no current plans to prune or remove the Western Redcedars.If construction requires pruning in the future, the developer will need to file an amendment to the permit. This would be reviewed by SDOT Urban Forestry to assess the necessity and impact. If approved, the work would need to be completed by a Registered Tree Service Provider (RTSP).”
In addition, the developer, MRN Homes, plans to plant four new trees on a site that currently has nowsignificant trees, just bushes, adding tree canopy in the future. (It’s also ironic that the petition posits proximity to trees as a bad thing for people living in these future townhouses, when their more common tactic is to claim people living in new buildings will lose the benefits of shade if trees are removed).
Finally, it’s pretty disingenuous to claim that a “million-dollar home” is being replaced by “seven million-dollar homes.” MRN, a local Seattle builder, has built some large, almost-million-dollar townhouses in the city. However, their smaller townhouses sell for a more typical-for-Seattle price of around $700,000—not affordable housing, by any stretch, but considerably more in reach than the $2 million to $3 million single-family houses currently for sale in the neighborhood near this development site.
As for the “million-dollar home” that was on the site—an 875-square foot, 2-bedroom house from the 1960s? That “house” was valuable not because of the house itself but because of the land underneath it, which is zoned for multifamily use.
2. City Councilmember Maritza Rivera has lost another legislative assistant—the fourth person to leave the position in the 19 months Rivera has been in office. Unlike most other council members, Rivera has just two legislative assistants, or LAs—longtime aide Wendy Sykes, and another position that has gone under several different titles in Rivera’s brief time on the council, including “policy lead,” “policy director,” and “district director.”
The turnover rate is higher, by far, than in most council offices, which tend to have more staff and retain them longer. (Only Rob Saka has had similarly high staff turnover).
The latest staffer, who we were unable to reach, lasted less than six months. That’s actually a better record than some of Rivera’s previous staffers, who’ve lasted between four and six months. In 2023, according to the Stranger, 26 employees at the city’s Office of Arts and Culture signed off on a letter complaining about a toxic environment at the office, quoting workers who called her a micromanager who treated them with condescension.
3. Friday update: Yup, Thursday’s results were an anomaly. As of the latest vote count, Katie Wilson leads the mayor’s race with more than 50 percent of the vote, to Harrell’s 41.7 percent. That’s a terrible result for an incumbent.
Thursday’s election numbers, which reflected the second set of ballots counted since Tuesday (election night), saw a notable shift away from the progressive trend in Wednesday’s results, moving the needle back slightly toward centrist incumbents. In the latest batch of about 32,000 ballots, challenger Katie Wilson led Mayor Bruce Harrell 47 to 45; challenger Erika Evans led incumbent City Attorney Ann Davison 53.4 to 36.7; and challenger Dionne Foster led incumbent Sara Nelson 54.9 to 39.3.
Overall, Wilson is currently leading Harrell 47.8 to 43.8, Evans is leading Davison 53 to 36, and Foster is leading Nelson 55.4 to 38. Rinck has 76.7 percent of the vote.
It’s unclear why Thursday’s ballots swung slightly back toward centrist candidates. Thursday’s count may have included ballots mailed before election day, while Wednesday’s reflected ballots dropped off at drop boxes on Tuesday; later votes almost invariably trend more progressive.
In the race for City Council in District 2—the seat currently held by appointee Mark Solomon—city land-use attorney Eddie Lin was leading SDOT outreach staffer (and former Harrell transportation advisor) Adonis Ducksworth by 46 percent to 30 percent overall, reflecting a slight gain by Lin (considered the more progressive candidate in this race) in the latest round of ballots, in which Lin got 47.7 percent to Ducksworth’s 30.4.
As of Friday, there are about 15,000 Seattle ballots left uncounted.
4. If you couldn’t get enough of Sandeep and me beefing over the election results, and/or if you’d like to hear what an actual current council member thinks Tuesday’s election means, check out Week in Review on KUOW this week, with host Bill Radke, City Councilmember Joy Hollingsworth, and us two chuckleheads. It’s a fun, lively listen.
Maritza Rivera’s amendments would shrink neighborhood centers—areas where 3-to-6-story apartments would be newly legal—across her northeast Seattle district.
The comprehensive plan sets rules for how Seattle develops in the future, including where the city will allow its renter majority to live.
By Erica C. Barnett
After nearly a year of delays, the city council is finally getting ready to put its stamp on Mayor Bruce Harrell’s proposed 10-year Comprehensive Plan—a document Harrell has branded with his campaign slogan as the “One Seattle Plan.” The council has been meeting for months to discuss elements of the plan, including the creation of a few dozen new “neighborhood centers” where apartments will be allowed for the first time in decades, but this week was the council’s first opportunity to propose tweaks to the plan—107 amendments in all.
The comprehensive plan sets policies for growth and development, designating where new housing, transportation, and other infrastructure should go and placing limits on housing density in the city’s neighborhoods. It’s updated every 10 years, with periodic amendments, and inevitably reflects the political priorities of whoever is in office at the time.
We’ve reported previously on the Harrell Administration’s reluctance to allow significantly more housing in Seattle’s traditional single-family neighborhoods as part of the plan.
After killing an early draft of the plan that would have allowed significantly more density, Harrell released a plan last year that fell far short of the changes necessary to create enough housing for new and current residents—including renters—to live in Seattle affordably. After intense criticism of that proposal—the city’s Planning Commission said it upheld exclusionary policies rooted in redlining and failed to provide the housing Seattle needs—the mayor came back with a new plan that allowed slightly more housing, though still less than the proposal most members of the current city council said they supported when they ran for election in 2023.
The council’s proposed amendments are a mixed bag. Several proposals would collectively shrink the size of the proposed “neighborhood centers”—areas within 800 feet of certain frequent transit stops where 3-to-6-story apartments would be allowed—by hundreds of acres, in a blatant retreat to old single-family zoning patterns that benefit people who already own property and don’t want renters living in “their” neighborhoods.
Others would impose new restrictions on any new development that requires removing trees, including one that would give the city free rein to force builders to redo projects if even one tree, of any size, was threatened.
Still others would provide new incentives for developers to build dense housing, serving as a counterpoint to other councilmembers’ proposals to shrink the areas of the city where people who can’t afford to buy a house in Seattle are allowed to live.
Breaking the substantive amendments down into broad categories, we have:
Expanded Neighborhood Centers
On balance, the proposed amendments that make it easier to build housing—including everything from density bonuses for affordability to expanded and brand-new neighborhood centers—outweigh NIMBY proposals to restrict housing, although some of the proposals are probably nonstarters—or negotiation starters—in their current forms.
Harrell’s final comprehensive plan proposal included 3o neighborhood centers—down from 48 in an early draft, but more than the 24 included in an early version of the plan. Since then, though, there’s been intense pressure on the council to further reduce the number of neighborhood centers in the plan, coming primarily from incumbent homeowners in neighborhoods like Wedgwood, Madrona, and Maple Leaf.
Although several council members did end up proposing amendments that would scale down the size of neighborhood centers, in some cases dramatically, the amendments to add new areas of potential density outweigh those proposals, meaning that if every proposed change to the neighborhood centers was adopted, the amount of land in designated neighborhood centers would increase significantly.
Council members who proposed new or expanded neighborhood centers included Dan Strauss (who proposed a new East Ballard neighborhood center and called for expanding the boundaries of five others, including in Magnolia), Bob Kettle (who proposed a new North Queen Anne/Nickerson Neighborhood Center) and Alexis Mercedes Rinck, who’s proposing eight new neighborhood centers, one in each council district.
“Seattle needs more housing,” Rinck said. “Seattle also needs full and thriving communities, and we’ve heard an overwhelming call from constituents to achieve these goals with more housing, especially in high-opportunity neighborhoods which haven’t seen proportional growth.”
Build This, Not That
Other proposed amendments would add density bonuses and incentives for different types of housing, such as stacked flats and affordable apartments.
Kettle, for instance, proposed getting rid of an “amenity area” requirement for new housing in neighborhood residential zones, freeing up more land for housing.
Under the current proposal, 20 percent of the space around new apartment buildings in the city’s traditional single-family areas would be reserved for open space, typically a yard, for residents to “recreate on site”—as if what apartment dwellers in cities really want is a tiny lawn where they can all hang out together.
An amendment from Sara Nelson would retain a requirement that residential buildings, including new apartments in all parts of the city, be exempt from environmental review under the State Environmental Policy Act (SEPA); that exemption is otherwise set to expire next month, making housing harder to build.
Other amendments, from Hollingsworth, Nelson, Kettle, and Rinck, would provide bonus density for developers who agree to build specific types of housing, including social housing, accessory dwelling units, and low-income or affordable housing. Several proposals would create incentives for developers to build stacked flats—apartments spread out across a single story of a building—including density bonuses for retaining trees and amendments that would allow stacked flats to be denser than other types of apartments in neighborhood residential (former single-family) zones.
Rob Saka also has an amendment that would give a density bonus for one- or two-story “cottage” apartments surrounding a large common area, a style that resembles single-family housing more than the three-to-six-story apartments that will be allowed in the new neighborhood residential zones under the current plan.
Strauss proposed an amendment that would increase the maximum height in these areas from six to seven or eight stories immediately next to a major transit stop, and Rinck proposed changing the definition of “major transit stop” to include high-frequency buses.
15-Minute City
Several amendments would reduce or remove mandatory parking requirements. The most ambitious, from Rinck, would “remove parking requirements citywide for all land uses in all zones,” a phrase that brings joy to my car-hating little heart. (Yes, I own a car. No, I don’t think the city should socially engineer car culture, as it currently does.)
Builders wouldn’t be barred from including parking in their developments, but they wouldn’t be forced to do so, as they are in many places under the city’s current code.
Another amendment from Rinck, essentially a backup if her first parking proposal fails would reduce parking mandates to comply with a statewide parking reform bill that requires cities to eliminate some of their parking mandates by 2028. Another proposal, from Strauss, would establish parking maximums in the city’s regional centers—the densest areas, including downtown, Capitol Hill, and Strauss’ home turf of Ballard. In a concession to the tree-preservation lobby, Rinck’s amendments also include one that would eliminate parking mandates for developments that preserve trees.
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A proposal to allow corner stores in neighborhoods could also see some meaningful changes.
In the past, we’ve dunked on Harrell’s proposal to allow corner stores in neighborhoods, because it would only allow new stores and restaurants on literal corner lots, with restrictions that don’t apply to other businesses in the city, such as a mandatory 10pm closing time. Several amendments attempt to remedy those issues. The amendments range from extremely modest (a Nelson amendment that would remove the literal-corner requirement but retain restrictions on business type, size, and closing hours) to ambitious, by Seattle standards (a Rinck proposal that would remove the corner requirement, allow businesses to be open past 10pm, and add bars to the list of businesses that are legal in neighborhoods.
Three amendments, from Rinck, Strauss, and Nelson, would make it easier to open stores and restaurants in residential neighborhoods where they’re currently banned. As we’ve reported, Harrell’s comp plan proposal would allow corner stores in neighborhoods, but only on literal corners, with additional restrictions such as mandatory 10pm closures and a stipulation that they can include restaurants, but not bars.
The amendments range from modest (amendments from Strauss and Nelson to allow stores throughout residential zones, not just on corners) to ambitious (a Rinck proposal that would allow restaurants and bars throughout these areas, eliminate a requirement that businesses be closed from 10pm to 6am, and ditch a 2,500-square-foot size restriction included in the mayor’s proposal). Allowing bars in neighborhoods, a policy that works fine in big cities across the country, may be a bridge too far for censorious Seattle, but a compromise between these proposals could be a first step toward creating more 15-minute neighborhoods in Seattle.
Homeowners vs. Renters
Of course, it wouldn’t be a zoning update without some NIMBY poison pills. Although no one, including newly appointed District 5 Councilmember Debora Juarez, has proposed reviving former D5 councilmember Cathy Moore’s quixotic effort to remove an entire neighborhood center from Maple Leaf, several councilmembers have proposed reducing the amount of land in their districts where people who rent apartments can live.
Maritza Rivera, who has frequently claimed that the city did insufficient outreach to single-family neighborhoods before allowing apartments near frequent transit stops, has three amendments to shrink neighborhood centers in Bryant, Ravenna, and Wedgwood. Her proposal to scale back the Wedgwood center is the most radical of the three, in that it would reduce the size of the center by about 40 percent, limiting apartments to 35th Ave. NE, already a busy arterial, and prohibiting them in the adjacent blocks. (In contrast, one of Rinck’s amendments would expand the Wedgwood neighborhood center to the south; expect strong objections from Rivera to that one).
“Based on months of feedback from community members who live in and near the proposed neighborhood centers, my amendments modify the boundaries of the neighborhood centers in the D4, including Wedgwood, Bryant and Ravenna, to reflect resident concerns…. around the ability of local neighborhood streets to handle increased growth and the infrastructure,” Rivera said.
A Rivera amendment for Ravenna traces a similar line to carve single-family houses in a designated historic district (itself a way for older neighborhoods to oppose density) out of the proposed neighborhood center around Third Place Books, leaving the commercial area but ensuring that there would be no apartments in the neighborhood surrounding the commercial center.
Separately, Rivera proposed an amendment that would give the city the HOA-like authority to dictate what kind of external siding would be allowed on buildings within designated national or local historic districts, based on factors like the “historic character” of an area; this extraordinary new power would also apply to historic districts that might be designated in the future, including those proposed by house owners who oppose new development in their neighborhoods.
Joy Hollingsworth wants to cut the Madrona Neighborhood Center by about seven blocks, concentrating new housing into a smaller area that already includes parks, schools, and other areas where housing can’t be built.
Joy Hollingsworth has proposed shrinking down another controversial neighborhood center in Madrona, whose homeowning residents showed up en masse to oppose the zoning change in their neighborhood. Hollingsworth’s amendment would shrink the Madrona center by nearly 40 percent, slicing off big chunks of current single-family areas on the east and west sides of the proposed center and concentrating any new housing around an existing commercial stretch that includes an elementary school, library, and playfield where housing can’t be built.
Finally, it wouldn’t be a conversation about housing in 2025 without hand-wringing over trees—not planting or maintaining trees in public spaces, which are actions the city could take at any time, or encouraging property owners to plant new trees themselves, but preserving trees that already exist, generally at the expense of new development.
In addition to the tree preservation incentives I mentioned earlier, there’s an amendment from Strauss to “recognize the importance of the natural environment and native species, including trees, bees, salmon, orca, and herons,” plus several from Rivera to make it harder to develop housing if trees are on site.
The most extreme proposal from Rivera—and the one that made Rinck confirm with council staff that the amendment really would do what it appeared to do—would allow the city to require developers to come up with a completely new alternative plan if it turned out their housing proposal would require the removal of any tree, no matter its size, age, or viability.
It’s easy to see how this could grind development in traditional single-family areas to a halt. If someone planted a sapling on a property slated for development, or if there was already unremarkable small tree on site, the city could stop the project and require the developer to start from scratch.
Housing is already tremendously expensive to build in Seattle, and construction permits are declining as developers pull out of the city. Empowering unelected city staffers to force full project redesigns around every existing tree would exacerbate the housing crisis, adding costs to projects that are already financed while reducing the amount of housing that could be built in every project with a tree on site. And forget about expanding the city’s tree canopy—who would plant a new tree on a property they may want to sell in the future, knowing it would instantly reduce their property value?
A Google Maps image shows trees on the site where Habitat for Humanity is building 22 new affordable homes, and planting 26 new maple trees.
By Erica C. Barnett
Earlier this month, NPR ran a story (“Why preserving trees while meeting housing demand is a good thing”) produced by Seattle’s KNKX radio station about efforts to integrate existing trees into new developments, calling tree preservation a “climate solution” that doesn’t have to conflict with new housing development. Trees lower temperatures on the ground and reduce carbon pollution, among many other benefits. The story highlighted two Seattle developments: A high-end project designed by local architects in the tony Bryant neighborhood in Northeast Seattle, and a 22-unit development in South Park, just north of Seattle’s southern city limit.
The first development, according to the story, used what one of the architects called an “enlightened” approach: Instead of removing trees, the architects designed around them, preserving trees that the architect sees as neighborhood “residents” in their own right.
The second development—the one the story uses as an example of a developer thoughtlessly removing trees for density—is happening in South Park, on “cleared lot [where] 22 new units are going in where once four single-family homes stood.” The story quotes an activist with Tree Action Seattle, a group that routinely opposes development in formerly single-family areas, positing that the developer could have easily spared a half-dozen trees by adopting a different site plan Tree Action posted on its website.
But the NPR story omitted a number of key facts. The biggest is that the project in South Park, unlike the million-dollar-and-up townhouses in Bryant, is an affordable housing project being developed by Habitat for Humanity, with 22 units available to homebuyers making 80 percent or less of Seattle’s area median income.
Another fact the story didn’t mention is that Habitat isn’t scraping the site clean: Their plan preserves several trees on the north end of the property, and the affordable-housing provider is planting 26 new maple trees to replace the ones they plan to remove—”effectively doubling the number of trees” on the site, according to the group’s chief operations officer, Patrick Sullivan.
“We appreciate community engagement and have reviewed the alternative site plan proposed by Tree Action Seattle. Based on our assessment, that proposal does not align with current city code,” Sullivan said.
Sandy Shettler, a member of Tree Action Seattle, said the group’s alternative site plan, which would effectively turn 16 of the 22 freestanding homes into duplexes with shared walls, would save most of the trees on the site and save money. Shettler argued that dozens of new trees will never make up for removing the trees that are currently on the site, including three large evergreens. “It is physically impossible for the 26 replacement trees to reach the canopy volume of what is already on the property,” Shettler said, arguing that the new trees will be packed in too tightly to thrive in the spaces between the new affordable housing.
“Large, established conifers in particular provide critical health benefits to a community with elevated pollution and sparse tree canopy,” Shettler said, noting that South Park has less tree canopy than almost any other areas in Seattle.
Sullivan, from Habitat, countered that the plan “meets all regulatory requirements and will ultimately result in more trees on the site and a healthier tree canopy over time.” The project will also provide a rare commodity in Seattle: 22 homes with mortgages set at no more than 35 percent of their income, and will place the property in a land trust that ensures the housing stays permanently affordable.
This post has been updated to include more information about SDOT’s pothole budget.
Several recently elected members of the City Council raised a novel objection to pro-housing advocates who argued the city should allow more density and plant more public trees yesterday: Trees in the private yards of single-family houses, they argued, are better for people than those in parks and public rights-of-way.
The arguments against public trees took place during a discussion about the impact proposed changes to the city’s comprehensive plan would have on tree canopy. Two years ago, the city updated its tree code to place new restrictions on some tree removals; since then, groups like Tree Action Seattle have argued that the tree code will lead to the “clearcutting” of Seattle.
Whatever individual tree advocates’ motivations, the impact of forcing Seattle property owners to retain trees in their private lawns is to prevent density in Seattle’s traditional single-family neighborhoods, worsening Seattle’s housing shortage as the population grows. (For people motivated by the desire to keep renters out of “their” neighborhoods, trees have largely replaced the blunter objections of the past, such as complaints that renters ruin people’s property values.) Advocates want to revamp the two-year-old tree code to make it difficult or impossible to remove large private trees for development or any other purpose, and Moore is their main champion on the council.
Addressing several staff for the city departments that deal with planning, land use, and trees, Moore kicked things off by saying that planting trees in street rights-of-way, such as planting strips and medians, is “problematic” and potentially “not sustainable” because sometimes the city ends up removing those trees anyway; for example, Moore said, a SDOT was “wanting to cut down all those trees” on a landscaped median on Beacon Avenue.
After staffers responded that most of those trees were actually going to stay in place—the city puts signs on trees to indicate that they could be removed, not that they will—Moore made her case that trees in people’s private yards are actually better than trees in parks and other public spaces.
“While you say everybody is 10 minutes’ walking distance from a park, not everybody is mobile,” Moore said, addressing city staffers who had been describing the city’s tree planting and maintenance program. “And also, I don’t think that you can necessarily get the benefit of a tree by it being in a park. I mean, sometimes the benefit of the tree is that you’re standing outside your apartment building or your house when it’s 90 degrees and you’re getting some relief from the heat. You have the benefit of looking out a window and seeing a tree that you might not see in a park.”
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Moving beyond parks, Moore said that planting trees in public rights-of-way could also be “problematic,” because the city might have to remove the trees later for unanticipated reasons. For example, she’s “received a lot of emails about Beacon Avenue,” where the city has to repair sidewalks damaged by the roots of large street trees, “[and] SDOT wanting to cut down all those trees,” Moore said. “I appreciate the idea of wanting to put trees in the right-of-way, but that, too, comes with with issues.”
The trees Moore was referring to were marked with evaluation notices earlier this year; as a staffer noted in response to Moore, most will be retained thanks to sidewalk redesigns that allow the trees to keep growing while keeping the sidewalk accessible to people with disabilities.
Moore also brought up her favorite straw-man argument, one I’ve never heard anyone actually make: People who want to allow private property owners to remove trees, she said, inaccurately believe that any new housing that gets built in its place has to be affordable. (In other words, she’s saying that you probably believe any townhouse that goes up in your neighborhood is reserved for a low-income person).
“So this narrative that [if we remove trees for development], suddenly we’re going to have affordable housing, is incorrect,” Moore said. “I challenge the department, [the Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections], to show me how many of these permits were for affordable housing, I submit to you that none of them were affordable housing.” This is the point when I started yelling “Literally no one has ever said that!” at my laptop screen.
Moore wasn’t the only council member to come up with reasons that forcing property owners to keep trees in their private yards was superior to planting and maintaining public trees.
Rob Saka, who set aside $2 million in last year’s budget to remove a traffic barrier that prevented illegal left turns into his children’s preschool, pointed out that if trees are allowed to grow tall in city rights-of-way, it makes it harder to remove them later for other “transportation purposes.”
“I definitely recognize that the right of way is it is an appropriate place to to plant trees and build our tree canopy,” Saka said, but “there are associated costs, nontrivial costs, associated with maintaining these tree canopies in our public right of ways.” Every year, SDOT’s budget for trees seems to “grow and grow. … I love arborists out there [but we’re] getting to a point, getting to a state where our ongoing annual maintenance costs for maintaining tree canopy alone, in shrubbery alone, eclipses our ability what we spend to repair basic potholes.”
“Planting trees is expensive,” Moore chimed in later, adding that the city should create a new fund to move existing trees, like a sequoia whose owner has become the target of protests, to other locations because the trees the city is planting now aren’t comparable to the ones in people’s existing yards. (City staff who compared new tree plantings to evergreens planted when Seattle was being developed were also being “disingenuous,” Moore said, because the new trees won’t live as long.)
SDOT’s general-fund budget for tree planting and maintenance is $11 million this year, up from $6.9 million in 2024 and $7.5 million in 2021. The general fund budget also includes $19 million for pavement maintenance and repair, which includes potholes—roughly the same amount as last year, and up from $15 million in 2023. Of that total, according to SDOT, about $4.2 million pays for pothole repair. Repairing each pothole costs a few hundred dollars.
The voter-approved 2024 transportation levy has an additional $29 million for urban forestry and citywide tree planting, and $67 million for pavement spot improvements, including potholes.
Planting “trees in a specific location,” Saka continued, has other inherent problems: “It limits our freedom to operate, and removes any flexibility, sense of flexibility or agility, that we need as a city. … So when you plant a lot of trees in rights-of-way and fully leverage that space, again, it limits our flexibility to accommodate new travel, new modes of travel, new traffic patterns, and make the most beneficial use of our roads that works for all.”
I have to admit, “street trees are a problem because you can’t move them” was a new one for me. So it was almost comforting to hear Moore return to a very, very old argument against adding density in single-family areas.
Contrary to what urbanists claim, Moore said, “it is disingenuous, I think, to talk about, you know, ‘if we don’t build density, then we’re going to sprawl.’ We are constrained by the Growth Management Act. If we don’t have density in Seattle, we’re not going to sprawl out, because we’re constrained by state law. So that’s a red herring, frankly. … People recognize when they’ve been sold a bill of goods.”
In reality, the red herring here is that the Growth Management Act prevents sprawl. King County’s growth management boundary—where, according to Moore, sprawl is prohibited— includes every sprawling bedroom community in the region, from Black Diamond and Maple Valley to North Bend and the Issaquah Highlands. (That sprawl exists, by the way, because developers cut down actual forests, as opposed to the “forest” of individual trees in people’s private yards that’s the subject of so much handwringing in Seattle.)
Moore’s wrong about the reason it’s happening, too. Seattle has created a housing shortage by adopting policies that prevent housing. That increases housing prices in Seattle and forces middle- and working-class people to move out into the sprawl that surrounds the city. The “bill of goods” is that Seattle’s anti-housing policies—and, yes, proposals to prevent development by forcing property owners to retain trees are anti-housing—don’t have consequences for the entire region.
We managed to dig in to three (!) hot topics on this week’s episode of Seattle Nice: Mayor Bruce Harrell’s comment that Trump “surrounds himself by some of the smartest innovators around”—Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, David Sacks, and Marc Andreessen; a Seattle Times story about the ongoing closure of Victor Steinbrueck Park on the waterfront due to a dispute over two controversial totem poles; and the story I wrote about two women who sold a house that had been in their family for more than 70 years and walked into a buzzsaw of anger when activists learned the buyer planned to cut down a large tree on the property.
That tree story continues to get more comments than just about anything I’ve ever written, most of them calling me angry and biased and saying I have a vendetta against trees. If you haven’t read it, don’t get too excited—it’s a reported piece about what happened with one tree when the family that owned the property decided to sell it after their mother died at 101.
Tree Action Seattle created an action page for “Grandma Brooks’ Cedar” and led protests against the removal of the tree, claiming that the former owner, Barbara Brooks, cherished the cedar and told various people verbally that she wanted it saved after she died. Her daughters, including one who lived with her during the last years of her life, said nothing could be further from the truth: “Mom hated that tree,” they both told me independently—and no one called her “Grandma Brooks.”
Both women were quite upset at the way Tree Action and some neighbors have characterized their mother and her wishes after her death, and said they no longer feel comfortable in their old neighborhood. Tree Action, meanwhile, has doubled down, saying the sisters previously said that they planned to save the tree, reneged, and are now lying.
Activists from outside the neighborhood, as well as some neighbors, have argued that I should have discounted the Brooks’ story about their own experience and reported that their stories were false—or, at the very least, presented the Brooks’ version as dubious compared to the narrative on Tree Action’s “Grandma Brooks’ Cedar” page. Ultimately, reporting usually involves speaking to human beings and reporting their version of events; in this case, I found the Brooks sisters to be very credible when describing their own family’s story.
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Both sisters’ stories were remarkably consistent: They told me their mother “hated that tree” because it required so much maintenance, and recalled that neighbors did not pitch in to help when their mother was alive and taking care of the tree on her own. They laughed bitterly at the image of their mother lovingly carrying buckets of water out to the tree in the summer; she did water her flowers with a bucket when it was hot, they said, but not the tree—which, both mentioned, prevented their mother from gardening in a large portion of her yard.
Both sisters also mentioned that neighbors often pestered their mother to put a covenant on the property to save the tree, but she refused. “My neighbor across the street— for years he would tell my mom, ‘When you sell this house, put it in writing that this tree has to stay,’ and she said, ‘No—don’t tell me what to do,'” one of her daughters, Beverly, told me.
In the end, like most families who sell their houses, the Brooks sold for the best price they could get and moved on—thinking, they said, that this would be the end of the story. “Don’t homeowners, after they pay taxes for 75 years, have the right to sell the place?” daughter Barbara said.
Like, I have to imagine, most people who live in Seattle, I love trees. Seattle’s natural beauty is one of the primary reasons I decided to move here. But I also know that the only way to meaningfully protect the city’s tree canopy long-term is by planting more trees for future generations to enjoy, including trees in public spaces like parks (where a 2023 study found that more than half the tree canopy loss in the city is actually occurring). The new development on the Brooks’ property, for instance, includes six new privately owned trees and one new street tree. No, those new trees won’t immediately replace the shade of the one tree that was removed. But they will eventually.
That’s the thing about trees: They often live longer than we do, long enough for us to forget about the context in which they actually grew. An 80-year-old, or even 100-year-old, cedar is not part of some old-growth forest—it was almost certainly planted, as landscaping, by the people who built the resource-hogging single-family houses that now make up neighborhoods like Ravenna. Go way back, and you’ll find, yes, developers who clear-cut the ancient forest that used to cover this part of the Pacific Northwest, scraping the ground bare so that white colonizers could live here in the manner they preferred.
Should North Seattle homeowners have to think about that every time they look up at a tree on someone’s private lawn and awe at the sweep of its branches? I’m not saying that, but I do think some perspective is in order. Banning private land owners from removing every large but not exceptional tree, which some advocates argue should happen as part of an upcoming review of the city’s tree ordinance, will indeed protect isolated older trees in people’s yards. It will also directly prevent the development of desperately needed housing in Seattle—pushing more and more people into distant exurbs, which can only be built by destroying the healthy forests that are large trees’ natural habitat.
A crew member removes limbs from the tree late Monday morning.
By Erica C. Barnett
Between 20 and 25 protesters blocked a tree service company that was trying to reach a construction site in the Ravenna neighborhood on Monday morning, where residents and activists from outside the area have been protesting the removal of a western red cedar since earlier this month. About 10 police officers came out later to remove protesters from the development site, arresting at least one who refused to leave. PhotogSteve81, on Instagram, captured the chaotic scene.
The tree stood on the corner of a lot where a builder, Ashworth Homes, plans to replace a single-family house with four new townhomes—and where Barbara Brooks, the former owner, lived for more than 70 years until she died three years ago at the age of 101.
Although Tree Action Seattle claimed, on its action page for “Grandma Brooks’ Cedar” (later changed to “Grandma’s Cedar”) that Brooks “cherished” and lovingly cared for the tree, Brooks’ daughters said the opposite was true—in fact, they said, their mother “hated” the tree because it shed constantly and was so work to maintain.
The sisters, Barbara and Beverly, said no one in the neighborhood offered to pitch in as their mother, and later Beverly, struggled to keep the roof, sidewalk, and gutters clear of debris from the tree. “My mom would cut back the branches and clean it up just constantly,” Barbara recalled. “We didn’t have a lot of money growing up. Mom always said, ‘If I could afford to get rid of this tree, I would.'”
Although Tree Action and others have suggested that the property developer promised the Brooks family they would keep the tree, both the developer and the builder who bought the property say that wasn’t true. Roque de Herrera, a representative for property developer Legacy Group Capital, said “there were no conversations, promises made, or agreements regarding the tree” when Legacy signed on as the site developer. Erich Armbruster, the president of Ashworth Homes, said no one brought up the tree at any point during the sale.
By 11:00 on Monday morning, the truck the protesters blocked earlier had made its way onto the property, and a crew member was busy limbing the tree from a bucket two stories above the ground. Despite the wind and rain, a handful of people watched from across the street as a pile of branches accumulated on the ground and a swirl of sawdust spun through the air.
One, Lynnwood horticulturist Gabriel Kearns, walked across the street periodically to film the workers and yell at them for removing the tree. She said her biggest issue was that developers were killing healthy trees to build “million-dollar crap” and creating “mini-deserts,” with dead soil and no shade, in the city. Gesturing at an apartment building next to the property, she said, “Those apartments are going to be 100 degrees this summer—they will not have shade. … Trees provide a livable community.”
Kearns said she wanted to see Seattle tighten its tree code to make it more difficult to remove trees, perhaps by imposing a waiting period between when developers remove a tree and when they can begin development.
Another person didn’t want to be quoted but told me they heard I was being paid by developers.
Michelle Tanco, who lives nearby and spent part of the previous night at the protest, told me she has no problem with new housing—”we really need new houses”—but was sad to see the tree cut down. “I spend a lot of time walking up and down with my kids, learning the names of the local trees, and this was the first one one my kids learned—western red cedar,” she said.
Standing with her was Kim Butler, who lives about a mile away. She said that when she heard the tree was going to be removed, she reached out to Armbruster to see if he would agree to keep the tree if advocates could come up with a different site plan that would keep it in place without reducing the value of the final development. As PubliCola reported yesterday, the site plan proposed by Tree Action would have substantially reduced the size of one unit and eliminated two garage parking spaces, lowering the value of the site plan to less than Armbruster paid for it.
“He said he was willing to work with me… to consider keeping the tree, but he couldn’t have it interfering with his development timeline and he couldn’t have any additional expense, so it had to be net neutral,” Butler said. “We were getting there, but it wasn’t ever going to be fast enough—it just wasn’t going to happen.”
Armbruster, who was standing on the site across the street from Butler on Monday, said that even though Butler and other advocates weren’t able to come up with a workable alternative site plan on extremely short notice, he found Butler “a little different” than most of the people who have protested his project, because “she asked a question—’What would it take? Help me understand this from your perspective.'”
Butler said that even though her efforts didn’t save the tree, her conversations with Armbruster gave her hope that the new development, which will include six new on-site trees and one new street tree, will be better. “That’s what I’m doing to honor this tree,” she said. “This line of communication that opened up is integral to having a better process in the future.”
Tanco said one thing she learned during the protests is that the most effective way to ensure trees don’t get cut down is for the property owner to place a protective covenant on the property. (Covenants are a tough sell because they generally lower a property’s resale value.) “This brought a lot of neighbors together,” Tanco said. “It’s good to know more community members, so we can come together and look at other trees in the neighborhood, and reach out to the people who own them to see what they want to do and help them with that process.”
“What was once a quiet refuge could soon be overshadowed by development. Someone’s living room window will be mere feet away from what was once a community space. All for what? So that some corporate entity can replace the existing million dollar home with SEVEN million dollar homes. Lining the pockets of capitalism.”
