Today is the last day for public comments in the latest round of process around the One Seattle Comprehensive Plan proposed by Mayor Bruce Harrell to guide the next 20 years of city growth. Until midnight December 20, people are invited to submit public comments on the City website.
Building on changes required by state law that will allow fourplexes on all residential lots across the city and sixplexes near frequent transit, the mayor’s proposal includes clusters of additional density focused around existing business districts. Within those 29 new “Neighborhood Centers,” in places like Tangletown, Madison Park and High Point, five- to six-story apartment buildings would be allowed, but only on a small number of parcels in each neighborhood. Allowed density would scale down on the surrounding blocks, with each Neighborhood Center (or “anchors” as they used to be called) covering a radius of about 800 feet, roughly speaking.
Housing advocates have welcomed some changes in the mayor’s growth plan that improved his earlier March proposal, which faced some sharp criticism, including from state lawmakers who say it skirted statewide minimum standards. Criticism intensified after the revelation — first reported in The Urbanist — that Harrell’s team had dramatically scaled back the internal proposal from the Seattle Office of Planning and Community Development (OPCD).
OPCD’s draft proposal had included nearly twice as many Neighborhood Centers, broader transit corridor upzones, and lifted parking mandates citywide, before the senior Harrell officials intervened.
Harrell’s proposal maintains parking requirements (at a ratio of 0.5 stalls per home) outside of Urban Centers. That move stands in contrast to a nationwide trend of cities eliminating parking mandates as a step toward reducing housing costs. Places like Minneapolis, San Francisco, Portland, Port Townsend, and Spokane ditched parking mandates. Just this week Bellingham and Shoreline, Seattle’s neighbor city to the north, voted to join the growing list of full-fledged parking reformers.
Criticism of the mayor’s housing plan
The Complete Communities Coalition — which includes nonprofit homebuilders, labor groups, climate organizations, the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce, The Urbanist, and others — praised alterations that will encourage more and family-sized housing in Neighborhood Residential zones, added five Neighborhood Centers, and “expanded Urban Centers: Extending Urban Centers around light rail and frequent bus stops, including NE 130th St, Upper Queen Anne, Greenwood, West Seattle Junction, and the Admiral District.”
The five Neighborhood Center additions unveiled in October were North Magnolia, High Point, Central Beacon Hill, North Fremont, and Hillman City.
However, the Complete Communities Coalition is also pushing Seattle to go farther and adopt following changes to the plan:
- Expand Stacked Flats for Accessible Middle Housing: Allow stacked flats on all lots near frequent transit, regardless of lot size, to maximize opportunities in high-opportunity and transit-rich areas. Restricting stacked flats to lots larger than 6,000 square feet will limit this housing type in many of Seattle’s older and most desirable neighborhoods.
- Add Neighborhood Centers Near Major Parks: Create new neighborhood centers in low-displacement risk and high-opportunity areas, including North Broadway, Seward Park, Alki, Gas Works, and Loyal Heights. This would create more housing options near some of Seattle’s most cherished parks and let more people meet their daily needs by walking or biking.
- Expand Neighborhood Centers: Expand the boundaries of proposed neighborhood centers to ensure their scale can support essential amenities like grocery stores. We suggest expanding these boundaries to encompass the area within a five-minute walk around a central point.
- Allow Mixed-Uses More Broadly: Allow for mixed use development along transit arterials, to create space for childcare, grocery stores, and small businesses. Build on the proposal to allow corner stores in neighborhood residential areas, by creating flexibility for small commercial spaces on all residential lots.
- Allow Transit-Oriented Homes Off Arterials: Extend multifamily zoning along transit corridors to include blocks within a five-minute walk of transit stops, enabling quieter, car-light neighborhoods with convenient transportation access.
- Expand the Affordable Housing Density Bonus: Allow the affordable housing density bonus to be used citywide, without parking mandates. Additionally, ensure the bonus can be used by a broad range of developers—including private, nonprofit, and social housing developers—to build mixed-income housing without relying on scarce public funding.
Likewise, the Seattle Planning Commission criticized areas were the proposal fell short, particularly around keeping parking mandates, keeping the transit corridor upzones only a half-block deep, and not reinstating the full 50 Neighborhood Centers proposed by OPCD.
The limited expansion of multifamily zoning in North Seattle, which is predominantly White and wealthy, continues a pattern of racial and economic exclusion that goes back to the original Urban Village strategy and racial covenants and real estate discrimination that preceded it. Wealthy neighborhoods with political might have generally sought to funnel growth elsewhere. Seward Park, where Mayor Harrell lives, was in OPCD’s proposal, but not his own.
North Seattle accounted for seven of the Neighborhood Center cuts between OPCD’s 2023 proposal and the Mayor’s March plan, as its 18 neighborhood anchors in the scoping report were hacked down to 11. Laurelhurst and Broadview each dropped two anchors, Maple Leaf and Wedgwood consolidate from two each to one each, and South Wallingford and West Woodland disappeared from plans. Largely, these are White, wealthy areas with high access to oppportunity and amenities.
The planning commission also noted that the strict regulations that accompany the plan’s neighborhood cafe and corner store provision will limit their usefulness and success in bringing that small-scale local retail to fruition in residential neighborhood sorely lacking such opportunities. The City is planning to require that corner stores and cafes go on literal corners, rather than mid-block were far more parcels would qualify. Plus, the plan requires off-street parking and upper-level setbacks that will add significant costs and make mixed-use projects harder to design and finance.
Homeowner groups rally to block housing
On the flip side, homeowner groups and other advocating for a slow growth approach have also been stepping up their advocacy efforts. Neighborhood groups have often focused on getting their local Neighborhood Center or Urban Center expansion removed from the plan. A meeting in Madrona this week was well attended by opponents, as was a meeting in Queen Anne on December 4.
Tonight I sat in on a zoning discussion in Madrona that was organized by neighborhood residents and promoted by the Madrona Neighborhood Association. Cell service was bad in the church hall, so I took some notes.
— Ryan Packer (@typewriteralley.bsky.social) December 17, 2024 at 9:41 PM
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Dissonantly, many homeowners argued that housing is too expensive and they want less of it in their neighborhood.
Here’s the City’s website for accepting public comments on the One Seattle Plan, which are due by December 20. Those looking for a shortcut or additional way to comment can sign the Complete Communities Coalition letter.
Doug Trumm is publisher of The Urbanist. An Urbanist writer since 2015, he dreams of pedestrian streets, bus lanes, and a mass-timber building spree to end our housing crisis. He graduated from the Evans School of Public Policy and Governance at the University of Washington in 2019. He lives in Seattle's Fremont neighborhood and loves to explore the city by foot and by bike.