The Seattle City Council took its first detailed look at Mayor Bruce Harrell’s One Seattle Comprehensive Plan on Monday, and already several councilmembers emerged as opponents of the mayor’s housing strategy. In particular, Councilmember Cathy Moore (District 5) was critical of the plan, while Maritza Rivera (District 4) sharply criticized the process, contending more outreach was needed. They argued the plan went too far in their North Seattle districts and expressed doubts that added housing would contribute to affordability, echoing complaints that neighborhood groups have raised in opposition to their local “neighborhood centers” — small beachheads of apartment zoning in Seattle’s expansive single family zones.
In fact, Moore delivered a slow-growth manifesto, tinged with derision for renters, who she portrayed an unengaged and a detriment to neighborhoods.
“Too many of our young people cannot afford to live in a city, and this is what’s driving a lot of this,” Moore said. “And yet they are told, ‘if you just let us have a free rein and build, you’ll be able to afford, you’ll be able to have housing.’ It’s not true. It is an economic justice issue, and so allowing free-range zoning is not going to get you into the home that you want. It’s not going to create the ownership opportunity that you need to grow your wealth to have create a stable society where people are engaged socially and politically. What we’re talking about is building high-end townhouses and lots of rentals. Rentals are not stable.”
Moore singled out the Maple Leaf neighborhood center as one she’d seek to roll back in particular, citing neighbor concerns and mediocre transit service. Later in the meeting, Councilmember Dan Strauss (District 6) encouraged his colleagues seeking to remove neighborhood centers to propose zoning changes that add housing elsewhere in their respective districts in order to maintain the principle of shared commitment to addressing the housing crisis and welcoming neighbors.
Moore: Urbanists are lying
Moore’s speech was loaded with anti-developer sentiment, claims that homebuilders and urbanists are lying, and insinuations that affordable housing providers have been manipulated to be on their side. She questioned the very concept of density. The comments echoed those she made last year at King County’s Housing Affordability Committee, which levied significant criticism of Harrell’s initial growth plan as not going far enough in encouraging affordability.
“So, we also need to challenge this statement that density is going to produce what people are seeking,” Moore said. “When I talk to young people, they want a place of their own. They want a little garden. They want the amenities that us current homeowners have, and we’re creating a false promise with what we’re putting out here and what the urbanist people are telling us, and what the homebuilding association is telling us, and even some of the affordable housing providers, who desperately need more affordable housing and have had to — because of the structure of the Mandatory Housing Affordability act — have had to try to have allegiance to them.”
The Mandatory Housing Affordability (MHA) program is Seattle’s version of inclusionary zoning, which means that all new multifamily housing contributes to affordable housing creation be either paying a fee into the City’s affordable housing trust fund or setting aside homes as affordable on-site. The MHA requirements were paired with upzones increasing housing capacity and enacted into law in 2019 across Seattle’s 27 urban villages (which are being renamed urban centers in the new comprehensive plan). So far, new single-family homes — despite being the most expensive type of housing in the city — have been exempt from MHA contributions or upzones.
Due to a statewide middle housing minimum standard, single family zones will no longer be exempt from upzones, with fourplexes set to be allowed citywide and sixplexes near major transit. The mayor’s direction on MHA requirements in these zones is not yet clear, but he seems to be leaning against applying them, hoping to avoid a drag on development. Townhome builders have smaller margins and less access to capital compared to large multifamily builders. Overall, Seattle housing production has remained strong following MHA passage, with the city likely setting a housing production record in 2024, driven mostly by apartment construction.
Moore accurately identified that the Harrell’s plan is focused on townhomes, but her assertion that $700,000 townhomes are not a welcome addition across many neighborhoods where single family homes easily cost more than $1 million is less certain, and family-sized housing options are scant otherwise. Moreover, her preferred alternative — apparently housing co-ops — hardly appears ready to be scaled up as a major housing option to be relied upon by Seattle’s middle class.
Outside of relying on the private market, the route to expanding low-income homes and family-sized middle housing would require subsidy and thus considerable public investment. It’s unclear where that public investment would be found at scale. Moore and her colleagues (besides the recently departed Morales) backed a City budget in November that raided more than $300 million in JumpStart revenues (largely set aside for affordable housing) in order to fund Council’s priorities and close a shortfall without raising new revenue.
When Moore was running for office in 2023, she told The Urbanist she was grateful for the new state mandate pushing the city to allow additional density, and said she was in favor of either the most transformative growth option that the Harrell Administration was studying — alternative five — or an even more ambitious alternative six that many housing advocates had been pushing the city to study. “If we have diversity of housing including duplexes, triplexes, quadplexes and apartments in all neighborhoods, I think ultimately that makes us healthier,” she told Crosscut shortly before the election.
Getting up to speed on housing plans
Meanwhile, Councilmember Rob Saka sought a primer on the basics of comprehensive planning, growth management, and housing economics from Seattle Office of Planning and Community Development (OPCD) senior staff, but also shared some criticisms of the process. The newly installed chair of the Select Committee on the Comprehensive Plan, Joy Hollingsworth (District 3), urged councilmembers to do their homework and get basic questions answered during office hours rather than derailing meetings. This advice Saka quickly ignored.
The former chair of the committee, District 2 Councilmember Tammy Morales, resigned from the city council effective January 6, citing ostracization and mistreatment by her colleagues. Morales was the only councilmember with an urban planning background.
Organized homeowner group opposition has picked up as the One Seattle plan has neared the finish line. Dozens turned out during public comment Monday — many sharing similar talking points, such as the assertion that new housing would jeopardize Puget Sound’s resident Orca whale population. It’s unclear how the next 100,000 people added to the Puget Sound region would threaten marine ecosystems in a way that the four million residents and their two million cars (with tires that emit particles toxic to the salmon resident Orca rely on) don’t already.
OPCD shared a timeline that calls for passing the first phase of the Comprehensive Plan legislation in May, which would square the city with state middle housing mandates. OPCD split the plan into a second phase that adds the new neighborhood centers and expansions of existing urban centers, which may prove to be the more controversial half. OPCD hopes to pass phase two in September.
District 7 Councilmember Bob Kettle, a former leader with the Queen Anne Community Council, noted the City should expect legal challenges that could delay the plan, alluding to the group’s appeal that delayed backyard cottage reform by several years, among others. Both Rivera and Kettle stressed that the City should have factored that risk into their timeline.
"I'm from Queen Anne, I know groups like to appeal," CM Bob Kettle says of the potential for the city's Comp Plan to be subject to an appeal at the hearing examiner. If you'd like to unpack that comment… www.theurbanist.org/2018/10/26/w…
— Ryan Packer (@typewriteralley.bsky.social) January 6, 2025 at 11:35 AM
Rivera pressed OPCD top brass on the reasons why the Comprehensive Plan was so behind schedule, with the Final Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) not even out yet (it’s expected by the end of the month). OPCD Director Rico Quirindongo and Long Range Planning Manager Michael Hubner both repeated the phrase “a lot of moving parts” a few times, but neither gave a satisfying answer for Rivera.
Behind the scenes, it appears OPCD and the Mayor’s Office not being on the same page about the plan initially in 2023 set back the release of the Draft EIS, as The Urbanist’s reporting revealed in April. Public records show Harrell’s team halved the number of neighborhood centers in the plan, vastly scaled back transit corridor upzones, and questioned the need for ending parking mandates citywide, as neighboring Shoreline recently approved to curb housing costs. Given the lack of mayoral buy-in, OPCD redid their draft plan.
Nonetheless, housing advocates have largely rallied around the Mayor’s plan, noting the improvements it makes over the status quo. The Mayor also added five more neighborhood centers to the plan and loosened multiplex size restrictions in October, responding to advocates and increasing housing opportunities. Compared with the backsliding homeowner groups (and some councilmembers) are seeking, it looks preferable.
The next Select Committee on the Comprehensive Plan meeting is January 15th at 2pm, with a whole schedule of meetings laid out through May on the committee webpage. An evening public hearing on February 5 will be an opportunity for Seattleites who aren’t free on a Monday morning to weigh in.
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.