By a 6-3 vote Tuesday, the Seattle City Council voted to allow residential uses in a small stretch of northern SoDo near T-Mobile Park and Lumen Field. Proposed by Council President Sara Nelson in early January, the move has been met with strong opposition from the city’s maritime and industrial advocates. However, building trades and business groups who want to see more activation in an underutilized corner of downtown rallied behind the proposal.
Opponents and supporters turned out in droves Tuesday to brandy their talking points in what turned out to be a marathon meeting of five hours.
Nelson has touted the proposal as paving the way for a new “maker’s district” — an area that could support both badly needed affordable housing while at the same time providing space for light industrial uses, which are becoming increasingly scarce in Seattle. The affordable housing component helped the proposal earn support from the Housing Development Consortium of Seattle-King County, which represent affordable housing nonprofits, builders, and investors.
“This is a monumental step forward. We have an urgent need for more affordable housing throughout Seattle at every level, including workforce housing,” HDC executive director Patience Malaba said in a statement. “The Stadium Makers’ District will not only address our City’s urgent need for housing, but also support local businesses, create jobs, and make the area safer and more vibrant for all.”
In contrast, the Port of Seattle and its industrial allies see the bill as the start of a slippery slope when it comes to allowing housing in more industrial areas, and have cited pedestrian safety concerns that would come from citing development so close to major trucking routes.
The legislation comes at a pivotal and unpredictable moment for South Downtown:
- Sound Transit is preparing to embark on over a decade of construction in the neighborhood, as part of the Ballard Link and West Seattle Link extensions.
- The US Coast Guard is set to decide whether to expand its footprint at nearby Pier 46.
- Amtrak has petitioned the City of Seattle to permanently close or grade separate a stretch of S Holgate Street that runs through its maintenance yard to reduce conflicts and allow for expansion.
- King County Metro’s SoDo bus bases could be getting a major overhaul under King County Executive Dow Constantine’s ambitious County Campus Initiative, which aims to redevelop the County’s South Downtown landholdings with mixed-use highrises containing housing, while potentially shifting some county office space to SoDo.
That said, Nelson painted the move as providing a clear net benefit to the city, touting the potential addition of around 500 affordable homes as required by code, if redevelopment proceeds.
“The fact that the benefits so outweigh the costs that I’ve heard expressed by by some of the opponents, makes it a very easy decision,” Nelson said ahead of the final vote. “We’re talking about a affordability crisis in Seattle that keeps getting worse and worse. We’re talking about businesses that are leaving Seattle because they can’t find capable places to set up shop. And we have an opportunity to address both of those challenges right now, and these challenges will will only get worse with continued delays. We’re talking about helping working people and putting affordable housing in a place with frequent transit.”
The required affordable housing is in the “workforce housing” range rather than deeply affordable low-income housing. Legislation specifies rents be set between 60% and 90% percent of the area median income (AMI) and be built on site. Rent for a 90% AMI one-bedroom apartment could be as high as $2,400, based on current Office of Housing guidance, whereas the City caps 60% AMI rents at $1,694 for a one-bedroom or $2,034 for a two-bedroom.
The idea of allowing housing in this zone, known as the Stadium Transition Area Overlay District, has been studied and discussed for decades. The City contemplated doing so in 2022 as part of an overall environmental review of its industrial lands reform. But permanent housing never made it into the final piece of legislation that the council approved in 2023, in large part due to opposition from the Port. Instead, the City landed on a compromise that allowed hotels, but not housing.
Now that environmental review has become a key point of contention, with Nelson and her allies pointing to it as evidence that building up to 990 units of housing in the area won’t have a significant impact. But industrial advocates have pointed out a major difference between what was studied then and what was approved this week.
While that 2022 environmental impact statement (EIS) did study housing in a broad array of industrial areas — including the stadium zone — it included a mandatory 200-foot buffer between all of the city’s major truck routes and areas where housing would be allowed. The stadium overlay is bisected with numerous major truck routes, including First Avenue S, Edgar Martinez Drive, and Royal Brougham Way. Many of these streets act as last-mile connectors between I-90 and the port’s container terminals, and the 200-foot buffer would essentially amount to a de facto continued ban on housing in the area.
Councilmembers Dan Strauss, Alexis Mercedes Rinck, and Bob Kettle voted against the bill, with Joy Hollingsworth flipping to back the idea Tuesday after opposing it in committee.
In advance of the meeting, both Strauss and Rinck calling for the vote to be postponed after a slate of nine amendments were posted to the council’s website with just 24 hours for public review. Some successful amendments seek to mitigate housing in an industrial liquefaction zone where added risk of noise and air pollution exists, including earthquake warning labels on buildings and increased requirements for noise-dampening windows.
Another successful amendment proposed by Councilmember Cathy Moore keeps the housing ban in place west of First Avenue, closest to the Port terminal.
Hanging over the entire council meeting was the shadow of a 2016 vote against the ceding of city-owned land on Occidental Avenue, which would have opened the door to developer Chris Hansen building an NBA arena in SoDo. Hansen still owns a significant number of the parcels inside the stadium overlay district, and opponents, including Port Commission President Toshiko Hasegawa, have suggested that the move is being made to benefit his holdings.
“Today’s biggest winner is an out-of-state billionaire developer, who more than a decade ago made a bet that he could buy industrial land on the cheap and get the city council to add millions to his property value just by changing the zoning,” a Port of Seattle statement issued after the vote read.
Nelson denies coordination with Hansen.
“I have never talked to Hansen, but here’s what I will say: we’ve got a property owner that is willing to develop a piece of property and subsidize the ground floor square footage for the small businesses that desperately need more affordable work spaces,” Nelson told reporters Tuesday. “And so what I say is: to me, what matters is the outcome and who this is going to help.”
Up for election in the fall, Nelson has already made the Stadium District housing push a big part of her reelection pitch. Nelson’s campaign manager has granted that “[t]his will be one of the most competitive races in Seattle” as she faces off with former Progress Alliance of Washington executive director Dionne Foster.
“To tackle the housing crisis, I introduced legislation that will create up to 1,000 new housing units in SoDo — and 50% of them will be affordable. These are real, tangible wins, but we must keep pushing forward,” Nelson wrote in a March 4 campaign email [emphasis original].
Contrarily, Nelson’s stance on the One Seattle Comprehensive Plan has been more measured and opaque. Last month, Nelson told The Urbanist she would not take a stance on the citywide housing plan until legal appeals from opponents are concluded. Though, her stance was not terribly clear before those appeals were filed.
Rinck, who had avoided weighing in on the bill as it headed through committee, focused on the process Nelson used to advance her proposal, expressing a desire for more time for a compromise to be worked out. But she also described the proposal as a distraction from the city council’s larger work of creating opportunities for more housing across the city, such as via the long-delayed Comprehensive Plan and the Seattle Social Housing Developer, which many of her colleagues (Nelson included) sought to obstruct by blocking a dedicated funding measure.
“There was a lot of talk today about support for union-built affordable housing,” Rinck said. “And I truly hope to hear that same energy when we talk about our other opportunities for union-built affordable housing, particularly with making sure the social housing developer is stood up for success, because that will deliver pro-union jobs as well, and I hope we keep this pro-housing energy when we talk about the comp plan, a more comprehensive discussion of housing citywide, and allow for more housing in our existing neighborhoods that have cleaner air, green spaces, schools — because working folks deserve to live in those neighborhoods too.”
Dan Strauss, who had chaired the council’s land use committee while the broader industrial maritime strategy was being hashed out, also repeatedly attacked the process Nelson used to advance her bill, which included sending it to her own Governance, Accountability, and Economic Development Committee, which generally doesn’t deal with land use matters.
“This proposal has merit,” Strauss said. “And there’s a process that we have to go through, together, to find the solution. This process has not been that.”
Meanwhile, the council majority painted themselves as working hard to find a compromise measure that everyone can live with.
“At the end of the day, voting in favor of this legislation is voting in favor of more union jobs, creating more living wage jobs for union members, for small makers, for people of color, for women, while at the same time attempting to maintain the jobs at the port, attempting to not encroach further on that important capacity that is so critical to this city, to our county, and to our state,” Councilmember Cathy Moore said.
The Port of Seattle urged Mayor Bruce Harrell to issue a veto, but with a 6-3 vote any veto could be overridden. Harrell has not yet said whether he would sign the bill, or let it take effect without his signature.
This article was made possible by the generous support of The Urbanist Fund. The Urbanist Fund is a 501(c)(3) organization that supports local, public-interest journalism. Visit theurbanistfund.org for more information or to make a tax-deductible gift.
Ryan Packer has been writing for The Urbanist since 2015, and currently reports full-time as Contributing Editor. Their beats are transportation, land use, public space, traffic safety, and obscure community meetings. Packer has also reported for other regional outlets including Capitol Hill Seattle, BikePortland, Seattle Met, and PubliCola. They live in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle.
