Yay – a PRO-HOUSING Comprehensive Plan update!
After 9 months, 20 meetings, and deliberating on over 100 amendments to Mayor Harrell’s proposed One Seattle Comprehensive Plan update, Council voted the final package out of the Select Committee on the Comprehensive Plan on Friday 9/19. It establishes new zoning maps and additional development capacity for desperately needed new housing for the next 20 years (while also protecting trees!).
Underlying my approach to the whole process is that, when given the choice between a carrot or a stick, I’m a carrot person. I believe in incentivizing the actions that will help attain our policy goals, be that increasing housing supply and diversity, making housing more affordable, protecting trees, or what have you. That’s my tell.
And that’s why I was happy to craft a package of amendments in partnership with the Complete Communities Coalition representing the Housing Development Consortium (or HDC: affordable housing providers like Habitat for Humanity); Futurewise; Tech 4 Housing; the Seattle Chamber; and Master Builders Association that provide, for example, additional height or floor-area ratio (FAR) in exchange for maintaining Tier 1 and 2 trees or adding affordable units to lots.
Because we’ve got a housing affordability crisis on our hands and we’re not going to be able to subsidize our way out of it. So we have to increase supply by making privately developed housing easier to build and ensure that sub-market rate housing projects pencil out. (That’s why I’m also championing permitting reform and got two bills passed last week.)
Specifically, my successful amendments aim to:
Create more affordable housing by applying bonuses citywide, including in low-rise zones, without parking mandates
Incentivize the development of stacked flats by removing lot size minimums and improving bonuses
Incentivize tree preservation and improve climate resilience through stacked flats development bonuses
Create more walkable neighborhoods by allowing “corner stores” in the middle of the block, not just on corners.
Encourage more homes near transit by removing parking minimums near frequent transit but outside of urban centers
At the request of Chinatown-International District leaders, I also put forward an amendment to restore the long-standing Comp Plan policy that discourages the concentration of human service uses in particular neighborhoods and it passed.
I abstained on all amendments modifying the boundaries of the proposed Neighborhood Centers and here’s why:
Originally, those amendments were to be included in the “Chair’s Package” which makes sense because I’d assume they’d be uncontroversial. Because why would one Councilmember oppose an amendment from the district representative who knows, after months of outreach, what their constituents want? I was prepared to approve those amendments as a block unless I knew of sharp divisions within the neighborhood about them.
However, they were pulled out of the Chair’s package and put up for individual vote just days before we began voting and I did not have time to vet them with all the groups across the city wanting – or not wanting – those changes. And if I couldn’t educate myself on an individual amendment’s merits, I didn’t want my vote on the record for or against it.
Council Bill (CB) 120985, which adopts the final Comp Plan update, CB 120993, which makes permanent the provisions of HB 1110, and Resolution 32183, which directs further study on additional amendments that we didn’t consider, will be up for a Full Council vote in the coming weeks. There could be some final amendments so stay tuned…