Last Chance to Comment on Seattle Comp Plan Scoping: Add Your Voice for Housing Abundance

Seattle is embarking on a journey to regulate its zoning coverage. That journey begins in earnest with the scoping interval for the Environmental Influence Assertion (EIS) for the Complete Plan Main Replace. The scoping remark interval ends tonight (August 22) at midnight. Go to the One Seattle Plan Engagement Hub to touch upon scoping — extra remark durations will open later within the course of, as properly.

Alongside greater than a dozen companion organizations, The Urbanist submitted a remark letter that urges the Seattle Workplace of Planning and Group Improvement (OPCD) to increasing housing alternatives inside all the alternate options. Doing so creates a supercharged Different 5, and our letter additionally requests including a fair bolder possibility, Different 6, that might finish residence bans throughout town and permit four- to six-story buildings. Augmenting Different 5 and including Different 6 would then enable town to have an actual dialog about the way to align its zoning coverage to advertise housing affordability, racial fairness, and local weather targets.

It boils all the way down to this: Can we need to be a metropolis for everybody or a one class metropolis just for the wealthy? Can we need to work to right racial housing injustices and environmental injury or solely search to entrench energy for the already highly effective? The selection is ours.

The Urbanist has carefully lined Seattle’s Complete Replace course of from when OPCD first launched its conceptual alternate options to a housing advocate’s information to commenting to columnist Ray Dubicki’s lament of how prolonged and summary the method is.

OPCD needs to listen to from you because it does this as soon as a decade replace. “The Complete Plan is a 20 12 months imaginative and prescient and roadmap for Seattle’s future,” OPCD notes on its webpage. “Our plan guides Metropolis selections on the place to construct new jobs and homes, the way to enhance our transportation system, and the place to make capital investments similar to utilities, sidewalks, and libraries. Our Complete Plan is the framework for many of Seattle’s big-picture selections on the way to develop whereas preserving and enhancing our neighborhoods.”

Upvote our remark letter on the engagement hub or submit your personal remark and be happy to crib from our letter under if you’re impressed.

To: Brennon Staley, Workplace of Planning and Group Improvement

Topic: Feedback on the scope of the environmental affect assertion (EIS) for the One Seattle Plan 2024
Complete Plan replace

We, the undersigned organizations, characterize a coalition dedicated to advancing housing affordability and addressing local weather change by Seattle’s Complete Plan replace, together with reasonably priced housing builders and operators, environmental advocates, local weather activists, and grassroots housing organizers. It’s important that the Metropolis analyzes a full vary of development alternate options within the EIS. We urge you to increase the scope of research of every of the choice development methods and to advance a brand new transformative Different 6, to supply as a lot flexibility to construct as many properties as attainable.

This Complete Plan replace is a once-in-a-decade alternative for Seattle to guide the area by reforming land use, rising density, and permitting for combined makes use of in neighborhoods. At this distinctive second in time, the urgency of town’s reasonably priced housing disaster is mixed with a rising local weather disaster and the disturbing actuality of persisting inequities. We can not ignore the interconnectedness that should bind our efforts inextricably on housing and local weather motion.

We have now an exacerbated housing disaster; far too a lot of our neighbors sleep unsheltered, battle to afford lease, or have been displaced from their communities, all due to how costly properties in our metropolis are. Merely put, now we have a scarcity of properties, and we have to construct extra of them. We want extra reasonably priced properties, extra sustainable properties, extra properties to lease and to personal, and extra center properties, residences, and nook shops all through our metropolis.

We additionally face a local weather disaster, pushed overwhelmingly by transportation, accounting for a whopping two-thirds. Automotive-dependent sprawl just isn’t in step with our local weather targets or a sustainable future. As the middle metropolis of this area, Seattle should lead in welcoming sustainable land use patterns. Per capita emissions are decrease in Seattle because of higher entry to transit, jobs, and walkable neighborhoods. By not welcoming housing development in its borders, Seattle forces it to the suburban fringe, the place residents are locked into automobile dependency and development jeopardizes forests and farms.

Of the choices at the moment drafted, Different 5 is the one different to make a serious optimistic affect on Seattle’s housing prices by permitting for extra housing development to satisfy demand. Per the Metropolis’s evaluation, by selling a better vary of rental and possession housing, the Mixed Progress Technique would deal with previous underproduction of housing and rising prices and assist full neighborhoods throughout town. It furthers local weather targets by permitting extra individuals to reside in walkable, transit-rich communities close to jobs and facilities, and will assist create transit-supporting densities all through Neighborhood Residential zones. And eventually, it goes furthest among the many 5 drafted alternate options to right the racial inequities of traditionally exclusionary zoning insurance policies.

Along with advancing Different 5, it’s important that every one the expansion methods studied embody as a lot flexibility to extend housing provide, range, and affordability as attainable. A new Different 6, ought to increase on the Mixed Progress Technique with insurance policies to create considerable, reasonably priced housing all through everything of Seattle.

• Different 2, the Centered Progress Technique, ought to create or increase new city villages and maximize housing improvement capability in neighborhoods with excessive entry to alternative and low threat of displacement. The Centered Progress Technique ought to be sure that city villages embody the complete 15-minute walkshed round frequent transit. Lastly, the Centered Progress Technique ought to incorporate evaluation of high-rise and mid-rise zoning. These housing varieties maximize density round mild rail stations and regional facilities, would generate extra Obligatory Housing Affordability contributions to increase town’s reasonably priced housing inventory, and will encourage sustainable mass timber development.
• Different 3, the Broad Progress Technique, ought to incorporate evaluation of a wider vary of lacking center housing varieties than simply triplexes and fourplexes. Rowhomes, stacked flats, sixplexes, and courtyard residences would additionally slot in properly in Neighborhood Residential zones and create new reasonably priced homeownership choices. This different must also embody mixed-use improvement on nook heaps, with an emphasis on permitting makes use of that meet residents’ important every day wants.
• Different 4, the Hall Progress Technique, ought to incorporate important upzones within the 15-minute walkshed round transit stations, not only a slender band straight on arterials. Mid-rise and mixed-use zoning ought to anchor the 5-minute walksheds round transit stations, with vast swaths of low-rise residences and lacking center properties permitted all through the remainder of the 15-minute transit walksheds.
• Different 5, the Mixed Progress Technique, ought to incorporate the extra flexibility for housing manufacturing from every of the expansion methods enumerated above.
• A brand new different, Different 6, ought to increase on the Mixed Progress Technique and be explicitly designed because the anti-displacement different requested by the Complete Plan Racial Fairness Evaluation: it ought to “finish the prevalence of single-family zoning” with a “racially inclusive strategy.” This consists of anti-displacement overlays in areas of excessive displacement threat and permitting most development of essentially the most reasonably priced housing varieties in areas of excessive alternative. It may appear like a related community of full neighborhoods, permitting 4-6 story residences in all neighborhoods, with bonuses for reasonably priced properties by proper, and floor flooring business and group areas to serve individuals’s every day wants. It ought to discover density bonuses and exemptions from setback necessities for inexperienced buildings, to encourage mass timber and passive home strategies.

Past particular development methods, we advocate that every one the alternate options be improved within the following methods:

• The entire development alternate options OPCD advances for evaluation ought to plan for—at a minimal—a continued charge of inhabitants development much like what Seattle has seen over the past 10 years.
• The Metropolis’s greenhouse gasoline evaluation ought to contemplate the regional advantages of stopping sprawl and including dense, climate-friendly housing within the current city core.
• The entire development alternate options ought to analyze altering the transportation community concurrently with the land use technique, to increase the realm of Seattle lined by frequent transit service.
• Broadly, all the alternate options ought to develop methods to increase the “15-minute metropolis” idea successfully in residential zones to make sure full, walkable communities with a mixture of housing varieties with jobs, business areas, faculties, well being clinics, and parks.
• For all alternate options, find new nodes of housing and enterprise density in areas that at the moment have low entry to frequent transit service and/or low entry to companies and facilities that present important every day wants. Progress technique alternate options must be designed to fill these gaps in entry by rising housing improvement capability to ranges that may maintain transit service and business providers.
• All alternate options ought to maximize housing alternatives close to deliberate mild rail stations. With the a hundred and thirtieth Road Station opening in 2026, the Metropolis ought to set up an city village across the station. Likewise, Graham Road, North Delridge, Avalon, the Junction, Ballard, and Uptown may use new or expanded city villages to enhance their deliberate mild rail stations.
• The entire alternate options ought to analyze the affect of assorted development methods and housing manufacturing charges on the full properties reasonably priced by space median earnings (AMI) band, with consideration paid to residents making lower than 30% of AMI, 30-50% of AMI, and 50-80% of AMI.
• The entire alternate options ought to consider manufacturing charges of rental and possession housing and incorporate land use methods to create new homeownership and rental choices throughout town.

The undersigned organizations look ahead to working with OPCD all through the Complete Plan Replace course of. We’re dedicated to shaping our metropolis’s land use to permit extra properties to be constructed and to create a extra equitable, reasonably priced, and inexperienced metropolis.