Seattle Works To Revise Comprehensive Plan

As Seattle updates its complete plan, questions loom about how town can put together for a predicted inhabitants development of 1 / 4 million individuals over the following a number of many years. In a bit for Crosscut, Josh Cohen outlines the adjustments proposed to date.

“Seattle’s first complete plan, adopted in 1994, established town’s city villages technique. It concentrated density and new development to neighborhood hubs alongside transit corridors, leaving about 75% of town’s residential areas for single-family homes.” Since then, writes Cohen, 83 p.c of latest houses have been constructed inside city village boundaries.

In accordance with Michael Hubner, mission supervisor for town’s complete plan replace, that technique doesn’t deal with “the legacy of exclusionary zoning within the metropolis.” The town now has 5 choices for ideas that may open up extra neighborhoods to denser housing, and is in search of public enter.

The great plan doesn’t set town funds, but it surely establishes priorities that metropolis officers are presupposed to comply with when budgeting. It doesn’t upzone neighborhoods to permit for condo buildings or new companies, but it surely reveals metropolis council members the place they’re presupposed to approve upzones. It’s not a transportation plan that claims the place new sidewalks and bike lanes will go, however the metropolis’s transportation plan should align with the great plan.

Professional-growth advocates hope Seattle will select the ‘Mixed Plan,’ which provides the broadest vary of choices and will make the most important dent within the metropolis’s insufficient housing provide.

In 2019, Seattle formally modified the identify of single-family zoning to ‘neighborhood residential zoning’ in an effort to acknowledge the range of town’s neighborhoods, a step that many density advocates referred to as purely symbolic.