This is a two-part series! The first part was a brief overview of the Growth Management Act, King County’s Urban Growth Boundary, and how we ended up with neighborhood plans. The second part will go into what the neighborhood planning documents actually say, what neighborhood planning did, and how Seattle’s homeowner-dominated neighborhood planning codified anti-renter bias, and where Seattle is headed.

Neighborhood plans are a weird thing. Many people have zero idea of their existence or history, and some of its most vocal defenders weren’t even living in Seattle during their creation. In many cases, the boosters of neighborhood plans are also the same people who opposed the affordable housing rezones, who opposed accessory dwelling unit liberalization, and who oppose safe streets and bike infrastructure (this last part is ironic, as most of the neighborhood plans are very vocal about increasing bike lanes).

Interestingly, Shelterforce magazine in 1999 claimed only 12,000 people participated in neighborhood planning (out of nearly 560,000 residents, a whopping 2%). More people moved to Seattle between 2018 and 2019 (16,900 per Office Financial Management) than participated in a planning process over 20 years ago that severely restricted where these new residents could live, as well as each of the five years preceding. There are 38 neighborhood plans, meaning the average Urban Village had 315 people working on it. Shelterforce also wrote the plans have their roots in keeping people out:

Yet the Neighborhood Planning Program has its origins in NIMBYism. The city began the program after residents of wealthier, single-family neighborhoods reacted against an earlier proposal by then Mayor Norman Rice, the city’s first black mayor, to create “Urban Villages” in various city neighborhoods by changing zoning codes to allow greater housing density and pedestrian-oriented development. The proposal called for developing more affordable multifamily housing throughout the city, including in wealthier single-family neighborhoods.

Sound familiar? Remember how the city looked at eliminating single-family zoning in the late 1970s, only to have wealthy neighborhoods rise up and kill a proposal to allow low-income duplexes and triplexes in single-family zones? Or recently, how homeowners tried to kill affordable housing through a modest rezone in more of the city?

The affordable housing component of then-Mayor Norm Rice’s original Urban Village plan called for 25% affordable housing in Urban Villages. In 1994, The Seattle Times reported that 250 West Seattle residents showed up to a meeting to criticize the Urban Village plans, stating they already had enough affordable housing, and that the Urban Village Strategy contained “neighborhood-killing viruses” that would lead to urban slums. West Seattle has over 80,000 residents today.

This is a two-part series. The first part is a very brief overview of the Growth Management Act, King County’s Urban Growth Boundary, and how we ended up with neighborhood plans. The second part will go into what the neighborhood planning documents actually say, what neighborhood planning did, and how Seattle’s homeowner-dominated neighborhood planning codified anti-renter bias, and where Seattle is headed.

A number of candidates in this year’s election have been waxing poetic about neighborhood planning Seattle undertook in the 1990s, some even claiming the process was “robust”–and this is never followed up on in forums. I come from a planning background, have seen what democratic planning (and democratic architecture–baugruppen) can look like. So when I first started looking at the neighborhood planning documents years ago, I imagined I would find plans that were inclusive, welcoming, and open. And in some ways, they are. The plans are very pro-transit, very pro-biking and safe streets, and very much geared toward fixing deficiencies that existed in Seattle neighborhoods after decades of neglect and economic downturns. These are all good.

But Seattle’s neighborhood plans also have a dark side. When it comes to housing and land use, they are extremely biased and exclusionary. And this is not an accident, this was largely by design.

But first, a little history.

Like today, in the beginning of the century, Seattle was a boomtown. As with most American cities, there really was no formal planning. New construction was haphazardly placed, there was largely no way to direct where new housing or buildings could or should go. There was only the building code. And at something like 150 pages, Seattle’s early building codes were a pithy thing of beauty. Today, Seattle’s building code is more than 700 pages long–then there are other codes to comply with like fire, mechanical, and plumbing.

Very much unlike today, the original building code had no limits on where housing could go. You could build three-story apartment buildings on every square inch of Seattle. The amount of the city zoned for detached houses was a whopping 0% (as it should be). So you could have apartments next to fine houses, and those proximities still exist in many of Seattle’s older and more walkable neighborhoods.

This changed with the passing of the 1923 zoning ordinance, which immediately downzoned much of Seattle. It was largely a zoning plan as snapshot, meaning multifamily housing and small neighborhood commercial were largely limited to where it already existed. Over time, the planning documents got longer and longer, the restrictions became stricter and stricter (larger setbacks, smaller height limits, less lot coverage, and density limits) leading to a fairly dire housing situation in the 1970s.

In 1980, the city attempted to pass rent control, but homeowners helped kill it. Further downzones in the 1980s, even as the region was growing, caused massive amounts of sprawl and environmental destruction. In 1990, the state passed the Growth Management Act (GMA), which among other things, required counties to plan for growth. But it is also kept to local control, and doesn’t say how or where growth should go. This can be problematic, and is one of the reasons I really like Vienna’s approach, which is both top down, and bottom up, planning.

One of the aspects to come out of the GMA was designation of rural and agricultural lands for protection. This is how we came to get the Urban Growth Boundary (UGB) for King County.