The fight to bring affordable housing to Fort Lawton, a derelict former Army base on the fringe of Magnolia’s Discovery Park, has been going on for so long the saga has become a shorthand for bureaucratic process and obstruction in Seattle. Since 2005, when the US Army declared the property surplus, the City of Seattle has been advancing a redevelopment plan that would allow more families to live close to one of the city’s most cherished parks. But appeals, the first one advanced by Magnolia residents in 2008, have stymied the project at every turn. Now, things finally look to advance toward the finish line — but only if several key hurdles are surmounted over the coming months.
After Mayor Bruce Harrell announced a revamped plan for Fort Lawton early last year, the Office of Housing has been working to reissue the project’s environmental review, a critical step that has hung things up at earlier stages. Last week, a public hearing on Fort Lawton’s Draft Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (SEIS) brought both project proponents and opponents out to Discovery Park’s Daybreak Star Indian Cultural Center, for what is expected to be one of the very last opportunities for members of the public to comment on the proposal… if all goes well.
Harrell’s new Fort Lawton plan increases the number of units across the 34-acre site from just 237 to more than 500, increasing density while still maintaining nearly 22 acres as public parkland. That additional density decreases the per-unit cost, which is also set to include additional infrastructure needed to accommodate the area’s new residents.
While the exact site plan hasn’t yet been developed — the City of Seattle still doesn’t own the land — a redeveloped Fort Lawton is expected to include around 200 units of affordable rental units, around 200 homes for ownership, developed in conjunction with Habitat for Humanity, and around 100 units of permanent supportive housing. Those units, designed with services to help people directly exiting homelessness, will be managed by the Chief Seattle Club.
Wednesday’s public hearing saw 90 minutes of testimony, with commenters urging the City to move forward, and others bringing up many of the same issues that have been raised over the past few decades: traffic, fears of increased crime from building permanent supportive housing in Magnolia, and the environmental impact of increased development close to Discovery Park. Listening to testimony were officials from Seattle Parks, Office of Housing Director Maiko Winkler-Chin, and Councilmembers Alexis Mercedes Rinck and Dan Strauss.
Pushing back on the city’s plans were numerous members of the board of Friends of Discovery Park, which has formally endorsed the idea of cancelling the project, allocating the funds for housing elsewhere and developing the land as a full extension of the park. The city has instead argued that if they withdraw their redevelopment plan, the Army would likely move to surplus the land by selling it to a private developer, where no portion of the site would become parkland.
“When you’re a doctor, you operate and you have options, [and] you always have a bailout,” Friends of Discovery Park Board President Philip Vogelzang said. “And the city has never acknowledged a bail out. You’ve never thought about a Plan B, even though, during all the public input, people repeatedly said, we’d like a parks option, a parks option has never been listed, especially now.”
“I am not here to voice opposition to the housing project, but I am here to ask us to remind ourselves that there is a group that isn’t given a voice tonight, and that is all the animals and living creatures that call Discovery Park home,” Pete Hanning, a former City Council candidate in D6 and a member of the board, said. “I think everyone checked their boxes, but we have a higher bar to cross when we’re talking about this development in relationship to one of the most precious parks in our entire city.”
Standing solidly behind the project were housing advocates, including those that will directly be maintaining that housing.
“Native people are 1 to 2% of the total population of our region, but are over 30% of the chronically homeless population,” James Lovell, Chief Seattle Club’s Chief Community Development Officer, said at the hearing. “We are here to heal our people and to continue to steward this land. We would not build housing to house our relatives here if we were not satisfied with the results of the process, especially the draft SEIS. This is not just another product for us, not just a flash in the pan, this is a part of our sacred work to heal our will and provide for the next seven generations.”
“I’m excited to voice enthusiastic support for this monumental and bold, overdue opportunity and proposal to advance housing and equity in our city,” Colleen Clayton said. “A project like this is truly rare and the best of all possible worlds. It opens up one of Seattle’s highest opportunity [areas] for the most marginalized communities. It poses little to no risk of displacement and low environmental impact, and it returns underutilized, vacant buildings and parking lots to meaningful and beneficial policies.”
In the end, commenters advocating for the housing project outnumbered neighborhood opponents by a small margin, despite the home turf advantage. This hearing was part of a larger comment period that ends Friday, after which the Office of Housing can move toward issuing a Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS). After they do, the door will open for a potential appeal — the stage where the project became bogged down in 2018. Despite the fact that state laws around predatory appeals have been substantially overhauled since that time, an appeal could add months to the timeline.
After clearing that hurdle, the Fort Lawton plan will need to head to the Seattle City Council for a formal approval vote.
“When we go to council, that’s when the clock starts ticking for something like this,” Jessica Gomez, a strategic advisor for the Office of Housing, told Seattle’s Board of Parks and Recreation Commissioners this month. “This new plan has to be approved by the US Army, which they’ve kind of been very excited to approve. They’re waiting for our City Council to approve so that they could just hit the ground running.”
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.
