Council’s 106 amendments include gems and clunkers.
Seattle’s long saga of passing its state-required, once-per-decade major update to its Comprehensive Plan is nearing its end. But first, one more public hearing will be held this Friday for residents to air their grievances or do their cheerleading.
The Seattle City Council has put forward a total of 106 amendments. As past Urbanist coverage noted, these amendments run the gambit from pro-housing and helpful to obstructionist and clunky.
For those that just want to cut to the case, here is a cheat seat for amendments to support and to oppose:
SUPPORT AMENDMENTS
- RINCK – 1, 2, 7, 17, 34, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 66, 69, 72, 76, 84, 95, 98
- STRAUSS – 5, 6, 8, 25, 29, 30, 33, 42-C, 43, 46-A, 47, 48-C, 49-C, 64, 73, 92
- SAKA – 11, 13, 23, 36, 77
- HOLLINGSWORTH – 19, 68, 78, 79, 80, 107, 108, 109
- NELSON – 52, 60, 63, 65, 74, 86, 89, 91
- KETTLE – 50, 61, 70, 90, 94, 96
- SOLOMON – 83
OPPOSE AMENDMENTS
- SAKA – 35, 37,
- HOLLINGSWORTH – 38
- RIVERA – 39, 40, 41, 81 93, 102
- KETTLE – 51, 97
As a member of Complete Communities Coalition on the advocacy side of our organization, The Urbanist is supporting a package of coalition-backed amendments promoting additional housing opportunities.
As coalition partner Futurewise (a nonprofit dedicated to land use advocacy) put it, the coalition wants “More homes, of more types, in more places, for more people!”
Jazmine Smith, Director of Local Advocacy at Futurewise and Co-Chair of Complete Communities Coalition, outlined six amendments that the pro-housing coalition is focusing on. (Smith serves on The Urbanist’s board and also co-chairs The Urbanist Elections Committee.) Council President Sara Nelson and Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck are carrying the legislation:
- Amendment 34: Eight new neighborhood centers in Broadview, South Wedgwood, Loyal Heights, Gasworks, Nickerson, Roanoke, Dawson, and Alki.
- Amendments 60 & 63: Affordable housing density bonuses (citywide and in low rise zones).
- Amendment 86: Eliminating parking mandates near frequent transit.
- Amendment 89: Allowing all residential lots to use the stacked flat bonus, and increasing the bonus.
- Amendment 91: Establishing a trees and density stacked flat bonus that would boost height limits on stacked-flat style homes to retain trees or have a higher Green Factor.
Complete Communities Coalition leaders partnered with Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck to lead a tour of the eight proposed neighborhood center additions to the plan.
“Speaking of Amendment 34… we had a wonderful opportunity on a sunny weekend to bike 62 miles crisscrossing Seattle to tour our eight new neighborhood centers we’re proposing with Councilmember Rinck,” Smith wrote in a coalition update. “We had a blast talking to neighbors like Michael in Loyal Heights and business owners like Robert from Third Place Books in Dawson about what they love about their neighborhood and the opportunities they see once we can unlock more options and more homes. It was such a fun time and really connected the need with the vision!”
In a similar vein, Councilmember Dan Strauss (District 6) proposed Amendment 42, adding East Ballard as a neighborhood center centered around 8th Avenue NW and NW 65th Street. The corridor is served by King County Metro’s Route 28 bus and already has a commercial hub centered around the Goodwill thrift shop on the corner, making it a logical place to locate a neighborhood center.
Strauss has proposed three versions for the East Ballard center. Version A is the smallest, and Version C would appear to be the largest, though Version B stretches farther north.
Ditching parking mandates
In addition to the main coalition package, most urbanists would support Rinck’s Amendment 7, which abolishes parking requirements citywide. If Spokane, Bremerton, Bothell and Shoreline can eliminate parking mandates citywide, Seattle should be no sweat. After all, Seattle leads the region in ditching cars and forming carfree households.
Rinck laid out why parking reform is important: “Our parking mandates just make it more expensive to build housing. And if we really are building towards a green energy future, we need to be encouraging more folks into taking transit, increasing pedestrianization, and improving our transit connections. [I’m] hoping that we can make some progress in alleviating some of the requirements around parking when it comes to development.”
Meanwhile, Strauss’s Amendment 8 would promote parking limits in “regional centers that are served by light rail.” In part, this policy is already in force, with the City already using maximum parking requirements in Downtown Seattle, South Lake Union, Uptown and the University District.
However, Capitol Hill/First Hill and Northgate are also regional centers served by light rail, and Ballard is a regional center that would meet the definition once light rail reaches it — whenever that is. Conceivably, the City could seek to designate more regional centers at a later date. Strauss’s amendment would grease the skids for parking caps in the most transit-rich neighborhoods.
Stretching the borders of proposed Neighborhood Centers
Councilmembers have proposed a slew of amendments altering the border of neighborhood centers in their districts. These are a mixed bag, with Councilmember Maritza Rivera (District 4), focused on shrinking centers in her district.
On the other hand, Strauss has proposed a huge array of boundary adjustments in his district, with the net effect of expanding borders and housing capacity — albeit with some localized cuts along the way. Showing his wonkish eye for detail, Strauss has proposed three versions for each center.
Strauss’s Amendment 43 amends the borders of Magnolia peninsula’s two small neighborhood centers into one larger center stretching the length of the 34th Avenue W and W Government Way corridors, both transit arteries for the area. Across the three versions, Strauss cuts a swath of southern and eastern block off the Magnolia Village center, while adding blocks to the north, orienting the center around Blaine Middle School and the adjoining playfield.
The net effect of any version of Amendment 43 is expanding the center, clearing the way for more mixed-use zoning in Magnolia. Any of the three versions seems promising. Version A would do the most to stretch the center toward the east entrance to Discovery Park, which is Seattle’s largest and certainly shouldn’t be cordoned off from renters.
Amendment 46 would stretch the borders of Phinney Ridge, elongating it to track along the Route 5 bus corridor. Version A would stretch the center all the way to NW 75th Street, with Strauss calling for an additional eight blocks beyond Mayor Bruce Harrell’s proposal. The southern border would also stretch an extra four blocks south to N 57th Street, while trading away some of the proposed center’s eastern blocks, farther down the ridge. It’s the best version for people wanting additional density along Route 5.
Phinney Ridge is an interesting case because the northern half of the neighborhood’s main drag was already technically an “urban village,” tacked on as a skinny extension of the Greenwood-Phinney Ridge Urban Village, an odd t-shaped center. The Mayor’s proposal lops the Phinney neck off the center’s Greenwood head, while reanimating a few of leftover parts to form a Phinney neighborhood center to the south. This technically brings the mayor’s total number of proposed neighborhood centers to 30, albeit with an asterisk.
Strauss’s amendment could see the entire ridgetop corridor in some sort of center, reflecting the reality that already exists, at least north of N 65th Street.
Amendment 47 stretches the borders of the Tangletown Neighborhood Center. Version A stretches south, mostly. Version B stretches east and west in the two or three blocks just north of N 50th Street. Version C stretches Tangletown east to the edge of the I-5 chasm. All three versions would drop the same four blocks western blocks from the center, but more than make up for it by extending south and/or east.
Amendment 48 would expand the boundaries of Upper Fremont, with Version C having the advantage of stretching the center westward to catch the blocks along Route 5’s Greenwood Avenue path. Oddly, the original proposal did not include these blocks despite Greenwood Avenue once hosting the Interurban streetcar line and already including historic apartment buildings and storefronts that have been grandfathered into North Seattle’s generally ubiquitous single family zoning paradigm.
Amendment 49 (also put forward by Strauss) would expand the borders of the West Green Lake Neighborhood Center. The catch is that Strauss drops single family blocks farther from Aurora Avenue to add more blocks along the busy, dangerous highway, in a move that ruffled some feathers among urbanists. That tradeoff seems most worth it in Version C, which adds choice blocks along Green Lake to cancel out the losses farther west in the blocks between Fremont Avenue N and Linden Avenue N.
In contrast, District 1 Councilmember Rob Saka’s Amendment 35, has requested a change that, perplexingly, renames the Endolyne neighborhood center to Fauntleroy while simultaneously pulling back its boundaries from the Fauntleroy Ferry Terminal by a couple blocks. Name debate aside, that’s not going to be a popular move with urbanists.
In better news, Saka proposed expanding the High Point center slightly in Amendment 36 and adding a density bonus for cottage housing in Amendment 77.
Weigh in and get involved
Friday, September 12th has two public hearings, where Council will take public comment on the final proposed amendments (more on those later). Here’s what’s going on that day. Make your plans to join in. The future of the city depends on you!
- 9:30 am – virtual public hearing (Sign-up from 8:30 – 10:00am)
- 1:00 pm – Housing Development Consortium pre-hearing Pizza Party!
- 2:00 pm – begin to line up to sign in
- 2:30 pm – Sign-ins open
- 3:00 pm – in-person public hearing
- 6:30 pm – sign-ins for public comment close
Additionally, The Urbanist is hosting a tour of the Madison Valley Neighborhood Center on Wednesday, September 10. Staff from the Seattle Office of Planning and Community Development (OPCD) will walk attendees through the changes in Madison Valley and take questions on the Comprehensive Plan in general. The tour will be great preparation for those looking to hone their testimony for Friday.
Doug Trumm is publisher of The Urbanist. An Urbanist writer since 2015, he dreams of pedestrian streets, bus lanes, and a mass-timber building spree to end our housing crisis. He graduated from the Evans School of Public Policy and Governance at the University of Washington in 2019. He lives in Seattle's Fremont neighborhood and loves to explore the city by foot and by bike.
