On Friday, more than 200 people testified at Seattle City Hall at the final public hearing before the City Council votes on amendments and finalizes the updated Seattle Comprehensive Plan later this week. The plan will guide the next 20 years of growth in Seattle, with big implications for housing and small business development.
Comments were split fairly evenly between housing advocates pushing councilmembers to go bigger and opponents demanding the plan be watered down. For both sides, much focus was on Amendment 34, which would restore eight neighborhood growth centers. The mayor’s plan proposed 30 neighborhood centers, but an earlier draft from his planning department proposed nearly 50. The amendment from Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck would restore eight of those jettisoned centers back into the plan: Broadview, South Wedgwood, Loyal Heights, Gasworks, Nickerson, Roanoke, Dawson, and Alki.
Neighborhood centers are generally proposed around small commercial districts, stretching a few blocks (about 800 feet) from these nodes and poised to allow commercial storefront and apartment buildings in the three- to six-story range. Neighborhood centers will join the city’s larger existing urban centers, or “urban villages,” as they were called under previous planning regimes.
Seattle's long in-person public hearing on the Comprehensive Plan has officially kicked off. First comments were from @ceceliablack.bsky.social: "As you're going through this Comp Plan, I would really hope you ask yourself what you would do if you were disabled tomorrow and you couldn't drive."
— Ryan Packer (@typewriteralley.bsky.social) September 12, 2025 at 3:19 PM
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A wide variety of people spoke in favor of adding neighborhood centers to broaden housing opportunities throughout Seattle. Disability rights advocate Cecilia Black noted that wheelchair users like her need more housing suited to their needs, which is typically apartments, as she noted in a previous Urbanist op-ed. Others highlighted the affordability crisis and spoke of worries they or their loved ones would be pushed out of Seattle without more housing options being made available.
Emily Pike, a Ballard renter who works at a Pike Place Market bookstore and at a Capitol Hill theater, warned that without a bold housing plan, people like her could be pushed out of the city.
“My life in Seattle is simple, beautiful and just barely affordable because I live, work and play in some of the city densest, most walkable and transit accessible neighborhoods,” Pike said. “I enthusiastically support amendments which add or expand neighborhood centers, those which eliminate parking requirements, those which encourage the development of small businesses and allow corner stores on all lots, and those which incentivize affordable and social housing, multi-bedroom and accessible units, apartments, balconies and stacked flat. I live in a stacked flat with a balcony. It rules. I’ve lived in Seattle for 15 years, and in 10 years, I want to be at City Hall, commenting on the next update the comprehensive plan. But if we don’t make bold choices now to make the city more affordable, I don’t like my odds.”
Residents speaking against the neighborhood center additions, meanwhile, emphasized process complaints, arguing affected neighbors had not been sufficiently consulted. Some also raised the prospect of a legal appeal challenging the environmental review for the new centers. While such an appeal could theoretically delay the entire plan, the fact that the centers were included in the City’s environmental study since they were in an earlier draft suggests that the City would be on firm legal ground and prevail.
Nonetheless, the legal risk argument could end up having a huge bearing on the outcome as the Seattle City Council votes on amendment on Thursday. With conservative City Attorney Ann Davison giving council legal advice (at least through November when she is very likely to lose her seat to Urbanist-endorsed challenger Erika Evans), they may opt for the conservative, risk-averse route, rather than pursuing more abundant housing.
On the other hand, the state mandate to allow middle housing citywide appears to have shifted debate away from that item, since it’s a foregone conclusion and one the City has already implemented as an interim ordinance to meet the state deadline at the end of June. With fourplexes legal in residential areas citywide, opposition had to move to proxy fights, like design standards, historic preservation provisions, and tree protections.
Missing the forest for the trees
The side pushing to scale back the plan brought up many environmental concerns and urged support for amendments ratcheting up tree protections. While several councilmembers proposed tweaks to tree policy or new tree incentives, Councilmember Maritza Rivera proposed two tree-focused amendment that could have far-reaching consequences.
- Amendment 93 would overhaul the city’s tree ordinance to make it harder to remove trees, while providing a height and density bonus to redevelopment projects that retain Tier 2 trees.
- Amendment 102 would add an extra layer of bureaucracy to Seattle’s already labyrinthine permit approval gauntlet authorizing the Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections (SDCI) Director to require alternative site plans to demonstrate that trees can be retained.
While the overhaul of Seattle’s tree policy in 2023 sought to trade greater tree protections and removal fees for more predictability for homebuilders in an effort to ensure housing can still more forward, Rivera would renegotiate that comprise and risk upsetting that balance. Although the 2023 ordinance expanded tree protections, it also quickly earned criticism from tree activists who wanted stricter rules.
Granting the SDCI Director the power to take a proposal and require whole new development plans in the name of tree retention could have a chilling effect on builders even taking on projects where that risk exists. Builders have warned that being blindsided with additional costs and requirements late in the development process can kill projects and scare off investors. This appears to be a recipe for just that, as architect and housing advocate Matt Hutchins noted in a Medium post.
“Amendment 102’s language about ‘no feasible alternative site plan’ isn’t sloppy — it is carefully worded to introduce a high risk that any project that affects any tree will not get a permit,” Hutchins said in a social media post. “Design teams can no longer be certain, if it is SDCI’s arbitrary call.”
Jennifer, who has been appealing the FEIS to the state court of appeals, repeats the false claim that the Mayor "doubled" the amount of housing in the plan. "How many more babies need to die?," she asks, referring to orca whale calves.
— Ryan Packer (@typewriteralley.bsky.social) September 12, 2025 at 3:41 PM
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In a related vein, several commenters shared their opinion that allowing too much housing in Seattle would threaten fragile Southern Resident Orca whale populations. If anything, the risk appears to go in the other direction. After all, one of the most dangerous things to salmon-eating Orca whales appears to be tire pollution and global warming, which is much more associated with suburban sprawl, rather than urban growth in Seattle, where the car population has stalled even as the human population has grown rapidly.
Sara Nelson, at the Haller Lake candidate forum earlier this month (the video only got posted recently), told the crowd that she supports Maritza Rivera's amendment 102 allowing SDCI to require alternative site plans in order to maintain mature trees. "We should have been doing that all along."
— Ryan Packer (@typewriteralley.bsky.social) September 15, 2025 at 7:17 AM
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Council President Sara Nelson backed Rivera’s SDCI site plan overrule amendment earlier this month, as tree advocates ramped up their pressure campaign. Nelson’s support could signal Amendment 102 having a pathway to approval, at least if she is able to wrangle the fellow centrists who helped install her as council president.
In addition to back neighborhood center additions and incentives for affordable stacked flats, the Complete Communities Coalition (of which The Urbanist is a member through its advocacy arm) has also backed a tree amendment. Amendment 91 would establish 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. It’s a more measured approach than Rivera is proposing, which could perhaps win the day if councilmembers are looking for a more moderate position.
Social housing call
Dozens of commenters also pushed for pro-social housing amendments. Thomas Barnard, who is board chair of the Seattle Social Housing Public Development Authority (PDA), urged support for Rinck’s Amendment 17 from District 7 Councilmember Bob Kettle’s Amendment 61, which expands the affordable housing bonus and extends it to social housing.
“We really hope that where you end up with the largest density and opportunities for social housing and for affordable housing in general for this,” Barnard said. “And so I’d like to send my thanks to Councilmember Rinck and Councilmember Kettle for those two amendments.”
Barnard, along with other commenters, noted that middle-income earners often struggle in Seattle’s housing market too, and that the social housing model, though in its infancy, could offer a solution for teachers, artists, nurses, and so forth who earn too much to qualify for subsidized housing, but too little to have stable housing in the private market, especially family-sized housing.
The popularity of social housing, after winning a new funding source in a landslide February special election, could propel these amendments to passage. On Wednesday, City Council will start digging into the amendments, with most of the votes expected on Thursday and potentially Friday as debate drags on.
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.
