Plans and Policy

Seattle’s Most Exclusive Neighborhoods File Appeals to Delay Harrell’s Growth Plan

The appeals, filed by residents in Madison Park, Mount Baker, and Hawthorne Hills, seek to require additional environmental review, pushing back the City's plan to allow more housing.

Map of the Week: Seattle’s New Long-Range Rail Plan Goes Big

Seattle's new long-range plan for high capacity transit echoes vision maps created by Seattle Subway and advanced by The Urbanist. Seattle's long-range rail transit vision...

Unserious in Seattle 

The City's Comp Plan is seriously flawed from the start. Seattle knows how to get serious when we need to, whether that’s building trillion dollar...

Seattle Is Building a Citywide Bike Network That Cannot Handle Its Own Popularity

Seattle's climate plan calls for doubling bicycling, but SDOT is not building its bike facilities to handle the load. To bike to Climate Pledge Arena,...

The Deck is Stacked Against Stacked Flats in Seattle

Once plentiful across the city, small apartment buildings with flats stacked on top of one another are incredibly rare in new construction. The reasons behind that are multifaceted, and stemming the tide will take a push on multiple levels of government.

Local Groups Push to Block Housing in Seattle’s Proposed Neighborhood Centers

By the time the Seattle City Council convenes for the first meeting of the Select Committee on the Comprehensive Plan on January 6, a group of residents from every single council district will have been pushing to scale back proposed zoning changes in their midst, all using similar arguments around lack of infrastructure and loss of neighborhood character.
A large home in North Capitol Hill with a sloping front lawn

Seattle Just Rezoned Entire City — That Was the Easy Part

To meet a state deadline, the Seattle City Council legalized fourplexes or sixplexes across the entire city via the adoption of an interim code Tuesday. The move is just a prelude to a bigger fight over urban density, as Council advances Mayor Bruce Harrell's broader growth plan.

Updated Seattle Growth Plan Adds Five Neighborhood Anchors, Bigger Fourplexes

An updated version of Seattle's 20-year growth plan includes additional opportunities for housing density, but mostly retains the city's longstanding pattern of walling off lower-density areas of the city.