The affordable mass timber Heartwood project from Community Roots Housing at 14th and Union (Image: AIA Seattle)
The city’s COVID-19 emergency has ended but its affordable housing emergency continues. New legislation shaped by the pandemic and championed by the mayor and city council would speed up the public approval process to create new low-and-middle-income apartment buildings by exempting the developments from time consuming and expensive design reviews. The effort could also produce a two-year test where any major development in the city could choose to undertake a public review as is currently required or pursue the streamlined administrative design review with public feedback but without public meetings.
Mayor Bruce Harrell sent legislation to the Seattle City Council this week to begin the process of winding down what critics say is one of the city’s largest bureaucratic barriers to more rapidly addressing its housing issues.
The bills formed by the Harrell office and Councilmembers Dan Strauss and Teresa Mosqueda would begin with a one-year interim period exempting affordable housing projects from design review. The city would then use the trial year to conduct what the Harrell administration says would be a full State Environmental Policy Act review of legislation to make the exemption permanent.
“Seattle’s housing affordability and homelessness crisis demands bold action and creative solutions to more urgently create affordable housing. This legislation will reduce permitting bottlenecks so that the process is more swift, efficient, and consistent,” Harrell said in a statement.
The legislation would permanently exempt affordable housing projects from design review, exempt housing projects that use the Mandatory Housing Affordability program to produce their units on site for a 2-year pilot, and “allow all other housing projects to choose whether to participate in full design review or administrative design review as a 2-year pilot,” a statement from the mayor’s office says.
The Harrell administration’s goal is for all affordable housing project permits to be approved within 12 months of submission.
CHS reported here on changes to the city’s design review process forced by the conditions of the pandemic as Seattle has also been looking at ways to overhaul the public design review process to make it more efficient and more predictable for developers.
The Seattle City Council’s Land Use Committee is scheduled to begin discussing this legislation on November 30 and will hold a public hearing on December 8th with hopes of a vote on the proposal on December 13th.
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This is exciting! Thank you CM Lewis and CM Mosqueda. Less local oversight, lower design standards and fewer opportunities for public input should lead to much higher profit margins for my out-of-state investors as we deliver “affordable housing” to Seattle. $$$$$
Awesome, so we’ll use up a lot of our planet’s resources, just to tear it all down, throw it in a landfill, and start over with a better design in 20 years? I’m all for affordable housing, but it should not be exempt from public input or design review. People live here, all kinds of people, and permanent(!) buildings should serve all of them. This not only gives free rein for cheap, ugly design, but also poorly functioning design, which entirely disregards the needs of the people it is designed to house!
Poor design is why the huge Safeway complex on 15th and John is being torn down after 20 years. Our buildings should last 100 years, something other countries understand but is really hard for us to grasp here in the U.S. It’s not that hard.
The issue is that design review doesn’t achieve any of these goals. Right now it holds up projects providing needed housing for years, largely for minor aesthetic nits from the review board. Review board input does nothing to make buildings more “permanent” or less “ugly” (if anything, it arguably does the opposite).
The Safeway is being torn down as part of a broader strategy by the parent company Albertsons to convert more of their stores in dense urban neighborhoods to mixed-use housing and stores. This is also happening in QA, U-District and U-Village.
Hooray for housing!!!! This is such great news.
If this goes through, it would be a major mistake. I’m really surprised Bruce Harrell (who I generally support) is proposing this change, and am very disappointed in him. But I’m sure the developers love it as they will make more $$$, which is all they care about.
The Design Review process should NOT be eliminated. It is important to maintain a level of design standards- otherwise the City landscape will become a patch work and the Middle and Lower Class society deserve the same quality of housing as the Upper class. The City will be a visual statement of inequality and divisiveness. Stream line the Design Review process- not eliminate.
How will I be able to voice my complaints about the architect’s selected wall sconces for my neighbors!?! Nevermind that my HOA can just go down to Home Depot and grab whatever exterior lighting fixtures we want without any community input… I insist on approval of every security light fixtures!
Sounds like something organized crime would want. Instead of working to improve/streamline the current process (which was put in place for valid reasons), let’s just throw it out altogether, because we know all of these developers are just altruistic angels building these homes out of the kindness of their hearts and not for profits.