A shift to extend and expand changes to design review made due to the pandemic and new state laws including changes around environmental review could knock “12-15 months off regulatory processes and provide more predictability in permitting timelines,” the Harrell administration said Wednesday as it advanced a suite of new proposed legislation.
The new bills would include home ownership projects under the city’s existing affordable development design review exemptions, allow large projects that include onsite Mandatory Housing Affordability-required units to choose the simpler administrative design review process, and allow all housing projects whether affordable or not “to choose a shorter administrative design review option rather than full design review.”
The moves follow reforms finalized late last year to exempt affordable multifamily housing developments from the city’s lengthy and expensive public design review process.
That legislation was hoped to speed up the approval process to create new low-and-middle-income apartment buildings by moving reviews of the developments into a more streamlined review process conducted by the city.
The new proposals now are hoped to extend the same efficiencies to all new housing development in the city.
“Establishing a more efficient and flexible review process will help us address Seattle’s urgent housing needs, significantly reducing the time between project proposal and when new housing is available for occupancy,” Mayor Bruce Harrell said in the announcement. “This legislation is an important step in solving our growing city’s housing affordability and homelessness crisis, and we’ve already seen promising results from some of these measures during the temporary design review waiver under COVID.”
CHS reported here in 2022 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.
Since then, multiple state bills streamlining permitting were passed during the last legislative session in Olympia including HB 1293 which aims to shorten design review process timelines statewide and SB 5412 which exempts the construction of new housing from the SEPA process, while preserving SEPA reviews at the land use policy and planning level, as well as for commercial and industrial projects.
CHS reported here in 2019 on how SEPA review had transformed into a tool to block development of all sorts — even the greenest office project in the world.
With the changes at the state level and the city, Seattle officials say the development process in Seattle could be sped up by as much as a year to 15 months.
More change is coming as Seattle battles ongoing affordability and homelessness crises and reshapes its 20-year comprehensive plan to move toward spreading future growth more equitably through the city.
A draft of the proposed Comprehensive Plan update is expected to be released for public review this fall with finalization of the plan by mid-2024 and new zoning legislation aligned with state legislative changes to move forward by 2025, the administration said.
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Wake me up when Seattle or WA state does anything to build dense multifamily properties that people can actually purchase.
Filling up our neighborhoods faster with even more rentals managed by multinational corporations that collude through yield management software to price people out of their homes every 1-3 years doesn’t seem like anything to be excited about.
https://www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-increase-realpage-rent
This is being done to a certain extent. A 13 unit development on Capitol Hill recently opened. A huge barrier is liability laws that drastically limit the construction of any sort of condo developments at all. Very, very few are either under construction or planned. Until regulatory reform happens on that front, there’s no chance of it happening on a large scale.
If we had leadership in the state this would have been addressed a decade ago. Condos build community because people put down roots. Instead we gave the city over to out-of-state corporate landlords to fleece tenants and leave retail spaces vacant for years as a tax right off.
I have been a design review nerd reading many, many full design review proposals over the years. In my humble opinion, the practice should just be ended entirely. There can be a single administrative review per project if it’s so darn important, but the whole-dragged out process as it is now should just be allowed to die. It’s not really improving project quality, leads to massively increased costs and causes unnecessary delays during a serious housing crisis. Time for it to R.I.P.
Hear, hear!