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The Seattle City Council heard updates Wednesday on the plan to put the first phase of legislation updating its comprehensive growth plan into place to meet new statewide requirements before an Olympia-mandated deadline does it for them.
Council comp plan committee chair Joy Hollingsworth is moving forward with “Interim Zoning Regulations” to implement the state’s “middle housing” legislation HB 1110 in Seattle. The committee is planning a May 21st vote on the legislation to establish the interim regulations with a vote of the full council expected May 27th.
Hollingsworth’s “interim” approach comes as the District 3 representative has pledged to move the growth plan update’s legislative process forward hile six appeals filed demanding additional environmental review of the city’s plans are considered by the Hearing Examiner.
The appeals include cases representing Madison Valley, Mount Baker, Hawthorne Hills, and “73 remaining Southern resident killer whales.” The Urbanist reports the appeals will be heard back to back in “late April and early May.”
The State Environmental Policy Act maneuverings have arisen as the city is moving forward on shaping a new growth plan to meet requirements of the 2023-passed state law HB 1110 that requires the elimination of single-family zoning in cities across the state to address the ongoing housing crisis. If Seattle doesn’t have its plan update approved by June, the city will be subject to state land use code.
The pushback on the growth plan over the creation of 30 new “neighborhood centers” across the city including D3’s Madison Park, Madison Valley, Montlake, and Madrona. The designation would “allow residential and mixed-use buildings up to 6 stories in the core and 4- and 5-story residential buildings toward the edges,” according to the proposal.
The interim legislation lines up with Hollingsworth’s Phase 1 and Phase 2 approach to forging a compromise on the plan but will create another round of debate when it comes to making the interim rules permanent.
Phase 1 of the legislation was intended to finalize the structure of the comprehensive plan and Neighborhood Residential updates to implement HB 1110. That’s the part that will say “Neighborhood Centers” exist — or they don’t — and these are the parameters.
The compromises over drawing the actual lines will be pushed into summer as the council considers Phase 2 including rezones for the new Neighborhood Centers, new and expanded Regional and Urban Centers, and “select arterial rezones along frequent transit routes.”
The interim step now creates a third phase to be squeezed in at some point in the process.
You can learn more about the growth plan proposal and view the proposal’s documents and maps at seattle.gov/opcd/one-seattle-plan.
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Middle housing is awesome. Grew up in a duplex, and would LOVE to live in one, or a cottage court, in the city. But uhh can someone please explain to me like I’m 5 why there’s an appeal to housing representing “73 remaining Southern resident killer whales.”???? Is someone actually trying to argue that…densifying cities…hurts whales?????
Someone actually is trying to make that claim, far-fetched as it may be: look at case W-25-006 here and check out the first paragraph of the “Appeal” document.
It’s been known for years that increasing the percentage of impervious land surface in the Puget Sound basin increases harmful bacterial counts and other nasties in the water of the Sound.
From Stormwater Quality in Puget Sound (https://www.cityhabitats.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/TNCWA_Stormwater-Report_2021_R3.pdf)
Sources of
toxics in Puget Sound are most clearly
attributable to the different ways land is
used (Rau 2015) – developed land is a much
larger source of pollution than undevel-
oped land. Monitoring of water, sediment,
and tissue contamination in Puget Sound
generally shows increased concentrations
of toxic chemicals proximate to urbanized
areas, and decreased contamination proxi-
mate to undeveloped areas (Ecology 2011).
Coho salmon pre-spawning mortality rates
increase along an urban gradient associated
with road and traffic density (Feist et al.
2017). Benthic degradation in freshwater
(Morley 2000) and marine (Bilkovic et al.
2006) habitats increases with increasing
impervious surface area (Booth et al. 2004).
Even areas with low development (5-10%
impervious) show significant benthic
degradation in streams (Cuffney et al. 2010).
In a California study comparing runoff
from similar watersheds differing in degree
of development, the urbanized watershed
consistently produced runoff with higher
True as that may be, using it as an argument against urban densification is tragically ironic, because redeveloping urban lots to accommodate more people is by far the most efficient way to avoid creating the new roads and driveways which would inevitably be built if that development were forced out into the suburbs instead.
Are they arguing against densification or against densification done badly?
What difference does it make? “Done badly” sounds subjective; the environmental impact is always going to be lower if you build in the city than out of it.
Densification with clearcutting and minimal permeable ground (e.g., guaranteeing 80% lot coverage) is objectively worse environmentally than densification with retention of significant trees and less lot coverage. The former provides an incentive for people to move to the suburbs and exurbs.
I don’t understand how that could possibly work. Densification inside the city is how we prevent people from needing to leave for the suburbs, where there will not going to be any retention of trees whatsoever when those new roads and driveways get built. If a tree gets cut down here and there so what? It’s vastly less impact to slightly lose a little bit of tree cover in the already-mostly-concrete city than it would be to lose relatively more trees out in the less-developed areas.
What does “clearcutting” even mean in the city? That all happened over a century ago.
The pictured setbacks in the photos of duplexes, cottage housing and townhouses all appear to be unrealistically large in light of today’s building codes in Seattle, misrepresenting the amount of permeable surface area that would be retained in development.
I have no connection to the appeals.