New State Bills Could Force Seattle to Reform Parking, Historical Landmarking Rules

Today's Afternoon Fizz showcases two bills that could help Seattle build more housing.

1. Here at PubliCola’s Pioneer Square offices, state senator Jessica Bateman (D-22, Olympia) has earned the sobriquet “Mayor Bateman” thanks to HB 1110, a Yes-Fourplexes-in-My-Backyard bill we’ve been tracking since she first proposed it in the run-up to the 2023 legislative session. It passed in 2023, forcing Seattle to allow four-unit multifamily housing in residential areas traditionally zoned for single family housing only; these zones make up the vast majority, about 70 percent, of the city's residential land.

Bateman’s latest bill, a longstanding urbanist wish-list item to get rid of mandatory parking minimums (they add hefty costs to building housing and perpetuate car(bon)-centric lifestyles), could once again force Seattle to up its game when it comes to enacting progressive planning policy.

The bill, co-sponsored by Seattle-area state senator Jamie Pedersen (D-43, Capitol Hill), would prohibit cities from requiring more than one new parking space for every two new residential units and from requiring more than one space per 1,000 square feet of commercial space.

While Mayor Bruce Harrell's current comprehensive plan proposal applies the same parking standards in residential areas as Bateman's bill, the legislation also eliminates parking requirements completely for new housing units under 1,200 square feet—a profile that will almost certainly overlap with much of the new fourplex housing that’s allowed across the city. The bill would also exempt affordable housing, senior housing, and child care centers from parking minimums—and, sensibly, bars.

Seattle eliminated parking requirements for development within a quarter-mile of frequent transit and in existing mixed-used housing and commercial urban hubs back in 2012. HB 1110 forced the city to go further by eliminating minimum parking mandates within a half-mile of major transit stops.

The bill moved out of the senate housing committee this week and is now in the rules committee.

2. State Sen. Jesse Salomon (D-32, Shoreline)—along with, yes, Sen. Bateman—is proposing legislation that would bar cities from landmarking any building without a property owner's consent if landmark status would restrict the owner from using, altering, or demolishing the building. It would also prohibit cities from designating buildings less than 40 years old as historic landmarks.

One in four Washington cities, including Seattle and Tacoma, allow historic landmarking without an owner's consent—a provision that empowers any person or organization to nominate any building that's old enough to qualify for landmark protection.

That might sound reasonable on its face; nobody wants to see important historic landmarks bulldozed. In practice, though, it has empowered groups to nominate buildings for landmark status that are merely old, like a nondescript 3-story commercial building near downtown; crumbling, like the derelict, long-vacant one-story building that housed Mama's Mexican Restaurant in Belltown until 2016; or cookie-cutter (a 1950s former bank building on Denny Way that's identical to many others across the state, including several in Seattle).

"It seems to me that you should have the property owners consent before you put essentially a hold on the development," Sen. Salomon said at a hearing on the bill last week.

Sightline's Dan Bertolet has many more examples of housing that has been delayed or prevented by nonconsensual landmark nominations here, including the recent nomination of a structurally obsolete building where the YWCA plans to build affordable housing and a house in the Central District where a fully permitted 49-unit mixed-income apartment building was halted by a last-minute landmark nomination.

In virtually every instance, the push to impose restrictions on a building comes in response to, or anticipation of, an effort to turn a site into housing. As Sightline's Dan Bertolet has dominated, questionable landmark protections have prevented hundreds of new apartment homes from being built over the past decade, and forced developers to redesign buildings (and eliminate housing) in order to incorporate old structures—like the facade of a former tire store at an affordable housing complex on Broadway.

And in Seattle, unlike most other cities, buildings older than 25 years are eligible for landmark nomination, meaning that a building that went up in 2000 could be nominated for historic status today. Seattle is the only city in the state that sets the landmark threshold at 25 years.

In two hearings on the bill this week, opponents argued that cities like Seattle should have the right to establish their own landmarking rules, and said the new restrictions would allow developers to run roughshod over neighborhood and historic groups. "Preservation is not anti development—it can be a tool for anti displacement," Historic Seattle's Eugenia Woo said. "The renovation of older buildings has long been used to provide housing."

In his testimony, Bertolet argued that not only has landmarking been used to prevent new housing in the past, it could be an even more effective tool against the "middle housing" allowed under Bateman's HB 1110, which will likely be built by smaller companies than those that developer large apartment buildings. "Anyone at any time could nominate the house on their project site for landmark status, putting the project in limbo," Bertolet said. "Requiring owner consent would eliminate this risk and prevent the misuse of historic landmarking to undermine [HB 1110's] goals."

—Josh Feit, Erica C. Barnett