Planning Commission: Harrell's Growth Plan Will Worsen Inequities and Keep Housing Unaffordable
"Upholding this pattern of economic and racial exclusion will do little to reduce disparities in housing affordability, access, and choice."
By Erica C. Barnett
The city's Planning Commission, which advises the mayor and City Council on policies related to Seattle's growth, sent a point-by-point critique of Mayor Bruce Harrell's proposed 20-year Comprehensive Plan Update to Harrell and Office of Planning and Community Development (OPCD) director Rico Quirondongo last week, echoing many of the issues PubliCola has identified with the status-quo proposal.
As we've reported, OPCD originally proposed a plan that would have included significantly more density throughout the city than the anemic version Harrell ultimately introduced, along with an "anti-displacement framework" that deleted dozens of proposals aimed at addressing ongoing harms caused by city policies, like zoning and development rules that prohibit most housing in single-family neighborhoods.
"The [Anti-Displacement] Framework, as drafted, is a list of what the City is already doing to address displacement, yet displacement has already impacted many people and continues to happen," the commission wrote.
By failing to provide enough housing of all types, especially apartments, in more parts of the city, Harrell's proposal perpetuates the existing "urban village" strategy, which preserves most of the city for single-family homeowners while concentrating apartments on major arterials and highways. "Upholding this pattern of economic and racial exclusion will do little to reduce disparities in housing affordability, access, and choice," the commission wrote.
Instead of remedying the existing housing shortage and planning for continued growth in the future, the proposal assumes housing growth will slow down dramatically over the next 20 years, from about 8,000 units a year to just 5,000.
"In order to ensure everyone has a home they can afford in the neighborhood of their choice, we need to plan to increase, not reduce, our current rate of housing production" to allow "five to eight story multifamily housing in many more areas of the city." Specifically, the commission recommends expanding "neighborhood centers"—small, isolated where Harrell's plan would allow three-t0-five-story apartment buildings—to include high-end neighborhoods like Laurelhurst and Seward Park, and allowing higher-density housing further away from "high-volume, high-speed" arterials, so that renters could more easily access amenities like "large parks and quiet streets for recreation" that single-family homeowners enjoy.
"The current housing market locks the most affordable homes, multifamily apartment buildings, into small areas of the city that are often along noisy and polluting major highway corridors or in areas that historically faced disinvestment," the commissioners wrote. "If the City continues to concentrate affordable housing types like multifamily apartments in the same areas of the city, these long-term patterns of inequity will not change."
While Harrell's proposal technically complies with state law by allowing four housing units on all residential lots, the city envisions these units as tall, narrow townhouses, not apartments or "stacked flats," which are generally more affordable (and accessible to people who can't climb multiple flights of stairs.) Increasing density in formerly exclusive single-family neighborhoods to allow small apartment buildings would make it more likely that people with modest incomes could live in these units, the commissioners wrote.
In addition to growth, the comprehensive plan includes strategies related to transportation and parking; these, too, fail to acknowledge 21st-century reality, the Planning Commission argues. Like Harrell's back-to-office mandate for city of Seattle workers, the plan "overemphasizes centralized employment in Downtown and other Regional Centers," despite the fact that "daily life and commuting patterns have shifted significantly with many more daily needs being met closer to home." Acknowledging this reality would mean allowing more neighborhood businesses (not just corner stores on literal corners) and "incorporat[ing] flexibility into land use policies associated with residential and commercial uses," the commission wrote.
As PubliCola reported, Harrell's office deleted an OPCD recommendation to get rid of minimum parking requirements throughout the city, a decision the commission recommended reversing "to reduce housing costs and encourage alternative transportation modes." In addition, the commissioners noted, Harrell's plan focuses on private vehicle electrification to reduce greenhouse gas emissions—a future in which Teslas, rather than gas-fueled vehicles, clog city streets every morning and afternoon. With Seattle already "leading its peer cities in the number of cars owned per capita," the commission argued, the city should focus on reducing vehicle trips by investing in alternatives to driving.
It isn't too late to weigh in on Harrell's vision for growth, housing, and transportation in Seattle, but the deadline is approaching. The city will hold its final in-person open house on the comprehensive plan from 6 to 7:30 pm on Tuesday, April 30, at McClure Middle School on Queen Anne, followed by a virtual open house starting at 6:00 on Thursday, May 2. The public has until 5 pm on Monday, May 6, to submit comments on the proposal.
I appreciate your reporting on the Comp Plan. However, there's a problem with the plan, which allows stacked flats, courtyard apartments and corner stores, and with your reporting. No one is willing to build them as rentals. The Master Builders will never build rentals, because that's not their business model. And the nonprofit members of the Housing Development Consortium won't, either, because they need 24 townhouses or 50+ apartment units to build and staff low-income apartments, based on economies of scale. Thus the only low-income units in formerly single-family areas will be built by homeowners themselves, if they can get a loan. There is no affordability requirement in the Middle Housing Bill. It's a gift to the townhouse builders.
This makes much more sense then Harrel's status quo, do-nothing-but-pander-to-his-political-base plan. Please god, where is his competition for Mayor next year?