Seattle Nice: Debating Density

The mayor's edits of the proposed Comprehensive Plan took density off the table. We discuss what this means for Seattle—and whether he's out of step with voters.

On this week’s Seattle Nice, we discuss the story PubliCola published on Monday on about Mayor Bruce Harrell’s edits to the draft Comprehensive Plan update, which will guide growth in the city for the next 20 years.

As we reported, an earlier draft of the plan, created by the city’s Office of Planning and Community Development, was ready to go in August, but Harrell’s office sent it back for extensive revisions and cuts. The plan released in March slashed the number of “neighborhood centers”—areas around major intersections deep inside Seattle’s single-family enclaves where the comp plan proposes denser housing, including apartments—by half. It also eliminates a proposal to allow more housing along main streets throughout the city; instead, new density is limited mostly to major arterial roads, as it is in the current “urban village” plan.

Harrell released his proposal, which replicates the “urban village” strategy of the 1990s within the framework of a new state law that requires all cities to allow at least four units per lot, at a time when most Seattle residents say they would welcome more housing in their own neighborhoods to help address the city’s housing affordability crisis. We discuss whether the mayor’s approach to housing has kept up with a city whose attitudes (and demographics—more than half of us are renters) have shifted dramatically over the last 20 years.

Listen below or wherever you get your podcasts.