The City Council Should Restore Affordable Housing to the Stadium District
Allowing apartments just south of Seattle's stadiums would help improve public safety and support small businesses, like breweries and clothing manufacturers, that are currently struggling.
By Joshua Curtis and John Marchione
In September 2022, after years of study, the City of Seattle finally released a much-anticipated Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS) analysis of proposed changes to the City’s maritime and industrial strategy. That document, released after years of discussion and consideration by the industrial lands task force convened by then-mayor Jenny Durkan, set forward a “Preferred Alternative” that called for allowing a limited amount of affordable workforce housing in the immediate vicinity of Lumen Field and T-Mobile Park.
But because of a behind-the-scenes lobbying push from the Port of Seattle and the Longshore Union, the City Council ended up adopting an industrial lands package that stripped out the housing from the Stadium District. That decision, driven largely by political calculus rather than sound policy, essentially killed a broadly endorsed vision for a vibrant “maker’s zone” in the immediate vicinity of the stadiums that would combine street-level light industrial and artisanal manufacturing uses—think breweries, distilleries, or a clothing manufacturer with a retail storefront—with that housing.
It’s time to correct that mistake.
Council President Sara Nelson introduced legislation last month that would restore the maker’s zone vision and add back the opportunity for about 1,000 mostly affordable housing units to be constructed in the north part of the SoDo neighborhood, providing a real opportunity to address our housing crisis. It would also take a big step toward reinvigorating small maker’s businesses that are slowly being pushed out of the city—like the 700 diverse urban manufacturers and producers represented by Seattle Made, one of the broad coalition of organizations supporting Nelson’s. And it will create greater vibrancy and improved public safety in an area directly adjacent to Pioneer Square and the Chinatown/International District (CID).
All of this can be accomplished while preserving our industrial economy and keeping well-paying blue-collar jobs in Seattle. As the Seattle Office of Planning and Community Development Director’s Report, transmitted to the council along with the industrial lands legislation, clearly stated: “OPCD’s independent analysis leads us to believes that some limited amount of housing would be compatible with the surrounding use pattern and would not cause additional adverse impacts on nearby industrial activities[.]”
The plain fact of the matter is that the transitional area immediately adjacent to the stadiums has changed so much that it no longer makes sense to consider it exclusively industrial. A significant portion of the area around the stadiums, primarily south of the ballpark, is characterized by deteriorating buildings and vacant lots. No actual industrial activity remains, nor will it ever return, because the high value of the land in that area makes industrial uses on those sites cost-prohibitive.
The area around these public facilities is already zoned for commercial use, including bland mid-rise offices, which, if developed, will actually bring more traffic to the area than a mixed-use maker’s zone would. The area benefits from an expanding transit system: It is less than a mile from two light rail stations, which currently have the lowest and third-lowest ridership of the 19 stations on Sound Transit's north-south 1 Line, largely because almost no one lives near them. And it directly abuts the Pioneer Square, Waterfront, and CID neighborhoods. As the environmental study concluded, the opportunity to create a mixed-use district around the public stadiums would ease the transition between Pioneer Square and the CID and the industrial areas to the south. These spaces can help to build employment and entrepreneurial opportunity within communities of color that often face intimidating barriers to entry.
To achieve all this, the inclusion of a threshold level of workforce housing is essential, both to help underwrite projects that include these maker’s spaces and to contribute to the city’s critical housing supply. We know this because an outside, expert analysis jointly commissioned by our two public boards in 2022 found that this sort of maker’s zone would not pencil and would not be developed unless a threshold level of housing was included.
Support for this plan is strong. In a 2021 poll, 87 percent of registered voters favored the inclusion of some residential uses in this area. Earlier this month, an impressive coalition of groups, including unions, small businesses, affordable housing developers, the Mariners, and many others joined with the two public boards stewarding the public ownership of the stadiums to urge the council to pass this important legislation.
There is a once-in-a-generation opportunity here. Reviving the maker’s zone idea would allow the Stadium District to accommodate light manufacturing along with a modest mix of affordable and market-rate housing. This would be a big step toward solving multiple problems, would make much better use of the underutilized land around the stadiums, and would transition well to the maritime and industrial areas of the waterfront.
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Joshua Curtis is the Executive Director of the Washington State Ballpark Public Facilities District. John Marchione is Executive Director of the Washington State Public Stadium Authority.