Seattle City Council is now considering a sweeping upzoning of all residential neighborhoods to comply with a federal housing mandate.
The broad upzone is among several options that Seattle’s Office of Planning & Community Development (OPCD) is mulling over after a presentation on Wednesday. The City has a deadline of October to finalize Seattle’s growth management strategy under the Growth Management Act with its Comprehensive Plan.
Michael Hubner, the Program Manager, and Senior Policy Analyst for OPCD stated “This is a process that happens about once a decade… The last update process happened in the middle of the last decade. And each time we update a comprehensive plan, we’re looking out to a new 20-year planning period and anticipating the kind of growth that we expect over that time.”
Alongside this comprehensive upzoning, OPCD is considering several other presented options, labeled as: “No Action,” “Focused,” “Broad,” and “Corridors.”
Broad
The “Broad” option would allow for a more comprehensive range of more affordable housing options, like triplexes and fourplexes, in all neighborhood residential zones.
“This envisions new types of housing and somewhat more growth at a very dispersed and lower level than you would see certainly in an urban village,” Hubner said. “But with housing types like triplexes, and fourplexes, townhomes, that sort of thing in all areas of the city and trying that emphasize what that would look like. It’s not tossing out the centers and villages, it’s a new feature.”
This plan would hopefully expand housing choices, particularly ownership, in all neighborhoods while mitigating the exclusionary nature of current zoning. It would also permit more housing options near existing amenities, like parks and other neighborhood facilities, with a slight increase in at-home and commercial businesses spread throughout the city.
No Action
A second option, “No Action”, steadies the course of focusing most housing and job creation efforts within the existing urban centers and villages. This choice would bring no change to land use patterns.
“This has been the city’s growth strategy for almost 30 years since the original comprehensive plan was adopted,” Hubner said. “The intent has been to concentrate new housing and jobs in compact, walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods that are linked by transit. It also focuses on industrial development and manufacturing centers. We’re also aware from community comment from our own data, that they’re growing concerns about this strategy with respect to equity, housing, supply and diversity, and affordability and displacement.”
Under the current plan, new housing development is primarily targeted at rental apartments concentrated in existing mixed-use zones. Most land outside urban villages remains limited to high-cost detached houses (with 75% of Seattle being zoned for single-family residences)
The current goal is to create 80,000 new homes and 132,000 new jobs over the next 20 years, which is the minimum requirement for Seattle under the regional framework.
Focused
The third strategy, “Focused”, aims to create additional areas of growth, including new and expanded urban villages and new smaller nodes.
“Essentially, [Focused] is taking over the current strategy and growing it with new or expanded urban villages in appropriate locations, smaller places, we’re calling them nodes for now, but think of those as mini-urban villages with businesses, services, and new housing opportunities around largely some of our existing neighborhood commercial centers across the city,” Hubner said. “And the idea here is to bring that walkable, complete 15-minute experience opportunity to more people across the city.”
Smaller nodes are defined as places with diverse housing and mixed uses to support complete microcosm neighborhoods that cut down on the need for personal vehicle use and ownership.
Focused was designed to increase opportunities to grow “complete neighborhoods,” where the majority can walk to their everyday needs alongside a more complete range of housing options, primarily rental apartments near amenities and services. There would be a slight anticipated increase in at-home and commercial businesses due to a larger number of people living in Seattle.
Corridors
The final proposal, “Corridors”, would permit a wider range of low-scale housing options only in neighborhoods near frequent transit and amenities. These areas would allow options like triplexes and fourplexes, but could also allow other types of housing such as townhouses and/or small apartments.
“Essentially, this is the same kind of concept as in the last alternative where more areas of the city allow what some people refer to as missing middle housing, but along our major transit corridors and around some of our major amenities in the city,” Hubner said. “Some of these large parks, community centers, or existing commercial retail areas, would be an area those places would allow not only triplexes and fourplexes, but also sixplexes, or small apartment buildings and new forms of townhomes.”
Hubner described the Corridors option as essentially the same amount of housing spread across the city the Broad plan would create, but with more concentration and a greater array of housing types.
An additional pitch, called “Combined”, would use a combination of plans 2, 3, and 4, resulting in more areas identified as appropriate for more housing and mixed-use development.
Under the Growth Management Act, Seattle has to adopt an updated plan by the end of 2024.
Brenden Covington
Trusted Real Estate Advisor
Windermere Real Estate/HLC
13901 NE 175th St, Suite 100 | Woodinville, WA 98072
Cell 206.617.4879 | Email [email protected]