Top Policy Priorities
Allow midrise housing (4-8 stories) and mixed uses in all residential areas within walking distance of frequent transit
Allow middle housing like triplexes, fourplexes, sixplexes, townhouses, and stacked flats throughout all residential areas
Create significant floor area, height, and density bonuses for affordable and social housing development
Reaction to the Draft One Seattle Plan
The Draft One Seattle Plan released by the Mayor and OPCD aspires to expand housing opportunities across the city, promote equitable development citywide, focus growth and investment in complete, walkable communities, and meet the challenges of climate change for a resilient future.
Unfortunately, the substance of the Draft Plan falls short of that vision and will not adequately meet Seattle's need for more housing. The Draft Plan retains land use patterns that have reduced opportunities for renters and first-time homebuyers and limited more affordable housing types to arterials. Failure to plan for enough homes across the city will result in rising housing costs, continued racial and economic inequities in access to housing and amenities, and stagnation in the City’s progress on climate goals.
Draft One Seattle Plan
Future Land Use Map Changes
Strengths of the Draft Plan
With the Draft Plan, the City gets several things right and we believe in giving credit where credit is due. Our coalition supports the following features of the Draft Plan:
Expanding Urban Center boundaries and creating a new Urban Center at 130th Street
Designating Ballard as a new Regional Center
Removing parking minimum requirements near transit and considering a citywide removal
Policy to support community-based developers working to help BIPOC homeowners avoid displacement
Allowing corner stores throughout Neighborhood Residential areas
Improving The Draft Plan
The City’s community engagement process during the scoping phase revealed that Seattleites want more housing options. By building on the framework of the Draft Plan and addressing its shortcomings, the City can respond to constituents’ desires and needs by ensuring that Seattle grows equitably over the next twenty years.
Expanded Transit-Oriented Development
Allow for midrise housing in all areas served by frequent transit, in the ¼ mile around frequent bus service and ½ mile around light rail.
Enlarge the proposed Neighborhood Centers, from 800-ft to ¼ mile.
Reintroduce Neighborhood Centers that were studied but not included in the Draft Plan.
Allow the development of cross-laminated timber highrise buildings in Regional and Urban Centers.
Expanded Middle Housing
Enable the development of family-sized homes in middle housing by allowing for more development capacity in fourplexes, sixplexes, and other middle housing options.
Align Seattle’s middle housing standards with the Department of Commerce model ordinance, at a minimum, to ensure middle housing can be feasibly built.
Create development incentives, like floor area ratio bonuses, for stacked flats and family-sized homes.
Ending Exclusionary Zoning & Advancing Racial Equity
Create height, density, and floor area bonuses for affordable rental housing, affordable homeownership, and social housing development.
Strengthen the Growth Strategy’s anti-displacement impact by allowing sixplexes on all residential lots in Urban Neighborhood areas with low displacement risk.
Give homeowners interested in redeveloping their property technical assistance and land use incentives.
Designate a Regional Center in South Seattle and conduct subarea planning.
Why the Draft One Seattle Plan Isn’t Enough
It Doesn’t Plan for Enough Homes
The Draft One Seattle Plan contemplates an average annual housing production rate of 5,000 homes over the next 20 years. This is significantly lower than the 6,800 to 12,500 homes that Seattle has actually built per year since 2015—which itself has been insufficient to keep up with job growth and demand.
Simply put, the current Draft Plan is a plan to make Seattle more expensive. This will most impact renters, low-income people, and people of color, as we face rising rents and displacement pressures. This is a step back in our efforts to meet the growing demand for housing.
It Doesn’t Allow for Family-Sized Homes in Middle Housing
We strongly support policies to allow for middle housing options like duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes, sixplexes, townhomes, stacked flats, courtyard apartments, and cottage clusters throughout current neighborhood residential areas.
However, the proposed standards do not represent an effective increase in development capacity beyond what is currently allowed with Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs). It only allows a developer to squeeze more homes into the same allowed footprint. This will limit our ability to create family-sized homes in middle housing in Seattle over the next 20+ years. ADUs, while important, are not sufficient to address our affordability crisis and displacement of Black, Brown, and low-income communities.
It Doesn’t Effectively Expand Housing Near Transit
The Draft Plan does not adequately expand midrise multifamily housing in transit-accessible neighborhoods. Outside existing urban centers and limited new neighborhood centers, the Draft Plan restricts multifamily homes to properties directly on arterials. Large swathes of Seattle within walking distance from frequent transit, with good access to amenities and low risk of displacement, will remain off-limits for multifamily homes under the Draft Plan.
This will restrict our ability to build new affordable housing across the city. It perpetuates the inequities of the existing urban village strategy, patterns of historic exclusion, and the environmental injustice of restricting new housing to noisy, busy roads. And it misses the opportunity to reduce carbon emissions by allowing more people to live in areas with access to frequent transit.
Detailed Policy Priorities
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Allow midrise (6-8 story) apartments within a 10 to 15 minute walk of frequent transit and parks. People should have access to affordable housing on safe, residential streets close to transit.
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Allow the full complement of “middle housing”--duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes, accessory dwelling units, cottage clusters, townhomes, stacked flats, and courtyard apartments–in all residential areas across Seattle. These housing options are relatively affordable, fit in well in neighborhood residential areas, and can create affordable homeownership options.
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Encourage the development of affordable and social housing by providing a height, density, and floor area bonus for properties that contribute to equity goals. This could involve reserving a significant portion for people earning less than 80% of Area Median Income, supporting homeowners at risk of displacement, or all-income housing that maintains full public ownership.
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Support walkable and complete communities throughout all of Seattle by creating neighborhood anchors that include sufficient capacity for housing and mixed-use developments to truly create 15-minute neighborhoods. Allow and incentivize the development of small ground floor commercial uses and community gathering spaces.
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Allow high-rise housing near light rail stations and urban centers, particularly in low-displacement risk areas.
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Allow the most growth in low-displacement areas. Fund community-based developments that utilize an affirmative marketing and/or community preference policy to allow displaced people to return.
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Consider the health and safety impacts of infrastructure routes in decisions about future land use and housing density. Mitigate the pollution caused by freeways, airports, and other carbon-emitting transportation options, which are disproportionately located in marginalized communities, through lids and other strategies.
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Expand opportunities for affordable homeownership, to help close the large and persistent racial homeownership and wealth gap. Ensure new affordable homeownership developments are able to benefit from all incentives available to other affordable housing types. Stabilize low-income homeowners at risk of foreclosure and displacement.
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Ensure permit review timelines are predictable and as fast as possible. Reform design review to ensure it does not delay the production of much-needed housing.
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Remove residential density limits and requirements for side-setbacks, upper-level stepbacks, modulation, and articulation. Such development standards require more complex building envelopes, directly reducing energy efficiency and making innovative construction methods like cross-laminated timber or modular construction more difficult.
Remove parking requirements to reduce housing costs and promote sustainable transportation options. The high cost of parking spaces limits the feasibility of affordable housing development. By eliminating these requirements, we can create more affordable and sustainable housing options while also encouraging alternative transportation methods.
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Encourage sustainable construction by offering incentives for meeting deep green building standards, such as passive house construction or preservation of embedded carbon in existing structures.
Promote the creation of housing options that are physically accessible to people with disabilities, as well as unit sizes that can accommodate multigenerational households, housing for elders, and housing with sufficient rooms for larger families.
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Identify gaps in transit frequency and park access, and work towards filling these gaps. Build safe walking, rolling, and biking infrastructure in parts of the city where it is missing. Ensure publicly-owned open spaces located near transit provide a variety of uses that are accessible to a wide range of users.