Next up in Seattle Housing

It’s a New Year in Seattle, with a New Mayor, and we are about to progress to the next stage of putting our twenty-year housing plan in place.

The Director of the Office of Planning and Community Development, Rico Quirindongo, announced that his office is aimed at getting the next stages of the plan in the hands of the city council. This includes the “centers” and “corridors” parts of the plan, now that the “neighborhood” phase is over.

Quirindongo noted that there are parts of these plans that could be better if tweaked in the future instead of now. Corridors, in particular, have come in for criticism, since they stuff all the housing on busy roads. However, it should be noted that in their original memo to the public, this office did suggest much more housing farther from busy roads. The Harrell administration simply squelched the idea.

Quirindongo’s suggestion, then, is to not significantly amend these plans (yet), which would require more environmental review and add lots more delay. The goal is to get them out the door as fast as we can, in order to increase housing construction and get compliant with state law. Then, he said, let’s come back, implement the state’s new Transit-Oriented Development law (hopefully earlier than the state deadline?!), and address corridors (include housing off the busy roads but still close to buses!), and make other adjustments as needed.

I think this is very much the right choice. We cannot let the perfect be the enemy of the fast + good, especially when there will be an opportunity to come back and tweak to get closer to the ideal form. 

Corridors alone are bad policy in the long run. But combined with the other off-the-shelf stuff like stacked flats and big neighborhood centers, and the aim to eventually increase housing a short walk from transit, they become part of better whole. And if we work to transform these roads into active transportation and green corridors — well then, they become amazing. And in the meantime they allow more housing to be built. 

With the Complete Communities Coalition having wrangled so much improvement out of the neighborhoods plan, and the council moving significantly left at the same time as we elected Mayor Wilson, the future for these matters is bright.

A correction upon reflection.

Which leaves me to correct myself from a previous piece. There I said the neighborhood stacked-flat legislation isn’t finished and should be revisited right away. I want to amend my timeline on that. I got new information and decided I was wrong.

Like corridors, neighborhoods should be improved after the other off-the-shelf stuff is done. Thanks to the work of the Complete Communities Coalition, the stacked-flat bonuses currently in place are perhaps the best in the country. That is something to celebrate! 

On certain pieces of property, stacked flats that qualify for bonuses may even outperform townhomes for builders, and so we’ll start to see more of this best-in-class building around our great city. 

That said, even though the legislation is best-in-class in the nation, I do believe that for wide-scale adoption, we will eventually need to do more. This stuff is hard!

But some of that “more” will come from the state. For instance, this year I’m working on a bill to reduce elevator costs, and I’ll be advocating (in my own name, not for any organization) along with others to change condo liability to make more buildings like stacked flat condos viable for homeownership. With some other code changes increasingly likely in the coming years, stacked flats will become much more viable. 

And by the time we’ve finished the other items on our to-do list in Seattle, we can boost the bonuses and remove the setbacks and we’ll be in stacked-flat nirvana!