Over the last 15 years, Seattle has steadily transformed its land use code, with every few years bringing another cycle of change and more intensive development.
Multifamily zones were revamped to allow more flexibility and introduce new housing types. Mandatory parking space requirements were eliminated in huge portions of the city. Micro-housing emerged in a new format, was subsequently banned, and later reinstated. Inclusionary zoning was enacted, requiring new development to pay for affordable housing. With it came major up-zones in areas that would have been politically unthinkable just a few years prior.
These earlier changes pale compared to what is on the table today. Exclusive single-family zoning has been eliminated — period. Such zoning will no longer exist, so neighborhoods once reserved for single-family homes will now allow four townhomes on every lot. In addition to swallowing that change, the body politic is also being asked to digest a substantial number of rezones in new neighborhood centers and along every frequent-transit route in the city. Unlike past cycles, powerful wealthy neighborhoods have not been excluded from these changes.
Unsurprisingly, homeowners in these areas are having trouble with the changes. Most of them are driven by state-level mandates and obligations under the Growth Management Act, and some are the result of a progressive, pro-equity, pro-housing agenda championed by the Seattle Office of Planning and Community Development (OPCD) and Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office.
The details of this proposal have been out there brewing for a while, tracked mostly by housing nerds and interest groups. But over the past month, the knowledge of these changes has become much more widespread, and the collective freak-out has begun. The public comment period for the OPCD-prepared portion of the plan ended on December 20. All of those comments were compiled, aggregated, and sent to the Seattle City Council to begin their work on refining and approving the final version. The first public meeting on this topic was held by the council early January, with many more to come.
This is a different city council than in the recent past. Councilmembers are less in tune with the pro-housing crowd and a bit more sympathetic to the slow-growth, save-the-trees, NIMBYish side of this conversation. How they will square their beliefs and their district politics with the plan laid before them is an open question.
Here are the key issues that will most impact building quality and the city’s urban fabric.
Rezone equitably versus real-world impact
The current rezoning proposal creates LR3 (low-rise), 50-foot-high apartment zoning along the length of frequent transit routes throughout the city. A lot of people with fancy houses in expensive neighborhoods have discovered that someone can build a looming apartment next door. This is the source of the most homeowners’ anxiety and the biggest political headache for the city council.
The equity principle behind the proposed zoning has merit. But it’s also largely an empty gesture. Density-advocates can change the zone, but if the existing home on the site is worth more than the land, no developer will be interested in buying. In many of these areas, the homes are worth substantially more than the dirt underneath.
In addition, the practical economics of building apartments in LR3 are quite difficult. The sites most likely to be developed are large parcels (15,000 sf or more), with frequent transit service and good utility service that does not require main extensions. Many of the new upzoned areas would be unlikely candidates for redevelopment for these reasons.
While the actual changes created by the up-zoning are mostly imaginary, the political backlash is real. This means that it will cost real political capital to enact these changes with little corresponding benefit to housing production. The pro-housing bloc may be popular, but it is not working with infinite political support. I think it would be wise to trim the sails of these symbolic rezones to areas where basic real estate economics might plausibly support future redevelopment.
Parking: How much to require? How much to allow?
Neighborhood Residential (NR) zones will now allow 4 dwelling units per lot. The kind of housing we hope to see at this scale is “ground-based housing,” where the homes enjoy meaningful connection from the interior living areas to exterior open space. The success of any given project hinges on the open-space design, and the success of the open-space design is largely driven by the amount and location of the parking. In sum, good housing requires a good parking solution.
The current proposal will require two parking spaces for a 4-unit development, effectively doubling the amount of required parking on-site. For sites without alley access this results in lots of area lost to driveways and parking. There is also the issue of what the market desires. Any spec builder or real estate agent will tell you that the typical buyer wants a parking space with their unit, so a typical new townhouse provides 1:1 parking. For a site without alley access, this results in an auto-court almost every time. So, if we don’t want to see drab 4-packs springing up throughout the NR zones, what are our options?
Option 1:
Don’t require parking for sites that lack alley access. This one is simple — don’t create a requirement for which there is no good design solution. This would relieve mid-block sites from being forced into a parking-court solution.
Option 2:
Don’t allow parking in the middle 1/3 of the site. This would essentially prohibit parking courts that fill the site with driveways in lieu of gardens and open space. This would significantly improve the quality of the resulting housing. Developers who want to respond to consumer preference and neighbors who want to protect access to their existing street parking would both be appalled by this idea. However, if you want the best result for the housing and the streetscape, this is the right solution. A less draconian version of this would be:
Option 3:
Only allow parking in the middle 1/3 of the site when it is covered by an open-space lid. This would encourage this kind of courtyard housing project. This solution would only work if SDCI and the fire department cooperated to create a building-code path to approve these projects in a predictable fashion, using Type V wood construction. My architectural firm designed several projects like this in the past, but each one was costly, risky, and slow to get approved. A lid over the drive aisle transforms a drab 4-pack into a gracious courtyard housing — but this type of project is only possible with encouragement from SDCI.
Design Standards. Can good design be prescribed?
It is widely recognized that prescriptive zoning regulations are not an effective way to foster good design, and that the rigid nature of such rules almost inevitably produces unintended, undesirable designs. The new design standards proposed for Seattle’s Residential zones fall squarely into this category, and they will inevitably result in uninspired cookie-cutter designs. They will strip homeowners of basic agency over the look and feel of their homes. They will constrain designers in ways that make excellence more difficult. And they will generally produce results that run contrary to their intended purpose.
Known bad ideas like design standards get proposed because the idea of allowing more intensive development is unsettling to the public and so policymakers are tasked with “doing something” about it. If that something turns out to be ineffective and counterproductive — then the results can be blamed on greedy developers and their kin.
While I would prefer that we just throw the design standards out the door and replace them with nothing, I recognize the political need for policymakers and politicians to address the public’s desire for the code to contain sufficient guardrails. There is a productive way to do it:
A points-based system could be used in lieu of design standards for NR and LR zoning. This system would avoid any rigid mandates while encouraging applicants to incorporate desirable architectural features. Applicants would choose from a list of widely recognized beneficial design elements. Each of these elements would be assigned a point value, and applicants would need to score a certain number of points to comply. This approach would promote the inclusion of desirable features while maintaining the flexibility necessary to accommodate a variety of project types, site conditions, and architectural styles.
To refine the system, existing buildings can also be evaluated against the rubric, creating a testing ground that ensures the guidelines are achievable and effective. See this memo for a more detailed description of this idea.
Design Review is over. What now?
The existing design-review program we have now has been rendered completely unworkable by HB 1293, which requires design-review guidelines to be concrete and objective, limits public meetings, and requires the process to be concurrent and logically integrated with the permit review.
What the city will propose in its place is anyone’s guess. They can continue to require applicants to attend a public meeting, but since application of subjective guidelines is no longer permitted, there is no role for a design review board in responding to public comment or application of the guidelines. Nor can approval of the concept at the public meeting be a rite of passage to future phases of the project, since there can be only one required meeting and that must be integrated into the approval process.
It’s a given that high-stakes public meetings and board approvals are a thing of the past. They can either be replaced by meaningless theater, or by nothing at all. But either way design review will no longer function as a means for boards and planners to integrate public comment, community sentiment, and design quality.
In its place, policymakers and politicians may be tempted to replace design review with a host of prescriptive new guidelines. This would be a disastrous approach for all the reasons discussed above, but these mistakes would also be writ large onto major public buildings.
A points-based system like the one described above could form the basis of a design review program that would meet the requirements of HB 1293 to provide “clear and objective development regulations” that includes “ascertainable guidelines by which an applicant can determine if the building design is permissible.” The city of Shoreline’s design-review program has some elements that provide a starting point.
What Else?
To be candid, there are countless other consequential issues on the table. Should MHA be applied to NR zoning? or should it be removed from LR zones? Should fractional density calculations round up or down? Should ECA areas be included in density calculations? Should floor-area ratio (FAR) go up in NR zones along with the density? How will departures be handled in a world without design review?
The next few months spent hashing out these and other issues are going to be quite challenging. The city council is going to make some tough calls. I do hope that among the huffing and puffing we can find some time to look carefully at the details of the proposal from a designer’s perspective to make sure that we are setting ourselves up for success to build the housing that we need, to absorb the transformational change that we must, and to preserve the best qualities of the urban neighborhoods we love.
I see that you’re in Madrona and I believe this area is up zoned along the #2 and #3 bus lines. I believe the area along Lake Washington Boulevard is also up zoned towards Leschi, though I’m not certain.
I believe that most homes along these bus lines are worth less than the dirt they sit upon, given the nature and age of the neighborhood. To me, that says more about assessment limitations and locational convenience.
Like most people, I love progress but I hate change, and you might say this applies to many folks looking at the up zone map.
My question to you is: how do you market a 1905 Craftsman on a standard city through lot with a lake and mountain view to a developer instead of a family, in the hopes of getting more money? Asking for a friend who is freaking out.
Want more money?
1. Hire a smart broker who is in touch with the developer world.
2. Make a deal with some of your immediate neighbors to sell together… Plottage value increases since (for example and generally) it’s often impossible to take advantage of maximum zoning with a single 5000 square-foot lot especially with no alley.
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By the way, this is a very smart post and I’ll be back for more comments. I don’t often read about Seattle zoning that actually make a lot of sense but this article does.
Neil,
Generally speaking, you don’t have to find the developer – they will find you. There are a number of land agents out there working w/ algorithms to identify good development sites. If your friend owned one, they’d have already gotten letters asking them to sell. Most homes are worth more than the dirt that they sit on. The new NR zoning changes will raise the number of units you can build from 3 to 4. This will make a difference around the margins but it isn’t a huge game changer in terms of which properties are attractive for redevelopment.
Generally speaking, you don’t have to find the developer – they will find you. There are a number of land agents out there working w/ algorithms to identify good development sites. If your friend owned one, they’d have already gotten letters asking them to sell. Most homes are worth more than the dirt that they sit on. The new NR zoning changes will raise the number of units you can build from 3 to 4. This will make a difference around the margins, but it isn’t a huge game changer in terms of which properties are attractive for redevelopment.
When the state mandated upzone of all single family comes down, Seattle developers will be choosing from over 100,000 newly available lots zoned for multifamily development. Many of those will be tear down ready, and it will be a buyer’s market. That’s one benefit of dispersing multifamily development away from the urban center focal points – the nicer houses in what used to be urban centers will be safe for a long time.
Parking analysis that as usual neglects the 2035 mandate, that new cars sold in Washington state shall be electric vehicles.
Anyone reading this have an EV? Charge it every time at a public charger? I bet not. Overnight charging is more or less essential, and it requires a parking spot on site. This is just going on my experience, maybe I’m different, but … about 1/2 million cars in Seattle, and 10 years from now there will be about 1/2 million. That’s a big line in the morning, in front of the local public charger.
This is going to change the picture with parking. Today people can weigh the costs, imagine themselves never needing a car, and then if they do, they can go out on the street, as long as everyone else doesn’t. When cars are electric, there will need to be one on site space per car-owning unit. If there are 4 units and each unit has an associated car, there will need to be 4 spaces. If typical buyers ask for 1:1 on site parking, then good for them, they’re “future proofing” residential construction, if only for that housing type. It’s astonishing that Olympia, whence this 2035 mandate came, is even considering going the other way.
Of course the electricity supply is going to need to be able to keep up with this. I don’t know if that’s an issue, bu I know infrastructure support for the sprawling “un-density” mandated by Olympia isn’t guaranteed. Check the mains water pressure at home, the gadget is available at the hardware store for a modest price. The traditional normal limit is 80 PSI, but they’ve quietly been raising the pressure to well over that, presumably to keep up with the draft from increasing low rise development. If you’re in one of those neighborhoods, it might be a good idea to invest in a pressure reduction gizmo, because they certainly aren’t going to bring the pressure back down just because it’s breaking residents’ plumbing.
This is an interesting point. If you imagine a future where everyone owns an electric car but many lack reliable access to charging infrastructure, that would indeed be quite a mess. I think it is also easy to imagine a future in which many of those electric cars are not privately owned but are rather shared and/or autonomous vehicles that park and charge in the public ROW. I won’t pretend to know what our transportation infrastructure will look like in 2035 or 2045, but I do know what new development will look like if we do 1:1 parking under today’s rules. It isn’t handsome.
So why would you need a car in a 15 minute neighborhood where stores and services are within walking distance? Or if you are close to convenient transit to take you to your job or downtown for entertainment?
Seattle is already at 20% of households not owning a car. A dense city like New York has car ownership that is about 50% of households. Frankly, you can’t put more people into the city and expect car ownership as a percentage to remain steady. The roads would be gridlocked in short order.
The Seattle Comprehensive Plan is tailored to create more walkable and bikable neighborhoods along transit, so you don’t need a car. It should not be presumed that how car dependent we are now is how the city will be going forward.
As an owner of 2 EVs, I park one in the back while it charging and the other one out on the street while at home. I’ve used 110v chargers before to charge at my daughter’s house, which is good for 30-40 miles of charge overnight. Good enough for most people. The only time that I use a public charger is for travel down to Portland which at 180 miles is just a tad too far for my older EV.
And let’s not forget that Seattle is already piloting curbside charging with 25 chargers located across the city. There are a number of companies that are also developing innovative business models to provide charging at curbside.
https://seattle.gov/city-light/in-the-community/current-projects/curbside-level-2-ev-charging
I’d also check your math and assumptions on the number of electric vehicles that we might have in Seattle in 10 years. Statewide the number of new car sales that are either fully electric or plug-in electric is ~20-25%, probably higher in Seattle. BUT the average age of cars is 12 years, which means that the majority of cars sold today will still be on the road in 10 years. Even with mandate that all cars sole must be zero-emission by 2035, it will take until 2045-2050 before the entire car fleet is zero emission. We have 20 years to sort this out.
Right, like every household with an electric car, you have a parking space where you can charge it.
80% of Seattle households do have a car. The state’s elimination of single family zoning is going to spread residential farther from transit and the 15 minute neighborhoods, because it puts a hole through the Comprehensive Plan’s urban village core strategy – to make residential density happen around certain areas, there have to be areas that are NOT zoned for multifamily. Now the most attractively priced lots will be the ones farthest from urban villages.
Seattle isn’t New York, and car owning households will continue to be a major fraction of residents. The state’s objective is for as many as possible of those car owners to go electric. The sooner we stop building multifamily residential that won’t work for owners who get with it, the easier that will be. This will be an increasing problem within the lifetimes of buildings already built.
There are plenty of studies which show majority of urban drivers can get by with 110v outlets, which is relatively low cost for apartments with dedicated parking to provide. There was a Nissan Leaf at our apartment in Portland that used this approach.
And let’s not discount with that new solid state EV batteries will be able to be fast charged in 15 minutes without degradation of battery life.
This argument just doesn’t hold up to scrutiny when you consider technology, policy options to make curbside charging available, and how people actually use EVs
Apartments with dedicated parking? Sure, isn’t that what we’re talking about? If you get an apartment where the building has been providing enough on site parking, then you’re in good shape to get an electric vehicle. But people don’t have EVs now, and developers can build and sell units without that parking cheaper, so that’s what’s being built, today. This is why it’s astonishing that the legislature would pass forward looking legislation one day, and then set it up for failure the next.
Pulling up fantasy scenarios is not what I call “holding an argument up to scrutiny.”
The state’s elimination of SFH is all the more reason to lean into more neighborhood centers — create some density along transit lines. I think the proliferation of parking problems, traffic etc will create the incentive for people to plan for personal transportation alternatives (find a home near transit, buy an e-bike, etc). Or they can stay stuck in traffic – their choice.
Hope they can make public chargers resistant to the metal thieves that cut their cords for drug money.
I’m surprised to hear that anyone thinks MHA might be removed from multifamily residential. I thought we had a problem with housing affordability, and I remember seeing Ed Murray in person in the University District declaring that MHA was going to address this problem so people would be able to afford housing. A grand bargain.
If it isn’t effective, it needs to be made effective, am I right? Increase the in lieu of performance fees, a lot. Affordable housing isn’t going to build itself.
When MHA was introduced in 2019, townhouse production dropped by half. You can see the numbers if you go to: https://seattlecitygis.maps.arcgis.com/apps/dashboards/0ecefa68fbda40de8ad9c6412ac5149d
MHA was supposed to encourage new development by granting extra development potential that was in excess of the fee charged. A drop off in housing production at a time when the rest of the city was booming is pretty clear feedback that the program isn’t working. That’s why people are talking about it.
The graph I managed to get showed a drop off more after 2020, than 2019.
Production of housing units in 2024 is an all time record, with MHA. You know how many factors there are behind the ups and downs of building construction numbers. If builders can’t put together four 2×6 and hardie board townhomes on a lot and sell them for $900K each or whatever they’re going for now, and have enough left over to pay a few bucks per square foot for affordable housing, I think there are other problems here.
My understanding of how MHA worked is that a lot of housing accelerated— outside of the MHA zones. Builders did not want to pay fees or build affordable units and so they stayed out of the zones. When it comes to townhouses if you make one of them seriously under market and you are a for profit developer it seems pretty clear to me that you have to make the other ones more expensive. It does not seem to me that works with larger Apartment complexes if at all. We need the exact opposite of MHA if we want to encourage homeowners to build 1-3 units in their backyards that could be affordable rentals or condominiums. We need accelerated permitting for them (In other words, the kind of permitting the bigger developers get), We need to get the water department off their backs so they are not charged a fortune for a water hook up, and we need dedicated and significant property tax adjustments if they offer properties below market.
Is this an affordable housing type we really need badly enough, that we can afford the level of subsidy that would make it happen?
I don’t imagine townhome developers ever choose the performance route. The rates depend on various zones and areas, but fee for a townhome unit, maybe $20K? No one really wants to pay $20K if they don’t have to, but … these townhomes go for $700K and up. And frankly the value is not there – they’re space inefficient, they aren’t going to last as long as traditional housing stock. If there’s an economical housing type for these low density neighborhoods, it doesn’t appear to be townhomes.
Design standards get proposed that will “constrain designers in ways that make excellence more difficult”, because there is all too little evidence that designers have any such aspiration. This is a matter that is generally laughed off as a trivial concern, and I don’t have any real idea what to do about it, but it’s a dismal prospect if something doesn’t change.
People who know this stuff mention a change in standards ca. 2010, and you can see the difference in neighborhoods that have multifamily built before, and after. Maybe it would be fair to accompany this major low rise upzone, with a return to pre-2010 low rise standards that are more compatible with the affected areas.
The zoning changes from 2010 were driven by widespread displeasure with poorly designed, cookie cutter development in LR zones – driven largely by a highly prescriptive and inflexible zoning code. The 2010 zoning changes didn’t magically outlaw ugly buildings, but they did provide enough flexibility to allow a profusion of new housing types to emerge — courtyard townhomes, rowhouses, small infill apartments — and it allowed enough design flexibility that good architects and good developers could do good work. There’s lots of it out there (if you agree with my taste)!
Not surprising:
“Most are driven by state-level mandates and obligations under the Growth Management Act, and some are the result of a progressive, pro-equity, pro-housing agenda..”
Eventually – maybe – this leftist boot will lifted from our neck.
But probably not in my lifetime.
The part that you perceive as “leftist” is just the rhetoric.
The effective part that this article discusses are deregulatory solutions from the supply sider book that Ronald Reagan’s administration sold. Single family zoning, focusing multifamily development in urban villages for a less auto oriented city. On site parking requirements. Design review. Regulations that get in the way of industry, so we are going to drop them and hope that the free market tooth fairy will deliver the abundant housing we need.
(Spoiler: it never works, and it sure won’t this time. The industry has been producing units in the Seattle area at record rates, and the upzones several years ago made no observable difference, because the problem was not zoning. But be happy, because it sure isn’t “leftist.”)
The so-called “Leftists” are philosophically aligned with Libertarians and many (not all) Conservatives in that someone who owns property should have the right to develop it as they so choose. Overly restrictive zoning in actuality treads on individual rights. It is the tyranny of the majority.
We humans have a propensity to destroy our world. Global warming is the ultimate example but continuing to reproduce so that we are forced into smaller and smaller living spaces that are less and less desirable is simply another example. We can’t control our biological impulses so we force ourselves into crevices. Then we call that progressive thinking. Then it’s Soylent Green. Good luck.