Upzoning Seattle May Trigger Political Freak-Outs

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.