HALA UPZONING: City’s proposal out today in final Environmental Impact Statement

(UPDATED 10:13 AM with link to interactive map showing what’s proposed where)

FIRST REPORT, 12:41 AM: Today’s the day for the next milestone in the city plan to upzone for the Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda (HALA) Mandatory Housing Affordability component. The final Environmental Impact Statement is being published today, and with it, the city’s “preferred alternative” for upzoning around the city, adding development capacity and requiring either affordable housing as part of a project, or a fee to go into a fund to build it elsewhere. Mayor Tim Burgess and City Councilmember Rob Johnson are scheduled to formally announce the proposed plan in a Capitol Hill park at noon.

Though the media advisory for that announcement didn’t mention the EIS – just the release of an “affordability and growth plan” – the Daily Journal of Commerce‘s city notices published at midnight include this one, “Notice of Availability of Final Environmental Impact Statement, Mandatory Housing Affordability (MHA).” The final EIS document is not online yet – should be within a few hours – but once it is, we’ll see the city’s “preferred alternative.” (and we’ll have a separate update). The “preferred alternative” will be a precursor to legislation that the notice says will be sent by the mayor to the City Council by year’s end (either by Burgess, who’s in office until November 28th, or Jenny Durkan, who takes office after that). Then, the notice says, “The City Council expects to take public comment and deliberate on the proposal for several months, and is expected to act on the proposal in summer of 2018.”

P.S. The EIS itself does not have a comment period – it’s the result of previous rounds of comment (including the one for the draft version, released five months ago) – but today’s publication does open a period in which it can be appealed, with November 27th as the deadline.

8:54 AM: Now that the city’s notice is out on its own website, the link it points to says the Final EIS will be available at noon (concurrent with the aforementioned mayoral event), although there are different links atop the notice (for PDFs that don’t seem to be downloading, thus far).

10:13 AM: Kevin from SCC Insight (who provides tireless, thorough City Council coverage) points out in comments that the interactive map that goes with the Final EIS is already live – if you are interested in a specific address, you can use the map to zoom in on it.

6 Replies to "HALA UPZONING: City's proposal out today in final Environmental Impact Statement"

  • Scott A November 9, 2017 (7:40 am)

    Thank you for the coverage of this!  As usual your concise and very readable writing helps me track what the heck this huge proposal is all about.  I hope there are maps highlighting any differences between the earlier drafts of the upzoning and today’s preferred alternative.

  • Kevin November 9, 2017 (10:03 am)

    The map with the new “preferred alternative” (hybrid of the 2 alternatives in the draft EIS) is already live. https://seattlecitygis.maps.arcgis.com/apps/MapSeries/index.html?appid=d3425fef5b884c29a710761c163b347a

    • WSB November 9, 2017 (10:10 am)

      Thank you! I have been looking at backlinks but hadn’t found that one.

  • Hawkeye November 9, 2017 (12:38 pm)

    Thanks Kevin! Can you explain what the selective areas mean?  For example LR2 (M1)?

    • WSB November 9, 2017 (12:43 pm)

      LR2 is low-rise 2. M1 means a particular category of what fee/percentage of affordable housing will be required for development in that area. Working on the followup now that we have departed Capitol Hill, and I hope the full suite of information on the EIS is live now with explanations of that and more.

  • zark00 November 9, 2017 (1:49 pm)

    Map doesn’t work as usual.

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