(WSB photos. Above, One Seattle Plan project manager Michael Hubner addresses attendees)
By Sean Golonka
Reporting for West Seattle Blog
About 80 West Seattle residents and others came together at Chief Sealth International High School tonight for an open house on the draft One Seattle Plan — a wide-ranging update to the city’s Comprehensive Plan for growth and development that several attendees expressed concerns over as insufficient to address the city’s dire housing needs.
“I feel like it’s been underwhelming,” said John Doherty, a 28-year-old software engineer who lives in West Seattle. “We need more growth in the city.”
Doherty and others attending the open house, the fourth of eight the city has planned to gather feedback on the once-in-a-decade update to its Comprehensive Plan, echoed a concern shared throughout Seattle neighborhoods: that the city is in a housing crisis, and more must be built to meet the needs of its residents.
Michael Hubner, project manager for the One Seattle Plan with the Office of Planning and Community Development, highlighted the stakes of the plan as city officials embark on an effort to reshape Seattle’s growth over the next 20 years.
“This is a rare event, where the city takes stock of how we’ve been growing, the challenges facing the city, our hopes and visions for the future, and plans for the next 20 years, especially around how and where we can grow,” Hubner told the crowd. “We also know that we’re facing a lot of challenges providing the housing we need now, and maintaining Seattle as an inclusive, affordable place to live.”
Sanders Lauture, 29, a South Lake Union resident who was in attendance, said he believed the plan “doesn’t do enough to address the current realities of the cost of housing in Seattle [and] the rise of homelessness.”
Among the city officials at the event — who included staff from the Office of Planning and Community Development and from Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office, and representation from the city council, including citywide Councilmember Tanya Woo and District 1 Councilmember Rob Saka‘s chief of staff Elaine Ikoma Ko — some said similar concerns had been raised at past open houses, with other Seattle residents expressing a desire to see the city pursue more housing development than it plans to.
Under the draft plan, the city has an estimated growth target from 2024-2044 of 80,000 housing units.
While the plan also addresses other factors in the city’s development, such as transportation and the environment, the core of the plan — and the comments from attendees — places a heavy emphasis on housing and neighborhoods.
Iñaki Longa, 36, said he would like to see more mixed-use zoning, and took issue with the proposed plans to increase zoning density in the areas where housing has traditionally been more dense while avoiding “more desirable areas and affluent areas.”
The changes include rebranding Urban Villages as Urban Centers, which serve as the primary commercial and housing areas of Seattle’s neighborhoods. In West Seattle, these include Admiral, Morgan Junction, West Seattle Junction, and Westwood-Highland Park.
The plan also proposes designating six areas of West Seattle as Neighborhood Centers that allow for three- to six-story buildings to encourage the development of apartments and condominiums. The boundaries for these areas appear as fuzzy circles on the map, but will appear with properly set boundaries when the zoning proposal is released later this year, according to Hubner.
Another zoning change in the plan implements a 2023 state law allowing “middle” housing, such as duplexes, triplexes, and fourplexes, to be built on land that has traditionally been limited to single-family homes. Continued growth, however, is likely to be focused in the Urban Centers and larger Regional Centers outside of West Seattle, such as in Downtown.
Amid concerns that these changes will not be enough to properly address the city’s housing crisis, some attendees offered ideas for enhancing development. Doherty, for example, suggested increasing height restrictions, which would allow for taller housing complexes.
While attendees said they received positive responses and helpful answers from city staff at the open house, they also raised concerns about local government’s follow through to address issues facing the city.
“I definitely have concerns about Seattle’s follow-through,” Doherty said, noting delays factoring into regional projects such as Sound Transit‘s light-rail line to Bellevue, and adding that it is difficult to have an effect on the city’s work as a resident. “But maybe I can help with giving comments on the One Seattle Plan.”
Read more about the proposal in our March report here.
If you missed tonight’s event, there will be other open houses throughout April, the closest of which will be at Garfield Community Center on Tuesday, April 16, as well as an online open house on Thursday, May 2. You can browse the full 198-page draft plan here, and provide comments online or via email here (5 p.m. on May 6 is the deadline).
The city is holding separate information sessions for the plan’s Draft Environmental Impact Statement, which evaluates different housing proposals for their environmental impacts. Find information about those events here.
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