By Tracy Record
West Seattle Blog editor

In a week and a half, the City Council will listen to what might be hundreds of speakers at the last major public hearing on the first phase of the Comprehensive Plan – aka One Seattle Plan – which is meant to guide the city’s growth for the next 20 years.

Upzoning has been the focus of what’s working its way through the system, dating back to the unveiling of proposed maps last October. The plan details included new terminology for new types of zones, including Neighborhood Centers envisioned as hubs of businesses and denser housing. We first reported, after that unveiling, on seven West Seattle areas proposed for the Neighborhood Center designation – north to south:

*Delridge (centered on Delridge/Dakota)
*Brandon Junction (centered on Delridge/Brandon)
*Fairmount (centered on California/Findlay)
*High Point (centered on 35th/Morgan)
*Holden (centered on 35th/Holden)
*Upper Fauntleroy (centered on 35th/Barton)
*Endolyne (centered on 45th/Wildwood)

We also noted in our initial report that the city had considered three other West Seattle areas as potential Neighborhood Centers but decided against the designation:

*Alki (would have been centered on 61st/Stevens)
*Sylvan Junction (would have been centered on Delridge/Orchard)
*Highland Park (would have been centered on 9th/Trenton)

Now, one of the 106 amendments that councilmembers have proposed for the Comp Plan/rezoning would resuscitate the idea of an Alki neighborhood center. And Alki neighborhood advocates say that shouldn’t happen without a chance for them to be part of the process – more than just having their say at the upcoming eleventh-hour public hearing.

The Alki NC proposal is in the 34th amendment in this package of amendments, one of eight neighborhood centers that citywide Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck wants to add to the plan (none of the other seven are in West Seattle) with support of a housing-advocacy organization. This amendment starts on page 56 of the 424-page document with all councilmembers’ proposals. Her amendment describes the proposed Alki neighborhood center as follows:

1. Alki (District 1)

This amendment would create a new Alki Neighborhood Center generally located west of 59th Avenue (SW), north of SW Hinds Street and south and east of Alki Avenue SW (Council District 1). It would encompass approximately 95 acres.

The area to be included in the Neighborhood Center includes a mixture of Neighborhood residential zoning, generally to the south, Lowrise 1, 2, and 3 zoning in the middle and west of the proposed center, and Neighborhood Commercial 1-40 zoning along Alki Avenue SW in the northeast corner of the proposed district. The area contains mostly single-family homes in the Neighborhood Residential zone, multifamily buildings in the lowrise zones, and a mix of commercial, mixed-use and multifamily structures in the Neighborhood Commercial zoned area. In addition to the section of commercial zoning proposed to be included in the neighborhood center, the commercial district extends three blocks east along Alki Avenue SW outside of the proposed boundaries. In addition, there are a number of parks in the area, including Alki Beach, Bar-S Playground and Alki Playground.

Bus stops for the 50 and 56 bus routes are located along SW Admiral Way, 63rd Avenue SW, 61st Avenue SW and Alki Avenue SW. The 775 bus route runs westbound along SW Admiral Way, north of 63rd Avenue SW, and eastbound along Alki Avenue SW. None of these routes individually meets the definition of providing frequent transit service. The areas farthest from the transit stops are approximately one half mile (2,640 feet) from the center of the proposed neighborhood center.

“Neighborhood center” was originally defined by the city as:

… places with a variety of housing options centered around a local commercial district and/or major transit stop (such as RapidRide). They typically serve as focal points within neighborhoods, offering shops, services, grocery stores, restaurants, and more. These places are suitable for residential and mixed-use buildings up to six stories in the core and smaller apartment buildings on the periphery. Neighborhood centers should generally encompass areas within 800 feet, or one to three blocks, of the central intersection or transit stop.

Councilmember Rinck’s amendment notes that some of her proposed additions (obviously including Alki) don’t fit the definition;

Many of the proposed boundaries of these Neighborhood Centers include areas that are significantly more than 800 feet from the central intersection of the center or a bus rapid stop. Consequently, the boundaries that would be adopted through this amendment are generally not consistent with Comprehensive Plan policy GS 5.4 which states: “GS 5.4 Determine the boundaries of Neighborhood Centers based on local conditions, but generally include areas within a 3-minute walk (800 feet) of the central intersection or bus rapid transit stop. ”

If the Council wants to adopt the boundaries for the new centers as proposed under this amendment, it should also amend this policy to allow greater flexibility in the configuration of neighborhood center boundaries.

While the originally proposed Neighborhood Centers around the city have been up for scrutiny and feedback dating to last October, the ones Councilmember Rinck seeks to add, including Alki, have not, and the Alki Community Council is voicing concern about that, sending the ACC mailing list an alert today, saying in part:

your voice will not be heard unless you message City Council that Alki deserves the same education, workshops, and outreach that the 30 other designated Neighborhood Centers received before zoning is approved. To compare public information in the 30 other Neighborhood Centers, here is a synopsis below from the city webpage. Alki deserves to be treated equally and fairly.

Outreach & Timeline in 30 Neighborhood Centers
Oct 16, 2024 – Dec. City launches One Seattle Plan zoning update website; 60-day public comment period opens.
Dec 20, 2024 – Public comment period closes.
May 2025 – Mayor introduces plan to City Council with 30 Neighborhood Centers (Alki still excluded after feasibility analysis).
July 31, 2025 – CM Rinck [proposes amending] plan to add back Alki and the other excluded neighborhoods, just weeks before the Sept. 19 vote — leaving no time for public education or feedback in Alki.
Aug 9, 2025 – CM Rinck’s staff holds a small unadvertised meeting in Alki to discuss rezoning.

If you aren’t on the ACC list and therefore haven’t seen it, you can read the full email, including information on how to comment, by going here.

(Regarding the “small unadvertised meeting” last month, we can confirm there was no media notification. One attendee, community advocate Steve Pumphrey, described it to neighbors in a message about the proposed rezoning, saying that he “attended a less than well-publicized (there were just four legitimate Alki residents that I could see) community meeting that was supposed to be for fact finding and community feedback. It was nothing more than a sales pitch.”

Councilmembers are scheduled to vote on the 100+ amendments, and the rest of the Comprehensive Plan’s Phase 1, the week after the September 12 public hearing, so that they can finalize it before spending more than two months focused on the budget, as happens every fall. In urging people to offer feedback, pro, con, or otherwise, ACC president Charlotte Starck says, “Your voice matters — no matter your opinion on how Alki growth evolves. What’s unacceptable is eliminating Alki’s voice altogether.” Testimony will be accepted in person and online during the two-session hearing on Friday, September 12 – 9:30 am and 3 pm; the agenda explains how to participate, as does the ACC email linked above. (Also on the agenda, links to everything that’s currently up for consideration.)

By Anne Higuera
Reporting for West Seattle Blog

Six years into the city’s efforts to have developers help meet the need for affordable housing, things aren’t turning out exactly as expected. Seattle’s Mandatory Housing Affordability (MHA) laws, which the City Council unanimously made citywide in 2019, were supposed to both provide more income-restricted units in market-rate buildings, and fund the construction of additional low-income housing. While some of that has happened, the MHA is also being blamed for making it harder to build multi-family housing units in Seattle, according to a report released recently.

Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office commissioned the report by BERK Consulting and Heartland LLC to evaluate how well the MHA policies, which included select upzoning to increase density, met goals during the first 5 years. After giving latitude to construct taller buildings with more units because of the upzoning, the city asked developers to either commit to providing a limited number of low-income units in their buildings for 75 years or to pay a fee based on the building square footage. It might seem like a simple choice to make, but it’s complicated by market conditions, land costs and in the case of the period from 2019–2024, the turmoil caused by the pandemic. The report paints a picture of declining feasibility not just in Seattle but across 13 “peer” cities they examined, where higher interest rates and increasing construction costs made it difficult for projects to pencil out. “MHA requirements play a relatively small but important role,” notes the report, adding that even with better market conditions, the cost of complying with the MHA could well be the deciding factor for a developer to say, “No go.”

As bleak as that sounds, many thousands of new housing units have been built since MHA passed. Through 2023, developers paid $300 million in fees to the city. The report points to MHA funds supporting 4,702 new low-income units, but those funds were pooled with other financing, so it’s hard to tease out exactly how many units can be attributed solely to MHA funds. The developers themselves only built 404 income-restricted units in projects during that time. The stated goal was for MHA to be directly responsible for 6,000 new units over 10 years, with no specific goals for how much of that would be achieved through developer fees. It turns out that 95% of developers opted to pay fees for their projects, most of which were either low-rise or high-rise. Of the 5% who did not, the vast majority of the income-restricted units were built in mid-rise projects.

While the preference for paying fees has been consistent, the amount collected has varied significantly. Fees from developers made up almost half of the Office of Housing budget in 2021 by bringing in $74 million that year, but that is down to a projection of $22 million for 2025. The Office of Housing does have other revenue streams, including the Housing Levy and Payroll Expense Tax on companies with high earners. That means the opportunity to build many more affordable housing projects remains, but not because multi-family housing is booming generally.

In light of some of the challenges during MHA’s first 5 years, and knowing that the legislation was written based on much different economic situation than the current one, the BERK/Heartland report makes a number of recommendations to take that all into account and still encourage more affordable housing:

* Adjust MHA fees annually based on market conditions, housing type and location, rather than using a formula

* Allow fees to be paid later or over time (currently paid early in the process, which is an added financing cost)

* Raise fees or remove fees entirely as an option to ensure more income-restricted units in projects.

* Remove red tape: Streamline permitting and eliminate design review, adjust other miscellaneous policies

In a letter to the City Council last week, Mayor Harrell indicated he will look into the possibility of fine-tuning the MHA, saying the report, “…serves to confirm that MHA can be a useful tool, but it requires careful design and active management to ensure it does not result in unintended consequences for Seattle’s housing market.” Harrell’s Press Secretary Callie Craighead told WSB that a 5- to 7-person technical review committee will be convened to assess and provide feedback on the report. Craighead said the BERK/Heartland study cost $250,000 and was funded by MHA administrative fees collected by the Office of Housing.

By Tracy Record
West Seattle Blog editor

Convened by the city for the first time in 15 months, the Southwest Design Review Board gave its final approval tonight to an 8-story apartment building proposed for 3010 SW Avalon Way, with just a few relatively minor recommendations.

All five current board members were in attendance – chair Gavin Schaefer and members AB Alvarez, Nicole Li, Jessie McClurg, and Rob McCulloch, all identifying themselves as West Seattle residents. The city land-use planner assigned to the project, Theresa Neylon, was in attendance too. Schaefer was the only holdover from the board’s previous meeting (about another project) in December 2023. The previous meeting about this project was three and a half years ago.

Tonight’s hour-long online meeting unfolded in the standard design-review format:

Read More

(Rendering by Studio 19 Architects)

Three weeks ago, we told you about the upcoming Design Review hearing for an 86-apartment project at 3010 SW Avalon Way. At the time, the city hadn’t linked the “packet” for that hearing (though we found a draft version for our story), but now it’s available and you can see it here. The online review meeting is at 5 pm Thursday (February 6); the links for participating/viewing are on this page. As we noted last month, this will be the first time the city has convened the Southwest Design Review Board since December 2023. The project passed the first phase of Design Review in November 2021. P.S. If you’re wondering how close this is to the future light-rail station, that’s shown on a map in the packet.

(WSB photo)

Checking the city’s online files for notable development proposals hasn’t yielded much lately, but we keep checking anyway, and found one this week: An early-stage proposal that has four old brick duplexes on the east edge of The Junction, west side of the 5000 block of Fauntleroy Way SW, slated for demolition, to be replaced on the 31,785-sf site by 28 new residential units – 20 townhouse duplexes and eight standalone houses. Off-street parking would be along the alley to the west. The stretch of Fauntleroy Way between The Junction and Morgan Junction has been slowly redeveloping for years, primarily into townhouses, but mostly a few units at a time; the size and scale of this makes it noteworthy. County Assessor files do not yet show a record of sale for the parcels, whose addresses range from 5029 Fauntleroy to 5045 Fauntleroy [vicinity map], but the developer is listed on the site plan as IS Property Investments and the architect is listed as David Cone. Again, this is an early-stage proposal, so it’s not in any official review phase yet.

Three notes tonight, with one week to go until the December 20th deadline for comments on the city’s rezoning proposals (on which we first reported two months ago):

CITY’S ONLINE ‘INFO SESSION’: An online informational meeting last night had some technical trouble, so the city has scheduled one last “virtual info session” about the rezoning plan for Tuesday (December 17), 5:30-7:30 pm. Here’s the link.

MORGAN COMMUNITY ASSOCIATION MEETING: Last night’s Morgan Community Association-organized meeting at High Point Library filled the meeting room there with more than 50 people. No presentation, but the meeting did include two Q&A sections, with MoCA president Deb Barker answering most questions. While the rest of the meeting just involved people milling around city infosheets on the walls (you can look up Morgan or other neighborhoods’ proposed changes here), we did record both sections of Q&A:

The zoning changes by neighborhood for City Council District 1 – which includes West Seattle – can be seen here.

FAUNTLEROY COMMUNITY ASSOCIATION’S CALL TO ACTION: Another West Seattle neighborhood group, the Fauntleroy Community Association, has launched a last-minute letter-writing campaign in opposition to some of the proposed rezoning. They contend that the changes “would harm our neighborhood.” Their campaign includes two templates for potential letters to the city – one with prewritten statements of concern, the other in which you can voice your own concerns about the plan. Or, scroll down the city’s main page to see how to comment, whatever you think about the proposals.