Seattle has long been kicking around design review reforms and hosted a stakeholder process on the idea, but citywide legislation has been slow in coming and exactly how Seattle would put those ideas into action was still up in the air, as The Urbanist reported last summer.

State lawmakers appeared to notice the lack of momentum. In 2023, the Washington State Legislature passed a law (House Bill 1293) capping the number of design review meetings per development project at one and requiring that design standards by “clear and objective.” Seattle faces a July 1, 2025 deadline to comply.

The law set a deadline of six months after the local jurisdiction’s next Comprehensive Plan update to be in compliance with that standard. Seattle missed its end-of-2024 deadline to pass its Comprehensive Plan update, with Harrell Administration infighting that watered down a bolder proposal from the City planning department appearing to be responsible for much of that delay. Major updates to the Comprehensive Plan occur once per decade and lay out City plans for growth in housing, jobs, and infrastructure, acting as a precursor to zoning legislation.

Even with Seattle’s tardy Comprehensive Plan delivery, the design review reform requirements still kick in six months after the missed deadline — hence, the need for interim legislation to meet mandates for design review reform and citywide middle housing. The state middle housing requirement also came out of the 2023 session, via House Bill 1110, which pushes large cities to allow fourplexes citywide and sixplexes near major transit.

Harrell did transmit his “Final Mayor’s Recommended One Seattle Plan” to the City Council recently in May, but it typically takes several months for Council to review, amend, and approve that plan, not to mention host their own public outreach processes.

While Harrell’s urgency around passing his One Seattle Comprehensive Plan hasn’t appeared particularly strong, he has noted an urgency to build housing and eliminate the unnecessary delays that builders encounter.

“Seattle needs more housing — and we’re taking critical steps that build on the success of current initiatives to get that housing across our city more quickly,” Mayor Bruce Harrell said in a statement. “These changes will modernize our Design Review process to focus the permitting process on what matters most — safe buildings that meet community needs — while eliminating unnecessary delays.”

The Mayor’s Office said that the “proposed reforms are expected to reduce the number of projects subject to Design Review by up to 40% in an average year, which would decrease permitting time for most new housing projects by one to two years.” Projects newly exempt from design review “would save an average of four to nine months in the permitting process thanks to a simplified process,” the mayor has pledged. “Life-safety and technical code reviews would remain in place for all projects through the existing construction permitting process.”

Support from builders and housing advocates

A coalition of builders and pro-housing advocates called Seattle for Everyone has long pushed for the design review reforms. Seattle for Everyone coordinator Brady Nordstrom issued a statement backing the mayor’s legislation.

“Seattle’s Design Review process plays a role in housing affordability, production, and access. While recent good-faith efforts have been made to improve the process in Seattle, more work is needed to ensure that it supports the creation of urgently needed homes. Seattle cannot control all the factors contributing to rising housing costs, but we can control how we permit and review new housing,” Nordstrom said. “That’s why we are thrilled about Seattle’s active efforts to implement the requirements of HB 1293 alongside key stakeholder and public input. This reform effort represents a major opportunity to make the system work better for everyone — by increasing clarity, reducing unnecessary barriers, and prioritizing homes in more places for more people.”

Seattle for Everyone has previously highlighted complex housing projects often faced a high number of review meetings, slowing down their permitting. Builders often started with the assumption of three design review meetings, but some projects were brought back for additional meetings if design board members were not satisfied — sometimes citing subjective tastes rather than clear design standards.

Design review has contributed to a challenging permitting process that took more than two years on average, from 2010 to 2020.

“In our experience, design review requirements and durations have wildly varied across projects, and meaningful reforms will help get housing built faster in Seattle,” said Raymond Connell, managing director at Holland Partner Group. In October 2024, Holland broke ground on a 45-story downtown highrise that claimed to be the first residential tower groundbreaking of the year on the West Coast, given a regional slowdown in tower-building activity.

At times, builders and housing advocates have criticized the Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections (SDCI) for resisting or slowwalking reform efforts. This time around, Nathan Torgelson, the long-time SDCI director who recently announced his departure with prodding from the mayor, voiced his backing for the reform.

“With these Design Review program reforms, we’re improving transparency, honoring community voices, and saving months — sometimes years — in the permitting process,” Torgelson said in a statement. “It’s a leaner but refined program that helps us build the housing our city desperately needs.”

The Master Builder’s Association of King and Snohomish Counties has backed the mayor’s reforms, with the group’s spokesperson Parker Dawson noting that streamlining design review dovetailing nicely with middle housing reforms.

“These reforms are especially important for small homebuilders constructing middle housing — projects that are crucial to addressing our region’s housing shortage,” Dawson said in a statement. “By simplifying the design review process and removing costly delays, Seattle is making it more feasible for local builders to deliver the ‘missing middle’ homes that serve working families.”

Design review overhaul features

The Mayor’s press release touted that the interim and upcoming permanent proposals would provide the following improvements:

• “Extend successful exemption for affordable housing. The interim ordinance would extend by six months a Design Review exemption set to expire in August 2025 for projects that meet Mandatory Housing Affordability (MHA) requirements through onsite affordable units. During the two-year exemption pilot, proposed onsite housing units more than doubled compared to all prior years of the MHA program. Building on this success, the legislative proposal coming later this summer would make this exemption permanent.”
• Increase the threshold for exempting projects from design review. “The review threshold would increase to buildings with 150+ housing units or 20,000+ square feet of commercial space. Smaller projects would be exempt, as well as projects located outside Urban Centers or Regional Growth Centers, and projects subject to other review boards, such as the Landmark Preservation Board.”
• Clarify and simplify guidelines. The mayor pledges to pare down design guidelines to meet the state’s “clear and objective” standard: “Permanent Design Review guidelines would be easier to understand and focus exclusively on elements of the building’s exterior.”
• Consolidate local design review boards to one citywide board. “The eight geographically focused boards would be replaced by one citywide board of 14 members who have expertise in design, development, and equity. Projects planned within established equity areas would use board members from the local community within the pool of 14. This change aims to simplify the program, make it more consistent, and improve representation for historically underserved communities.”
• A new administrative route to design review departures. Currently, builders must pitch departures from design standards to design review boards, often in exchange for added public benefits. Harrell pledges such flexibility will continue: “Departures from design standards, such as increased height or floor area, may be allowed for projects that add public benefits like meeting equity goals or enhancing street-level design. Projects exempt from Design Review would also benefit from similar flexibility through an administrative process.”

Design review departures may ultimately be the reason that some projects opt into a design review meeting during the moratorium, since departures may allow for more efficient or elegant designs than the City’s often clunky land use code allows.

The Mayor’s Office noted that the reform package would not impact his three-year downtown design review holiday he proposed and Council passed in 2024, as part of his Downtown Activation Plan (DAP). That downtown-only pilot program will continue until November 2, 2027.

Arguably, the City could have accelerated its citywide design review effort by skipping the piece-meal approach that portioned off a downtown exemption while the rest of the city waited. However, Harrell argued that the downtown design review holiday was an important feature of his activation plan, which focused on boosting economic activity downtown following pandemic hits to office occupancy and brick-and-mortar business activity.

Heading to Council

The mayor’s team said it will submit interim legislation to City Council following the State Environmental Policy Act review process, which “began on June 9 and is expected to conclude on June 26.” That leaves a tight and likely impossible to timeline to pass the legislation in June as stipulated in state law, but passage could happen in July.

The reception at City Council may be mixed, with Councilmember Mark Solomon and Council President Sara Nelson signaling support for permit streamlining, but others like soon-to-resign Cathy Moore (District 5) expressing skepticism of builder-friendly policies.

“Safe, well-designed buildings are key to building safe neighborhoods,” Solomon said in a statement. “By streamlining the design review process and focusing on clear, objective guidelines — especially those that improve how buildings interact with public spaces — we’re making sure that safety, accessibility, and visibility remain top priorities as our city grows.”

It seems likely the mayor can whip up the votes, but Moore staging a last stand to weaken his policy in her last days isn’t out of the realm of possibility either. Of course, Moore’s planned July 7 departure could end up removing an obstacle.

The post Harrell Proposes Design Review Moratorium, Interim Legislation Complying with State Mandate first appeared on The Urbanist.

Developers have adjusted to the major contributor of development slack, weak demand for new office space and vacancies. As projects reemerge, offices are being replaced with residences. In our April 2024 update on Downtown Bellevue’s projects, The Urbanist had found a significant decline in the planned office space in the downtown; 1.5 million square feet of office space had been canceled.

Last month, the developer of one of the largest projects in the city (and the region) also announced a pivot away from office space. The Pinnacle Bellevue South project disclosed a new residential focus with eight tower containing 2,114 units, 88,267 square feet of retail space, and 2,223 parking stalls. With more than 2,000 homes and eight towers in just one project, it would be the largest residential development in the history of Bellevue.

The proposal is now without the 125,000 square feet of office space contained in the scope that we had first reported on. In addition to the office space, just under 30,000 square feet of retail, the hotel, and just under 300 parking stalls were also cut and exchanged for almost 600 new homes. That scope change adds more homes than the vast majority of projects in the region include in the first place.

An emerging pattern of downtown housing

The Pinnacle Bellevue South also has a sibling to the north — dubbed Pinnacle Bellevue North — which is also seeing these adjustments. Pinnacle’s northern companion will include 1,451 homes across six towers, with 1,814 total parking stalls, according to permits filed in 2023. The project continues to be characterized as mixed-use, but other uses are not discussed in the permits.

We originally reported this project as 60,200 square feet for office space, 1,181 residential units, 129,500 square feet for non-office commercial space, and 1,814 parking spaces over seven towers. The 2023 revision means 270 additional residential units in place of some office and commercial space.

This shift away from office has solidified as a trend in the downtown core. In our last update, we had two big examples. Cloudvue had exchanged 1.3 million square feet of office space for nearly 1,200 homes and the final phase of the Washington Square project had exchanged 129,000 square feet of office space for 400 homes. Meanwhile, some office projects had been shelved entirely, with new residential projects emerging elsewhere.

The residential shift is also impacting smaller projects in Bellevue. 11040 Main Street, 305 108th Ave NE, and 200 112th Ave, have collectively shed proposals for over 500,000 square feet of office space in their latest iterations. In their place, more than 700 residential units have been proposed. Along with that lost office space, around 450 parking stalls are also being dropped.

Balancing jobs and housing

All in all, Downtown Bellevue has seen 1,500 additional homes proposed and nearly 700,000 square feet of office space pulled just since April. Altogether with our April update, Downtown Bellevue’s pipeline has seen nearly 4,000 additional homes added and more than two million square feet of office space abandoned in just the last couple of years.

Removing completions since 2022, office space in Bellevue’s pipeline has declined 15%. It’s unclear how many of the remaining office projects are actually alive, but around 11.5 million square feet of office space is still be in the pipeline, based on permits.

Another roughly 2.5 million square feet of office space has been completed, but has mostly been left in a shell state without office space built out or tenants moving in. Much of this is Amazon office space; the retailing giant continues to add jobs in Bellevue, but perhaps not quite as quickly as once envisioned. In 2021, Amazon announced plans to locate 25,000 jobs in the city by 2025. At last count, Amazon has 17,000 workers in Bellevue, compared to about 50,000 in Seattle.

As office development has slowed, residential units in Bellevue’s pipeline have surged 40%. Around 600 or 900 units, depending on how you count Avenue Bellevue’s hesitation to open, have been completed since our 2022 report. The city could be up to 14,000 homes in the downtown pipeline.

This is a big shift from our first 2022 pipeline aggregation of over 13,100 new residential units and over 16 million square feet of commercial space. Assuming 1.5 residents per unit and 250 square feet per job, the 2022 totals would’ve brought around 20,000 residents and 65,000 jobs to Downtown Bellevue, around 3.25 jobs per resident.

The ratio now is more balanced with the development pipeline housing an estimated 21,000 new residents and 46,000 new jobs, which works out to about 2.2 jobs per resident. These ratios impact how workers will arrive at their downtown jobs, more residences downtown mean more workers could live within walking and biking distance to work — and near great transit access via East Link light rail, which opened this April in abridged form.

Breathing Life into Downtown Bellevue

In 2022, around 16,000 people lived in Downtown Bellevue, according to the Puget Sound Regional Council. Another 21,000 people would greatly transform the growing downtown. Office workers will still bring a surge of people into the downtown during peak hours, but close to 40,000 residents can help keep the downtown active throughout the day, encouraging more restaurants, retail, and nightlife to flourish.

These large shifts in the development patterns in Downtown Bellevue reflect the massive scale of projects occurring there. A shift in a handful of projects managed to add 1,500 homes and cut over half a million square feet of office space. Individual shifts can also cut hundreds of parking stalls out of the pipeline. Many of these projects each command the fate of millions of square feet of the downtown’s future.

The Urbanist will be keeping an eye out on how the rest of the over 11 million square feet of office space in pipeline will pan out.

The post Builders Continue Pivot to Housing in Downtown Bellevue first appeared on The Urbanist.

In mid-August, developer Holland Partner Group broke ground on Sloane, a 45-story apartment complex on the site of the former Elephant Car Wash near the Space Needle. The 442-unit tower is, according to the developer, the first residential skyscraper to start construction on the West Coast of the United States in 2024 amid a cooling market.

Mayor Bruce Harrell was on hand for the Sloane groundbreaking to make the case that his Downtown Activation Plan is gaining steam – and that the city’s efforts to boost housing construction (including recent bills to exempt downtown projects from design review and streamlining permits for accessory dwelling units or ADUs) are working.

Although Seattle has already produced 6,500 new apartments through the first half of 2024 according to City data, there are troubling signs that permitting and construction of multi-family residential buildings – despite the example of the Sloane project – may be slowing down in Seattle. The stream of projects entering the permitting pipeline is slowing to a trickle, which will eventually force a major slowdown unless applications rebound quickly.

Sloane tower bucks the West Coast downturn in highrises

According to Holland Partner Group, Sloane will be participating in the Multifamily Tax Exemption (MFTE) program and designate 20% of units on-site  — 91 homes — for renters earning between 60% and 85% of area median income (AMI). The developer said they will also pay “significant” contributions to the in-lieu affordable housing fund as part of the Mandatory Housing Affordability (MHA) program, Seattle’s version of inclusionary zoning.

The 440-foot tower, according to the proposal submitted during design review by architect Weber Thompson, will offer 2,550 square feet of retail space and have 262 parking stalls. The design review board granted some departures from design guidelines, and there was discussion over improving pedestrian interface with the side of the tower facing Battery Street. Holland Partner Group began the permitting process in 2022 and received approval in September 2023.

“The groundbreaking of The Sloane, on the historic site of the Pink Elephant Car Wash, is exciting news for Downtown Seattle,” Mayor Harrell said in a post on Facebook. “This location, rich in our city’s history, will now bring much-needed housing and space for new businesses, helping to shape the future of our city’s center.”

Parker Dawson, a government affairs manager for the Master Builders Association of King and Snohomish Counties (MBAKS), said the new project is good news in a mixed climate for multifamily housing construction. 

“The Sloane building starting to go up right now and delivering a great number of units across a number of income brackets is a fantastic sign that we are still seeing these construction projects get underway in 2024 even in the face of heightened interest rates, rising costs of labor and materials, and continued complexities that building processes can come with.”

Strong production could be last gasp of drying pipeline

Across the nation, there was a post-pandemic surge in apartment permitting and construction that has continued into 2024 despite high interest rates and inflation. According to rental economist Jay Parsons, the US is expected to build a record 600,000 new multi-family units by the end of the year, the highest figure since 1974. 

Seattle has been a part of this surge. According to the Seattle Department of Construction & Inspections’ permitting dashboard, Seattle has completed 6,500 new units of multi-family housing in the first half of 2024, beating the 2019 figure of 5,900 units, and just shy of the 2023 total of 6,600 new apartments built.

Spurred by the national surge in production, homebuilders racing to vest their permits before Seattle’s new stricter energy code went into effect in 2022, and easing of ADU restrictions, Seattle also had big production years in 2022 and 2023. 

Still, there are troubling signs on the horizon for those hoping that more multi-family housing will begin to address the lack of supply and high cost of rent in Seattle. 

“As we continue moving forward with the conditions that I shared – rising costs and persistent building complexities and processes from the city’s end,” said Dawson, “we will see more of a struggle throughout that entire pipeline.”

After a surge in application for multi-family permits at SDCI in 2020 and 2021 (reaching a peak of 7,400), new applications for apartment permits have been stagnant in the past two years, with permit applications in 2024 on pace for just 1,800 units, similar to last year.

Assuming a lag time of three years from application to completion of construction, Seattle will see a slump in apartment construction potentially as soon as next year even as the Federal Reserve began lowering interest rates last month. If the permitting pipeline fully dries up, it could take a good while to rectify. Large residential projects tend to take longer to build and sometimes even longer to navigate Seattle’s daunting design review and permitting gauntlet.

Bryan Stevens, a spokesman for SDCI, notes that construction markets are cyclical in nature and that the recent permitting slump is likely to result in slower multifamily construction in Seattle in the near future. 

“Permit applications for new housing have been decreasing overall, but especially over the past year,” Stevens said. “Many factors can affect how quickly those cycles change including financing rates, inflation and material costs, and access to labor. Interest rates are a major factor in this and recently hit a 20-year peak.”

Seattle grasps for solutions to spur construction

For its part, the mayor’s office has recently stepped up efforts to boost housing construction, though the upcoming comprehensive plan draft maps, which are expected to be released on October 16, will demonstrate how seriously the Harrell administration takes zoning reforms to increase housing supply. In September, the city council approved Harrell’s bill that would exempt multifamily housing projects in the greater downtown area from design review. 

And in September Harrell also introduced a package of reforms further easing ADU restrictions  that would bring it in compliance with new state legislation, including increasing maximum size to 1,500 square feet (allowing for 3-bedroom ADUs) and reducing the need for homeowners associations.

But the City’s slow pace reforming design review troubles developers and builders, Dawson said. 

“What we’ve often seen is that the lack of objectivity and the lack of a predictable timeline through that process creates an incredible amount of uncertainty that often dissuades investment in a project,” he said. “And where you are able to get started on a project, it can ultimately create delays that last years, and add financial costs to a lender, to a builder, and eventually to a home buyer or a renter.”

Brian Runberg, lead architect at the Seattle-based firm Runberg Architecture, says that while factors such as high interest rates, material prices and labor costs are pushing some developers to shun Seattle, what’s adding to the problem is the expense and uncertainty of design review. His firm used to do about 80% of its multifamily residential design work on Seattle projects and about 20% in the Eastside. In the past decade, that’s flipped to just 20% of projects in Seattle and 80% in places like Bellevue and Redmond. 

Runberg said that the flight of tech companies to the Eastside is also driving the decline. “It’s not coincidental that when this migration of the tech business pivoted to the Eastside, so did our clients to provide housing over there.” 

He also noted the opening of the new Eastside Link light rail line has made construction of multifamily housing in places like Bellevue and Redmond an easier sell. 

But on top of those difficulties, it’s the costly and unpredictable design review process, which Runberg has been a vocal critic of, that’s becoming a deciding factor in causing developers to hesitate in the Seattle multifamily housing market.

“You have a design review process that five years ago might have taken 12 months and creeped up to 18 months, and then it was 24 months, and now it’s 30 months,” Runberg said. 

“The folks that put up 90% of the financing for these projects are out-of-state investors, and if they see the risk is too great, that it takes too long to put it together, or the process is too complex, it all adds risk,” he said. “And they’re going to lend less on these projects if this happens repeatedly. You start to get the bad reputation that we’ve got – that it’s a risky market.”

Runberg cites two examples of projects he was personally involved with that failed to complete construction because of design review squabbles. One, a 134-unit apartment building at 12th Avenue and Olive Way, burned through at least 2,700 hours of the firm’s time on the 21-month design review process, adding at least $400,000 in extra costs to the transit-oriented development. Existing housing was demolished, but cost pressures eventually forced the developer to back out.

“It was, sadly, one of the ones that the clock ran out when interest rates tipped,” Runberg said. The lot now sits vacant.

Another of Runberg’s projects, at 118 W Mercer, would have created 113 new units of housing. Runberg said outreach by the architect and developer generated overwhelming support from the local Uptown Alliance, but the project soon bogged down in a 21-month delay before the West Design Review Board. Runberg said the process added more than 1,600 hours of his firm’s time to the project at a cost of at least $250,000. Despite community support, the board pushed for numerous changes to the project, Runberg said.

“There was also turnover on that board that made it even more convoluted and confusing,” Runberg said. “As a consequence, the existing apartment building was torn down, and the Tup Tim Thai restaurant demolished. Here we are four years later with an empty site and the project is effectively mothballed. It didn’t make economic sense.”

Runberg also notes one additional pressure on apartment construction in Seattle. While he agrees that setting high energy efficiency standards is an admirable approach to addressing climate change, he believes the city of Seattle set extremely high goals with little attention paid to how those standards would impact costs or the pace of construction.

Those new building standards, which Runberg said are now the most restrictive in the nation, add additional costs on to projects already burdened by interest rates, materials, and labor costs. His industry lobbied the City to stick with Washigton state’s new standard, already the nation’s most stringent, but the City was committed to topping that by 10 to 15%, he said.

In response, Mayor Harrell recently proposed rolling back tighter energy code requirements to spur homebuilding.

“It will be really onerous, for the industry to try and dig ourselves out of the hole we’re in,” Runberg said. “Nobody wants global warming. We all want to get there. But, it’s a big, complex thing. It’s like trying to turn an aircraft carrier. You can’t spin the wheel that fast.”

Correction: Brian Runberg was misspelled in the original draft. We apologize for the error.

The post Seattle Breaks Ground on West Coast’s First Residential Highrise of 2024 first appeared on The Urbanist.

Under the proposal, currently under consideration by the Seattle City Council, nine permanent staff positions would be eliminated, and another 20 positions that had been set to be eliminated at the end of 2025 would be cut a year early. All told, the layoffs would represent a cut of just under 7% of the entire department. Moreover, the cuts would prompt changes in job assignments up and down SDCI’s org chart, and represent a significant shakeup.

SDCI has been touting progress toward a structural overhaul in response to a city auditor’s report that stressed a need to improve “customer focus and consistency” and reduce permit times, but it’s not clear what the implications of these staff cuts will be, both in the short-term and long-term.

The proposed cuts come at a time when the city is ramping up efforts to encourage development activity. Homebuilders have complained that slow, unpredictable permit processes add project costs and encourage them to look elsewhere, and an understaffed SDCI could exacerbate that trend. Employees at SDCI worry that a significant reduction in staff at SDCI could result in long-term hit to the department’s effectiveness.

“Our workers in SDCI do much more than permit review,” Jamie Fackler, an SDCI employee and a union steward for PROTEC17, told The Urbanist. “They provide vital customer service to homeowners, building owners, and builders by being on call to answer questions about complex land use and development questions. If Seattle is concerned about developing more affordable housing quickly, laying off highly-qualified staff that play a vital role in approving permits and reviewing complex projects is not the way to do it.”

Just last month, the City Council approved a three-year downtown design review moratorium on the heels of a bill encouraging more office-to-residential conversions, moves that are all intended to prompt developers to get their projects in the queue. While design review requirements being dropped means fewer onerous meetings for SDCI staff to conduct, those projects will still require staff time.

The current housing starts downturn may not be long-lived. As federal interest rates begin to come down and make some dormant projects feasible, the development industry is expecting a rebound, with permit intake volumes potentially ticking back up again.

Nonetheless, SDCI insists that there won’t be an impact on development projects.

“Permit timelines will not be affected by the staff reductions because fewer projects will require a master use permit, and the retained staff will be sufficient to review the anticipated permit volumes,” SDCI’s Shane Muchow told the Council at a budget briefing late last month.

SDCI Director Nathan Torgelson touted the fact that the department has been given contingent budget authority, which essentially means that unlike other departments, which would have to ask the Council to approve the hiring of additional staff, SDCI can go out and hire people right away if it’s needed.

“With the continent budget authority, when the economy does come back — which it will — we can immediately go into the hiring process, which is a great benefit,” Torgelson said. But he said that only saves around three to six months, with the department able to fill existing positions that become vacant much more quickly.

During the briefing, councilmembers including Tanya Woo and Land Use Committee chair Tammy Morales peppered SDCI staff about the planned layoffs. Morales noted additional land use reforms down the road that could potentially increase master use permit requests, like planned accessory dwelling unit (ADU) reform. And she noted that the council has not yet made any policy decisions about the permanent future of the design review program, which has to be modified to conform with state law by the end of 2025.

Morales also brought up staffing levels at the Code Compliance division, which is not funded by permit fees but rather the City’s General Fund, which is receiving a significant boost in funding thanks to dollars diverted from the JumpStart payroll tax.

“We’ve got something like 9,000 outstanding code compliance issues, so that is […] still a problem,” Morales said. “I’m kind of flummoxed at why we’re cutting positions in code enforcement and compliance.”

Torgelson noted that SDCI is developing a plan to tackle outstanding code compliance issues, but the proposed budget eliminates a vacant position in that group.

But Dan Eder, interim Director of the City Budget office, seemed to get defensive when facing Council’s questions about whether the layoffs at SDCI are in the city’s best interest.

“We fund these staff with permit fees. Permit fees are not there to continue supporting the employment of those staff. So consequences could be worse, and we’d still not have the money to pay for the staff, because the permit fees haven’t been there at a level sufficient to keep those people employed,” Eder said. SDCI’s permit fees, along with street use fees and parks fees (including athletic field rentals and pool usage fees) are all set to see an increase in Harrell’s budget.

While SDCI touts the ability to rehire staff quickly, planning staff are in high demand in a region with substantive land use overhauls happening in jurisdictions of all sizes, thanks to recent changes in state law.

“Training for most positions at SDCI occurs on the job, and it takes many years for reviewers to develop the knowledge to quickly and accurately review plans,” Fackler said. “These cuts will set SDCI back several years by losing important institutional knowledge, which sets the stage for longer wait times in the future.”

Another budget cut victim: the Seattle Planning Commission

The Mayor’s proposed budget also includes a proposed staff cut that could have an oversized impact when it comes to impending discussions around housing and growth planning. The Seattle Planning Commission, a body that is mandated by state law to advise the Mayor and City Council on land use issues, would lose half its policy staff leaving only one full-time employee tasked with providing policy guidance to the Commission. The position to be cut has been filled by John Hoey since 2016.

Operating as part of the Seattle Office of Planning and Community Development (OPCD), the Planning Commission has been highly involved in analyzing the early drafts of the city’s Comprehensive Plan, issuing a full critique of the ways that the plan reinforces past policy mistakes and providing recommendations on proposed fixes. With an updated draft of the plan expected later this month, the staff cut comes at one of the most critical times in Seattle’s growth planning cycle as the City Council prepares to dig into the plan early next year. In addition to land use planning, the planning commission is also heavily involved in transportation planning, issuing recommendations for refinements to the Seattle Transportation Plan last year.

“We commissioners absolutely depend on staff to help us make sense of some so the densest, dryest documentation a city could produce and keeping John is a great investment in Seattle’s future,” planning commissioner Matt Hutchins tweeted on X in reply to news of the impending cut.

In the coming weeks, the Seattle City Council will have to decide how to modify the budget that has been recommended to them. Policy priorities for SDCI and OPCD will be competing against those at other departments, as they grapple with whether to endorse the Harrell Administration’s proposal to permanently change the distribution of funds from the 2020 JumpStart tax, previously dedicated for affordable housing, economic development, and sustainability infrastructure.

The post Harrell Officials Downplay Impact of Permitting Staff Cuts first appeared on The Urbanist.

Instead of project proposals being reviewed by a volunteer board, they will be reviewed administratively by staff at the Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections (SDCI). SDCI would also have the ability to approve some deviations from the city’s land use code — called departures — without the ability for those decisions to be appealed to the city’s Hearing Examiner, a process that can add months if not years to projects. According to a recent city review, the existing design review process adds nine months of time to projects on average compared to administrative review, not counting any additional appeal time.

With developers already making moves in response to targeted Downtown upzones that the City Council approved last year, the design review exemption is expected to prompt more builders to get their projects into the queue, particularly as the Federal Reserve starts to lower interest rates and project financing becomes easier. This design review exemption would also join new incentives to convert existing office space to residential units in the common aim of turning Downtown into more of a 24-hour neighborhood, but projects in Uptown, South Lake Union, First Hill, and a sliver of north SoDo would all be able to take advantage.

The strongest advocate on the Council for the change seemed to be Council President Sara Nelson, who argued that the city needed to take steps to advance a policy goal of having more housing downtown by reducing barriers to development.

“I always say that if we want to build more housing, we have to better align our regulatory environment around that policy goal,” Nelson said. “I want to acknowledge the concern that we’ve heard from people that that design review protects the ability and the right of people to weigh in on their physical environment by weighing in on the on buildings that are going to be in their neighborhood. And I also recognize that we definitely need more housing, especially downtown.”

Opponents of the bill argued it gives too much power to SDCI to approve departures, which can involve building features like height, upper-level setbacks, facade shapes, and street-level use type, removing opportunities for public input. Coming out particularly strongly against the bill was Friends of the Market, an advocacy organization that exists to protect the Pike Place Market historic district, which itself has its own internal commission reviewing design changes and would be fully exempt from this bill.

“The Market has guidelines that protect noise, views, and natural light and energy control, unlike any of the other historic districts or city landmarks, and so if there’s no design review in the next three years, it means that lots or buildings that may be redeveloped across First Avenue from the Market, they may shadow the Market and may take out some of the natural light,” Heather Piel, President of the Friends of the Market, told the land use committee earlier this month. “If we don’t have notice, and the decision can’t be appealed, then that really raises a problem for all of us on how to protect the Market.”

But even Councilmember Bob Kettle, whose district includes the area around Pike Place Market, appeared unconvinced by that argument. Kettle, who was recorded in 2018 pushing back on the proposed seven story redevelopment of the Safeway store in Upper Queen Anne using the design review process, voted yes after introducing an amendment that removed SDCI’s ability to issue departures when it comes to vehicle loading access, a frequent topic of concern with Belltown condominium groups.

Councilmember Cathy Moore, the lone vote against the bill, complained that the city was taking a “hodgepodge approach.” “We’re basically getting rid of design review one little piece at a time, and we don’t have any replacement,” Moore said. “I would rather us take a uniform approach, and actually have a discussion about what design review looks like.”

Moore also echoed a talking point that had been raised in a memo written by Ketil Freeman of the Council’s independent Central Staff that downtown has significant unused zoning capacity, making building incentives superfluous. But the design review exemption isn’t intended to create more capacity, it’s to ensure the capacity we already have does not go to waste. Reducing costs and providing quicker permit times could nudge projects that are on the edge of being financially feasible into viability.

Even with this bill approved, the Council will still have to return to the larger issue of design review’s permanent future whether it wants to or not, with a deadline of the end of 2025 to implement a state mandate in House Bill 1293, which added new guardrails for local design review boards. The state is requiring design standards to be “clear and objective,” necessitating a complete overhaul of Seattle’s neighborhood-specific design guidelines, which are peppered with subjective requirements. But even more significantly, design review boards will only be allowed to have one meeting to discuss a project, when currently boards can vote to ask applicants to come back for multiple meetings.

Multifamily homebuilders throughout the city can already get an exemption from design review if they include on-site dedicated affordable units as part of Seattle’s Mandatory Housing Affordability (MHA) program, as opposed to paying a fee to subsidize affordable units off-site, a move the City Council approved last year. The fact that this exemption exists and hasn’t been in place long enough to be evaluated was used as an argument against more exemptions, but Councilmember Dan Strauss, former chair of the land use committee, said he wasn’t persuaded by that argument.

“As we continue to review the design review program — because it needs to be improved, it needs to have fixes — I think it is helpful for us to have a bit of a differentiation between these pilot programs, so we can see what’s working, what’s not,” Strauss said.

Ultimately, though, there won’t be much time to review the full impact of this three-year moratorium before the City needs to enact permanent reforms to the design review process sometime next year. The Harrell Administration has been making slow progress on that work, with a study intended to inform legislation seeing a delayed release.

Some housing advocates have been pushing for design review to be permanently abolished, but most councilmembers, including land use committee chair Tammy Morales, don’t seem ready to go that far. In remarks after the bill passed out of her committee last week, Morales noted what she saw as a need for some type of design review process in communities to get buy-in on changes that impact the whole neighborhood.

“I will say as somebody who has regularly experienced frustration in knowing that there really isn’t a place for Black and brown communities to ask the question: ‘How is this project going to impact us?’, and we hear from people over and over again: the fear of density, the fear of development in their communities because they have witnessed displacement as a result of these projects, and there aren’t that many places for people to weigh in on what will happen to their neighborhood,” Morales said. “And these are important decisions — we are making decisions, we are allowing or disallowing projects that will shape the way a neighborhood looks for generations.”

For now, this time-limited exemption seems to represent a fairly broad consensus that reducing barriers to adding more housing is in alignment with city goals, a move that has the potential to move Downtown in a positive direction, with tougher conversations around design review’s role in citywide planning left to another day.

The post Seattle Council Streamlines Development Downtown with 3-Year Design Review Bypass first appeared on The Urbanist.

Under the bill, proposed building projects that include at least half of their floor area as residential or hotel space, or include any research and development lab uses, would be exempt from having to go through the full design review process, controlled by all-volunteer boards. Instead, those projects would be reviewed by staff at the Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections (SDCI).

Only projects within Downtown, Uptown, South Lake Union, First Hill, and a small slice of SoDo’s industrial area north of Royal Brougham Way would qualify for the exemption, and the exemption would sunset three years after it takes effect. Areas inside the Pioneer Square, Chinatown-International District, and Pike Place Market historic districts wouldn’t be included.

Developers wanting to build projects downtown would likely be incentivized to get their applications in during that timeframe, even if they aren’t fully ready to move forward. Another major benefit to applicants is that projects approved by SDCI during this period could not be appealed to the city’s Hearing Examiner, something that can add even more time to projects and a tactic that groups trying to halt projects have long utilized. According to the City, average completion times for full design review can total more than two years, not including any appeal time. That time wouldn’t be fully saved, with administrative review still taking time, but the difference could be substantial. A recent citywide analysis found that full design review adds nine months delay compared to administrative review, on average, and downtown has some of the most complex projects.

Unusually, the memo distributed to councilmembers from the council’s independent central staff appeared openly skeptical of the proposal, questioning whether the Harrell Administration had even articulated what it is trying to accomplish with the bill.

“It is unclear what problem [the bill] seeks to solve,” the memo, written by longtime staffer Ketil Freeman, stated, noting that the downtown neighborhoods in question have the additional capacity, on paper, to accommodate 41,000 additional homes and 110,000 additional jobs. However, homes and jobs can’t come to fruition if projects do not pencil out as feasible for the builders. So, it’s not clear how relevant the zoned capacity of downtown is in this context.

Council President Sara Nelson, not a member of land use committee and joining as a guest, acted as its biggest advocate at Wednesday’s meeting, with no one present from Mayor Harrell’s office to speak to the bill’s role in the broader Downtown Activation Plan.

“I have always said that we need to better align our regulatory environment to meet our policy goals. So when it comes to housing, that means, if we want more housing, we have to make it cheaper and easier to build,” Nelson said.

The council president took issue with Freeman’s characterization of downtown’s capacity in the staff memo, and noted that design review comes with real costs for developers. She pointed to council’s decision to exempt projects from design review when they produce rent-restricted Mandatory Housing Affordability (MHA) units on site as recognition of the hurdles the program creates — and the incentive a faster permitting track creates.

“More salient to me is the concern of our constituents that do say that we are taking away the ability for them to weigh in on the design in them the appearance of a building,” Nelson said. “And I take that seriously, but we have permanently citywide eliminated design review for market-rate development with on-site [MHA] performance and so, I don’t know if the same argument was made at that time, but again, it’s about consistency in how we in how we try to incentivize what I think everybody agrees is a positive.”

Committee chair Tammy Morales was more skeptical of the bill, suggesting that staff time at SDCI would be better spent working on more systemic fixes to design review. By the end of 2025, Seattle needs to revise the entire design review program to align with House Bill 1293, changing its design standards for every single neighborhood to be more objective, and updating the process to only include one meeting. Design review boards can require three or more meetings to review a single project under the current design review program.

Morales brought up the challenges of quantifying the costs that design review adds, noting that developers are loath to publicize detailed financial information for a project, or a “pro forma” in developer lingo.

“I know there’s a lot of talk about design review increasing costs of production. There’s really no evidence to support that, because pro formas of projects were not available for analysis,” Morales said. “So I’m sure there is some connection there, it’s just a hard point for us to prove because we don’t have pro formas from projects that can help us see how these delays might add to cost. I would love [it] if there are developers out there who are interested in sharing that information so that we can really back up what we’re saying with data that would be helpful.”

Despite the lack of public pro formas, housing advocates have been able to link design review to significant costs, both in terms of fees paid to architecture firms to produce design review packets and present to boards and in terms of delay, which adds carrying costs while they wait and inflates project costs when builders are finally able to break ground.

Councilmember Dan Strauss called the bill “prudent,” limited in geographic scope, development scope, and time.

“This gives us a nice pilot to prepare us for the future changes that need to be made [to design review]. And the scope of where we are is a heavily developed area, which means that there’s not a lot of potential, as compared to — if this bill was being applied to Neighborhood Residential [zones] today, I would have a lot more concerns,” Strauss said.

Meanwhile Councilmember Bob Kettle, whose district encompasses most of the area that would fall under this bill, doesn’t sit on the land use committee and didn’t weigh in directly. But in a discussion at the transportation committee the day prior, Kettle brought up the topic of design review on his own, seeming to throw shade on this bill.

“I recognize design review is a dirty word in some communities, but I favor design review because it really brings in the communities,” Kettle said. “And guess what, there’s a lot of smart ideas that come out of the community, and I know that from personal experience in terms of the Queen Anne Community Council but also Uptown Alliance and South Lake Union Community Council.”

During the public hearing, numerous commenters asserted that exempting projects from design review would be giving up authority from elected councilmembers to unelected city staffers, despite the fact that design review board members are not elected either. Last week, the Seattle Times published an op-ed by Belltown resident Megan Kruse opposing the bill, with Kruse accusing the city of trying to “mute the neighbors” of planned developments, without mentioning the prominent role that Kruse has played in blocking projects downtown, preventing millions of dollars from being contributed to fund affordable housing.

The land use committee has just one opportunity to vote on the bill before suspending its meetings for the fall budget season, which ultimately means that if there’s not a vote on September 18, the bill would be punted into December, at the earliest. With Council President Sara Nelson behind the proposal, it seems to have enough support for ultimate approval, but whether councilmembers are able to get their questions answered within the next two weeks is another question.

The post Downtown Design Review Moratorium Gets Mixed Reception from Seattle Council first appeared on The Urbanist.

Three years after the city council tasked the Seattle Department of Construction & Inspections (SDCI) with examining how to reform its cumbersome design review process, SDCI released its stakeholder report on the program in July. Despite finally releasing the report, the department still remains nearly a year away from making substantive changes to design review.

Bogged down by a contentious stakeholder process, and thrown for a loop by the passage of state legislation (HB 1293) in 2023 that curtails design review processes statewide, SDCI still appears committed to making only minor tweaks to design review rather than major reforms beyond state minimum standards. Starting in June 2025, HB 1293 will require that all design standards be “clear and objective” and set a maximum of one public meeting per project.

“The Design Review [statement of legislative intent] and stakeholder process [were] helpful in identifying program outcomes, gaps in equity, and stakeholder recommendations for how to address those gaps or refinements to the design review process,” said SDCI spokesman Bryan Stevens in an email. “We expect the legislation for these changes will be completed by the June 2025 state deadline.”

In November 2021, the Seattle City Council directed SDCI to look at ways to improve design review, which ostensibly exists to implement design guidelines, improve the exterior aesthetics of multi-family residential buildings, and to promote designs that better fit into Seattle neighborhoods. But housing advocates, architects, and developers have long complained that the program substantially increases the time to issue building permits, increases the cost and complexity of projects, focuses on intangible aesthetics, and makes the permitting process unpredictable.

“The primary harm it causes is the uncertainty of the delay,” said Scott Berkley, an organizer with the group Tech 4 Housing, which advocates for abundant housing options. “When developers can’t reliably predict how long it’s going to take them before they can begin construction, that puts their financing at risk and makes projects less viable.”

In the past several years, Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office has taken several small steps to reform design review and exempt some projects from the process. A pandemic-era exemption for affordable housing projects was renewed in 2023, and the exemption was extended that same year to multi-family housing projects that include Mandatory Housing Affordability units on-site.

This April, the mayor’s office proposed exempting residential, hotel and research laboratory projects in the greater downtown area (including downtown, First Hill, Uptown, and South Lake Union) from design review. SDCI submitted the legislation to the city council in July. The bill will receive a hearing on September 4, and a possible land use committee vote on September 18, according to a spokesperson for Councilmember Tammy Morales, who chairs the committee.

“I certainly think this is a step in the right direction,” Berkley said of the legislation. “But the housing crisis in Seattle is past the point where these small, incremental changes are really addressing the problem with the urgency it demands.”

Berkley also observed that if downtown could benefit from design review exemptions, other areas of the city deserve relief as well. “We object to the implication that maybe this is good enough for areas with higher renter populations,” he said, “but we somehow still need to protect other neighborhoods that have higher rates of home ownership.”

The three-year process to create the stakeholder report was fraught with confusion and controversy. In its statement of legislative intent or SLI, Seattle City Council asked SDCI to look at the impacts of design review through a racial equity lens, while also instructing the department to document how long the process takes, how often departures from guidelines are granted, and whether the program increases housing costs. It also asked for a review of similar programs across the country, and asked for a list of recommended steps to modify and improve the program.

As the report makes clear in its opening letter, there was early confusion about how much emphasis was to be placed on racial equity analysis versus improving the efficiency of the program. The consultant hired by SDCI, Paradigm Shift, eventually resigned from the group after the mayor’s office added more representatives on behalf of organizations such as AIA and Seattle for Everyone. These groups were, admittedly, more focused on broad program outcomes rather than a narrow racial equity analysis focused on boosting participation from underrepresented Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) communities, but largely leaving the program intact – perhaps with even more layers and hurdles.

In its resignation letter, Paradigm Shift representatives Sofia Voz and Ti’esh Harper wrote, “From our point of view, if the intent of the SLI was to analyze ‘whether the program creates barriers to participation for BIPOC residents, either as applicants, board members, or public participants, and whether the program creates or reinforces racial exclusion’ the stakeholder group should have prioritized members who can speak intimately about this topic.”

Paradigm became frustrated that its attempts to analyze the equity impacts of design review were bumping up against efforts to streamline the process. “The desire to make changes was rooted in pressure primarily from the development community,” they wrote, “and more specifically, in money and the current cost of the process.”

Stevens, with SDCI, addressed the controversy by noting that both the mayor and city council, while focused on improving equity outcomes from the program, were primarily concerned with reducing its complexity. 

“Both the Mayor’s Office and Councilmember Strauss verbally stated throughout the process that one of the underlying principles of the SLI was to decrease the complexity of the design review program, streamline the permit process, and increase program predictability while making public engagement more equitable, all in an attempt to increase housing production and affordability in Seattle,” Stevens said. “While the scope of the SLI remained intact, it was important to clarify that program evaluation and improvements were the overarching goal.” 

Howard Greenwich, research director for Puget Sound Sage, hopes that the city will modify or replace design review with a system that is truly responsive to the needs of residents threatened by gentrification and increasing housing costs.

“In places that are not at risk of displacement, high opportunity areas, I think design review, by and large, goes away,” Greenwich said. “Instead, it’s replaced with a community planning and governance process like the ISRD [International Special Review District] in BIPOC-majority neighborhoods. Whether it’s SDCI staff or Office of Planning & Community Development staff bringing together stakeholders who can not only do the planning for the neighborhood, but also can evaluate projects and whether they fit within the community vision.”

David Neiman, an architect with Neiman Taber who served on the Ballard design review board, hopes SDCI will do more than follow the letter of state law requiring design review to be more simple and objective. 

“I hope the city won’t try to create a design review program that is somehow nominally compliant with state laws, but still maintains a bunch of the process,” Neiman said. “I think that’s a terrible outcome. It’d be meaningless kabuki theater, because the state law doesn’t allow your program to in any way engage in subjective judgments.”

SDCI’s 179-page report, like the stakeholder process itself, is complicated and takes its time in getting to the point. Asked to succinctly summarize the conclusions of the report, Bryan Stevens of SDCI listed six takeaways in an email response, which are summarized here:

1. Rewriting and simplifying design guidelines, including adding equity-focused guidelines;
2. Fewer design review hurdles for housing by allowing for more departures from the land use code; requiring minimum floor area ratios to prevent under-developed land; and increasing thresholds so fewer properties must go through design review;
3. Increasing predictability of the permitting process and increasing staff capacity to improve consistency and reduce approval time;
4. Replace eight district-based design boards with one centralized and “professionalized” design review board by paying stipends and requiring expertise, such as architecture or engineering backgrounds; recruiting more members from BIPOC communities, and training boards to promote racial equity;
5. Improving community outreach through more concise, simple language, and better engagement with BIPOC communities;
6. Meaningfully embedding racial equity throughout the design review program, including creating program missions focused on equity; creating an accountability framework, and convening a group from BIPOC communities to evaluate how well this accountability framework is working.

Stevens said that SDCI, over the past year, has been “working to identify how design review changes could respond to both the Design Review SLI Stakeholder recommendations and the requirements of HB 1293.” Though SDCI is planning to propose reform legislation by the  state-imposed deadline of June 2025, some changes to the program are already in the works, he said, including:

• Reforming the design review board appointment process to increase BIPOC and historically underrepresented voices on the boards;
• Rewriting design review documents with concise, plain language, including websites, instructions, design review reports, etc.;
• Increased training for design review boards and reviewers to improve review times and ensure consistent application of design guidelines;
• Racial equity training for design review boards and reviewers.

Berkley, with Tech 4 Housing, questions SDCI’s approach, with long timelines and minor tweaks to the program. 

“I think we need to start approaching things with urgency to fix the problems, and not this hesitancy that says we can’t make any mistakes and we can’t cause any person to be worse off,” he said. “We need a bias towards action – something the city has been sorely lacking over the last several decades.”

Referring to the infamous Queen Anne Safeway multi-family housing redevelopment that took seven years to permit and build and whose design review squabbles over minor aesthetic details sparked calls for reform, Berkley said, “Seattle isn’t facing a brick color crisis because of a lack of qualified architects. We’re facing a housing and homelessness crisis caused by a lack of housing.”

One question the city council asked SDCI to address in its stakeholder process was how much design review, on average, adds to the cost of a multi-family housing development. The report didn’t answer that question. Stevens said this was because the consultant hired by SDCI to do the analysis only heard anecdotally from developers about the added costs – and that to accurately determine those costs, the group needed more data. “Developers would need to share their proformas with this data, comparing similar types of development with and without design review,” Stevens said. “Those proformas were not made available to the consultant.”

Though a study by ECONorthwest commissioned in 2021 wasn’t able to estimate the added costs of design review, it did find that projects that went through full design review took 26 months to receive a permit on average – while projects that went through administrative design review took a little less than 18 months on average.

Neiman said taking a project through full design review substantially increases costs for his firm, and that’s passed on to the developer and renters. “It adds somewhere between nine months and forever to a given process,” Neiman said. “If it goes well, it adds the better part of a year and adds at least $100,000 in architects’ design time. And probably significantly more than that in the cost to the project in terms of added design features and time delays.”

While many comments submitted during the stakeholder process call for eliminating design review altogether, Stevens said SDCI isn’t considering that option. “While the option of eliminating design review was mentioned by a few stakeholders, other stakeholders pointed out that ending design review would have a disproportionately negative impact on BIPOC communities, since that’s often the only point of communication they have with city decision-makers,” he said.

Neiman hopes the process might be replaced with objective guidelines. “Instead of having 100 things you must do, maybe have: here are 20 prescriptive rules; pick seven,” he said. “If you have porches facing the street, you get a couple points. If you put brick on your building you get five.”

As for extensive public meetings to tell architects and developers the best way to design apartment buildings, Neiman hopes that will become a thing of the past. “We don’t have public meetings to decide what kind of restaurant you get to open,” he said. “We don’t have public meetings to decide […] what foods a grocery store will carry.”

The post Seattle Inches Down Path to Design Review Overhaul with New Report first appeared on The Urbanist.

The rules concern Seattle’s Living Building Pilot Program, which dates to 2009 and encourages developers to incorporate environmental sustainability elements into their buildings by offering a height bonus and additional floor area allowances. The pilot has been capped so far to just 20 projects, and 15 have already been enrolled, including the internationally recognized Bullitt Center in Capitol Hill.

Appellants worry new towers, even with their participation in the city’s top green building program, are not bird-friendly. “Increasing the number and density of tall buildings is likely to significantly adversely affect birds by increasing bird strike injuries and death,” the appeal claims.

Since 2020, Saratoga Capital has been trying to get approval to build a 19-story, 182-unit apartment building at 2616 Western Avenue under the pilot. The building was set to be awarded a 25-foot height bonus for meeting the Living Building standards and an additional ten foot bonus for including three-bedroom units, which are scarce in Downtown. After a lengthy design review process, the City eventually gave the green light for the project to move forward last year. But things didn’t stop there.

Within weeks, a so-called “Belltown Livability Coalition” filed an appeal; its primary representative, Pat Montanino, lists an address directly across the street from the planned development in the group’s filings at the Hearing Examiner. The first appeal the group filed in 2023 argued that the building shouldn’t be granted additional development rights under the Living Building pilot because of an existing provision in city code limiting buildings over 175 feet when their lots are less than 19,000 square feet. Earlier this year, Seattle’s Hearing Examiner Susan Drummond sided with the appellants, finding that the Living Building pilot doesn’t make a project exempt from that provision.

The Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections (SDCI) disagreed with the Hearing Examiner’s interpretation of the code, but nonetheless completed a Determination of Non-significance (DNS) for a code update that would have clarified that the Living Building pilot doesn’t have a minimum lot size. The Seattle City Council had been set to take up that update for adoption in early September.

However, early this week, the Belltown Livability Coalition filed another appeal, arguing that the City did not adequately study the impact of the proposed rule change, and its appeal puts front and center a claim that allowing taller buildings Seattle’s central core will be bad for birds. The appeal seeks to force SDCI to go through an environmental review process before advancing the policy update.

“Tall buildings adversely affect birds because birds fly into the sides of them and are injured or killed,” the appeal states. “The proposed code amendment would allow significantly taller buildings on smaller lots than the code currently allows. As a result, the proposed code amendment would not only allow taller buildings, but allow for those taller buildings to be more closely packed within the Downtown Mixed Residential zone.”

The appeal also alleges that SDCI needs to study the rule’s impact on aesthetics, light and glare, historic sites and landmarks, vehicular traffic, pedestrian traffic, public transit, emergency services, and utilities. This is a common tactic in land use appeals: to throw every possible category of issue at the Hearing Examiner and see if any of them stick. The appeal even argues that SDCI should more carefully weigh the impact of allowing additional people to live in one of the densest neighborhoods on the West Coast due to noise.

“People generate noise by talking, yelling, using speaker phones, and operating vehicles and equipment. Constructing tall buildings generates significant noise impacts, too. The proposed code amendment would increase these adverse noise impacts significantly,” it states. The appellants argue that the DNS is in violation of the State Environmental Policy Act (SEPA) and should be withdrawn.

Even if the appeal is dismissed as expeditiously as possible, its filing likely means a delay on City Council action of at least several months, likely pushing it into 2025 and along with it these 182 homes, along with any others that could be built elsewhere in downtown under the Living Building program.

Appeals like this have been common for decades as a way to stall individual projects, until the Washington State Legislature passed Senate Bill 5412, which categorically exempts infill development within the state’s urban areas from SEPA. And the delays from those projects came with real costs: an analysis by The Urbanist conducted in 2023 found that just in the area around Downtown Seattle, project-level appeals had delayed over 3,000 units of housing and over $39 million that those projects had been set to contribute to funding affordable housing in Seattle.

This code change, because it is not at the project level, is not specifically exempt from SEPA, opening the door to this specific appeal. However, that doesn’t mean the Hearing Examiner will find that it has merit.

For every dense building blocked in Seattle’s dense urban core, additional development pressures mount on the edges of the Puget Sound’s growth boundaries, causing more sprawl that ultimately drives up climate pollution and fails to protect the environment. But for the Belltown Livability Coalition, taking a wider-angle view is apparently for the birds.

The post Belltown Group Tries to Block Taller Buildings Downtown Over Birds first appeared on The Urbanist.

When QFC vacated Wedgwood Center in 2021, their departure was seen as a “devastating” move that left the neighborhood without a convenient grocery store. Now, three years later, a developer is redeveloping the area into an as-yet-unnamed grocery store with 331 apartments stacked on top at the 8400 35th Ave NE site. 

In public comment, residents expressed concerns about inadequate parking for new residents, congestion and noise, and the prospect of losing beloved businesses like Van Gogh Coffeehouse and The Broiler. Others voiced support for added density and the stacked-apartments-and-retail model in particular. The biggest area of conflict, though, centered on the developer’s request to depart from zoning and add an additional sixth story in exchange for saving two trees.

For developers, saving a tree entails redesigning the “building envelope” and can mean reducing a project’s raw square footage, which typically cuts into expected revenue. Healthy revenue projections are needed to offset climbing building costs, which have jumped recently due to high interest rates. A zoning departure to allow an extra floor can ensure that a project pencils out financially, which is why Seattle’s recent tree ordinance included such an incentive for saving trees on site.

Wedgwood Community Council backs developer’s six-story alternative

The Wedgwood Community Council has advocated for the six-story option, Concept C, which is also the developer’s preferred option. WCC president Per Johnson explained in an interview, “[Six stories is] greater than the density that we were looking for on this particular site when we as a community requested upzoning of this property back in 2015. [But] we have been and continue to be proactively planning for density in these areas.”

At a public comment meeting on March 25th, the Design Review Board appeared to be moving towards Concept C. But some participants objected to Concept C for a different reason: unlike Concept A and Concept B, it adds a surface parking lot in addition to the two levels of underground parking, at the request of the unknown grocery. For some commenters, this seemed like parking overkill. 

To avoid an explosion of strip malls, the city has restricted developers from building surface parking lots on pedestrian-designated zones, including 35th Avenue NE, and from building curb cuts for vehicles to access that parking from a pedestrian zone. Security Property’s design requests departures in both of these areas to build “approximately 20 accessible and convenient surface parking stalls as part of a shared use public plaza.”

For Johnson, it all comes back to the need for a grocery store, whoever that grocer is. “We understand it’s a priority for a grocer there, and a grocery is of high value to us. Our community’s built around a grocery at this location, and we’d very much like to see that back. So we’re willing to have a surface lot there, although we recognize that there would be some potential for pedestrian and vehicular conflict.”

“The Northeast Design Review Board has asked the designer at Security Properties to go back and look at ways to further reduce the potential for conflict and to make it less car-focused,” said Johnson. He noted the surface parking is intended to accommodate DoorDash, grab-and-go, and other food delivery options, which became more popular during the pandemic. Concept C adheres to the grocer’s other wishes, too, including to have only one entrance to mitigate retail crime, he added.

Johnson envisions a pedestrian-focused and “people-first” development, and mock-ups from the developer show young people eating and socializing. But the chaos of pedestrians entering retail or apartments from 35th Avenue NE while motorists simultaneously enter the surface parking lot could disrupt that atmosphere. Can a parking lot ever truly be a “shared use public plaza”?

Capitol Hill QFC strives for six stories and a hornbeam

To the south, a similar debate over density has sprung up in Capitol Hill. After the QFC left in 2021, the developer Hunters Capital took over the 416 15th Ave E site with plans to build 170 apartment units stacked on top of retail. Just like in Wedgwood, the developer has opted to request departures to add an additional story in exchange for saving trees, per the tree ordinance. 

Michael Oaksmith, who is president of development at Hunters Capital, said the extra floor also directly contributes to affordable housing via the Multi-Family Tax Exemption (MFTE) and Mandatory Housing Affordability (MHA) programs.

“Buildings of all residential types are not able to keep up with demand, especially now with interest rates slowing construction considerably. The tree ordinance is a creative way for the city to save mature trees while preserving developers’ rights to maximize density on sites,” Oaksmith said in an email. “It may not seem like much, but adding 20 units here, 30 units there, etc .— this all adds up. Especially for projects that take part in the MFTE affordable housing program and take part in the city’s mandated MHA programs. With even a 5% added density factor, we are talking hundreds of millions added in fees, along with thousands of added affordable units.”

Trees also improve the look of the building, provide sidewalk shade, and maintain habitat for squirrels and birds, he wrote.

In a flurry of public comments from the February 28th Land Use Meeting, some residents decried the additional fifth story for being “out of scale” with the neighborhood or ruining its “intimate feel.” Most comments, though, were supportive of the additional story.

Justin Oaksford, a volunteer with Tech4Housing, lives near Volunteer Park and notes that the area has many amenities — green space, the Asian Art Museum, the historic water tower — that make it desirable. Nonetheless, the area has not been as heavily upzoned and redeveloped as other parts of Capitol Hill — nor do plans for Seattle’s next 20-year comprehensive plan update significantly alter that growth strategy.

“In the upcoming Comp Plan updates, the area around Volunteer Park is barely touched,” Oaksford told The Urbanist. “The Aloha and Broadway area is going to be part of an urban neighborhood. But Volunteer Park is blocked off despite being right next to the 10 bus line, and quite close to the light rail station — blocked off above sixplexes or something like that. The sixth floor we’re talking about is about 22 units. That’s 22 households who will be looking for housing somewhere else, because it’s 22 households who want to live in this neighborhood. Those don’t just disappear. It’s not ether, they’re real people.”

From Oaksford’s perspective, the limited upzoning of Seattle has turned every new apartment building into a tooth-and-nail fight for housing capacity. In the proposed Comprehensive Plan, a few upzoned “Urban Centers” like Northgate stand out as islands of density in a sea of unchanged single-family zoning.

“There’s an argument to be made that if we had a sweeping upzone of the city, everything wouldn’t need to be six floors, or not in the first 50 years anyways,” Oaksford said. “But the truth is, development is so constrained in general, there’s very much a ‘we need it where we can get it’ mentality because it takes so much time, money, energy, permitting, delay, and consensus to get a single unit built. To get 22 units built is calculable in years of people’s lifelines.”

One of the more detailed and thought-out critiques came from land-use attorney Samuel Jacobs, who has also served in leadership roles with the Master Builders Association. Writing only as a resident of the neighborhood, however, he explained in an official comment letter why he doesn’t believe that this housing project meets the City’s four criteria for a departure. 

First, the building may not adhere to design guidelines, he said: “These departures, which would result in a significantly larger and taller building, are simply not justified at a zoning edge where, if anything, the Design Guidelines call for decrease in height and bulk.” Established zoning and adopted neighborhood plans mean the City Council has declared five stories the appropriate level of zoning for this area, Jacobs argued.

Second, he contends that the developer could save the tree without sacrificing square footage by tweaking their design, for instance by eliminating a voluntary ten-foot setback on the south side of the building. Third, Jacobs doubts whether this hornbeam is indeed an exceptional tree, according to the tree ordinance. Finally, he writes that, “Avoiding development in the tree protection area will not reduce the total development capacity of the site,” given that the bulk of the tree is on the public right-of-way, not private property.

Obviously, Hunters Capital disagrees and sees the extra floor as essential to achieving full buildout while still saving the tree.

Looking ahead

In a sense, the tree ordinance has succeeded by making developers hyper-mindful of saving trees, perhaps fearing backlash from tree activists. But has the slowdown in development that architects like David Neiman feared come to roost? In Capitol Hill, Hunters Capital’s Master Use Permit is pending, with another Design Review meeting on the books for later this spring or summer. “We expect to have our Master Use Permit by winter if all goes to plan,” Oaksmith said.

Meanwhile, in Wedgwood, Securities Property is refining their early design before their next design review meeting. For now, it seems that the Seattle Process is chugging right along, as usual.

Clarification: The original draft referred to the Wedgwood preferred proposal as five stories, but it’s five stories of residential over one story of retail so referring to it as a six-story building is clearer. We have updated the piece to reflect that.

The post Two Seattle QFC Redevelopments Run Into Concerns Around Height and Parking first appeared on The Urbanist.

The legislation would apply for three years and provide design review exemptions in the Downtown, Uptown, South Lake Union, and First Hill Urban Centers for the following types of projects:

• Mixed-use projects where at least 50% of floor area is hotel use;
• Mixed-use projects where at least 50% of floor area is residential; 
• Projects that include any research and development lab uses; and
• Projects that are fully residential.

Not included in the proposed legislation are projects that are mostly conventional office space, a reflection that the City is anticipating lower office demand with high rates of work-from-home for white collar workers and is shifting to a strategy to encourage residential growth to activate downtown.

SDCI has indicated the legislation would have minimal impact on Chinatown-International District and Pioneer Square or landmark districts like Pike Place Market since projects are already exempt from traditional design review in those areas and instead go through special review districts. Though projects exempt from design review in those areas can and would still be able to voluntarily opt-into the program to receive flexibility from development regulations. It does not appear the City thinks such an option is likely to be well-used.

Projects eligible for the exemption would need to show that they don’t have any special features, such as a corresponding land use application that requires approval by the city council or a landmark structure on-site, that would need to be addressed through permit review. 

In addition to exemption from design review, eligible projects would be able to seek waivers and modifications for certain types of development regulations. The list of potential waivers and modifications is lengthy, but not as expansive as in the regular design review program for eligible development standard departures. Applicants would need to show that approval of waivers and modifications would “address siting constraints or result in an increased number of dwelling units or lodging rooms being constructed,” according to the proposed legislation.

Most residential, hotel, and research and development lab projects seek departures, at least those subject to design review in the area proposed for design review exemption, according to a report by City planners. The reports notes that:

“The 46 residential and hotel-related development proposals received approximately:

• 40 departures from Land Use Code requirements involving development standards that manage the location of the building on the site, such as setbacks between structures or from lot lines; 
• 48 departures from Land Use Code requirements involving standards related to features of new development, such as ground-level uses, landscaping, the amount of wall area with windows or blank spaces, or adjustments in automobile access, parking, or weather protection; 

For the 9 non-residential development proposals that included laboratory components: 

• 42 total departures were proposed, which averages out to 4-5 departures per development. 
• Most of these were for building-siting departures, in proportions similar to other nonresidential developments.”

The proposed set of waivers and modifications is based upon a review of these projects for the most commonly requested and granted departures from development regulations. Review of the waivers and modifications would be conducted as non-appealable ministerial review of a project application.

Reform of Seattle’s design review program has been a priority by housing advocates for many years now. Interim changes were adopted during the pandemic to streamline reviews with further changes adopted last year to enhance and extend exemptions for affordable and permanent supportive housing and provide new exemptions for other projects that commit to providing on-site affordable housing under the Mandatory Housing Affordability program for residential development.

A new state law is set to push the City to revise its design review program by, among other things, adopting “clear and objective development regulations” in most areas of the city by July 2025.

For now, the Mayor’s proposed legislation is set to join two other land use pieces of the Mayor’s DAP currently awaiting city council review and approval. Those proposals seek to make it easier to fill vacant storefronts in parts of Downtown Seattle, Uptown, and South Lake Union with less active uses and encourage conversion of vacant commercial space (mostly offices) to residential uses. Last fall, the Mayor was successful in winning council approval of two Downtown Seattle rezones to facilitate more highrise housing and hotels. 

Barring an appeal of the proposed design review exemption legislation, a formal ordinance could be transmitted to the city council in a matter of months for final adoption.

The post Harrell Proposes Design Review Exemption for Downtown Housing Projects first appeared on The Urbanist.