Through the first decades of this century, the greater Seattle area had a secret weapon for fighting climate change: it let people choose to live closer to each other.

Using a study of neighborhood-level carbon emissions, Sightline estimates that new residents to the Seattle area produced about 5% less greenhouse gases from 2000 to 2020. That’s simply thanks to their metro area being better than any other in the United States at adding homes to existing neighborhoods.

The region eliminated about 1 million tons of potential greenhouse gas emissions basically for free: no government spending, no tax credits for efficiency, no carbon trading market, no carbon tax. This public benefit came just from reducing red tape and letting construction workers build the kinds of homes that people want to live in.

Key Takeaways

• By letting new homes locate in existing neighborhoods, the Seattle metro stopped some new and existing residents from being forced out of them. 
• This trend reduced those new residents’ climate impact, since people who live farther from each other tend to emit more greenhouse gases than people who live closer together. 
• Sightline estimates that new residents emitted 5 percent less greenhouse gases than they would have if they had lived in more sprawling neighborhoods. 
• This climate benefit, approximately equivalent to electrifying two-thirds of the cars in the City of Seattle, did not require a large government investment. 

Building those homes created jobs. Letting people live in them created economic growth, more location choices, and lower energy bills. The metro might have done even better, of course, if it had allowed more homes throughout the region; and it can keep improving in the future.

But for the economy of greater Seattle, this category of climate action has been better than a free lunch. It’s been a lunch the region got paid to eat.

Living closer to neighbors saves energy

In general, it’s a simple relationship: when people live close enough together, they use less energy and emit less greenhouse gases. Take it from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: “compact and resource-efficient urban growth through co-location of higher residential and job densities, mixed land use, and transit-oriented development (TOD) could reduce GHG emissions between 23% and 26% by 2050 compared to the business-as-usual scenario.”

This effect comes from three main factors: less driving, more energy-efficient buildings, and less displacement of nearby ecosystems by energy-intensive objects like pavement.

1. Lower transportation emissions

Cars and trucks are the leading source of greenhouse gas emissions in most states and provinces. Residents of the most compact neighborhoods—areas of apartments mixed with workplaces and shops, whether in cities or suburbs — drive much less than residents of spread-out neighborhoods of detached houses on large lots. “Infill housing reduces pollution by reducing driving,” as UC Berkeley’s Terner Center for Housing Innovation puts it.

A Terner Center study finds that San Franciscans emit less than a third as much carbon from transportation as residents of the sprawling Bay Area exurb of Oakley, while making a similar number of trips for the same purposes. Another found that households in California’s suburban, single-detached neighborhoods drive more than twice as much every weekday as households in urban neighborhoods with high transit usage. And public transit usage increases with population density (among other factors). In places where few people live close enough to walk to the bus stop, transit can even be less climate-friendly than personal automobiles.

These emissions benefits also accrue to existing residents of a neighborhood that adds people, not just new residents moving in. When there are enough people in your neighborhood to support a grocery store or a new bus line, now you get to walk to the grocery store or take the bus to work instead of driving.

2. More energy-efficient homes

There’s no better insulation than another entire climate-controlled home on the other side of your wall. Urban neighborhoods are much more likely to have such wall-sharing multifamily housing, which one study finds uses 35% less energy for heating and 21% less energy for cooling than equivalent households in single-detached houses. (What’s more, multifamily homes generally have smaller floorplans, which further reduce energy consumption from heating and cooling.) 

3. Preserving—not paving over—carbon-sink ecosystems

It takes energy to make stuff, and spread-out cities require more stuff. One researcher at Delft University of Technology found that “urban sprawl accounts for a third of all greenhouse gas emissions” via increased raw materials in construction, less efficient land use, and higher consumption of goods and services. Sprawl also replaces previous land uses that can sequester carbon, while infill adds homes without destroying these vital carbon sinks: forests, wetlands, grasslands, farmland, and others. 

A tale of two ZIP codes 

Consider some (hypothetical) denizens of two different neighborhoods around the metro: Beth, a resident in Seattle’s Beacon Hill neighborhood, which features lots of apartments, local shops, and services, and is comparatively transit-rich; and Maria, a typical resident in the suburb of Mercer Island, which has mostly large, single-detached houses on large lots and a single commercial center on its north end best accessed by car. According to a 2014 study from UC Berkeley, Beacon Hill Beth emits 16.75 tons of greenhouse gases in a year, while Mercer Island Maria emits 25.05 tons of greenhouse gases annually — almost 50% more than that of her counterpart across Lake Washington.

Why such a big difference? According to the researchers, Maria used more electricity and natural gas, drove more, and consumed more goods and services than did Beth.

As the Seattle metro grows its population, one key for reducing carbon emissions is figuring out how to make adding a newcomer look more like adding a Beth than like adding a Maria. And the high home prices and rents in places like Beacon Hill show, via basic market supply-and-demand principles, that plenty more Beths would love to live there if they could — i.e., if there were more homes they could afford there.

In general, the metro’s more populous urban neighborhoods are full of Beths (the dotted regions below, clustered along the I-5 spine), and its less populous suburban neighborhoods are full of Marias (the wavy regions below, often along the water or east of Lake Sammamish). Over the last 25 years, strategies like the city of Seattle’s urban villages plan and other upzones across the region have channeled new residents into existing urban neighborhoods instead of sprouting new exurbs at the edge of the metro.

What was the climate impact of all those new people living where they ended up? To know that, you’d have to make an educated guess about what would have happened if Seattle had sprawled even more instead of growing inwards as much as it did.

If this were medical research, scientists might want to study twins separated at birth. It turns out that the Seattle metro has a twin whose similar origin but different destiny helps us imagine a hypothetical, more sprawling Seattle. It’s Dallas.

Everything’s bigger in Texas, especially the suburbs 

In 2000, the Seattle and Dallas metro areas were very different in the popular imagination: a tech hub of fleecy outdoors enthusiasts and an oil boomtown of truck-driving football fans.

In one way, though, they were unexpected siblings. Their populations were spread across the land in similar patterns. Specifically, if you parceled out their populations into buckets based on how close they lived to each other — their population density or concentration — and made a chart, you’d see almost the same shape. In both cases, the follow patterns emerge:

• Few residents lived in low-population density neighborhoods characteristic of more rural parts of the United States (picture a Vashon Island-like spread of detached homes separated by acres of farms and forests);
• Lots of residents lived above the median U.S. population density (picture something closer to Bothell, a mix of smaller-lot homes, duplexes, and scattered low-rise apartments); and
• A handful of people lived in neighborhoods with higher population density than just about anywhere in the country (picture Seattle’s U District, with larger apartment buildings along major corridors and plenty of small-lot multiplexes elsewhere).

Over the next 20 years, however, the two metros took different paths. Seattle added new residents across neighborhoods of all types, with both new neighborhoods and old neighborhoods growing a modest amount. Dallas, meanwhile, saw booming growth in its least populous neighborhoods, sprawl beyond the prior footprint of the metro, and a loss of residents from its most populous neighborhoods.

Hundreds of thousands of people in Dallas now live in neighborhoods that were farmland and open space as recently as the early 2000s, while already built-up neighborhoods have barely changed to accommodate the new babies, families, and workers arriving in the area. When new residents do manage to arrive in old neighborhoods across the Dallas metro, they usually replace existing residents rather than growing the neighborhood: existing residents either pass away, move out to a new exurban subdivision, or leave the region entirely.

Dallas, then, offers Seattle a useful what-if. The two metros started at around the same place in 2000 but diverged by 2020: Dallas went out. Seattle went up.

Imagining a Texas-style Seattle — and its emissions 

Imagine a more Dallas-like Seattle since 2000: Seattle’s metro area grew just as fast as in real life but followed Dallas’s outward pattern. No downtown highrises in Bellevue or Seattle. No reinvention of South Lake Union as an urban hotspot. No walkable town center in Kirkland or Redmond. No spinal cord of eight-story apartment buildings along arterial streets. No three-story walkups near suburban transit stations. No explosion of mother-in-law apartments, backyard cottages, and townhomes.

Now compare the carbon emissions of real Seattle and Dallas-style Seattle using the same Berkeley study of ZIP code-level emissions estimates, to get a back-of-the-envelope idea of the scale of Seattle’s specific growth pattern on Seattle’s specific emissions level. The main assumption: that additional residents of a neighborhood would, on average, emit the same as their neighbors.

Think of it like this, with Beacon Hill Beth and Mercer Island Maria from earlier. Say that Beacon Hill gained 100 new Beths (on net) between 2000 and 2020. At 16.75 tons of carbon emissions per capita, that’s 1,675 extra tons of greenhouse gases compared to 2000. But if instead, in Texas fashion, Mercer Island gained 100 Marias, the town would have emitted an additional 2,505 tons of carbon — far more than if those residents had gotten to live in Beacon Hill.

Like all research on the climate impact of where people live, Sightline’s analysis has its own assumptions, shortfalls, and caveats. Relying on a one-time snapshot of emissions disentangles population changes from other factors that change over time, but it also ignores how changes in population density would themselves affect per-capita emissions. Keeping the total metro population constant avoids conflating increased emissions with increased population, but it also essentially assumes that infill patterns don’t affect the number of people migrating from one metro to another, only location choices within each metro.

The question here: How much carbon do Seattleites save by being unusually good at welcoming more neighbors? The best answer Sightline can offer: about a million tons a year.

The benefit: Like electrifying two-thirds of Seattle’s cars  

Sightline’s analysis of the Berkeley ZIP code emissions model estimates that by 2020, the Seattle metro area’s slightly less-sprawling growth since 2000 was keeping 1 million tons of greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere every year, compared with what Seattleites would have been emitting if they had sprawled like Dallas. The region’s additional residents are 5% more energy-efficient than otherwise, due entirely to where they chose (and could choose) to live.

This happened on top of all the other climate action from people and governments in the Seattle area, from subsidizing solar panels to composting eggshells to weatherizing old buildings. And this happened essentially for free! A million tons of greenhouse gases is as much as you would save in a year by switching over 315,000 cars from gasoline to electric, or more than two out of every three cars in the city of Seattle.

As Sightline explains in a report on the Seattle metro area’s best-in-the-U.S. success at urban population growth over this period, the star of this show was the city of Seattle itself. In other infilling metro areas, like San Jose, suburban jurisdictions led the way on adding residents to existing neighborhoods. But here in the middle of Cascadia, Seattle proper was the standout performer. The average Seattle resident emits 6% less greenhouse gases than the average resident of the rest of the metro area, so every person who gets to move to (or stay in) the city instead of the suburbs shaves off about one ton of their annual carbon emissions. That’s even more than they would save by skipping a solo road trip to Dallas every year.

These findings reflect actual, real-world behavior by millions of people. Claims about immense emissions reductions often depend on immense uptake: “if every gas-powered car were replaced with an electric car,” “if the population density of a city doubled,” “if the meat substitute industry were substituted for the meat industry.” And indeed, if every Mercer Island Maria turned into a Beacon Hill Beth, we might expect emissions to drop by much more.

But in real life, where the Seattle metro added a handful of Beths to the mix instead of going all-in on more Marias like Dallas did, a 5% savings is a win worth celebrating. For the city of Seattle, which led the way, every additional resident who didn’t have to move to Woodinville is a mini climate victory.

Just one piece of the puzzle 

While this ZIP code model is a useful tool for estimating neighborhood-level emissions, it still excludes what actual emissions in the Seattle metro look like over time, which likely tell an even rosier story. In addition to the population distribution changes described here, other trends like less driving, more electric vehicle adoption, and energy efficiency upgrades are also reducing greenhouse gas emissions across the region.

Letting people live closer to each other connects communities, improves transportation options, and makes homes less expensive. To that, we can add that it fights climate change. Quite the list.

For those of us in and around Seattle, a bonus: though we can still do more to welcome new neighbors to our blocks, we can boast that to date, we’ve been doing it better than anyone else in the country. And it’s paying off.

Author’s note: Thanks to Good Measures for graphic design, CORE GIS for mapping, and Zack Subin for feedback on an early draft.

This is a crosspot that first appeared at the Sightline Institute. Find audio versions of Sightline articles on any of your favorite podcast platforms, including Spotify, YouTube, and Apple.

The post Seattle’s No-Cost Climate Pollution Cut first appeared on The Urbanist.

The Washington State Urban and Community Forestry (UCF) Program provides technical assistance to local governments, tribes, and nonprofits across the state when it comes to work to plant and sustain trees and other vegetation, and directly provides grant funding for them to advance that work. Most of the funding that it administers comes through the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), dollars that require dedicating staffing support at the state level to secure. Since 2008, the department has administered close to 250 grants intended to increase urban tree canopy in jurisdictions of all sizes throughout Washington.

But the supplemental two-year budget released earlier this week by House leaders would zero out funding for urban forestry.

“It’s not a reduction per se, it’s an elimination of a program,” Will Rubin, Communications Manager for DNR’s Forest Resilience Division, told The Urbanist.

Some of the projects enabled via the UCF program over the past few years include installation of a rain garden with new tree plantings at the Title I First Creek Middle School in Tacoma in 2019, workforce training that resulted in the planting of 400 native plants and removal of invasive species in South King County in 2023, the planting of 302 trees in downtown Snoqualmie in 2024, and the creation of an invasive plant and pest management plan in Mason County in 2024.

Not only would the elimination of DNR’s program make it much harder for these communities to access federal tree funding in the future, zeroing out the program right now could require those local partners to pay back any funds tied to work that isn’t able to be wrapped up by the time the state budget takes effect on July 1.

“There’s about $5.5 million of active pass-through funding out there, federal funds that the state has passed through to these communities. Those are executed projects, those are executed agreements, and cutting this program would call into question the future of those executed projects,” Rubin said. “[If] we don’t have the staff to do that work, then that work’s not getting done. So, it’s not exactly an unfunded mandate that can be accomplished without funds. It’s not like we can move these people into wildfire [division at DNR] to have them do the work over there. So, it’s an existential proposal that way.”

The Urbanist reached out to House Majority Leader Joe Fitzgibbon (D-34th, West Seattle) and Appropriations Committee Chair Timm Ormsby (D-3rd, Spokane) for a comment on these potential cuts, but neither were available for an interview ahead of the publication of this story. The House’s proposed budget still needs to be reconciled with the version advanced by the state Senate before the end of the legislative session on March 12.

In the wake of the 2021 heat dome event in Washington, in which dangerously high temperatures resulted in at least 159 excess injury deaths over the course of three sweltering weeks in June and July, there’s been increased attention on the role that urban trees play on temperature control.

Tree canopy counteracts the urban heat island effect, which drives temperatures up in cities, largely due to the heat absorbing qualities of pavement and concrete. Low-income neighborhoods and communities of color tend to be the most lacking in tree canopy and bear the brunt of urban heat as a result. A 2019 study focused on Madison, Wisconsin found that an urban tree canopy that reaches 40% maximizes the amount of cooling that occurs during high-temperature events — reducing temperatures by as much as seven to nine degrees Fahrenheit.

“The science is clear on the need for more of a urban tree canopy as far as heat islands and mitigation for climate change and making sure that some of our most vulnerable populations are able to benefit from our urban tree canopy, so those frontline communities would be directly impacted,” Snohomish County Councilmember Megan Dunn told The Urbanist.

Dunn is a member of DNR’s Urban Forestry board and has a front-row seat to the types of investments that the state program is able to leverage.

“I know it’s a hard budget year, and these are hard decisions, but eliminating the program is what we’re concerned about. I would understand the need to reduce some of it, but to completely eliminate it, I think is, unfortunately, a short-sighted decision,” Dunn said.

Another city that depends on support from the DNR program is Tacoma. With just 21% of the city’s land covered by trees, Tacoma ranks at the bottom of the list for tree canopy rates across Puget Sound, and is unlikely to meet its goal of achieving 30% tree canopy coverage by 2030. That said, Mike Carey, Tacoma’s Urban Forest Program Manager, told The Urbanist that the impacts of these state cuts would likely fall disproportionately on smaller cities and towns that don’t have their own urban forestry programs.

“The state DNR program is so fantastic in that they get to bridge those jurisdictional gaps, and they get to connect partners. So while I might be doing a project in Tacoma, and somebody might be doing a project in University Place or Federal Way or somewhere that’s surrounding us,” Carey said. “They’ve really been the hub for a lot of the work that’s happening at the state and they have awareness of all of these programs and projects, and they’ve been able to connect community partners to leverage each other. And that, in and of itself, is a huge wealth of knowledge and resource to the State of Washington that would go away.”

In the context of the $79.2 billion operating budget proposed in the House, the cuts being eyed here are not significant, with the program’s ongoing costs totaling just $3 million. But those dollars pay large dividends across the state and almost certainly bring in more dollars from outside the state than what it costs to administer.

“The grant money that we receive from the state isn’t necessarily a huge amount of money, but we’re using that to amplify our own funds, our own partnerships locally and community based organizations work,” Carey said. “And so it’s not just the money that’s being redacted, it’s the leveraging of local grant resources and local dollars as well. And that capacity just goes away with this too. And so it’s so much more than just what the state is looking to remove.”

Along with these proposed cuts, House Democrats are also poised to divert more than $300 million from the Climate Commitment Act — dollars that had been poised to fund clean energy, flood resilience programs, or public transit — in order to backfill a the state’s Working Families Tax Credit. All of this is happening in the shadow of climate denial at the federal level, with the Trump administration increasingly abandoning climate work. Many environmental advocates have pointed to that fact in pushing officials to do even more at the state level to combat climate change.

“At a time when we’re seeing longer summers, hotter summers, events like the heat dome, we can’t afford to go backwards,” Rubin said. “We can’t afford to just go pretend that urban forestry doesn’t exist, and it would have a long, run on effect with communities up and down the I-5 corridor, [and] across the state. You don’t need to be an ‘urban area’, like a Seattle or Tacoma or an Olympia or a Yakima or Spokane, to have urban forests.”

The post ‘Existential’ Budget Cut Would Wipe Out State Urban Forestry Program first appeared on The Urbanist.

Highways have a profound impact on the health and wellbeing of our city. If you think about a part of Seattle that is particularly unsafe and hostile to pedestrians, it’s probably adjacent to highway infrastructure. Not only is this infrastructure unsafe and unpleasant to live next to because of air and noise pollution, urban highways actively make it harder for transit to compete with the time it takes to get somewhere driving. 

Take, for example, my weekly trip from Rainier Valley to bring my kid to language classes near Northgate. Best case scenario, If we were to bike to and from the nearest light rail station, it’s a one-hour-and-15-minute trip. Driving would take 20 minutes. This disparity is why Seattleites drive for most non-commute trips. 

Despite our relatively extensive and frequent transit access, our urban freeways make driving almost always faster. When Commute Seattle’s Survey respondents were asked why they drive alone, the top response was: “It makes my trip significantly shorter.” One of the reasons Canada has higher transit ridership in all their cities than the U.S. is that they didn’t build urban highways to the extent we did. Transit remains more competitive.

What do I mean by “urban highways” in the context of Seattle? In this definition, I’d include I-5 and I-90, as well as state routes like SR 99 (Aurora Avenue), SR 522 (Lake City Way), and SR 513 (Sandpoint Way). City-owned routes that restrict crossings to speed car traffic also function as urban highways: this would include the West Seattle high bridge  Spokane Street Viaduct, and 15th Avenue NW in Ballard. 

I’d go as far as to include some of our legacy state highways as well — like Rainier Avenue, which includes many quarter-mile long stretches between traffic signals, encouraging higher driving speeds and more crashes for pedestrians, bikers, and drivers alike. 

So what can we do? First off, as Kadie Bell Sata suggested in her recent Urbanist op-ed, “The multi-year maintenance project known as Revive I-5 should have been a once-in-a-generation opportunity to shift trips away from single-occupancy vehicles and toward transit, walking, rolling, and biking.” As Bell Sata suggests, it’s not too late. There’s still time for our city to use these closures as an opportunity, but it will require clear leadership and focus. 

The city of Seattle needs a clear mayoral directive that ensures that every project that touches our city encourages a mode shift away from single occupancy car trips and reduces gross (not just per capita) vehicle miles travelled (VMT). This needs to include City of Seattle projects, which must be required to demonstrate how they reduce VMT, and projects where city streets and state highways meet. 

In 2008, Washington State set a goal to reduce per capita VMT by 50% by 2050. This was followed by a report released 2023 that looked at strategies for how our state could meet these targets (the only time we did was during the first year or so of the pandemic). Unfortunately, since the report was released, there’s been little forward momentum and insufficient funding for meaningful VMT reduction work. 

HB 2134, which died in this legislative session, was a step in the right direction, giving Regional Transportation Planning Organizations in some of our more populated regions the ability to monitor the plans of local jurisdictions to ensure they are working towards meeting carbon pollution and VMT reduction targets. 

We’ve all seen plenty of well-intentioned climate, transportation and public health policies that look good on paper, but lack the political will or structure for implementation. For example, the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) released the Climate Change Response Framework in 2023 , which set the goal to reduce the number of vehicle trips that use an internal combustion engine from 65% to 35% by 2030. We are nowhere near meeting that target, nor the projected increases for the percentage of transit, walking and biking trips defined in the SDOT framework. 

Re-allocating street space is a powerful tool that can be unlocked with a mandate to reduce VMT. But without a well-designed and implemented mandate, projects that maintain the status quo will continue to coast through our planning process. 

Here’s an example of how that works: a WSDOT-led Judkins Park workgroup planning a ramp reconfiguration design for I-90 and Rainier got stuck debating whether we could reduce the number of general purpose lanes on Rainier Avenue S. Seattle’s Comprehensive Plan cites 2045 Puget Sound Regional Council traffic projections that show that while projected population for the area increases and the percentage of car trips is reduced, the total volume of car trips will not decrease. 

Because of these projections, which are codified in our comp plan, WSDOT was arguing for the need to maintain all six lanes. As of February 5, WSDOT seems to be walking back from this assertion after models show that, with both current and reduced traffic volumes, four lanes should be sufficient. 

What’s clear from this process is that we’re designing our streets backwards. The expectation that we must move the same or more cars through this burgeoning area limits the possibilities of what is feasible for a redesign. Sound Transit is opening a new light rail station and developers are building dense housing around it. Instead of a design that prioritizes how the station area will grow into a community where people want to spend time, we are designing for anticipated car volumes. 

If we design a road for current car volumes, we are inducing those volumes to exist, and we’re actively working against our mode shift goals. Add a lane, and it will quickly fill with cars. Only by designing for reduced car capacity can we manifest a reduction in car volume. And only when we design for less car volume can we improve the experience of movement for everyone outside of vehicles. 

Fundamentally, we can’t ignore the context in which urban highways were built: often with the explicit intention of displacing non-White and low-income communities. Preserving infrastructure that maintains the current volumes of trucks and cars only perpetuates the public health costs of automobiles in cities, costs that continue to be disproportionately borne by low-income, non-White and immigrant residents. As communities across the U.S. are starting to take steps to address these harms, Seattle can be a leader in this space. 

In addition to a directive to reduce vehicle miles traveled, our mayor should convene a project team to take the lead on highway mitigation projects. We need safer and more frequent crossings on Lake City Way in North Seattle, safer and more comfortable crossings of the I-5 ramps at the 45th Street in the U District, and on Albro street in Georgetown. And we need to reconnect South Park by removing Highway 99 and rebuild Aurora Avenue to prioritize local, non-car movement. 

All of these will run into the same barrier we’ve encountered with the Judkins Park work: if vehicle volumes are to be maintained, then vehicle throughput has to be maintained, meaning our options to remove slip lanes, ban right turns on red or reduce the number of travel lanes won’t be allowed.

Highway lids are one tactic, and do decidedly make communities adjacent to highways less awful (my kid is fortunate, as advocates in the 1980s fought for a lid on I-90 in Judkins Park; his school sits on the lid instead of next to the freeway.) But lids are the proverbial band aid. By allowing the same volume of cars (and often more cars, as we saw in the Rose Corridor Project in Portland) to travel through the area, all the other harms of vehicle miles travelled still accrue. 

As Allison Sant notes in a recent Bloomberg CityLab piece about urban highways in New York: “While capping can have positive impacts in local communities, it will not limit the number of vehicles flowing through the neighborhood or fully mitigate their effects.” 

We have to tackle the public health harms that vehicles themselves create. Only then will we be able to have a city with vibrant public spaces and a robust transit network that everyone uses. That means mandating that all road projects must be designed to reduce the overall volume of car trips through and in our communities.

With a clear mayoral directive around achieving our VMT reduction goals, we can start looking seriously at other policies that would help us reach our targets. Where should we create bus-only lanes and traffic diverters to make transit, walking, riding and rolling more appealing travel options? Where can we pedestrianize public spaces, creating play streets and places for all of us to connect with our neighbors, especially in neighborhoods that are being upzoned to include more people?

The post Op-Ed: Nobody Wants to Live Next to a Highway first appeared on The Urbanist.

At the meeting on Wednesday, a handful of builders and housing advocates spoke in favor of the reform, including Logan Schmidt speaking on behalf of the Master Builders Association of King and Snohomish Counties.

“This ordinance provides a clear, predictable framework to advance housing production while still meeting Seattle’s long standing growth and environmental goals,” Schmidt said. “Streamlining SEPA is not a rollback of environmental standards. It’s an acknowledgement that those standards are already embedded throughout the city’s planning and regulatory framework.”

Ryan Makinster, Advocacy and Policy Manager for Habitat for Humanity of Seattle-King & Kittitas County, echoed that sentiment and highlighted the human cost of slowing down housing production.

“For families like the Cornejos, who waited years to close their Habitat home in Seattle, every month of delay means another month of housing instability. Redundant reviews slow housing production without improving environmental outcomes,” Makinster said. “Our pipeline includes 204 permanently affordable homes, 75% of those in Seattle. Streamlining permits means we serve more families sooner with the same limited public resources for your unit.”

The proposal drew criticism from some tree advocates and growth skeptics. While most from this contingent opposed the underlying legislation, some did speak in favor of an amendment from Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck that targeted parking garages and paid parking lots.

“The reason I’m bringing this amendment forward is to ensure our environmental goals aren’t being put aside to promote more parking without proper review,” Rinck said ahead of the committee vote. “Our city’s biggest source of emissions comes from transportation, and single occupancy vehicles are a large share of that — they’re the culprit. And I want to be clear that I support this legislation holistically, because exempting housing from SEPA just simply makes sense. That’s because we know when we build more housing — and we’re building in Seattle — the environment is better off because we’re reducing sprawl and reliance on cars, but I don’t believe we should be clearing the way for more parking, especially flexible use parking, to exempt from environmental review.”

Rinck’s amendment passed on a 4-0 vote, lowering the threshold for the SEPA exemption in all non-industrial areas of city from 40 stalls down to 20 stalls of “flexible use” parking, which is the City’s term for paid parking that is open to the public, rather than resident-only parking which wouldn’t trigger SEPA review. The amendment, however, allows the SEPA exemption to rise to 90 or fewer stalls in industrial areas, in keeping with the original version of the legislation.

Land Use and Sustainability Chair Eddie Lin shared a similar sentiment, noting that encouraging housing in Seattle was a climate-friendly action that was good for the environment, given the heavy environmental impact and carbon footprint of sprawl on the suburban fringe. He argued that cities have better tools than SEPA to improve environmental outcomes.

“I do think there are important places where we need to address these [environmental] issues, whether it’s in our zoning, as we think about our built environment and our Comprehensive Plan. Whether it’s in our storm water codes, whether it’s in our building standards, these are critical areas where we can make real improvements,” Lin said. “Thinking about our right-of-way, and whether we can increase tree canopy and public spaces… how we fund our transportation system and our buses and light rail so that people can get around in ways other than single occupancy vehicles. I think about the toxic chemicals and tires that are harming our salmon, and whether we can take action at the state level to transition to ban those harmful chemicals.”

In fact, Lin alluded to the way SEPA can encourage inertia and status quo outcomes instead of climate action.

“As we are already well on our way towards climate crisis, if we don’t do anything, we basically sit on our laurels and take zero action — just big picture — SEPA doesn’t even ever do anything, because there would be no action for us,” Lin said.

Recent history of SEPA exemptions

The legislation is set to build upon past SEPA reforms by the City and a two-year mandated holiday by the Washington State Legislature. 

In 2017 and 2019, the Seattle City Council adopted legislation to significantly adjust categorical exemptions for residential and non-residential development within urban centers and urban villages, so long as certain planned growth levels weren’t exceeded. In mid-2023, the Council approved higher SEPA categorical exemption levels for Downtown zones in an effort to spur more activity and interest in the urban core following the pandemic.

Also in 2023, the state legislature passed Senate Bill 5412 to specifically alter SEPA exemptions in Seattle. The text of the bill was broad, granting outright categorical exemptions from SEPA environmental review for “all project actions that propose to develop one or more residential housing or middle housing units” in the city during the period from July 23, 2023 through September 30, 2025. 

The Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections (SDCI) accordingly interpreted the statutory language broadly when applying it to projects. Applicants with projects already under review at the time of the statute’s implementation were allowed to terminate environmental review under SEPA and move forward with other Master Use Permit components or construction permits. 

An SDCI departmental rule detailed that the categorical exemption applied to both residential-only developments and mixed-used developments, and that the exemption extended to such developments even when on lands covered by water — a situation which typically nullifies categorical exemptions under SEPA, though codified shoreline and environmental regulations were still applicable in such cases. The new legislation, however, restores application of SEPA for projects occurring on lands covered by water.

Demonstrating the power of the exemption is a 15-story hotel project in Uptown. Because the applicant proposed one apartment unit in the structure, the entire project was able to use the SEPA exemption as a mixed-use building, in addition to temporary design review exemptions. That allowed the project to obtain Master Use Permit and early site construction approvals in just over a year — which is significantly faster than Seattle’s norm.

How SEPA reform would work

The council’s proposed reform streamlines the SEPA categorical exemptions by eliminating complex tables for residential and non-residential development and replacing them with standard exemptions regardless of zone and other geography criteria, relying on a combination of state statutory provisions to raise infill exemptions. 

Generally speaking, residential and mixed-use development would be exempt from SEPA going forward, unless citywide residential growth exceeds 99.5% of the planned levels in the 20-year Comprehensive Plan update. In the unlikely event that this happens, only residential and mixed-use projects with more than 200 dwelling units would be subject to SEPA, while projects that don’t exceed that number of dwelling units would remain categorically exempt. 

For non-residential-only developments, the citywide categorical exemptions would be 30,000 square feet or less of retail commercial uses and 65,000 square feet or less of non-retail non-residential uses, with a similar caveat to residential and mixed-use development. If citywide non-residential employment growth exceeds 99.5% of the planned levels in the 20-year Comprehensive Plan update, only projects with 30,000 square feet or less of non-residential development would remain categorically exempt from SEPA.

Along with these changes, the legislation increases the cumulative limit on excavation and fill projects to 1,000 cubic yards, from the current limit of 500 cubic yards. This mostly serves as a benefit for modest remedial site activities on larger commercial and industrial lands, since excavation and fill activities are typically exempt from SEPA when in connection with otherwise SEPA-exempt construction activities like new townhomes or mixed-use buildings.

In building a case for the changes, SDCI provided a report explaining why additional SEPA categorical exemptions are warranted. 

“The main purpose of the City’s SEPA reviews is to identify situations where a permit should be conditioned in order to avoid significant adverse environmental impacts. However, due to the effectiveness of the City’s codes, fewer and fewer SEPA reviews are resulting in individualized SEPA-based conditions of approval in Seattle’s land use permit decisions,” the report stated. “This illustrates that the current City codes mitigate the majority of impacts of new development on elements of the environment.”

The report provided concrete data on the limited number of SEPA projects resulting in actual permit conditioning.

“It is rare that any development, even in the range of 100-500 dwelling units in size, receives SEPA mitigation measures tied to unique environmental impact findings. Available data from the 2010s shows that only 16% (about 1 in 7) of SEPA reviewed residential developments led to SEPA-based mitigation conditions, among approximately 250 development decisions,” the report stated. “For a smaller sample of non-residential developments, only about 30% of the projects had outcomes that included any SEPA-based mitigation for specific site impacts.”

In concluding discussion on the proposal, the report pointedly stated: “SEPA reviews for nearly all developments are not adding value, and should not be required going forward due to the body or regulations that will still continue to apply to new development proposals.”

Nevertheless, categorical exemptions will still be nullified in certain cases, such as projects seeking modification or demolition of existing structures that may warrant landmarking or exceeding allowed use, density, or intensity limits specified in City codes.

As a backstop to protect cultural resources, the legislation modifies grading requirements. Projects with proposed grading activities within 200 feet of navigable waterbodies or state-designated shoreline districts would need to incorporate protective measures into plans for potential archaeological and cultural resources on-site and implement them during construction. SEPA has traditionally been used as a method for addressing and conditioning protection of archeological and cultural resources as part of project permitting, but codification of protection requirements should more directly cover many more projects.

The SEPA reform had appeared poised to pass in late 2025, but councilmembers pulled it off their calendar. The delay seems to have been in response to concerns raised by local Tribes. City staff outlined new procedures that would be put into place for greater notification to and information-sharing with Tribal governments for broader types of projects, potentially easing those concerns.

Given the four votes in favor Wednesday, the legislation appears likely to pass on February 10, although District 4 Councilmember Maritza Rivera (who doesn’t sit on Land Use) did attend the meeting and share a variety of concerns.

Correction: Ryan Makinster’s name was misspelled in the original version of the article.

The post Seattle Poised to Remove SEPA Review Hurdle for Most Housing Projects first appeared on The Urbanist.

The appeal in question dates from last winter, one of six that were filed against the environmental impact statement (EIS) conducted on Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell’s “One Seattle Plan.” The updated Comprehensive Plan spells out which areas will see additional housing density as the Emerald City prepares to accommodate at least 112,000 new homes through 2044, and the policies the city will follow as it stewards that growth.

All six appeals alleged that the city didn’t conduct enough analysis on the future impact of housing and job growth, with environmental advocate Jennifer Godfrey’s appeal focusing on the potential impacts to Puget Sound’s population of Southern Resident orca whales from increased stormwater runoff due to tree removal.

Thanks in part to recent updates to Washington’s State Environmental Policy Act (SEPA), adopted by the legislature with the goal of eliminating predatory appeals that slow down the production of infill housing, all six appeals were dismissed at the city level last April. But Godfrey, along with the group “Friends of Ravenna Cowen” and Mount Baker resident John Cary, appealed that decision to King County Superior Court. After those two appeals were also dismissed, the group elevated their appeal to the state’s court of appeals.

A hearing on the two appeals, consolidated into one, had been scheduled for early March, but last Wednesday City Attorney Erika Evans’ office filed a motion to dismiss the case as moot, given the fact that the plan has now been fully adopted by the city and is in effect. The filing asserts that if the groups want to appeal the plan, the avenue to do so is the state Growth Management Hearings Board, which has “exclusive jurisdiction.” A 60-day clock to file that appeal started in mid-December.

In response, a coalition of conservation groups are now publicly pushing for City leaders to drop their fight against the appeal and allow it to proceed, despite the high likelihood of dismissal at the hearing, with the appellants directed to the state hearings board. A January 21 press release from Orca Nexus, a group Godfrey founded last spring after filing her initial appeal, contained a “call for accuracy in Seattle’s Comprehensive Plan environmental review.”

Among the organizations signing on were Birds Connect Seattle (formerly Seattle Audubon), Thornton Creek Alliance, Orca Conservancy, the Puget Sound Chapter of the American Cetacean Society, and the Oceanic Preservation Society. A form letter has been directing those calls to stop fighting the appeal to Mayor Katie Wilson, despite the fact that the Seattle City Attorney is an independent office that is separately elected.

“Trees filter pollutants, cool waterways, and reduce stormwater flow. Yet the City’s adopted plan fails to accurately assess the increased runoff and raw sewage overflows that would likely result from replacing tree canopy with concrete,” the release stated. “The One Seattle Plan will further reduce canopy coverage following years of the City’s failure to achieve canopy goals. According to the appellant, this dismissal effectively removes the public right to use the long established appeal process on an inadequate EIS, setting a dangerous precedent.”

Just before Christmas, those same groups filed an amicus brief in Godfrey’s appeal, contending that a dismissal would set a “set a dangerous precedent” that could make it harder “to ensure that the City’s compliance with SEPA and the [Growth Management Act] will include dependable, scientifically competent analyses of likely impacts at future stages of regulatory development and project permitting.” The group argued that the citywide analysis conducted on the plan was not robust enough to prevent environmental impacts that will get approved later, when builders head to the city to get their permits.

Ultimately, the brief encapsulates a split between environmental groups when it comes to the issue of urban development. Many old-guard organizations focused on conservation argue for local governments to more intensely micromanage growth and its potential impacts, a position that puts them at odds with environmentalists who argue such micromanagement slows down urban housing production that reduces greenhouse gases and limits pressure on the fringe of the urban growth area, where development has a much higher environmental cost.

“One of Godfrey’s main concerns is the unnecessary increase in impervious surfaces resulting from the removal of large trees to accommodate higher density housing,” the brief stated, bringing up regulations around tree preservation that predate the most recent update to the City’s regulations that occurred in 2023. “[We] are very familiar with this issue and believe the City has failed to update its tree ordinance to actually ‘protect trees.’ For example, an interdepartmental team did a careful evaluation of the City’s tree code in 2016–2017 and determined that the City’s ‘Current code is not supporting tree protection.'”

To date Godfrey has raised around $4,500 from a Gofundme page set up to fund the legal appeal, with longtime Seattle density opponent (and former aide to Councilmember Alex Pedersen) Toby Thaler handling the appeal’s legal filings.

“Seattle’s growth should not come at the expense of the last remaining 74 Southern Resident Killer Whales,” Godfrey said in the release. “This plan will literally pave over orca recovery efforts. It will increase hardscape and facilitate indiscriminate removal of the large trees that provide vital stormwater filtration, without requiring effective mitigation or honest analysis of the ecological consequences. At the same time, the plan will not produce the quantities of low income housing needed to solve the ‘housing affordability crisis.’”

Tree Action Seattle, a group that had turned out in force to Comprehensive Plan hearings to push for amendments that would reduce flexibility for homebuilders in the name of tree preservation, also joined the fight this week via an Instagram post. That prompted a response from Sierra Club Seattle Chair Robert Cruickshank, who made the case for increasing density within the city being a net benefit for orcas in an op-ed in The Urbanist last year with Futurewise advocacy director Jazmine Smith, who also serves on The Urbanist board of directors and elections committee.

“Building new housing is one of the most important things we can do to help our orca population survive,” Cruickshank said. “Density actually helps orca populations. That’s because it reduces the amount of pollution in stormwater that harms salmon and the orca that depend on the salmon runs. Now, what is in that stormwater that harms salmon and orca? It’s runoff from cars. It’s oil, it’s bits of tires. It’s the shavings off the brakes when you hit the brakes, when you’re driving. Stuff like that that gets into the stormwater, runoff goes into the sound, kills salmon and hurts orcas, and it’s exacerbated when we build sprawl, when we cut down forests and pave over farmland that destroys salmon habitat that orcas depend on, it also means more people are driving. So what we need to do is build dense cities.”

If the state court of appeals sides with the City of Seattle, the appeals could be dismissed as soon as this week… but that likely won’t be the end of the story.

The post Conservation Groups Join Push Against Seattle Growth Plan first appeared on The Urbanist.

Takeaways: 

• Seattle renters are largely locked out of the cost-saving and comfort-improving clean energy appliances, like heat pumps, induction stoves, and solar panels.  

• Newly inaugurated Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson, a renter herself, could help change that, in part because the City she runs owns its electric utility, Seattle City Light. 

• New city programs could front the cost of heat pumps and explore new apartment-friendly versions; spread the word and benefits of induction cooktops; and legalize plug-in solar for balconies and patios. 

• These measures could allow renters to enjoy affordable, healthier, more efficient homes and would establish Seattle as a leader in welcoming more renters into the climate solutions fold.

Seattle’s new mayor, Katie Wilson and I share more than a few things in common. We’re both parents to toddlers. Scandalously, our children’s grandmothers help cover a portion of sky-high Seattle daycare costs (though my daughter’s 2026 daycare cost hike just swallowed my in-laws’ contribution). We’re also among the roughly 50% of city residents who rent.

Seattle renters contribute less to climate-warming pollution, on average, than homeowners. Renters in the city are nearly twice as likely to heat their homes with clean electricity as homeowners, more than half of whom burn natural gas for warmth. Seattle renters occupy smaller homes than residents who own where they live, fitting more people in less space. Renters are six times more likely than homeowners to get around Seattle without a car.

(These data points are from the Census Bureau American Community Survey, 2024 estimates. I feel optimistic that Katie Wilson, with her transit background, will do everything she can to make the city safer and easier to navigate for bikers and walkers. This is one of the best climate bets she can make.)  

Ironically, though, Seattleites who rent are excluded from enjoying many of the upsides of the clean energy revolution.

Renters cannot lessen our rising electricity bills by adding solar panels to our rooftops. We cannot rip out our gas stoves in favor of healthier, better performing induction cooktops and ranges. We’d be laughed at, at best, if we asked our landlords to remove our baseboard heaters or gas furnaces and shell out tens of thousands of dollars for more efficient heat pumps.

At least, we can’t cash in yet. Mayor Wilson could change that.  

Mayor Wilson enjoys an unusual opportunity among her peers: the City she runs owns its electric utility. One of the largest municipal utilities in the United States, Seattle City Light could make or break the city’s climate goals. It could also create new ways for renters to participate in the clean energy economy.  

With Katie Wilson installed in City Hall, City Light could launch nation-leading heat pump, induction stove, and plug-in solar programs. For those of us forking over hefty rent checks every month, the mayor could let us in on cost-saving — and emissions-lowing — clean energy action.

Get City Light to front heat pump costs for renters

Converting homes from low-efficiency electric furnaces or baseboards (the most common heating sources for Seattle’s renters) to high-efficiency heat pumps would lower monthly heating bills by reducing electricity use by up to 75%. More efficient electric rentals would also free up space on City Light’s grid to connect the thousands of homes and businesses in Seattle currently burning fossil fuels, thereby reducing the likelihood that the utility will have to buy expensive, dirty energy in the event of an energy supply crunch.

Most of the United States’ electricity comes from burning fossil fuels, whereas roughly 90% of City Light’s power sources are carbon-free.

For the minority of renters who burn gas for heat (including your truly), upgrading to heat pumps would loosen our yoke to the fossil fuel price rollercoaster. Plus, heat pumps are cool; half of Seattle renters lack air conditioning, compared to just a quarter of the city’s homeowners, a figure with potentially deadly consequences as the region’s summers grow hotter.

Heat pumps are, however, basically impossible for Seattle’s renters to access. No renter will succeed in convincing their landlords to shell out the $15,000 to $20,000 the appliances cost. And renters are unlikely to afford the systems themselves even if a landlord consented to associated renovations. Seattle’s renting households earned less than half the median income of homeowning households in 2024.

Under Wilson’s leadership, Seattle City Light could launch an ambitious program to front the cost of heat pumps for renters. Renters would pay a monthly service fee to enjoy the equipment, but the electricity savings from the upgrade would offset the fee. In other words, electricity bills would go down while comfort would go up.

In these types of programs, known as “inclusive utility investment” or “pay as you save®,” participants don’t assume debt or need a credit check, unlike typical on-bill financing programs. The utility owns the heat pump until the renter pays their last service charge, at which point system ownership switches to the landlord. If the first renter moves, the next renter enjoys the savings on their monthly bill. Though the programs needn’t be limited to renters, the model resolves the so-called split incentive problem, in which landlords resist investing in energy efficiency upgrades because they do not pay the energy bills.  

Since the idea was developed in 1999, 20 utilities across 10 U.S. states, including Missouri, Kansas, and California, have active inclusive utility investment programs. If these places can do it, so can Seattle.  

Launch a window heat pump initiative for Seattle apartments 

Even if Seattle City Light fronts the bill, heat pumps are likely to remain out of reach to most renters at current prices. Plus, the dominant heat pump models, such as mini-splits, can be a poor fit for large apartment buildings and require a trained contractor and electrical panel upgrades to install. Nearly three-quarters of Seattle renters live in apartment buildings with 10 or more units, compared to just 13% of homeowners.

Window heat pumps (also known as saddle heat pumps or micro heat pumps) could solve that problem. These innovations plug into a standard 120-volt outlet, don’t require professional installation or renovation, and can cost 40% less than conventional heat pumps. Also a design challenge and successful pilot, the New York City Housing Authority plans to install 30,000 window heat pumps in public housing apartments. Boston recently announced it will follow suit.

But at more than $3,000 apiece, window heat pumps are still out of reach for most renters. Nor are they widely available for purchase. (I asked a representative from Gradient, one of the two window heat pump companies selling in the United States, if I could buy one as a renter. He said yes, but only because I am an “influencer.” News to me!) 

Plus, the models rolling out on the East Coast are designed for cold climates and therefore may be unnecessarily expensive for Seattle’s milder winters. Finally, they only fit in windows that slide open vertically, a more common window type on the East Coast than the West Coast.

Wilson could make Seattle the West Coast leader in apartment heat pumps. She could launch an initiative, co-led by Seattle City Light and the Mayor’s Office of Sustainability, to develop Seattle-specific window heat pumps, at a price point renters could afford. The city might provide grant funding or guarantee bulk procurement to help bring down initial prices. The initiative could also ensure Seattle benefits from parallel efforts, such as California’s new market transformation plan for window heat pumps or future pilots led by the Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance (of which City Light is a member).  

If successful, the initiative could open the door… er, window to Seattle apartment renters owning and controlling their heating and cooling.  

Spread the induction stove gospel

Induction stoves are now the best products on the market for performance, safety, ease of cleaning, health, and efficiency (just ask known climate radical, Wirecutter). But once again, they’re out of reach for most renters due to cost, wiring requirements, and that perennial difficulty of asking your landlord to upgrade anything.  

I have a gas stove, but I now almost exclusively use a $114 plug-in induction cooktop to protect my daughter’s lungs. Gas stoves emit a “cloud of chemicals” including cancer-causing benzene, asthma-causing nitrogen dioxide, and climate-warming methane and carbon dioxide. (Plus, it boils water twice as fast as my gas stove, helpful when I’m trying to outrun a macaroni-and-cheese-related tantrum.)

Wilson’s Seattle could give away these induction cooktops to low-income renters with children. The Mayor could also push Seattle City Light to educate its customers about the downsides of gas stoves and upsides of single-burner induction cooktops. Recent Seattle City Light newsletters offered ways for Seattle residents to stay cool during heat waves and lower their energy usage. Tips for healthier, safer cooking would be just another flavor of this kind of consumer guidance.

At the same time, under Wilson’s leadership, Seattle could participate in California’s new effort to bring more affordable, plug-in induction ranges to market, pushing so that the outcomes of that effort will benefit Seattle renters, too.  

And, Mayor Wilson is now a board member of the Puget Sound Clean Air Agency, the region’s air quality regulator. There, she could drive the adoption of clean air appliance standards to benefit all Seattleites.

Legalize plug-in solar  

In Germany, renters can go to a big-box store, buy a small solar panel for around $200, plug the system into their home outlet, and start harnessing the power of the sun later that same day — all without needing to hire a professional installer. Millions of these “plug-and-play” or balcony solar systems are now connected to homes in Germany, making it possible for renters to offset a portion of their energy use.  

In Seattle, plug-in solar systems are illegal. A City Light representative told Sightline that balcony or patio solar products are not eligible for the utility’s interconnection process that rooftop solar systems use and that they introduce potential safety concerns, such as accidentally energizing a downed power line by sending electricity back onto the grid. (Germany has not experienced any safety issues with its millions of systems.) The only way to get in on the solar action in Seattle is by owning a roof or by signing up for a community solar program, which City Light does not currently offer. 

Mayor Wilson’s Seattle City Light could legalize balcony solar, taking a page out of Utah’s playbook. That state’s legislature unanimously legalized the systems in 2025 by creating a new class of portable solar generation devices (maximum power output of 1.2 kilovolts) exempt from utility interconnection processes and fees, and introducing safety requirements. At least one company, EcoFlow, now sells a plug-and-play solar product in Utah that boasts “anti-islanding” safety features to turn off the system in case of a power outage.  

Seattle’s summer sun is one of the city’s best-kept secrets. With a free, simple, and safe City Light program for balcony solar, renters could start to enjoy it in more ways than one.  

Wilson can make Seattle a green city for renters  

In Katie Wilson, Seattle elected a renter Mayor for the first time in at least 15 years, and perhaps ever (I gave up searching for one). While the city has boasted about its green bona fides for decades, renters have been mostly worker bees for this green credential, not recipients of its benefits.  

By creating new ways for Seattle renters to enjoy efficient heating and cooling with heat pumps, easy and safe cooking with induction stoves, and cheaper electric bills with plug-in solar, Mayor Wilson can make Seattle the model for pro-renter clean energy policies. And she may even reap some of those rewards herself. 

The post Op-Ed: Katie Wilson Can Be Seattle’s Climate Mayor for Renters first appeared on The Urbanist.

Carbon auctions under the Climate Commitment Act (CCA), Washington’s 2021 landmark climate law, have brought in $760 million more than legislators expected when they adopted the two-year budget, which extends to mid-2027. Ferguson’s proposal allocates the lion’s share of those dollars — $569 million — to funding the state’s Working Families Tax Credit, a program that is currently paid for via the state general fund. That’s over a half billion dollars that won’t be available for public transit, flood resistance, active transportation, or clean energy projects and will instead bolster existing programs elsewhere in the state budget.

The proposal comes less than two years after voters defeated Initiative 2117, a ballot measure repealing the cap-and-invest program at the heart of the CCA, by more than 23 points. After a campaign in which opponents of the measure put planned investments in walking, biking, and transit infrastructure front-and-center, I-2117 lost in 24 of Washington’s 39 counties and bolstered the legacy of Ferguson’s predecessor, Jay Inslee, who had been a major champion of the program.

The Working Families Tax Credit provides lower-income households in Washington with a refund of state sales taxes that scales up to $1,290 annually, with the exact amount dependent on income level and the number of children in a household. Also approved by the legislature in 2021, it was explicitly included in the list of potential programs that could be funded with cap-and-invest proceeds along with a broad number of uses aimed at reducing greenhouse gases, increasing energy efficiency, and ramping up climate resilience, but lawmakers ultimately utilized other dollars to get the program up and running.

Ferguson’s budget announcement has mostly been garnering headlines for another reason: the fact that he is throwing his support behind a high-earner’s income tax, expected to be set at 9.9% on all gross income over $1 million per year. If approved, that tax would not start collecting revenue until 2029, a long runway provided to account for potential legal challenges and a likely referendum campaign. But it’s that revenue source that Ferguson is eyeing for the Working Families Tax Credit long-term, including a potential expansion of the program’s eligibility criteria.

In speaking with reporters last week, Ferguson said the idea to divert such a significant amount of CCA dollars came late in the process of assembling his budget, which will still need to be approved by the House and Senate.

“It’s specifically called out as being an appropriate use for the CCA — that said, it wasn’t my first choice, or second choice, or third choice for those funds,” Ferguson said after being asked about the guardrails placed on the funding. “At some point, it became clear I needed other options to balance this budget in a way that I felt was responsible and minimize harms.”

But the diversion is not sitting well with environmental groups, who are also losing ground at the federal level when it comes to resources intended to make progress on Washington’s ambitious climate goals. Climate Solutions, a nonprofit advocacy group focused on the clean energy transition, issued a statement blasting the Governor’s budget.

“Climate Commitment Act funds should go to the purposes that — lawmakers agreed, and voters confirmed — the program was created for: reducing climate pollution, expanding affordable clean energy and energy efficiency, and strengthening communities in the face of rising climate impacts,” the statement read. “With disappearing federal support for clean energy and environmental justice programs, Washington State provides continuity and stability in climate policy and investments that also provide people with enduring energy savings through revenue raised through charging major polluters for carbon emissions.”

This fall, Ferguson condemned the Trump Administration after more than $1.1 billion in clean energy projects were abruptly terminated, including $1 billion that had been set to go toward the Pacific Northwest Hydrogen Hub. But those programs now appear to take a back seat to other priorities in his own budget.

“We need new investments that both cut climate pollution and make energy affordable for the long run. Sweeping Climate Commitment Act funds shortchanges energy efficiency, clean energy, and other cost-saving programs, setting back our goal of affordable, clean energy for Washington.” Climate Solutions Washington Legislative Director Leah Missik said. “Voters overwhelmingly support our state’s popular climate investments. The Governor’s budget proposal misses the mark by directing less than 10% of climate funds to actually growing clean energy programs that both cut pollution and boost affordability.”

Earlier in the month, Ferguson had presented his proposed transportation budget, where many of the dollars diverted away from walking, biking, and transit infrastructure projects would have been allocated if they hadn’t been diverted away. Instead, those programs would be kept stable, while Ferguson proposes issuing $3 billion in new bonds to pay for basic transportation maintenance and preservation projects.

Leveraged against new funding sources approved by the legislature earlier this year — including a 6-cent gas tax increase — in order to keep the state’s highway megaprojects on track, the proposal likely faces a tough road at the legislature where a 60% vote is needed to approve the issuance of new state debt. But if approved, the move would constrict future state leaders by adding more debt service payments onto a state transportation budget that already allocates nearly 12% to paying back prior bonds: an amount that is more than the entire state ferry system budget.

When the state legislature convenes for its 60-day legislative session on January 12, budget issues are set to dominate the agenda. Ferguson’s proposals are likely to be put under the microscope, especially when it comes to areas where it would represent a step back from previous state commitments in the areas of sustainable transportation and clean energy.

The post Ferguson Proposes ‘Unprecedented Sweep’ of Climate Dollars to Balance State Budget first appeared on The Urbanist.

Washington’s first foray into providing cash rebates to spur new e-bike purchases left more than $1.6 million in unspent funds on the table after rebates were redeemed at lower-than-expected rates, a new state-produced report released earlier this month has revealed. The leftover dollars, which are likely to be rolled into the amount disbursed with the next round of rebates, remained on hand despite the fact that nearly 35,000 Washingtonians signed up for a chance to receive a rebate but didn’t.

The state launched its “WE-bike instant rebate program” this past spring after securing funding via a legislative earmark in 2023. The program allowed state residents to sign up for the chance at a $1,200 rebate or $300 rebate. The larger rebate was reserved for lower income households and required proof that a household is earning less than 80% of their county’s area median income (AMI) in order to qualify. The goal was to enable more residents to access an additional pollution-free mobility option, aided by funding from the state’s Climate Commitment Act.

Despite the added paperwork, 55% more potential bike owners applied for the $1,200 rebate during the two-week application period in April compared to the $300 rebate, which meant that only 10% of applicants successfully scored the larger discount. But of those who did, 84% followed through and made a bike purchase — in contrast with just 24% of those who won the smaller $300 rebate.

Under a legislative mandate, 40% of the total rebate funding was intended for the pool of $300 rebates, but in the end less than 13% of the total dollars handed out went to those applicants, after a sizable majority let theirs expire without buying a bike.

Despite offering more than twice as many $300 rebates via random lottery than $1,200 rebates, the state saw 1,880 rebates worth $1,200 redeemed, compared to just 1,087 rebates that were worth $300. Clearly, the larger rebates provided winners with a much bigger incentive to see their purchases through. The unspent dollars could have helped more than 1,000 more low-income Washingtonians to purchase an e-bike

This first attempt at rebate distribution, which comes on the heels of other programs elsewhere in the US, offers some major lessons learned for the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT). In rolling out a rebate program from scratch, the department faced an impatient public and had to significantly tamp down expectations for the program, given the relatively small pool of money that was set to be available.

The report notes that low redemption rates have been seen elsewhere when rebates around $300 were offered, citing a San Francisco bay area program and a Tacoma program, which was offered to residents who live along I-5 at the same time as the statewide WSDOT program.

“[T]he $300 rebate appears to have been insufficient for many recipients, suggesting that some explored purchasing an e-bike but ultimately found the cost prohibitive,” it concludes. “With prices expected to rise further due to recent tariffs […] these affordability barriers are likely to become even more pronounced for lower-rebate recipients.”

The limited program clearly did provide significant benefits. As part of the rollout, WSDOT partnered with the University of Washington to survey rebate program participants, finding that only 6% of residents who failed to win one of the $1,200 rebate went on to make an e-bike purchase. Only 8% of lower-income rebate program participants reported already owning an e-bike, a group that was found to be much more likely to use public transportation as their primary way of getting around. Across both the $1,200 and $300 rebate, 17% of program respondents reported owning no car at all.

“The program also measurably improved access for e-bike purchasers,” the report states. “44 percent of study participants who purchased an e-bike stated that owning an e-bike allowed them to go places that they previously did not visit. 68 percent reported using their e-bike for trips they would have previously taken by car, 46 percent for trips they would have walked, 36 percent for trips they would have biked, and 33 percent for trips they would have taken by transit. These results suggest that e-bikes expanded the range of trips participants could make and offered an alternative to vehicles, biking on a traditional bicycle, walking, and transit for certain trips”

What the UW survey did not find was any measurable impact on the amount of driving trips made by participants before and after purchasing an e-bike, a major question when it comes to gauging the effectiveness of the program as a greenhouse gas reduction tool. Survey respondents used an app to track their trips, with the program automatically determining whether participants had been travelling via bike or car with a 88% accuracy rate.

“Neither the $300 nor the $1,200 rebate offers produced a statistically significant change in daily [Vehicle Miles Traveled] relative to their respective control groups,” the report states, noting the limited scope of the study, which concluded after six months. “Overall, we found no evidence that rebate recipients substantially reduced their vehicle travel. […] These results suggest that while e-bikes may have expanded participants’ travel options and mobility, they did not replace enough vehicle trips to reduce overall driving.”

Other studies, conducted either by GPS or self-reported data, have shown a decrease in driving rates from e-bike incentives, including in Canada, Sweden, and Norway, and the report takes pains to note the limited amount of data from which conclusions can be drawn. But in context with the other data points shown from this initial round of rebates, e-bike purchases seem to be enabling Washingtonians who would have gotten around without a car anyway to dramatically improve their mobility and travel options.

“E-bike rebates may require longer time periods and/or complementary measures to translate increased e-bike adoption into measurable reductions in vehicle travel. Expanding funding for more types of load-carrying equipment or other bike-related accessories, such as add-on equipment for transporting children, might also affect the extent and type of e-bike usage,” it notes.

The chances of winning a rebate are likely to be much higher in the program’s second round, expected in 2026, after the legislature earmarked an additional $7 million for the program. Governor Bob Ferguson’s proposed budget for WSDOT, released earlier this month, rolls over unspent dollars from 2025 into that amount, bringing the total to more than $9 million. But it will be up to the legislature to decide whether to keep that amount in place, and the data learned from the initial round of rebates is likely to significantly shape that decision-making.

Correction: an earlier version of this story stated that Washingtonians who weren’t offered rebates had received rejection notices, when they were simply not notified.

The post Washington’s First Try at E-bike Rebates Leaves Thousands of Vouchers Unredeemed first appeared on The Urbanist.

The move will grind to a halt plans for 48 single family homes sprawling across the site. Critics had lambasted the proposal as creating a lavish suburban enclave within a stone’s throw of the University of Washington, a campus with more than 52,000 students sandwiched between two light rail stations.

The authorization for the $64 million purchase using Seattle Public Utilities (SPU) funds was first reported by the Seattle Times and took many housing advocates by surprise. For years, Affordable Talaris and other advocates had pushed the City to pursue a more forward-thinking urban vision for the site.

Affordable Talaris, a Share The Cities working group, has been demanding change at the Talaris parcel in Laurelhurst to build different & more affordable housing alongside trees, wetland, and a future daylit creek. We are heartened by the news that this parcel may have a different future!

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— Affordable Talaris (@affordabletalaris.org) December 16, 2025 at 11:49 AM

Rather than urban design scruples, the driving force for SPU’s acquisition is a state law that would ban the City of Seattle from simply replacing the pipe carrying Yesler Creek under the Talaris site if it were to fail. The issue was long known. For example, Ray Dubicki noted in a 2020 Urbanist article that Yesler Creek has an easement and represented a significant obstacle to development, flagging the opportunity to daylight the creek.

“The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife will not allow SPU to repair or replace the pipe unless it is made fish passable. The private property owners have plans for a major new development which, if completed, would make it dramatically more difficult and costly for SPU to make the drainage pipe fish passable,” a City staff report on the sale noted. “The utility determined the property is also suitable for stormwater control facilities because the area needs additional stormwater drainage facilities to manage increased flows.”

After SPU is able to complete a plan to make Yesler Creek fish passable through the site, the City could repurpose any portion of the site that is deemed surplus, a potential path to building housing. However, any plan would need to contend with neighborhood opposition.

The prospect of wholesale redevelopment on the Talaris site has been deeply controversial within Laurelhurst, one of the city’s wealthiest and most exclusive neighborhoods, and faces significant barriers. The site was declared a city landmark in 2013, and a settlement agreement dating to 1991 between the Laurelhurst Community Club (now known as Laurelhurst Community Council) and a former property owner is still attached to the parcel and could hinder future plans for redevelopment.

The Talaris property has been owned by 4000 Property LLC, a company with ties to businessman Bruce McCaw, since 2000. Several redevelopment plans have been put forward since then, including a proposal to build a 300,000-square-foot institute for advanced study that would have entailed the demolition of most of the existing buildings and trees on the site.

After that plan fell through, the company shifted gears, and applied for a contract rezone in 2012 that would have allowed them to build multifamily housing, preserving much of the site’s open space. But that would have required a council-approved rezone, which the Laurelhurst Community Club opposed, leading the city council to take a contract rezone off the table in 2013.

That same year, the site was nominated for landmark status without the consent of the property owner, but the exact controls that would be placed on the site still haven’t been determined. (By 2026, that move will be illegal under state law, thanks to a newly approved House Bill 1576, which requires owner consent to landmark a property younger than 125 years old.)

In 2020, a deal to sell the site to Quadrant Homes for a 62-home redevelopment plan fell through and 4000 Property LLC went back to square one. For the past five years, Bassetti Architects has been working on a plan that could pass muster with the Landmarks Preservation Board (LPB), holding 14 individual meetings between 2021 and 2023 to come up with a plan that retains five of the seven structures on the site that have been designated as landmarks.

But as those plans to build tract homes advanced, Seattle housing advocates have not been quiet about such a clear missed opportunity for a largely undeveloped parcel of this size. In 2017, state legislator and mayoral candidate Jessyn Farrell brought up the idea of pushing for affordable housing on the parcel while on the campaign trail. A few months later, advocates founded the group Affordable Talaris to push the city to think more broadly about Talaris’s future.

“This is an insult to the teachers, nurses, baristas, working musicians and UW staff who cannot afford to live in the city where they work,” Affordable Talaris founders Laura Loe and Myra Lara wrote of the plan for single-family homes in an op-ed in The Stranger in 2018. “Affordable Talaris organizers believe development should provide many more people with the opportunity to live near sought-after schools, abundant open space, grocery stores, a Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) line, two major regional hospitals, the most useful bike trail in the city, and a major state employer, the University of Washington. During a global climate crisis we want many more people to be able to walk, bike, or bus to the Husky Stadium Link light rail station. Building much more housing on or near Talaris is a chance to do development right.”

Despite those years of advocacy, none of Seattle’s elected officials stepped up to change Talaris’s zoning, which would be the first step toward allowing uses beyond single family homes. Yet urbanists continued to push: in The Urbanist, the South Seattle Emerald, and elsewhere. When the issue appeared to be fully settled, last week’s council vote opened the door.

Ahead of the council vote, District 4 Councilmember Maritza Rivera referenced other instances of where the City of Seattle has successfully daylighted creeks that had been formerly undergrounded, including Northgate’s Thornton Creek.

“I really appreciate the state law that necessitates when you are replacing the pipe, to actually do the fish passage and the daylighting of the creek,” Rivera said. “We’ve done it in various places across the city, including Mapes Creek and also Thornton Creek, and I think this is another example.”

The 2009 Thornton Place development, which daylighted the creek in addition to building more than 500 apartments, retail space, and a 14-screen movie theater, is a clear model for redevelopment at Talaris — but such a proposal in Laurelhurst would be a significantly bigger battle.

The 1991 settlement agreement that purports to bind future use of the Talaris property, updated to include 4000 Property LLC in 2005, requires “permanent landscape buffering” along the edge of the site, and includes stipulations on building height and the number of potential parking stalls. The City of Seattle, originally a party to the agreement, was dropped in 2005 and any future property owner will be likely to challenge the legality of the document as impacting their ability to take full advantage of any underlying zoning.

What’s next for Talaris’s future remains incredibly up in the air. Seattle Public Utilities is likely to spend a significant amount of time assessing how the site could be used to address stormwater runoff along with fish passage. But with the parcel in public ownership, plans that squander the site’s potential and turn it into a luxury homeowner playground are off the table, at least for now, and a bolder urban vision could be back in play.

The post City of Seattle Purchases 18-Acre Laurelhurst Property, Scuttling Sprawl Plans first appeared on The Urbanist.

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