The announcement comes on the heels of the roll out of the Comprehensive Plan’s second phase, which includes targeted upzones only directly along streets where frequent buses run — on top of 30 new neighborhood centers clustered around existing business districts — and completely steps away from density increases where they had previously been proposed, but where the City faced community pushback.

“I’d like to provide some clarity so that there is no misunderstanding about where we are. OPCD and the new administration have every intention of putting into our phase 4 Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement, the expansion of upzones to two blocks on either side of frequent transit corridors, and that will be all frequent transit corridors that are as defined by Seattle Department of Transportation,” Quirondongo said. “That scoping is not something that we have on paper at this time. That is not a consultant that we have on board at this time. I’m just speaking to what our intention is as staff and the discussions that we have had with the administration.”

Quirindongo said the plan would need to go through a full environmental study, which would put the zoning change to what the department is calling “Phase 4” of the One Seattle Comprehensive Plan. The plan was due at the end of 2024, but Phase 4 is looking like a 2027 or 2028 effort. The delays and cuts to scope stem from former Mayor Bruce Harrell, whose team pushed back on an early OPCD plan to add upzones more broadly than his ultimate plan did.

Harrell’s scaled back plan was widely criticized by housing advocates, with the Seattle Planning Commission among those pushing the City for a bolder plan adding more housing density and broader corridor upzones.

The planning commission pledged support for the two-block plan. In fact, a few planning commissioners appeared to push the City to go further, noting that policymakers could use generous land use policy to induce a virtuous cycle with more transit and greater ridership.

“We tend to maybe not center the fact that land use and density needs to come first for transit service to follow, even though it seems like it’s the other way around,” Commissioner Dhyana Quintanar Solares said. “It is this chicken and egg situation where the land use does drive where service and demand and future ridership potential and increasing fair revenue and justifying infrastructure expenditures and investments go. So I think putting forth a vision of where these corridors and the expanded TOD perspective and upzones happen should have the opportunity to plant where we want to see frequent transit.”

OPCD again pointed to legal requirements for environmental study as limiting the City’s ability to implement corridor upzones on a faster timeline. Phase 3 is already scoped to include the eight additional neighborhood growth centers that city councilmembers discussed last year. Department leaders have said shoehorning more upzones into that study would delay phase 3, as reported earlier in The Urbanist.

“The final EIS for the Comp Plan and zoning legislation that was released in early 2025 studied a preferred alternative that included upzones along transit corridors at a depth of generally half a block, in most cases, including only those parcels that had frontage on the arterial served by the transit,” Sarah Graves, OPCD’s Communications Manager, told The Urbanist following Quirondongo’s appearance at the planning commission. “OPCD had studied a concept of wider upzones in the draft EIS. However, analysis of that alternative was not as detailed as in the FEIS and not sufficient to fully address SEPA requirements legislation to enact significantly broader zoning changes, such as going out to one or two blocks from the arterial.”

The early plan that OPCD internally floated in 2023 and The Urbanist revealed through public records request, included wider transit corridor upzones using an eighth-mile radius that appears even broader than the Wilson administration plan. Harrell also cut OPCD’s 50 proposed neighborhood growth centers down to 30.

Whether two-block-radius transit corridor rezones for midrise apartments are enough to sate housing advocates and urbanists remains to be seen. As the earlier lessons with the Harrell administration shows, an overly limiting environmental study can come back to bite the city and tie policymakers’ hands later in the process.

Before all is said and done, it could be that Harrell’s decision set the city backed by four years on more fully embracing transit-oriented development citywide, rather than in handpicked locations that often allow wealthy and well-connected neighborhoods to weasel out of doing their fair share. The change in leadership does appear to mean that those transit corridor upzones are coming eventually.

The post Seattle Planning Director Says Upzones Within Two Blocks of Transit Inbound… Eventually first appeared on The Urbanist.

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.

As Sound Transit grapples with its budget shortfall, some have suggested cutting the light rail extension from South Kirkland to Issaquah (or replacing it with buses) to prioritize funding for Seattle. But this is a lazy take – it ignores Sound Transit’s principle of sub-area equity, and more importantly, the staggering potential for transit-oriented redevelopment along the route. 

Let’s look at how the Eastgate neighborhood in Bellevue could transform by the time light rail arrives in the 2040s.

Link from South Kirkland to Issaquah

Voters approved the Link extension from South Kirkland to Issaquah as part of Sound Transit 3 (ST3) back in 2016. It’s one of the last elements of the ST3 system, with planning set to start in 2027 and service commencing around 2041-2044. 

For now, the only official information is the “representative project”, a napkin sketch that’s unchanged since the vote passed. It shows light rail running about 12 miles from South Kirkland park-and-ride to Issaquah Central, sharing the existing 2 Line tracks through the heart of Bellevue, and adding four new stations and about nine miles of new track. The new track lies mostly within the I-90 median and Eastrail corridor, allowing long stretches to run at-grade, minimizing construction costs and impacts.

Critics of the planned extension point out that it doesn’t extend far enough into Kirkland or Issaquah to reach their respective downtowns, merely running through the lower-density areas in between. Today, that’s true: the area is dominated by sprawling office parks, industrial uses, and car-oriented shopping malls. But to see the potential, we need to look beyond the current land uses. What matters more is how the area will look in two decades, when light rail arrives.

Inspiration: transforming Bel-Red (2009-present)

Fortunately, nearby Bel-Red provides an excellent model. Once an industrial zone, it’s transforming into an urban corridor. In the earliest plans for the 2 Line, then known as East Link, light rail was expected to closely follow State Route 520 between downtown Bellevue and Redmond, skirting around the forgettable area in between. But fast-forward 15 years, and what actually happened is much more exciting: a series of transit-oriented urban villages are blossoming along the route, from Spring District, to Bel-Red, to Overlake Village.

In hindsight, three essential ingredients enabled this transformation: (1) Sound Transit picked an alignment through the area, rather than around it, bringing large swaths of land into the vicinity of new stations; (2) the City of Bellevue boldly laid out a new street grid to break up existing large parcels, with urban amenities like wide sidewalks; and (3) the whole area was upzoned to allow mixed use redevelopment, with the highest density closest to the light rail stations.

Together, these changes are catalyzing significant private investment. While the full build-out will take decades, many projects including thousands of housing units have already been built, with more in the pipeline. Some street corners are almost totally unrecognizable. Here’s a real before/after of the newly rebuilt 132nd Avenue NE in Bel-Red, with new sidewalks, bike lanes, and eight-story apartment buildings clustered around the light rail station.

The striking transformation in Bel-Red was achievable in part because the prior land uses were so forgettable: the City and Sound Transit could afford to acquire new right of way, and the step-change in value from upzoning spurred redevelopment. Bel-Red illustrates a sort of “best case scenario” when major regional transit investments and whole new neighborhoods are planned together.

Could we replicate this success along the light rail to Issaquah?

Link station at 156th Ave SE / Airfield Park

The first step would be a well-situated station.

Sound Transit’s representative project calls for two stations in Bellevue, at Richards Road near Factoria and Eastgate park-and-ride, before light rail transitions into the I-90 median for the five miles to Issaquah. This misses what might be the most promising opportunity for redevelopment: the area around 156th Avenue SE. Previously an airport, it’s over 100 acres of underutilized offices and parking, on the same side of the highway as the train. For perspective, that’s three times larger than Spring District! It’s also near Airfield Park, where the City of Bellevue plans to locate its new Aquatic Center.

A better alignment would see light rail pass under 148th Avenue SE and its access ramps in a retained cut trench, to enable a convenient station on the near side of SE Eastgate Way at 156th Avenue SE, before transitioning to the I-90 median. This alignment is only about 0.1 miles longer and could be accommodated without any property impacts or reconfiguration of the I-90 ramps just by tightening the cloverleaf to a radius more like the NE 8th St interchange in downtown Bellevue. (The current ramps are almost double that radius!)

The station itself could resemble the current trenched station at Spring District. It could be an additional infill station, or a relocation of the provisional Lakemont station. Either way, failing to plan ahead for a station here would make it much harder to add later, with trains already back in the I-90 median.

New walkable local streets

The next step would be an urban street grid. To orient the neighborhood around transit, people need to be able to comfortably walk or bike between the station and where they’re going. Fortunately, the area already has avenues at regular intervals – like 156th, 158th, and 160th – so what’s missing are the cross-streets, namely an extension of SE 33rd Street and all-new SE 34th and SE 35th Streets. Here’s one possible layout that achieves block sizes similar to Bel-Red, about 280 feet by 400 feet.

As in Bel-Red, these new local streets would prioritize walkability, and with minimal through traffic, they could be much narrower than arterials, perhaps just one lane in each direction plus planting and sidewalks. They could either be built by the City’s capital improvement program, extracted from private developers, or more likely a strategic combination of both, with the City and Sound Transit prioritizing the immediate station area and redevelopment filling in the rest over time. As in Bel-Red, the key is to enshrine the required new streets in code early.

Increased density and mixed-use

The final step would be to amend the Land Use Code to allow mixed-use redevelopment around the light rail station. Concentrating growth near transit not only maximizes how many people can live/work car-free, it actually helps preserve the surrounding single-family neighborhoods, too. With mixed-use zoning, active uses like restaurants, storefronts, and daycares add vibrancy at ground level, while housing and offices are stacked efficiently above.

For a conservative baseline, we could apply the exact same zones and dimensional requirements that Bellevue approved last year for Bel-Red. This would limit building heights to 150 feet (squat high rises) in the blocks nearest to the station, then 70 feet (five-over-ones) in the blocks beyond that, and finally 45 feet (townhomes). Here’s how that might look fully built-out, using actual building designs from the area:

This example delivers about 9.5 million habitable square feet on the 3.5 million developable square feet of land (after accounting for streets), for an aggregate floor area ratio (FAR) of about 2.7 – nothing crazy. If this were 100% housing, it would be over 9,000 units within a half-mile walk of transit.

For a more ambitious example, we could incorporate a few blocks of the Mixed-Use Highrise (MU-H) district approved last year for Wilburton, which allows apartments and condo buildings up to 250 feet. This pushes habitable square feet over 11 million, or about 11,000 housing units, with an aggregate FAR of just over 3.0.

We may not think of Eastgate as particularly desirable today, but its prime location is hard to argue. Once light rail arrives, it’ll be just a few stops from downtown Bellevue and downtown Seattle, miles closer than many other growth centers. It’s surrounded by parks, including the soon-to-be-developed Airfield Park and Bellevue Aquatic Center. It’s a short drive to the mountains. A radical transformation isn’t far-fetched – Bel-Red’s history shows that it’s more likely than no change at all.

What happens next

Now is the time to start laying the groundwork. In 2026, the City of Bellevue is set to update its subarea plan for Eastgate, and in 2027, Sound Transit will kick off planning the light rail extension between South Kirkland and Issaquah. The potential for urbanization along the corridor is staggering, and Eastsiders should urge both their elected officials and Sound Transit to pursue a truly ambitious vision. Let’s swing for the fences and create the next Bel-Red!

The post Op-Ed: Light Rail Could Transform Bellevue’s Eastgate into Urban Oasis first appeared on The Urbanist.

For decades, Kitsap County has been trying – and mostly failing – to concentrate growth into compact areas that can be best served by schools and ambulances, sewers and sidewalks. Kitsap’s state-mandated solution, the so-called “Urban Growth Areas” (UGAs) have failed to attract growth. Since 2000, the vast majority of new housing has been built in rural Kitsap. 

Kitsap County’s proposed ‘Housing Element’ of the 2024 Comprehensive Plan has been declared ‘noncompliant under the Growth Management Act (GMA) by the Growth Management Hearing Board for overstating available housing, preventing infill housing and ignoring wildfire risks. This was the fourth time Kitsap County had its Comp Plan remanded, it also occurred in 2012 for oversizing UGA for the population, 2006 for allowing too much density in rural areas and 1998 for encouraging growth outside of cities. Kitsap County has been inviting sprawl for a long time.

Kitsap is Washington State’s third densest county, following King and Vancouver. And two thirds of those people — 190,000 — live in the area known as Greater Bremerton. Over the last 20 years, growth in Greater Bremerton has primarily sprouted outward, in mushrooming subdevelopments in the forests and farms around Bremerton, Port Orchard and Silverdale, as opposed to infill development within the existing urban footprint, as required by the GMA. 

Kitsap’s UGA: flawed from birth

Kitsap’s first attempt to define Urban Growth Areas (UGAs) in the 1996 Comprehensive Plan fell short of state requirements. The Central Puget Sound Growth Management Hearings Board (GMHB) invalidated the plan, ruling that the UGAs were too large and lacked density, while rural areas permitted inappropriate urban densities. This problem of sprawl persists today.

Despite placing strict limits on rural housing (e.g., 1 home per 5–20 acres), Kitsap County continually expands the boundaries of Urban Growth Areas to accommodate sprawl. The largest expansion occurred in 2006, when the Silverdale Urban Growth area doubled in size, from 3,456 acres to its current 7,400 acres, enclosing thousands of acres of prime greenfield for suburban sprawl. Kitsap County has expanded the area of its UGAs in every Comp Plan since 2006, except the most recent one.

Kitsap’s newest sprawling development is Royal Valley, a bucolic 165-acre farm that was previously zoned for one home per 5 acres. Royal Valley was outside of the original UGA boundaries, which were stretched in 2012 to accommodate housing. The land was upzoned to 10 per acre in 2016. And thus, the Royal Valley became ‘urban’ and ready for sprawl.

Despite stretching boundaries, the vast majority of housing development has sprouted up outside of Kitsap’s UGAs over the past 25 years. Kitsap County has added homes in the least sustainable way possible, creating high rural density, without sidewalks, buses or new schools. 

In August 2025, Kitsap’s 2024 Comprehensive Plan was remanded (aka, sent back for a do-over) by the Growth Management Hearing Board. In particular, Kitsap County “failed to identify sufficient capacity of land for housing for all income groups… in particular for the low, very low, extremely low, and moderate-income levels…” Additionally, the County was cited for thumbing its nose at wildfire risk, because it did “not include multimodal emergency and evacuation routes… nor does it direct growth away from the wildland urban interface… as required by the GMA.” The remand was the result of a lawsuit from the nonprofit advocacy group Futurewise, which specializes in sustainable land use policy. 

A new plan for Silverdale’s Regional Growth Center

In 2006, a portion of Silverdale’s UGA was designated a “Regional Growth Center” (RGC) by the new Puget Sound Regional Council. The ‘primary goal’ of RGCs is to “concentrate the region’s future population and job growth into dense, walkable, and transit-connected urban hubs’. 

The UGA has been expanded multiple times, but not in 2024. To understand why, it’s helpful to know that Silverdale’s UGA and its growth center have very different boundaries. Silverdale’s 7,400-acre UGA is nearly nine times larger than the Silverdale Regional Growth Center, with just 848 acres. Housing is affected, as developers have preferred to build single family housing in the UGA’s vast unbuilt farms and forests, rather than concentrate multifamily units in the little designated center. 

But the County’s reliance on exurban sprawl has left the Silverdale RGC dangerously close to losing federal transportation funds, due to falling below minimum ‘activity units’ (1 job + 1 housing unit = 2 activity units). Silverdale is required to have 18 activity units per acre but only had 17.3 units in a recent update. And the requirement will grow to 44 activity units per acre in 2044, a tall order for an area that’s added virtually zero new housing in 25 years. 

Kitsap County is scrambling to rewrite the Silverdale Center Plan to create more dense housing and encourage multimodal travel. The Plan’s December 2025 update, envisions “trail-oriented development” to create “a contiguous fabric of walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods” and “diverse, affordable, and higher-density housing choices” and a “low-stress network” of enhanced sidewalks and multiuse trails to connect the waterfront, shopping, medical and cultural facilities. It introduces the worthy idea of ‘park once and walk’ to complete errands in the Center.

The RGC Plan envisions dense, multi-use developments on parking infill. That sounds fabulous – exactly what Silverdale plans and residents have been wanting for years. To date, no infill projects have been filed in Silverdale. Kitsap’s Director of Community Development points out that “much of the land within Regional Center has […] limited near-term redevelopment feasibility. Redevelopment in these areas often requires parcel assembly, utility upgrades, environmental review, and higher upfront costs.”

The Silverdale Center Plan transportation elements are quite good, but unfunded. The Plan proposes interconnected trails and ‘low-stress’ bike lanes. But the RGC trails have no logical connection either to the rest of Silverdale UGA, nor north or south to the cities of Bremerton and Poulsbo. And every bike lane that’s ever been built in Silverdale is unsafe, stressful and unprotected. Further, Silverdale RGC Plan multimodal paths have no funding, unlike Kitsap’s unrelenting street widening program. 

More sprawl, more roads… repeat forever

Kitsap County has several major “traffic capacity” projects planned. Massive street expansions within the Silverdale Regional Growth Center are already complete: Silverdale Way, Bucklin Hill Road and upper Ridgetop Boulevard. While these projects, outlined in the Silverdale Transportation Improvement Plan, include multimodal fig leaves, the finished projects fall well short of goals because they build narrow sidewalks and lowest common denominator bike lanes, which are neither low stress nor “Complete Streets.”

The next self-destructive project is Phase 2 of the Ridgetop Boulevard Corridor Widening project, which will expand a short stretch of street from three to five lanes for a massive price tag of $13.7 million for just 0.24-miles. At $57 million per mile, it’s probably the most expensive Kitsap County streets projects ever, owing to the need to buy private property from the likes of Dairy Queen and Wells Fargo. 

Ridgetop’s widening violates every element of the Silverdale Center Plan. As currently planned, it does not contribute to a low-stress multimodal network. The new five-lane street will increase crashes and car speeds, and restrict pedestrians from crossing the giant stroad. It does include a crappy, unprotected bike lane, but it will fall far short of plans for Complete Streets. 

A much better Ridgetop would pull the useless paint-only bike lanes off the street and use the same space for a multi-use trail. Two five-foot bike lanes plus a five-foot sidewalk would make a wonderful 15-foot-wide trail, a first step towards the trail network envisioned in the Silverdale Regional Center plan. Better yet, cancel the street widening entirely and dedicate that $13.7 million to building out the multi-use trail network. 

The Puget Sound Regional Council, which oversees the Ridgetop funding could be helpful here – pointing out that Kitsap continues to cash checks for projects that fail to meet PSRC goals. But they probably won’t. PSRC policy enforcement tends to be toothless. Indeed, PSRC is all too willing to fund road expansion projects with the barest minimum of multimodal infrastructure. 

Kitsap: the status quo is broken

For nearly 30 years, Kitsap County has passed strategic plans which claim to concentrate growth into UGAs, decrease vehicle traffic and support multimodal transportation. Kitsap County has expanded the area of its various UGAs during every single comp plan, since the first – with the notable exception of the most recent, 2024 Plan, which keeps boundaries the same for the first time. The repeated expansions of the UGAs designates new farms and forests for sprawl.

It’s not too late for Kitsap County to bend the curve on forest destruction, traffic growth and sprawl, and build the walkable communities that 30 years of Comprehensive Plans have called for. But it must break with the status quo of prioritizing rural subdivisions above concentrated development. The future will be decided by three county commissioners this spring. 

To change the status quo, Kitsap County should consider three policy changes:

1. Downzone (allow less housing) and restrict subdivision of all large farm and forest parcels, whether inside or outside of UGAs.
2. Offer tax incentives for infill development across all Kitsap County UGAs.
3. Halt road widening road projects that invite additional traffic congestion and instead focus new transportation spending on multimodal corridors that encourage walking, rolling, biking, and transit use.  

Commissioners will meet to discuss the Kitsap Comprehensive Plan remand on January 7, 2026 at 10am. Written comments should be addressed to ddaniels@kitsap.gov. Or attend the meetingin person or via Zoom video conference.

The post Op-Ed: Why Kitsap County Can’t Stop Sprawling first appeared on The Urbanist.

The post Sunday Video: What Is The YIGBY Housing Movement? 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.

Much has been written about the negative effects of urban highways in the U.S., but they mostly focus on neglect, displacement, and gridlock that are consequences of completing the projects. Local author Emily Lieb’s new book, “Road to Nowhere: How a Highway Map Wrecked Baltimore”, shows that you don’t even have to build a highway in order to scar a city; you only need a map and some patience. Automobile proponents’ persistence pays off, literally, because their friends are able to make an obscene amount of money along the way.

Despite the book’s title, the 10-D highway, the East-West expressway that was supposed to revitalize downtown Baltimore to better serve its suburban population, plays only a supporting role in the story. The main character is Rosemont, a middle-class neighborhood in West Baltimore. The book begins with Rosemont’s transformation from an exclusively White working-class neighborhood into a Black, but still middle-class neighborhood thanks to the city’s segregated school system. 

The author dives into all aspects of the neighborhood’s deterioration and stagnation over almost 40 years while it was held hostage to constantly changing highway plans before the project was eventually canceled in 1981. Finally, she describes how Baltimore officials made an insincere attempt to restore the neighborhood to its pre-expressway-imagined state with the help of federal money. During all three stages, fortunes were made – not by Rosemonters, but by real estate speculators, money lenders, contractors, and politicians – while Rosemont itself didn’t see much investment.

Together, this makes “Road to Nowhere” a good introduction into how local and federal policies and interests shaped not only this part of Baltimore but many other, usually non-White neighborhoods in other cities across the country. The sprawling ramps of I-5 and I-90 in Seattle’s International District would not have been possible without the Federal Highway Act’s generous funding, the same federal program that made Baltimore’s politicians look seriously at the plans for 10-D. 

On top of bad transportation policy, the Federal Housing Administration’s Section 235 program, which guaranteed mortgages for low- and moderate-income homebuyers, became a source of financial ruin for many Rosemonters who were lured into unknowingly buying condemned houses after the highway project was put on hold. The fiasco was a national scandal in the 1970s.

There were many factors that led to the eventual withdrawal of the highway project, including an oil crisis and the concurrent rise of environmentalism, but it was the loss of funding that proved decisive. The city’s tax base had declined, the state was getting less money from its vehicle excise tax, and the federal gas tax was too low to continue building at the pace of the 1950s and 60s. At the same time, highway costs were rising, in part due to environmental regulations and the new road design standards requiring a larger footprint.

Rosemont’s story also serves as a sad reminder that activism isn’t always enough. Even though, on paper, opponents of the highway won, their fight dragged on too long, and the consequences have lasted to the present day.

As dismal as the account is, the book ends on a positive note, reporting on a future light rail project, the Red Line, which, after some drama of its own, is in its planning phase. It is intended to reconnect the neighborhood and breathe new life into Rosemont, this time for real – that is, if funding comes through.

Elliott Bay Book Company is holding a discussion of “Road To Nowhere” with author Emily Lieb on November 20 at 7pm.

The post Book Review: How a Highway Map Wrecked Baltimore first appeared on The Urbanist.

Now that the dust has settled, we can game out how the One Seattle Plan’s nearly final development standards will open up new opportunities for affordable and accessible neighborhood housing. The flurry of late amendments created incentives for higher-density stacked flats, additional floor area, more accessible units, taller buildings, and parking reductions that could fundamentally evolve the neighborhood’s next generation of housing.

The recent history of Seattle’s housing market has been split into three housing types: single-family houses few can afford, townhouses, or five- to seven-story apartment blocks partitioned into hundreds of studios and one bedrooms. New middle housing can split the difference: Larger units in smaller buildings, with more options that appeal to wider demographic trends, distributed throughout more walkable neighborhoods, built to today’s higher green standards, at a reasonable risk, cost, and return.

More project types, both market and subsidized, are now viable at least on paper in the city’s Neighborhood Residential zone. Seattle’s housing needs are evolving, and using the incentives to build the kinds of projects that would fill growing niches that aren’t being served currently is an exciting prospect.

Each of these concepts starts with Seattle’s typical 50-foot by 100-foot residential lot, with an alley. Since parking is no longer required for units under 1200 square feet, and wouldn’t fit anyway without budget-busting below-grade structured parking garages, we haven’t included any fully parked concepts. Finally, each of these concepts has a similar boxy form — there is a reason that small apartment buildings such as these were the mainstay of ‘naturally occurring affordable housing’ for generations — they can be wonderfully efficient housing solutions.

Case 1: Greener Market Rate Flats for Lease

During the run-up to the vote on the various amendments to the One Seattle Plan, public testimony became a zero sum game between new housing and tree canopy. Amendments that preserve existing Tier 1 and Tier 2 trees, achieve a higher quality of landscaping using the Green Factor, and plant for future canopy in addition to current requirements for street trees, mean that developments with well-placed large trees on the periphery can unlock an additional building story. In this case, designing around a Tier 2 tree isn’t a compromise — it is an unlock that allows enough height and floor area to build eleven two-bedroom flats.

In our development work, we expect two-bedroom apartments to be snapped up by households with children, but we’re seeing older households who want long-term options to flex space between working from home, caring for elders, or reducing the cost of living for the next generation. And if we can build hundreds more buildings like this, we can reduce the scarcity that makes affording a two-bedroom seem out of reach for many of the 56% of Seattle households who rent.

The form factor of flats tends to be more compact, and single-stair buildings further optimize their efficiency. The case study approaches the maximum building size without hitting the maximum lot coverage, and provide 225 square feet of outdoor space per household, with generous balconies for every unit. Unfortunately, there isn’t any additional incentive for greener buildings under the new zoning, but it helps that the baseline under Seattle’s stringent energy code is already one of the best in the nation. Just adding households to established neighborhoods within walking distance of transit and amenities is great for lowering our city’s per capita carbon footprint.

Case 2: Larger Ownership Flats:

Zoning incentives to increase allowable floor area for new stacked flats outpaced the density limits a bit, creating an opening for larger units. While conventional multifamily development is focused on packing more units into less square footage, leading to such innovations as windowless bedrooms, the new rules make designing more spacious flats similar in size to townhouses and accessory dwelling units (ADUs).

With longtime homeowners aging out of the space and responsibility of a single-family detached house, downsizing Boomers and Gen-Xers will be looking to convert some of their equity into a lower-cost, less commitment flat without having to leave their neighborhood. One of the biggest incentives discounts more accessible ‘Type A’ units, great for aging in place, entirely pulling them out of calculations for density, lot coverage, and floor area ratio. With the extra development capacity, maybe we can spring for an elevator and still make it pencil by marginally increasing the sales price of the units.

Flats with more smaller bedrooms, like the three-bedroom units in Case 2, are a good fit given how households are changing. The trend is that more households include either an aging parent or an adult child. That extra bedroom means flexibility and stability for families over time. Concerns about housing affect couples’ decision to whether to have children and family friendly buildings like Cases 1 and 2 can make it less daunting.

Seattle isn’t producing enough ‘starter’ homes to satisfy the demand, locking out those who’d like to step up into ownership and locking in those who’d like to downsize but can’t find anything to move from their single-family house. Building stacked flats works both to create elasticity in the housing market (price reductions responding to supply increases) and flexibility for households changing situations.

We are hearing anecdotally that this scale of building is also appealing to those who would love to work together with friends to co-develop, build, and live together in an intentional community under a co-op or condo ownership structure, but development is a risky venture and few will take the leap.

Case 3: Subsidized Ownership Flats

Seattle’s stock of subsidized affordable housing is concentrated in the areas designated as urban centers, but the need is much more broadly distributed. The new Neighborhood Center place type is going to expand the territory where typical subsidized affordable housing can be built at the scale that works for most service providers, but our local Habitat for Humanity Seattle-King County has been deploying a scaled-down solution that can provide 10 to 20 households with ownership opportunities for those making less than 80% of the area’s median income. One-bedroom homes, such as in Case 3, are priced from the mid $200,000s, equating to a monthly all-in payment of $1800-$2600.

Using incentives for affordable housing, stacked flats, Green Factor landscaping, Type A accessible units, and lot coverage, non-profit affordable housing providers can fit up to 16 one-bedroom units on a parcel and still have space for 174 square feet of outdoor space per resident.

Over the next ten years, the fastest growing segment of new households will be single-person households over age 65. Rather than be isolated in a detached house, a building such as Case 3 (add an elevator) offers community, affordability and stabilty. Because a building this size can be built nearly anywhere within the new Neighborhood Residential zone, over time we can hope to see senior housing pop up in easy walking distance of bustling Neighborhood Centers.

Case 4: Subsidized Rentals + Child Care Center

Seattle desperately needs more child care, and the process to certify a new center is rigorous. In order to justify the investment, the basic template is four classrooms, each with twenty kids, plus administration and facilities, and a space for outdoor play. If a provider can assemble two adjacent NR lots, like in Case 4, the ground floor area is the perfect size. This is essentially what many of our larger affordable housing projects are doing — anchoring the ground level with a child care center, then drawing kids from both the housing above and the surrounding neighborhood.

The real benefit of Case 4 is that this project might take 30 months instead of four or five years for a larger project, require fewer funding sources for the affordable housing, and have tens of thousands of potential residential sites to choose from rather than having to compete with other developer interests in the urban centers. Being in the neighborhood might also induce parents to walk their kids to the center, so we aren’t mixing idling car exhaust, impatient drivers, and vulnerable kids.

Moving Forward

These four case studies illustrate how new zoning incentives can generate more housing, more affordable housing, more accessible housing, for more more types of households. I am looking forward to Seattle City Council’s passing these incentives later this year, and welcoming some new neighbors in the near future.

The post Op-Ed: Making Seattle Neighborhoods More Accessible by Design first appeared on The Urbanist.

As sold by its proponents, the vision behind the zoning tweak was a potential “Maker’s District,” with smaller, more affordable industrial spaces that become feasible to develop with residential uses above. Under city code, half of new apartments in Urban Industrial (UI) zones like the stadium district one have to be set aside as affordable to households making anywhere from 60% to 90% of King County’s median income. Because of that, Nelson and her allies touted the bill’s passage being as a major win for affordable housing in Seattle.

But with significant freight corridors in the area including First Avenue S, Edgar Martinez Drive, and Royal Brougham Way, the council needed to repeal an existing prohibition on residential uses within 200 feet of a major truck street in this area — corridors that tend to be the city’s noisiest and most dangerous. The Port of Seattle and BNSF appeal called the city council’s process “hasty and irregular.”

Specifically, the appeal contended that the City had skipped over several requirements under state law to complete such a change, and that the environmental review conducted was not specific enough to understand the impacts of allowing hundreds of new homes in this specific area, close to some of the Port’s biggest container terminals.

In agreeing, the ruling by the Growth Management Hearings Board (GMHB) lays out multiple “failures” on the part of the City of Seattle ahead of a final 6-3 council vote on March 18. They include unmet public participation requirements under the state’s Growth Management Act (GMA), a requirement to provide the state’s Commerce Department 60 days to comment on the proposal that was bypassed, and violations under the State Environmental Policy Act (SEPA) when it comes to review of potential impacts.

Rather than sign or veto the ordinance, Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell left it unsigned, allowing it to take effect this summer and letting the city council take full ownership for the change.

Notably, the board ultimately concluded that the 990 potential units of housing touted by both supporters of the bill and its opponents is overinflated, and that it would only be likely to produce around 375 units of housing within the vicinity of First Avenue S, given the limited number of parcels that would be impacted. While the stadium transition overlay district includes around 53 acres apart from the stadiums themselves, the board found that only around 7.5 of those acres are developable.

The board also found the city relied on the 2022 Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for a broad citywide industrial land reform, rather than conducting a separate analysis of the impact of Nelson’s bill more specifically. The city also did not complete a required Director’s Report laying out public comments received on the bill and how it was responding to them.

“There is no evidence in the record that the City considered the maximum potential development of property impacted by this Ordinance, let alone in a concentrated area. Nor is there evidence in the record that would demonstrate the City considered the environmental impact of placing 375 residential units in a liquification prone zone,” the ruling states. “the Board is left with the firm and definite conviction that the City’s failure to produce and consider the required Director’s Report before adopting this Ordinance was clearly erroneous and therefore concludes that the City did not comply with its code and, as a result, the GMA’s public participation requirements.”

The board did dismiss some of the Port’s other claims about the change, including the idea that more housing in the stadium district would have a negative impact on freight mobility and traffic safety in the neighborhood.

“While it is evident that intermodal rail facilities as well as truck traffic accessing the Port facilities rely on the City’s Major Truck streets […] there is an absence of evidence which would demonstrate the Ordinance, by its terms, fail to encourage or otherwise thwarts the goal of efficient multimodal transportation systems or that it is contrary to regional priorities or not coordinated with county and city comprehensive plans,” the ruling states.

Nelson has been touting the stadium district bill as one of her major accomplishments in four years, noting that she had to overcome “significant opposition” to get it across the finish line. That opposition included over 30 state legislators who wrote to the council in late January contending that the change would “likely harm current and future employment opportunities in the region.”

Her SoDo housing move did not appear to sway voters, who broke heavily for former Progress Alliance executive director Dionne Foster. The 25-point loss means Nelson will lose her citywide council seat after one term. Foster won the endorsement of a number of progressive groups, including The Urbanist Elections Committee (of which I am a member).

Port leaders celebrated following the ruling’s release Monday.

“This is a win for international trade, our region’s industrial workforce, and community advocates who stood against housing injustice. It’s disappointing that so many resources were expended fighting this bad policy. This was totally avoidable,” Port of Seattle Commissioner Toshiko Hasegawa said in a statement Monday, posted to her Instagram account. “I hope City leadership will join us in re-centering collaboration over conflict. We can build housing in appropriately zoned areas without compromising trade or commerce. Our communities, workers, and regional economy are counting on us to get this right.”

The City of Seattle could appeal the ruling to a Superior Court judge, or it could go back to square one and check all of the boxes that the growth hearings board says it missed and try and advance the proposal again. But with its biggest champion now heading out the door, it’s not clear that it will be anyone’s priority to advance forward at all.

The post Stadium District Zoning Change Declared Invalid After Port of Seattle Appeal first appeared on The Urbanist.

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