Newsreal 98105

Livable Seattle Movement in a March 6 presentation to City Council expressed deep concern with a draft update of the Multifamily code and zoning written by DPD.   The draft MFU, which contains major and minor changes to standards adopted in 1989, like the Planning Commission’s Affordable Housing Agenda, is written to accommodate population growth in Seattle; however, no such growth in population has occurred nor is realistically expected. 

The Livable Seattle Movement,  in an effort to spotlight political mythmaking including the notion that density equals affordability, assembled a team of  planning professionals, architects, and citizens – many involved in previous planning efforts the data back  decades.  

In its March 6 presentation to Council, LSM notes:

Reviewing the changes we find that both inside and outside the urban villages, the [proposed] MFU changes would produce buildings even bigger and uglier than the code of 1982, a problem code that resulted in a citizen revolt. [See Seattle PI, "Revolt of the Neighborhoods,' 1/22/87 by present Councilmember Jean Godden.]  It will also heat up the view capture, sunlight capture, and other capture problems we seenow with the monster houses in other zone. (See Appendix C.) We have no doubt that this MFU update will be equally unpopular this time around.

Revising the standards will also change the neighborhood plans to something new and unpredictable – veering far from what people thought the standards were when they OK’d their plans. In 1994, the City Council made a compact with the neighborhoods, which every neighborhood honored by developing neighborhood plans that accepted the conditional urban village designations and boundaries of the 1994 Comprehensive Plan. No grounds have been put forward to justify breaking this compact. None exist.

Adopting the MFU as written would destory the urban villages strategy — the essence of our present comprehensive plan – and would instead scatter new pockets of density randomly around the city….

See 21 pages of changes Seattle needs to make to its zoning code. Lots of photos of ‘zoning gone wrong’ for an excellent write-up by Greg at SmarterNeigbors.

Thanks to Kent Kammerer of Seattle Neighborhood Coalition for photos.  Find more at SmarterNeighbors and Livable Seattle Movement.