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Greg’s Smarter Neighbors blog is hands down the best for neighborhoods or anyone working to improve land use, but when I read his post, “Blogging about land use is easy…” a while back, I had to hold back a flamer of a comment.  Nothing about improving land use policies seems easy to me.  The political blowback on any progress seems almost preconceived and is downright insidious.  Take neighborhood planning.  Are we being walked down a garden path?  Our attention directed anywhere but behind the Oz curtain?

I attended the March 1 Neighborhood Planning Forum at the UW Evans School. Six hours on a Saturday, there we were. Ninety predominantly white, older folks in sweaters and khakis, at a lecture on democracy in city planning and reciprocal responsibility between city and neighborhoods. We broke into focus groups that predictably found DPD problem number one,  completed a survey, and then reassembled where Norm Rice wrapped it up with a by your leave, nothing’s definite folks. NP is still just a proposal.  Several times he mentioned “clustering,” that he thought transportation was the key, and warned of “inclusivity.”   As we filed out, he gave us a copy of the DON memo proposing the NP updates. (The Department whose budget and staff had been cut.)  So that went well, not.

Not long after came the comp plan amendments fiasco. Depending on who you talked to, the citizen-initiated amendments weren’t even going to be considered, which is why the amendment process wasn’t even publicized until two days before it was opened. And what was that placeholder the Planning Commission submitted as an amendment dated 2009?

Concurrent with debate on comp plan amendments came Council Bill  CB 116010 proposing to amend SEPA requirements and crashing council member email systems with heated protests for all sides.  Nothing was said about language in the bill that as far as I can tell based on knowledge of the English language would assign control of the Seattle Land Use map, including changing its boundaries, to the director of DPD.   What?   Could someone tell me what I’m missing here?  For that matter, what about all these bills and Legislation pending, indexed by word “SEPA”   It’s not just what’s being tossed about as SEPA 10

Yesterday came the heralded City Neighborhood Planning Forum, which brings us to what?  More munch and crunch on information gathered from citizens by the city.  While credit and many kudos are owed to Chris Leman, chair of the City Neighborhood Council; and  more, who is probably the hardest working and best informed neighborhood activitist and advocate in Seattle (email or call him with questions and you’ll get more than you ask for) – cookies and coffee at forums with surveys are really so much about citizens giving it up for the city, after all.   Meanwhile, back at the city, major policy changes, code updates, housing agenda changes, transporation policies, environmental policies, public health policies are in process, all of which have major impacts on the existing neighborhood plans, and could even bench, sideline, or render moot significant portions of those plans,  like zoning, multifamily (including single family) building codes, and the urban villages that so many  of us consider the core of our city’s  plan for the future. 

Thinking inside and for our neighborhoods is a good thing. But equally and sometimes more important is thinking as  citizens of our city.  We vote for councilmembers in districts that — county and city – change.   But all Seattle residents vote for the city executive, i.e., mayor.   Some city-wide questions now begging for answers include an accounting for where things stand in the zoning of our city.  Where is the map?  What are the numbers?  Who controls the changes and what have they been?   Why is our Mayor proposing code and zoning changes based on population growth that hasn’t happened and that he has no basis in reality to expect?   A new grassroots Livable Seattle Movement is hard at work combining its expertise and research on housing and building code and zoned capacity realities that every Seattle citizen has a right and a responsibility to know.  LSM gets its data the old-fashioned way – by analyzing census data, land value assessments, housing values, and recorded sale prices.  Sign up on the LSM website to be notified when new research is published or a new proposal is presented to City Council.

Finally, it’s deja vu all over again for the neighborhood planners going  into NP Round 2 reading (at least the title of) Peggy Sturdivant today in Crosscut Seattle regarding Neighborhood Planning, Part I:

Even the neighborhood boundaries are an issue. Only 60 percent of Seattle’s land mass is included in the plans, despite boundary overlaps. Due to a decreased budget and a desire to align with the city’s Department of Transportation, one proposal calls for updating neighborhoods within the six transportation sectors, at a rate of one sector per year, rather than the individual neighborhoods consecutively. The neighborhoods are most commonly divided within 13 districts.

What proposal is that?  Citizens need to take a strategic look at what’s happening in and to our city.  Greg at Smarter Neighbor’s is dead on in a way.  At the  end of the day, it’s not rocket science and you don’t need a degree in architecture, land use or environmental law, or public policy.   We all have a vote.  We’re all invited to each and every city council and design review board meeting.  We’re all part of the process whether we participate or not.