City Council, labor

Nelson Bill Would Eliminate Minimum Wage for “Gig” Drivers—and Slash Workers’ Rights

By Erica C. Barnett

Gig delivery workers and their allies were bracing for legislation by City Council President Sara Nelson to repeal minimum wage legislation passed last year, known as the PayUp law. What they may not have expected was how far Nelson’s proposal would go to roll back reforms unrelated to wages, including protections against deactivation, transparency requirements, and legal rights for delivery workers to sue if their employer violates the law.

The new minimum wage, which works out to around $26 an hour, was intended to offset many of the employer-side costs drivers must bear because they’re classified as “independent contractors,” including workers’ comp insurance, employer payroll taxes, unemployment insurance, family and medical leave insurance, and gas, maintenance, and other costs associated with driving for a living.

The PayUp legislation also ensured that drivers would be paid for rest breaks and time spent doing work other than actively driving—costs that an employer would have to pay if the workers were traditional employees. And it made it harder for the companies to deactivate or otherwise penalize workers for doing things the companies don’t like, like going offline during periods of high demand.

Delivery companies, including Uber and Doordash, claimed that paying for these expenses would make it impossible for them to turn a profit, and imposed a $5 fee on every delivery order, instantly driving down demand for drivers’ services and leaving many in desperate straits. Nelson and other allies of the delivery companies now argue that rolling back the minimum wage is the only way to eliminate the fees and get Seattle residents ordering again—a claim workers dispute, noting that the apps haven’t provided financial data to back up their pleas of poverty.

But Nelson—whose company, Fremont Brewing, just sold a majority share to a firm that also owns dozens of restaurants that deliver through DoorDash—has proposed legislation that would far beyond repealing the new minimum wage. The bill Nelson introduced this week would put far more power in the hands of delivery companies, and strip authority from the city to enforce its own labor laws.

And, notably, it wouldn’t require the app companies to stop charging the $5 fee or prohibit similar fees in the future, leaving open the possibility that every time the city attempts to regulate them, the apps could just impose fees large enough to grind their own business to a halt.

At the city council’s regular meeting on Monday, most of the people who testified about the legislation were against it. One, a former driver for Uber and Lyft named Sandra, said she drove 10 to 12 hours a day, seven days a week, for years until she was deactivated without explanation last September. “There is no consistency in pay, and the apps treat workers as disposable,” she said. “These apps like to pretend they’re doing things that are in their workers’ interests. …  They are not. They just want to get out of paying a minimum wage.”

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In addition to eliminating the minimum wage for drivers, which worked out to about $26 an hour before expenses, Nelson’s proposal would:

• Cut drivers’ base per-mile payment from 64 to 35 cents a mile, less than half the federal rate for tax deductions;

• Eliminate a $5 minimum payment for each delivery offer;

• Eliminate penalties (currently double pay plus $5,755) imposed on companies that fail to pay drivers;

• Deny workers the right to file a civil suit against delivery companies that withhold their wages or violate other rights guaranteed by the law;

• Remove transparency requirements that help workers decide whether to accept a delivery offer, including whether the delivery requires climbing stairs, what’s in the delivery, and the amount of any tips provided in advance;

• Reduce the amount of time workers have to decide whether to accept an order or lose it from two minutes to 45 seconds;

• Extend the amount of time companies have to inform workers how much they made on a delivery from 24 hours to 48;

• Prohibit the city’s Office of Labor Standards—the only city agency that enforces local labor laws—from asking delivery companies for “the production of any record,” including information that would help workers make informed decisions about which apps to work for, unless it’s part of an enforcement action against a company;

• Bar OLS from adopting rules that “impose additional requirements” of any kind on delivery companies, in perpetuity;

• Require OLS to give the app companies 30 days (with an option for extensions) to correct most “non-willful” violations before taking any enforcement action;

• Remove a section prohibiting “adverse actions” by delivery companies that was intended to stop the companies from deactivating, threatening, penalizing, reducing or garnishing pay, or discriminating against workers because they won’t take certain jobs or aren’t available when the companies want them to be on the clock;

• Allow delivery companies to charge workers a $5 fee (adjusted by the rate of inflation every year) every time they take out their earnings before the end of the company’s “pay period”—an ironic twist, given that the rest of the law insists drivers aren’t employees.

 

Density, Development, discrimination, housing, Mayor Harrell

Mayor’s Office Removed All New Anti-Displacement Proposals from Draft “Anti-Displacement Framework”

By Erica C. Barnett

As Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office prepared to release the proposed 20-year update to the city’s Comprehensive Plan earlier this year, an advisor sent an email to key staffers at the Office of Planning and Community Development, including OPCD director Rico Quirindongo, raising concerns about an “anti-displacement framework” the office submitted to the mayor’s office last year.

OPCD developed the anti-displacement strategy as part of a proposed comprehensive plan update that included significantly more density throughout the city than the plan the mayor eventually released; that plan, as we’ve reported, reluctantly complies with a new state housing law while preserving the city’s exclusionary housing patterns.

The mayor’s office had already deleted sections of OPCD’s proposal “that would suggest some commitment of new dollars or policy pivots that haven’t been vetted” with his office, the staffer wrote, but OPCD still needed to “really beef[…] up” sections of the plan that highlighted the city’s existing anti-displacement interventions, “with a ton more detail (including the millions we [are] spending on these efforts!)”

For example, the staffer wrote, “We should really be talking up our affordable housing investments—I wouldn’t be surprised i[f] Seattle residents are spending more per capita on this than anywhere else in the country.”

When he announced the draft comprehensive plan in March, Harrell said that his experience growing up in the historically redlined Central District “has informed my belief that we need more housing, and we need to be intentional about how and where we grow, addressing the historic harms of exclusionary zoning and embedding concrete anti-displacement strategies every step of the way.”

But a comparison between the 2023 draft of the plan and the version released in March reveals that the mayor effectively vetoed an ambitious plan to combat displacement and replaced it with a list of laws that are already in effect, including the “record high” $970 million housing levy.

The changes aren’t mere trims or cuts. The August draft, which OPCD finalized after four months of community engagement, described itself as “a toolbox for robust anti-displacement strategies needed to achieve equitable growth” and concluded with an appendix titled “Examples of current City anti-displacement tools.”

In the 14-page version Harrell released, that appendix is the plan.

The changes reflect a dramatic shift in the city’s official strategy for addressing displacement through smart planning and investment strategies. Instead of endorsing policy proposals to prevent displacement in the future, the draft plan repeatedly pats the city on the back for policies adopted years or even decades in the past.

For example, OPCD’s draft included five strategies to “Expand Tenant Protections” in the future, such as expanding access to information about vacancies in affordable housing, expanding tenant protections to more people, funding tenant organizing efforts, and paying for short-term rental assistance to prevent evictions.

In contrast, under a section retitled “Protect Tenants,” the framework released in March summarizes existing tenant protections without proposing any new ones. These include the Just Cause Eviction ordinance (1980),  the Tenant Relocation Assistance Ordinance (1990), the Rental Housing Inspection Ordinance (2010), the Economic Displacement Relocation Ordinance (2021), and the winter and school-year eviction moratoria (2020 and 2021, respectively.)

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Similarly, the unreleased draft suggested the city expand or establish investments in strategies like land banking (buying land for future use), social housing, and right-of-first-refusal laws that would give community-based organizations or tenants the right to buy buildings that house low-income tenants when they go up for sale.

The March proposal eliminates these proposals, instead listing two existing city programs that help homeowners at risk of displacement from historically redlined communities—the Equitable Development Initiative and a density bonus for religious institutions that build affordable housing on their properties, which has been required by state law since 2019.

A spokesperson for OPCD told PubliCola the slimmed-down anti-displacement strategy “reflects many of the existing City policies and programs that were identified, through extensive stakeholder engagement during the summer of 2023, as strategies that collectively play an important and ongoing role in addressing displacement throughout the city.”

“Before assuming new and different policies are needed, the City needs to assess the efficacy of current policies and where there might be gaps. To the extent current policies are effective, the City may want to double down on those,” the spokesperson added.

As with the draft comprehensive plan update released in March, the draft anti-displacement plan avoids discussion the ongoing impacts of explicitly racist past practices like redlining, portraying displacement as the result of market forces rather than ongoing policies the city has the power to change. But market pressures don’t exist in a vacuum, a now-deleted section of the draft plan reads. They are exacerbated by the preservation of “exclusionary zoning” in whiter, wealthier single-family areas, which “limits access for lower-income people and contributes to displacement in other more vulnerable areas as people priced out of these neighborhoods look elsewhere for housing and bid up homes in relatively lower-cost areas”—not in some distant, racist past, but in our present, because of policies in place today.

These deleted sections, which span pages, weren’t just rhetoric; they directly informed city planners’ proposals for the policies they included in the early draft of the plan, including new tenant protections, more apartments all over the city, and “substantial” increases in funding for existing and new anti-displacement strategies. (I’m not referring to the early draft’s pages of historical context, which have been moved to a different part of the plan, but to the sections describing how past discrimination has reverberations in existing city policies.)

A spokesperson for Mayor Harrell’s office pointed out to PubliCola that the draft plan, including the heavily edited anti-displacement strategy, is “not the final plan, and we are still gathering feedback from residents. We see this process as an opportunity to have a conversation with community about how and where our city should grow and will be reviewing every aspect of the plan in the context of the public feedback we receive.”

Based on an earlier round of community feedback, however, there’s little reason to believe the city will change its plan in response to community input now. According to OPCD’s own report on a series of meetings held across the city between November 2022 and February 2023, Seattle residents overwhelmingly said they wanted to see more affordable housing in their neighborhoods, that the city should allow new density, in general, “everywhere” or “spread throughout” the city, and that their favorite thing about where they lived were amenities they could access without leaving the neighborhood, like grocery stores and transit.

Digging into the database of comments, which OPCD links on its website, “density without displacement” is a common theme, with many people identifying the need to allow more housing everywhere while adopting specific strategies to stall displacement in areas that are being rapidly gentrified. OPCD’s original anti-displacement strategy appears to have incorporated many of these concerns by proposing specific policies to address them. But by the time the plan emerged from the mayor’s office, all those proposed policies were gone.

Uncategorized

“He Grabbed Her By Her Hair and Hit Her”: Witnesses Describe Alleged Assault by Ex-KOMO Reporter Jonathan Choe
Screenshot of police report describing the alleged assault

By Erica C. Barnett

Earlier this month, when a group of migrants from Venezuela and Angola briefly set up tents outside Garfield Community Center in the Central District, Discovery Institute staffer Jonathan Choe showed up and attempted to enter the area but was stopped by people who blocked his path with their bodies. (Choe started working for the Discovery Institute, which previously employed Chris Rufo, after KOMO News fired him for posting a video promoting a Proud Boys rally in Olympia.) In a choppy video he posted on X, Choe calls someone holding their hands in the air a “little soy boy” and repeatedly threatens to call the police if anyone touches him.

But Choe’s heavily edited video didn’t show what happened next: After leaving the parking lot, three witnesses say, Choe assaulted one of the people who had prevented him from getting closer to the migrants, punching her in the face repeatedly and sending her to the ground. One witness, a city of Seattle Parks Department employee who ran out of the community center when he heard shouting, told police he saw Choe punching the woman “two or three times.”

PubliCola spoke with the woman Choe allegedly assaulted, who asked to be referred to by her middle name, Celeste, along with three witnesses to the confrontation. (One, the Parks Department employee, said he had nothing to add to the statement he gave police).

Celeste said she was volunteering as an interpreter for Spanish-speaking migrants when Choe showed up and took out what police later described as a “retractable baton,” which she worried he planned to use against an Angolan migrant. “The worst-case scenario that was going through my head was that the migrant was going to defend himself, and because the migrant probably doesn’t have the same rights as I do as a citizen, I decided to physically get between Jonathan Choe and him,” Celeste said. “I was trying to say shit to him to distract him.”

Another witness named Riley, who was dropping off donations for the migrants, said she saw Celeste “putting her body in between [Choe] and the [community center] and using her words. He would rush her and retreat, trying to get her to touch him, and eventually, he ran out of steam.”

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At that point, according to Riley and Celeste, Choe went across the street to call 911 (telling the operator that people weren’t allowing him to “get by” and enter the park, according to the police report), then returned and kept trying to enter the area where the migrants were. After exchanging more words with Celeste, she said, he told her, “‘I’m going to turn my phone off so there’s no evidence,’ and punched me,” striking the left side of her face. “I kind of stumbled to the ground, and he grabbed my hair and ripped a chunk of my hair out.”

Riley, who had been watching from across the street, said “it looked like they stopped to have a conversation—another verbal spat—and then he grabbed her by the hair and hit her in the face two or three times.” When she ran over to intervene, according to Riley and another witness, Choe grabbed her phon and ran off with it. (Choe told police he returned Riley’s phone “immediately” after taking it from her; Riley says she chased him and got it back.) In the confusion, Choe dropped the baton, which Celeste said she hurled as far away as she could.

A witness who was waiting at the bus stop across the street told PubliCola she watched as Choe “threw [Celeste] down and started punching and kicking her” before taking Riley’s phone and running off “toward the dog park” near 23rd and Cherry.

The Seattle parks department employee told police he was inside the community center but ran out when he “heard a commotion,” then “observed Choe punching [Celeste] on her face 2-3 times.”

In his own account, summarized in the police report, Choe claimed Celeste was “bumping him and assaulting him” and that he “pushed her” in an effort to “defend himself.” Choe’s X feed is filled with videos in which he shows up at protests and other events and antagonizes left-wing activists and others, moving extremely close to them and then claiming they have “touched” or “assaulted” him. According to the report, Choe also told police he “believ[ed] that he would be assaulted by [Riley’s] phone.”

According to the police report,  Choe told the officer “he was dragging [Celeste] and threw her to the side. Later, I asked Choe to clarify what he meant by dragging and he explained that his hand became tangled on [her] which interfered with him letting go and leaving.” None of the eyewitnesses described Choe being “tangled on” Celeste so that he had to drag her; instead, they all independently described him punching her in the face.

The SPD officer who showed up in response to Choe’s 911 call wrote that he personally found Choe’s claims about self-defense “plausible” and that he couldn’t find probable cause to file charges against him for assault or theft. He also said that based on Choe’s “heavily edited” video, Celeste appeared to be “berating” him.

According to Riley and Celeste, Choe seemed fixated on their gender identities—asking Celeste if she was “one of those trans people” and misgendering Riley.

PubliCola sent Choe a list of questions. He responded (full exchange here) by saying he was “still sifting through the mountain of evidence and trail of destruction you left behind after your alcohol fueled benders” adding that he was “[g]onna make a huge announcement real soon. I just signed up to report for a national cable channel.” He did not answer our questions.

City Council, Police

Changing Seattle’s Police Hiring Test Won’t Fix SPD’s Recruitment Issues, City’s Test Administrator Tells Council President
A demographic chart shows SPD is losing out on a huge potential hiring pool: Women.

By Erica C. Barnett

The head of the city commission that administers tests for new Seattle Police Department recruits, the Public Safety Civil Service Commission, pushed back against several of City Council President Sara Nelson’s claims about police hiring and recruitment at a meeting of the Community Police Commission this week.

Nelson has proposed legislation that would push the PSCSC to switch to a test called the Public Safety Test (PST), which has a 90 percent passing rate and is used by smaller jurisdictions around the region.

In contrast, about 75 percent of applicants pass the test Seattle uses, which was developed by a company called the National Testing Network in response to a federal consent decree that required SPD to implement policies to reduce biased policing and excessive force. The test, which the city has used since 2012, is designed to eliminate applicants who are biased, dishonest, or unable to react appropriately in various scenarios, including crises.

Switching to the PST test, Nelson argued, would mean that applicants would no longer have to take a different test to apply in Seattle—an extra step Nelson said is preventing “highly qualified [people] that we think would be great candidates for our force” from applying. “We are competing against” other cities like Bellevue that use the PST, Nelson said. “That is why there is an interest [in using the same] exam so that you can just order the scores to be sent to the several jurisdictions at the same time.”

PSCSC director Andrea Scheele, who addressed the CPC after Nelson wrapped up, said the NTN test has never been a deterrent for applicants in the past, suggesting that the test is not the problem. Just a few years ago, she said, thousands of people took the test during each testing cycle, and the test has only become more accessible since then—for example, applicants can now take it online. “Personally, I don’t believe that the problem is that people can’t find us or people don’t want to take our test, or that people don’t know that Seattle Police Department is hiring,” Scheele said.

Scheele and police reform advocates have noted that the NTN test was specifically designed for Seattle in response to the consent decree, and tests for specific qualities that may not be captured by the more generic PST.

Addressing those concerns, Nelson argued that it would be a straightforward and relatively speedy process to add new questions to the PST that would effectively make it as rigorous as the NTN test. This would occur, she said, through a “validation study,” which Nelson described as “about eight weeks in which the people that design the test meet with stakeholders, the accountability partners, the chief, and … anybody [else who] wants to be involved in the formation of this exam, and they figure out what do we want to test for, and then then design the test around that.”

But Scheele told PubliCola that “customizing” the PST exam, which Public Safety Testing licenses from another company called Industrial/Organizational Solutions, would probably take much longer than eight weeks. “My estimate is that to do a full validation study would take six to 12 months,” she said—and that’s if the company cooperates by providing information about the test itself. Scheele said she’s already  “due diligence” to determine if there are other tests that would work in Seattle, but that process has been hampered by the fact that the president of Public Safety Testing, Jon Walters, has refused to participate or respond to any of the PSCSC’s questions.

“I sent a list of 44 questions to each of the two companies, and NTN got back really quickly with what appeared to be complete and thorough responses,” Scheele said. In contrast, Walters “said ‘I’m not going to answer your questions.”

“I don’t think I’m going to persuade them to participate,” Scheele told the CPC, “but I’m still going to complete my due diligence process.”

Nelson also said she hoped her bill would encourage applicants to stick with the process by funding a new PSCSC staffer to do outreach and engagement to applicants, something she claimed the PSCSC doesn’t do. “Think about if you’ve ever applied for a job and you hear nothing from the from the prospective employer,” Nelson said.  “Most jurisdictions acknowledge that application within 48 hours and invite the candidate to be able to ask some questions and be guided through the next steps. We don’t do that.”

Scheele said Nelson is misinformed. “Of course their application is acknowledged,” Scheele told PubliCola. “They receive an email almost immediately from us, they get at least six messages throughout the application process, and they can call us at any point if they have a problem with the actual test,” an opportunity Scheele said many candidates take full advantage of.

One recruitment opportunity Nelson and the CPC did not discuss was hiring more women, by addressing SPD’s culture of misogyny; recent articles in PubliCola and on KUOW have shone light on the issues faced by female officers, from overt sexual harassment to getting passed over for promotions and opportunities because of their gender.

Last year, according to a slide Scheele used in her presentation, just 7.4 percent of the candidates who passed the test were women, while to 90.1 percent were men (another 1.8 percent declined to identify their gender, and a handful were trans or nonbinary)—a fraction of the percentage of women SPD has pledged to hire by 2030 as part of the “30 by 30” initiative.

homelessness, Mayor Harrell, Morning Fizz

Morning Fizz: New City Attorney Hire, Changes Coming at KCRHA, Council Seeks “Reversal” of Pandemic Travel Trends

1. City attorney Ann Davison has hired a former Pierce County deputy prosecutor, Fred Wist II, as her new criminal division chief; he’ll replace Natalie Walton-Anderson, who resigned last year.

According to Davis’ announcement, Wist “oversaw the elimination of a backlog of thousands of cases and worked with stakeholders to more efficiently move cases through the criminal justice system” in Pierce County. There’s scant information about Wist online, and several people who routeinly deal with the city attorney’s office said they had never heard of him; his Facebook page—where he uses a sheriff’s badge with a “thin blue line” mourning band as his avatar—is mostly inactive.

Wist was in the news a few years ago, though, when his office investigated the actions of a special drug investigation unit led by Lt. (and 2021 Pierce County Sheriff candidate) Cyndie Fajardo, finding they had committed potentially dozens of policies and procedures, including falsifying a police report to protect an informant. Fajardo and eight deputies later sued Wist, another deputy prosecutor, and several sheriff’s department officials, accusing Wist and the other defendants of harming their reputation for “political” reasons; the prosecutors put some of the officers on a “Brady” list of dishonest cops, preventing them from testifying in court.

One of the council’s resolutions seeks to “reverse” the following trends “to pre-pandemic” status: “disruptions to transportation patterns and behaviors, which have resulted in sustained trends including increased remote work, intra-neighborhood trips, and use of public right-of-way for people uses, alongside reduced downtown commute trips and an associated decline in transportation revenues.”

2. On Thursday morning, the King County Regional Homelessness Authority’s governing committee, made up of elected officials, could discuss plans to reorganize the embattled agency’s governance structure to give more power to elected officials and less to the experts and people with direct experience of homelessness who make up the agency’s implementation board. (Representatives from actual homeless service providers are explicitly barred from serving on this board.)

This would be the long-awaited showdown over who is in “charge” of the agency, and could result in a singular new board made up mostly of elected officials with a handful of homelessness experts in the mix—a change that would effectively hand power to the elected officials who ceded authority to experts when the KCRHA was created in 2019.

While that discussion has been going on, the homelessness authority has decided to forge ahead with its search for a permanent CEO—a process that two powerful members of the CEO search committee, Seattle Chamber CEO Rachel Smith and former governor Christine Gregoire, told committee members and Mayor Bruce Harrell they wanted to halt. Interim CEO Darrell Powell, Harrell’s pick for the temporary position, is reportedly one of the top contenders for the permanent job.

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3. Earlier this week, the City Council’s transportation committee approved several amendments to Mayor Harrell’s Seattle Transportation Plan, including one intended to “identify the Council’s priorities for future renewal of the Move Seattle Levy.” As we’ve reported, advocates for active transportation and safer streets have asked the city to increase levy spending on transit, sidewalks, and safety improvements, which Harrell’s proposal cuts in favor of huge new investments in roads and bridges that primarily serve cars.

So what are some of the council’s top priorities? In addition to sidewalks and street calming to “deter… drive-by shootings” near schools and in areas with high levels of “vehicle-involved [gun] violence,” one of the council’s resolutions seeks to “reverse” the following trends “to pre-pandemic” status: “disruptions to transportation patterns and behaviors, which have resulted in sustained trends including increased remote work, intra-neighborhood trips, and use of public right-of-way for people uses, alongside reduced downtown commute trips and an associated decline in transportation revenues.”

In other words: People need to re-commit themselves to hated commutes, stop working from home, stop patronizing businesses inside their own neighborhoods (so much for the 15-minute city?) and make room for cars in streets that transformed during the pandemic into safe places for kids to play. It’s a weird juxtaposition: Full-throated support for sidewalks in neighborhoods (and, thanks to an amendment from Councilmember Joy Hollingsworth, traffic calming improvements on Lake Washington Boulevard) combined with a hellbent insistence on getting everyone back on the road to their downtown cubicles.

Other council goals for the plan: “Improving on-time performance of transit in the Denny Way corridor,” home to the perpetually delayed Route 8; including funding for traffic calming on Lake Washington Boulevard (courtesy Joy Hollingsworth) and, as we’ve reported, Bob Kettle’s amendment to “exclude funding for the Pike Place Event Street”—a concept-level plan to periodically kick cars out of Pike Place Market and allow people to enjoy the space—from the transportation levy.

 

Density, Development, discrimination, housing, Mayor Harrell

Mayor’s Office Edited Ambitious Growth Plan for Seattle to Preserve the Status Quo

By Erica C. Barnett

Last August, Seattle’s Department of Planning and Community Development produced a draft update to the city’s Comprehensive Plan that would have allowed for significantly more density in more parts of the city, including single-family neighborhoods, than the final version Mayor Harrell released in March.

The never-released draft plan, which PubliCola obtained through a records requests, would have allowed more density near bus lines, more apartments in areas historically reserved for single-family houses, and more housing of all types in the city’s most exclusive neighborhoods.

The unreleased plan zeroed in on the city’s history of racist zoning restrictions, and left no question that wealthy, white Seattle residents continue to benefit from exclusionary policies today. Areas that once had explicit covenants banning Black residents “remain disproportionately white, restrictively zoned, and characterized by high-cost detached housing,” according to the original draft, thanks to “facially race-neutral standards like minimum lot size and prohibitions on multifamily housing — both of which remain in Seattle’s zoning today.”

Instead of releasing that plan, Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office spent six months taking their red pens to the document—watering down the density requirements, removing provisions that would have allowed more housing in single-family neighborhoods (such as Laurelhurst, Wallingford, and east Queen Anne) and ensuring that the new comprehensive plan would preserve the status quo while just complying with a new state law designed to allow more density everywhere.

Here, for the first time, is a look at some of the changes Mayor Harrell’s office made to the plan that will guide how and where Seattle grows over the next 20 years. The comp plan is an important document: It sets goals for the coming decades and establishes policies to make them happen; these policies become the framework for future decisions about zoning, land use, greenhouse gas reductions, and much more.

The most obvious and high-impact changes to the plan are reductions in the amount of density the city will allow in every neighborhood, especially historically single-family areas. Many of the reductions in density are fairly subtle, but the first one is glaring: The August version of the plan would have created a new land use designation called “corridors,” where buildings of up to five stories would “generally” be allowed, although “higher heights may be appropriate in areas of mixed-use zoning or other focal points.”

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Urbanists (including PubliCola) have raised issues with the idea that apartments should be restricted to big, busy arterials. But that isn’t an argument against tall apartment buildings on streets with bus routes; it’s an argument for denser housing throughout the city.

The proposal the city released in March completely eliminates the corridor designation, taking large swaths of land surrounding streets like Sand Point Way, Ravenna Ave. NE, and East Madison Street off the table for density. According to a spokeswoman for the city’s Office of Planning and Community Development, Seferiana Day, “the Mayor’s Office considered the corridor option but ultimately decided not to include it as part of its Draft Plan as the other zoning changes contemplated in the Draft Plan can readily accommodate any amount of future growth that does occur.”

According to Day, the city has not calculated how many new apartments and other types of housing including the corridors would have added to the plan.

“[T]his seems to be calling for more housing well beyond what is needed based on projections,” Harrell’s staffer commented. A long-range planner with OPCD responded, “Yes, that is intentional. We have not kept up with past job growth and want to ensure there is a buffer of housing capacity in anticipation of potential future housing demand exceeding the adopted projections (which were low-ball last update).”

For decades, there has been a tension in Seattle between “accommodating” the number of people who are expected to move here—by allowing enough additional housing for a theoretical maximum number of new people—and providing an abundance of options for everyone already living here as well as those who will move here in the future. The comprehensive plan draft the city release in March takes the former approach, creating “capacity” for about 100,000 new homes over a period when at least 200,000 new people are expected to move into a city already facing a critical housing shortage.

Notes between city staff on a draft of the plan show that there was internal debate on this point, and that the mayor’s office prevailed. In one copy of the draft that included staff notes, a staffer for the mayor’s office questioned the plan’s original recommendation to “Plan for expected growth over the next 20 years while also providing additional housing capacity to enable the city to respond to existing unmet needs and potential demand from future employment growth.”

“[T]his seems to be calling for more housing well beyond what is needed based on projections,” Harrell’s staffer commented. A long-range planner with OPCD responded, “Yes, that is intentional. We have not kept up with past job growth and want to ensure there is a buffer of housing capacity in anticipation of potential future housing demand exceeding the adopted projections (which were low-ball last update).” Continue reading “Mayor’s Office Edited Ambitious Growth Plan for Seattle to Preserve the Status Quo” →