Yeah, let's turn Seattle into a city of nothing but five over one construction that is affordable only if you work for amazon.com. We probably can find some Soviet era architects to make it even more unique.

If single family houses can't survive without protection by the state in the form of zoning codes, then what good are they?

Next up; you can Rent out your new microapartment by the our via Uber.

Basically our Mayor is trying to entice companies to bring more employee's to Seattle; bring more jobs so more people want to live here.

If your lease is up and your landlord tells you to move; it's likely you'll be moving out of the Seattle area because there is 4% of the apartments up for Rent. What you will find will be out of your price range.

Slum lords are having a field day because they can overcharge for property that hasn't passed code in 10 years (or more).

... and don't forget they told us we don't need rent control.

I'm hoping this will mean a new zoning type with similar rules about lot coverage, front yards, and height limits to single family, just without the "one unit per lot" requirement. The option to legally convert houses to duplexes and to build cottages/MIL units beyond the restrictive ADU rules we have now could save a lot of great properties while allowing a slightly higher density.

Of course, @1, it is precisely the untouchability of SF zoning in 2/3 of the city that's directing nearly all our growth into expensive and unlovely five over one construction. Because the vast majority of the city is prevented from accommodating any of our population growth, it must be channeled into LR zones, which drives up the value of that land, and makes maxing them out in similar ways the best way to get those projects to pencil out. Any rational person who doesn't like the ubiquity and expense of the current waive of five over one construction, should be celebrating this recommendation. The typical backyard cottage, basement MIL, or big old house subdivision will have much lower construction costs and will rent for a lot less than most new construction today. I'm surprised this made it this far, since SF zoning seems to be something a third rail. I'm not optimistic that's going to change, but I'm still excited to see such an important recommendation make it this far. It would be great if people reeling from the rapidity and sterility of new growth in LR 1 zones in places like Ballard and Capitol Hill would recognize this as objectively in their interest, since it would take the pressure off their hood to provide virtually all the needed new housing, but I'm not at all optimistic about that. Analysis that moves beyond the sophistication of "developers bad, homeowners good" is thin on the ground.

The ubiquity and untouchability of SF zoning is strangling and preventing any kind of organic growth in this city. It's an inequality-enhancing, environmentally destructive, freedom reducing disaster.

Allowing more backyard cottages and basement apartments and subdivisions of big houses is *such* a no brainer. It has numerous benefits:

1) the odds are the rent will be lower than in other, more expensive forms of new construction. Win for affordable housing.

2) Most homeowners won't want one. They'll be more spread out. Less dramatic, short term change of neighborhoods than our current policy, which just today produced a backlash from LR 1/2 residents that resulted in new restrictions on housing. Win for organic growth, rather than the sterile, over-concentrated version we've got now.

3) The rent money goes to a middle/upper middle class homeowner directly, rather than wealthy developers and the investor class. Win for inequality.

4) A new path to help people stay in their homes and make their mortgage if their economic situation takes a bad turn. Another win for inequality, middle class stability.

5) Smaller units, more units in city. Win for environmental sustainability.

The costs are....what? Slightly more competition for convenient and free car storage? Homeowners having to live in closer proximity with people of a different socio-economic standing than them? There are few more obvious calls than this.

"...it's time to start increasing density in the places density should be. No not the farm land. No not the forests. No not the river deltas. It's in the city." Yes; agreed. And the places in the city to increase density are the urban villages and urban centers that have been designed to accommodate growth. In Sept. 2014, the City published its Development Capacity Report, http://www.seattle.gov/dpd/cs/groups/pan… -- which documents that Seattle, under existing zoning, has the capacity to absorb 3 times the number of new residents expected over the next 20 years. There is simply no need to be discussing the elimination of single-family zoning. We can easily accommodate all the newcomers in the areas already planned for them!

@7 - Agree. As long as developers continue building multi unit market-rate and above housing where it is zoned, subdividing existing homes is SF1 areas is probably the easiest and most efficient way of creating reasonably priced homes in the near-term.

BTW I think they posted a PDF with tracked changes showing.

As has been pointed out to you numerous times, RDPence, that's a bullshit metric. We're not going to max out urban village zoning, because some below-max zoning land uses aren't going to be torn down any time soon, nor should they be. If tearing down a newish 3 story apt building and replacing it with a 4 story one pencils out, we'll have reached an affordability crisis of San Francisco proportions. We've just seen the political fallout of this strategy; LR1 and 2 residents rebelled against taking all the growth and the city council capitulated, reducing unit capacity going forward. It's a strategy that's failed on affordability, design, and neighborhood stability metrics. Continuing to flog that meaningless statistic is dishonest and unserious.

I own a single-family home in a quiet residential neighborhood in Seattle. I would welcome more density. I would welcome greater diversity, people of different incomes, and the vibrancy that would come with it. Hopefully a few more shops and restaurants but open up too, make this place more walkable! I think my property values will only go up with more density, but if not, who cares? As long as I don't exit the Seattle market altogether, only moving from place to place within Seattle, whether the market goes up or down is more or less irrelevant to me.

Just like Ansel and The Stranger to publish a non-story about a draft report and mislead the public. Well done again jackasses. What online journalism school or correspondence course did you take Ansel?

@10
even more than that, it conflates zoning with demand. This is America, where you can't force people to live where you want them. You can zone for 80 story buildings on top of a landfill, but that doesn't mean anything will ever get built. Conversely, you can limit zoning where there is a lot of demand (hello fremont, ballard, cap hill, etc) and see a serious affordability problem.

@13, yes, and it also assumes zoning can/will just force people to sell. If Whole Foods is making a ton of money at their Roosevelt location, and know they'll only make more as the neighborhood densifies and light rail comes, why on earth would they give that up just so someone can build a six story (or whatever max zoning allows there) apartment building?

@11
I totally agree. Stuff like this will increase land value (yay for owners), and increase the number of units (yay for renters). Whats the downside?

Building is not cheap, therefore only the rich can build; and they will want MAXIMUM return on their investment. They will not be building to foster an altruistic affordability and diversity to the neighborhoods.
To really work, wouldn't these developments have to be strictly regulated to ensure there were adequate submarket options? Without rent control policies IN PLACE before approving these kinds of development, there would likely be an even quicker displacement of working class and service laborers to the fringes of Seattle; along with numerous small businesses unable to keep up with the pace of the building hysteria.

Will people be willing to give up their cars?
Shouldn't we build the transportation infrastructure FIRST?
Isn't this like bleeding into shark infested waters, without a finished tunnel to get trapped below in?

I'm confused. Is the Stranger now against urban density? Does it want to keep property prices and rent well outside the reach of the middle/lower classes?

What the hell are you whining about here?

@10, call it bullshit if you want, but the City published it (Development Capacity Report) less than a year ago. Check it out -- http://www.seattle.gov/dpd/cs/groups/pan…, especially Appendix 2 which documents all the parcels excluded from the calculus. If you have a problem with the report, take it up with the City of Seattle.

Does this mean I can sell off my front yard?

Just like the nation, the biggest threat to our well-being is from within. Paul Allen has done more damage to this city than anybody else and now we have Hizzoner, too, like it's his own little fiefdom. He does act like it is. Public notification of Shell Oil's plans to park their drilling rig here illegally? Who needs it?!

Weekilter @1, if you don't like the way Seattle is changing, there's always Tacoma, Spokane, etc. The only people who had any right in perpetuity to this land, and to keep other people (probably people like you) from moving in and changing the character of this land, are the Duwamish, and that horse has long since been let out of the barn.

I only wish the process that's going on now had gone on 30 years ago because Microsoft had decided to build its headquarters in the city rather than in a rabbit hutch on the edge of nowhere.

OK, having had my soapbox moment, I will allow that redefining the 65% of Seattle that is single-family into something else is probably overkill. This city has done a good job funneling growth into the urban villages and urban cores, and if that's not enough, we can always chip away at the edges of those areas with some tactical upzoning. Maybe you can accomplish all the growth you need just by taking that 65% single-family zoning and bringing it down to 60%.

That anyone in a position of power any major city is willing to consider touching the third rail of exclusionary zoning is amazing, and speaks to the depths of the crisis we're all looking at now. Bravo to Seattle for going there first.

The one upside of the complete debacle in San Francisco (and NYC and LA) is that they're providing an excellent example to other cities of what not to do.

@ 19: RDPence, now that you've admitted you have no defense whatsoever of your claim that we don't need to worry about housing supply if we estimate new units based on maxing out existing zoning, I hope you'll stop trotting it out all the time.

The document that serves as the foundation for your argument from authority (I suspect you don't use "city officials said so so it must be true" when city officials take positions you oppose) is, of course, a political document. It's making an effort to defend a political compromise made 20 years ago. The last few years have exposed, badly the flaws of that compromise, as seen in the city council's recent vote to reduce housing capacity in these areas. Requiring virtually all growth to take place in LR zones has resulted in disruptive, rapid, sterile, ugly, and very expensive growth in those neighborhoods, which (predictably) lead to the complaints that produced that effective downzone.

Even if this idea goes nowhere in the HALA proposal, that it made it this far shows that the reality that the "cram it all into 10% of the city, never change anything in 65%" strategy is clearly failing, and if we're remotely serious about affordable housing we need to move on. It's a free country, and you are free to cite political documents as unimpeachable authorities while the city lurches toward San Francisco level prices (and your own investment radically appreciates, coincidently), but there's simply no reason for anyone to take you seriously if you do.

@ 16: rent control continues to a bad idea--it's OK for the winners of the time/place lottery who have no interest in ever moving, but it's terrible for long-term affordability. But that's beside the point--it could be the silver bullet that would solve all our affordability problem, and it wouldn't matter, because the chances of the legislature giving us permission to do it are 0%, and even if the Democrats regain control of the senate in 2016 (a 50/50 proposition at best), the chances of permission being granted would still be south of 5%. Anyone who blathers on about rent control as a solution as an alternative to things that are actually legal is engaging in narcissistic, 'leftier than thou' posturing, and behaving in a way that indicates they're completely unserious about actually addressing the affordable housing problem in the world we actually live in. There are lots of legal things we can do and some of them might actually help.

@22,
I don't think they will add too much multifamily, just that you are now allowed to build motherinlaws and such. That is a great way to add units painlessly. It is actually the other half of Vancouver ' strategy

@24, where do you get the idea we're now "requiring virtually all growth to take place in LR zones"? Huge quantities of our multi-family housing are going up in commercial and mixed-use zones.

When was the last time the city council recognized the middle class? Why are they hell bent on us becoming San Francisco? A city where only the wealthy and the poor can live. Tax the rich and give to the poor, and middle class can go live somewhere else. Forget your dreams of owning a house. They are forcing the very thing that they say that they are protecting against.