The Comp Plan Committee Public Comment Hearing Was a Warzone

At 4 p.m. yesterday, advocates for increased housing density gathered at City Hall to attend a pre-public comment rally organized by the Housing Development Consortium (HDC). By the time this eternally tardy journalist arrived, at 4:15 p.m., they dispersed, hastily queuing up inside to sign up for public comment in front of the city’s Select Committee on the Comprehensive Plan, which began at 5 p.m. 

City Hall security had wisely cordoned off chambers, directing attendees to line up in the main lobby level, rather than allowing a crowd to crush in. I say wisely because the line sprawled out from a large, zigzag queue at the bottom of the grand staircase to chambers, winding around to the coffee stand, back to the information desk, and down the long east hallway to nowhere.

Relatively speaking, there were a shitload more people there than is usual for public comment. Dan Weisbeck, the HDC’s communications and outreach coordinator, estimated that at least 100 people had come up from the rally— likely only about a third of the visible crowd. Which is not to say the other two-thirds were all there to protect “neighborhood character,” as the NIMBYs call it when you keep the poors out. The split between pro-housing signage and potentially anti-housing (a lot of it was about trees, but more on that later) was about 50-50, in this journalist’s estimation. Either way, a lot of people showed up to say their piece.

If you’re not someone who cares enough about the comprehensive plan to have an opinion at this point, that’s OK. Shit’s incredibly wonky and learning about it requires listening to some of the worst boomers this city has ever produced. I lived on Vashon for three years, and I thought I’d seen the most upsetting, unkempt male ponytails our region had to offer, but this public hearing proved me wrong.

That said, it’s still worth understanding what’s at stake and who wants what, because the comprehensive plan is, well, comprehensive. It affects every resident of this city. It controls how we build housing, how much we build, the affordability of that housing, how transit-accessible it is, what kinds of small businesses can be built alongside it, how we handle tree preservation, how we prepare for climate change, and much more. 

Here’s where we stand right now: Mayor Bruce Harrell has submitted his One Seattle Comprehensive Plan to the council. Besides being true to his relentless #OneSeattle branding campaign, it promises to allow a maximum of about 120,000 new housing units, legalize corner stores everywhere, legalize apartment buildings in and around almost every neighborhood commercial district and/or main arterial, and generally gear us up to build, baby, build. Which, by some experts’ estimates, we desperately need to do.

What happens next? Well, the select committee, which includes every councilmember except new guy Mark Solomon, is now tasked with soliciting public comment (which they will do again in April and May), furiously poring over said public comment to determine what course of action is least dangerous to their reelection (which involves factoring in whether making a few angry homeowners mad carries more weight than making the Mayor, the real estate lobby, and — strange bedfellows, we know — the progressive left mad), and then making or not making whatever amendments their conscience political survival demands.

So what did Seattlites have to say about all that? Plenty. Too much, even. When this journalist had had enough, around 7:30, there were still dozens of people stuck in the Bertha Knight Landes room, which had been hastily set up as overflow after council chambers hit capacity. Keep in mind, this crowd did not include the online commenters, who weren’t allowed to chime in until after 7:30.

(Quickly, as a reward for making it this far into this article, I want to tell you what I did when I finally decided I couldn’t hear another seventy-something white woman “speak for the trees”—I got the city’s absolute best smash burger. Maybe you’ve already been to Bad Bishop, a Pioneer Square cocktail spot started by two Jarr Bar alums, but if you haven’t you have to go. The crispy, soot-black edges of the patty are a masterclass in saline hedonism.)

Okay, intermission over. Here’s what you need to know to not sound stupid when people bring up the comp plan at parties, which I’m sure happens all the time, and/or you have to decide whether to reelect whichever member of the rogue’s gallery on council represents your district.

Takeaway #1: NIMBYism is alive and well in Seattle. Just don’t call them NIMBYs.

Despite HDC Executive Director Patience Malaba getting the first word, advocates against density were heavily overrepresented in the opening stages of public comment. Based on my mostly accurate tally of who was for, against, or just rambling incoherently about the Mayor’s current plan—people who wanted the council to pump the brakes, pause upzoning, and mire the whole thing in more process outnumbered people who were in favor of the plan or even eager for a more permissive plan three to one. One commenter with a ponytail that should probably be illegal, and was maybe against the current plan, but he also ranted about how we absolutely need more housing but should keep it to the existing urban villages because it’s not about race. He also threw a rhyme scheme in there somewhere. Score one for the ramblers.

One of the earlier vaguely anti-density voices came from a woman from Maple Leaf, who opposed the potential upzone of her neighborhood as part of a new “neighborhood center” designation. She told listeners she hated being called a NIMBY. In the same breath, she said, “We can’t build our way out” of the housing crisis. While there was one other direct protest against the hated NIMBY term, it was lost in a sea of coded NIMBY complaints—references to concrete jungles, canyons, expanses, and so on. Lots of people described their “neighborhood character” while studiously avoiding saying the actual phrase. Hardscape percentages (up to 90 percent of lots!) were a major bogeyman here. “Don’t pave Seattle!” was definitely said at some point.

Most commenters framed their objections in terms of climate or public greenspace concerns, but one elderly lady from Magnolia was hellbent on playing the hits.

She implied the city was planning to “rape my neighborhood and take my house” and that children would no longer be safe walking to school. She said something about homeless people and needles. She voted for Harrell thanks to his public safety platform, she added, but now ranks him 0 out of some unspecified number. It wasn’t exactly coherent, but it was a glimpse at a lot of the fear that’s creeping around behind the curtain of others’ seemingly well-meaning testimony. 

Anyway, while some people were happy to say the quiet part out loud, the vast, overwhelming majority of people framed their opposition as being about trees. While no one sang on behalf of the trees this time, a good 90 percent of people urged the council to “pause” or “slow down” (Seattle for “kill via process”) were interested in protecting and perhaps even hugging trees. The crowd carried a small forest (pun intended) of signs urging our legislators to think of the trees, including a handmade “We Love Trees” sign that flew directly behind the camera trained on the commenter podium.

Takeaway #2: Climate is a big part of this, it’s just really hard to tell who is genuinely concerned about climate and who doesn’t want to share their neighborhood.

So why is there so much overlap between people who are desperate to keep the city from naming their little pocket of paradise a neighborhood center and people who just heckin’ love trees? Jesse Simpson, the HDC’s director of government relations and policy, had a pretty sharp take on it.

“Politically, I see there as being two camps—first, it’s the most politically correct way for Seattleites who don’t want to see more housing around them to oppose it. Second, there are definitely sincere tree advocates who are fine with seeing taller redevelopment in exchange for saving trees,” he said via text. “It’s not always easy to suss out where someone lies there within a 2 min testimony. But the balance of the most classically NIMBY neighborhoods also being where most of the ‘tree advocates’ are from is telling.”

To give the tree advocates their due, people who brought up the risks posed by the urban heat island effect and the importance of mature trees in combating it are absolutely correct about that.

But, as Simpson said, the demographics do speak volumes here. 

Almost all of the environmentally conscious commenters were there to speak on behalf of specific neighborhoods and almost all of those neighborhoods were those types of neighborhoods. We’re talking Laurelhurst, Queene Anne, Madrona, Greenlake, North Ballard, and Magnolia. 

South Park, where I live, is set to become a neighborhood center, but no one from down here showed up to complain about it.

Which brings us to the big issue here: class.

Takeaway #3: Race is a major issue here, but class (which of course has everything to do with race) is very much the central issue in this debate.

We don’t have time to go deep into the history of urban villages, which were adopted as the city’s main plan to accommodate density during the 1994 comprehensive planning process, but suffice to say they were bad. Basically, they made poor Black and Latino neighborhoods accept all the dense and affordable housing, totally coincidentally stuffing it all in areas subject to lots of pollution. Everyone agrees it sucked and was very racist!

How does class play into the current debate? Well, I noticed some speakers were adamant that HB1110, which created a state mandate to provide so-called “missing middle” housing, did enough. The city didn’t need to do a damn thing more; four units on every lot and six on every lot on a transit line would do. Thing is, four to six unit projects are almost invariably townhouse projects. Technically, they don’t have to be, but I live on a transit line across from a brand new set of six townhouses in a very rapidly gentrifying neighborhood, and I can tell you that every single family home sold here is invariably turned into townhouses. I’d much rather see more squat, two-story courtyard apartments like the ones that dot S Cloverdale St. Not to get too deep into class signifiers, but the sixplex brought a Honda Element with an “I Brake for Catgirls” sticker, while the crappiest brick apartments boast not one but two project El Caminos out front. You do the math.

Notably, all of these “HB 1110 is enough” types were against their areas being designated neighborhood centers, a newly created zoning designation that would allow apartment buildings up to six stories within their geographical limits. Most of the new neighborhood centers are in places that have a modest commercial core but were never big enough to be anything close to an urban village. The idea is to spread density across the city instead of concentrating it in the rather racist, classist ways we historically have. While the whole “no concrete canyons” thing could, especially when you consider how ugly many of our city’s new apartment buildings are, be considered an aesthetic argument, it really feels more like classism here. Which, of course, almost always involves a certain other -ism.

Equally ugly townhouses that sell for $750,000 and are made out of particle board and pure greed? Yes, daddy, in my backyard, daddy. Apartments with a lot of units and a lot of people paying market rent or — heaven forbid — below market rent? An abomination, ruins neighborhood character, can’t let my kids walk to school anymore.

Takeaway #4: No one is talking about this! This being ballooning market rate rents and cardboard townhouses selling for exorbitant sums.

But lo! A lot of folks urging the city to slow down (read: gut) the comp plan were adamant that they love density and care deeply about affordability. While advocates in favor of more housing argue that increasing supply will ease up demand, thereby driving down prices, the NIMBYs say, “Not exactly.”

Credit unfortunately goes to the people who absolutely do not have to worry about affordability for being the only ones to bring up the fact that development by no means guarantees low rent, and that private equity, quickly becoming one of our country’s biggest blocs of landlords, cares not a whit for how much supply or demand there is, only how much profit they can extract. Rents have gone up a lot, and while there is a lot of good science saying increasing supply will drive them back down, a bit of skepticism is understandable.

And, as the anti-comp-plan people also deserve credit for pointing out, a $750,000 townhouse is not exactly affordable. And sure, there are affordability requirements for new construction but, as the NIMBYs once again correctly pointed out, developers consistently opt to pay a fee instead of keeping affordable units on site.

One proven method of ensuring new, affordable housing gets built is, of course, providing public housing that carries no profit motive and caps rents at a percentage of people’s incomes. Worth noting: Signs supporting Proposition 1A, the upcoming proposal to fully fund Seattle’s new social housing developer, which would provide exactly that type of housing, were in abundance at this hearing. If you hate what ends up happening with the comp plan, you’ll have to wait until November to hold those responsible to account, but if you want to guarantee that more of the new housing we need is a rent-stabilized public asset, you can lock that in immediately. All you have to do is vote yes, vote 1A, and march your ass to the ballot drop.

Takeaway #5: The anti-housing people are organized, but it is by no means over.

Sure, Joy Hollingsworth, who famously lobbied against a five-story building that would have blocked her view of Bellevue, might seem exceptionally sympathetic towards the NIMBYs and, sure, she’s the select committee’s chair and, sure, her fellow council members seem dead set on killing as much density as possible. And, sure, the rest of the public comment process is going to be dominated by a bunch of density-averse old people who think they’re the fucking Lorax, but the plan as it stands has a lot of powerful backers.

While one might assume that the current council would be tripping all over themselves to do what rich, privileged people want, a better question is, “Which rich people?” Their lord and master Bruce Harrell signed off on this thing, as did the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce, whose policy director, Sarah Clark, testified in favor. While the council is largely beholden to Bruce, the Chamber controls them all. Real estate developers, who gave a lot to the independent expenditure campaigns that helped seat every single elected council member besides Alexis Mercedes Rinck, are another powerful interest in favor of the current plan.

As architect and former mayoral candidate Andrew Graham Houston put it, “The plan as delivered down to you by our Seattle Mayor is already a Seattle compromise.”

But as the HDC’s Malaba put it, “The One Seattle plan that the Mayor has put forward in front of you is a solid, strong start. What we’re asking you to do is to expand on the strength of this plan and not whittle it down.”