![]() ![]() Note the red lines, which indicate urban growth boundaries. This is how we came to get the Urban Growth Boundary (UGB) for King County. One of the aspects to come out of the GMA was designation of rural and agricultural lands for protection. This can be problematic, and is one of the reasons I really like Vienna’s approach, which is both top down, and bottom up, planning. But it is also kept to local control, and doesn’t say how or where growth should go. ![]() In 1990, the state passed the Growth Management Act (GMA), which among other things, required counties to plan for growth. Further downzones in the 1980s, even as the region was growing, caused massive amounts of sprawl and environmental destruction. In 1980, the city attempted to pass rent control, but homeowners helped kill it. Over time, the planning documents got longer and longer, the restrictions became stricter and stricter (larger setbacks, smaller height limits, less lot coverage, and density limits) leading to a fairly dire housing situation in the 1970s. It was largely a zoning plan as snapshot, meaning multifamily housing and small neighborhood commercial were largely limited to where it already existed. This changed with the passing of the 1923 zoning ordinance, which immediately downzoned much of Seattle. So you could have apartments next to fine houses, and those proximities still exist in many of Seattle’s older and more walkable neighborhoods. The amount of the city zoned for detached houses was a whopping 0% ( as it should be). You could build three-story apartment buildings on every square inch of Seattle. ![]() Very much unlike today, the original building code had no limits on where housing could go. Today, Seattle’s building code is more than 700 pages long–then there are other codes to comply with like fire, mechanical, and plumbing. And at something like 150 pages, Seattle’s early building codes were a pithy thing of beauty. New construction was haphazardly placed, there was largely no way to direct where new housing or buildings could or should go. As with most American cities, there really was no formal planning. Like today, in the beginning of the century, Seattle was a boomtown. And this is not an accident, this was largely by design. When it comes to housing and land use, they are extremely biased and exclusionary. These are all good.īut Seattle’s neighborhood plans also have a dark side. The plans are very pro-transit, very pro-biking and safe streets, and very much geared toward fixing deficiencies that existed in Seattle neighborhoods after decades of neglect and economic downturns. So when I first started looking at the neighborhood planning documents years ago, I imagined I would find plans that were inclusive, welcoming, and open. ![]() I come from a planning background, have seen what democratic planning (and democratic architecture–baugruppen) can look like. The second part will go into what the neighborhood planning documents actually say, what neighborhood planning did, and how Seattle’s homeowner-dominated neighborhood planning codified anti-renter bias, and where Seattle is headed.Ī number of candidates in this year’s election have been waxing poetic about neighborhood planning Seattle undertook in the 1990s, some even claiming the process was “robust”–and this is never followed up on in forums. The first part is a very brief overview of the Growth Management Act, King County’s Urban Growth Boundary, and how we ended up with neighborhood plans. Housing near the Burke-Gilman Trail in Laurelhurst, which is not an urban village. ![]()
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