On Friday, the Seattle City Council had a marathon meeting on amendments to the proposed Mandatory Housing Affordability (MHA) rezones and land use regulations. The meeting started with discussion on text amendments to the Land Use Code and then moved into a district-by-district discussion on proposed amendments to zoning changes.
The latter portion of the discussion generally focused on reducing the scale of MHA zoning changes, which also would reduce affordable housing that program was designed to deliver in the first place. Councilmembers Teresa Mosqueda, M. Lorena González, and Debora Juarez pointed this out and highlighted the need to undo the legacy of racist housing policy and discrimination in the marketplace.
[T]he city was deliberately redlined and constructed to keep particular people out of neighborhoods in particular areas. I’m hoping we can right a historical wrong.
Councilmember Debora Juarez
Most of the amendment proposals were considered to be consensus items by councilmembers. This means that at meeting on February 25th, the city council will introduce revised bills incorporating the amendments unless they were objected to by councilmembers at Friday’s meeting. There were several instances where amendments did get an objection, particularly where there were zoning reductions sponsored by councilmembers for specific areas. It is possible that those amendments could still find their way into the final bills.
Unless an objection is noted or the text indicates otherwise, the following amendment proposals were adopted at the meeting.
Map Amendments
District 1 Map Amendments
In Councilmember Lisa Herbold’s district, a large number of the proposals would reduce MHA rezones. She went on to suggest that she generally supports the proposals to reduce MHA rezones in her district, providing various justifications for this such as future station area planning around Alaska Junction that may bring greater density in the future and their small area. Councilmember Rob Johnson said that he opposed the lower rezone proposals, but that he would later have an inconsistent argument for his own district.
Councilmember Mosqueda said that she was concerned with blanket proposals to not adopt the proposed MHA rezones. “I’m going to be concerned with the amendments that do indicate that we’re going to downzone or not fully upzone under the existing EIS [Environmental Impact Statement],” she said. “I think that in every opportunity that we have to expand housing to opportunity-rich, thriving neighborhoods, I would like to see us take advantage of that. And I do have reservations about reducing the capacity to increase our ability to serve folks in exactly the types of places that we are looking at that are in Urban Villages, in transit-rich areas that could offer more affordable housing to various areas of the city.”
Councilmember Juarez followed to say that she understands the difficult challenges of displacement and unique issues of neighborhoods. But she also said that she thinks the Housing Affordability and Livablility Agenda, of which MHA is a portion of, is important. “I’m hoping in these discussions that we don’t just find ourselves carving out places where people politically think it’s not viable to make change,” she said. “And that’s what I’m concerned about for this city because I think we understand how the city was deliberately redlined and constructed to keep particular people out of neighborhoods in particular areas. I’m hoping we can right a historical wrong.”
Councilmember González, who lives in District 1 but does not exclusively represent it as an at-large councilmember, expressed her concern over proposed MHA rezone reductions. She said she didn’t think she could “support many and if any” of them.
