The Seattle budget process is chugging along with another public comment session tomorrow Wednesday at 3:30pm. Soon Seattle City Council will be making their final tweaks to the Mayor’s budget. Now is the time to comment or testify at City Hall.
The six-billion-dollar budget is a daunting document so we at The Urbanist have some recommendations to make it easier to make an impactful comment.
Pass the MASS Transportation Package.
Seattle Neighborhoods Greenways has a handy form to submit comments backing the Move All Seattle Sustainably (MASS) coalition’s package of walking, rolling, biking, and transit infrastructure improvements. Some MASS resolutions have already passed, while others still need your help. Priorities include the Georgetown to South Park Trail, the Beacon Avenue trail, a safe crossing for the Duwamish Longhouse, doubling the amount of bus lanes, a people-first traffic signal policy, and finding a long-term source of revenue for sidewalk repairs and expansions.
Pass Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda’s proviso obligating the City to reassess its urban village growth strategy.
Seattle Tech 4 Housing has made a handy form to comment. The budget action would set aside $500,000 for an environmental impact statement (EIS) focusing on the racial equity implications of our current approach and how we could alleviate them via strategies to minimize displacement of low-income residents and communities of color.
“The EIS study would be initiated in 2020 and would explore additional housing capacity and diversity—including duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes, and row homes—in areas currently zoned exclusively for single-family houses.” These “missing middle” housing types are very difficult to build in Seattle exacerbating our housing crisis and blocking mixed-income neighborhoods from forming. The Seattle Planning Commission estimates 75% of Seattle’s residential land is reserved for single-family homes–the most expensive housing type. Single-family homes have a median sale price of $715,000 in Seattle right now.
Although the City must laboriously study and defend every zoning change, the City doesn’t ever have to defend the status quo in which wealthy, predominantly White neighborhoods like Magnolia, Madison Park, Madrona, Montlake, Laurelhurst, Broadmoor, and Wedgwood that have manipulated the system to avoid urban village status. Passing this proviso would be an important first step toward rectifying Seattle’s uneven growth and decreasing displacement.
