Back from Recess, Council Takes Up Design Review Downtown, Continues Delay on Social Housing Measure

By Erica C. Barnett

In a surprise cameo, former city councilmember Kshama Sawant showed up at the council’s first post-recess meeting Tuesday to denounce the “council Democrats” for a shelved proposal—which was not on the agenda—to adopt a sub-minimum wage for tipped workers. The plan, proposed by Sawant’s District 3 council replacement Joy Hollingsworth, would allow restaurant and bar owners out of an agreement they made a decade ago to start paying the full minimum wage by next year.

In response to pushback, Hollingsworth pulled her legislation and announced that she’s working on a “balanced solution.” The last time that happened, Council President Sara Nelson quietly dropped her proposal to reduce the mimimum wage for “gig” delivery drivers.

The meeting also included a perfunctory, unilluminating discussion of Initiative 137, which would fund the city’s social housing developer by increasing business taxes on employee compensation above $1 million a year. Before going on break, the council delayed a vote to put the initiative on the November ballot, ensuring that it will appear in a low-turnout February special election rather than the general election in a Presidential election year; they’re required to discuss the measure at the beginning of every council meeting until they take action.

The delay is already lengthy by recent historical standards. In 2014, the city council delayed a vote on the preschool levy on the ballot by one week; in that case, the city proposed a tax increase to pay for affordable preschool, but also placed a competing a union-backed measure that require a higher minimum wage for preschool workers, without new funding, on the ballot alongside it.

During the meeting, Morales tried to ask whether the council was working on an alternative ballot measure, but was shot down by Councilmember Dan Strauss, who said he could respond to that question privately or in a closed executive session.

“The point of having this as an information item is so that we can share with the public what we’re contemplating, and if we’re contemplating
an alternative, I think the public deserves to know that we’re contemplating an alternative,” Morales responded, then Nelson cut off the discussion, ordering the audience, “Do not speak!” when they shouted their opposition to the opaque process. (It’s becoming a familiar move.)

Earlier this month, the Seattle Chamber was polling on an alternative to I-137 that would siphon money away from the housing levy to pay for social housing, rather than raising taxes. One possibility is that the city attorney’s office is still wordsmithing the council’s alternative, which has to be on the same topic as the original initiative.

On Wednesday, the council’s land use committee held an initial public hearing on a proposal that would temporarily exempt residential, hotel, and life sciences buildings in the downtown area from design review—a lengthy process in which volunteer review board members look at the aesthetic aspects of a development and, more often than not, require developers to change their buildings.

Design review has been used to require changes to materials and brick colors, reduce the number of apartment in multifamily developments, and mandate specific retail footprints, often in the interest of making new buildings conform to the existing scale and “character” of nearby single-family areas. According to a Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections memo on the proposal, which would last three years, design review for residential projects currently takes between 10 and 25 months.

The proposal, billed as part of Mayor Bruce Harrell’s Downtown Activation Plan would also give the OPCD director more authority to approve some specific variances from the land use code for developments that are exempt from design review downtown—like setbacks, the location of mandatory open space and landscaping, and the type of street-level uses that are allowed.

Somewhat unusually, several councilmembers took issue with the conclusions of a memo from the council’s central staff that seemed to argue against the temporary exemptions.

“It is unclear what problem [the bill] seeks to solve,” the memo says. “Greater downtown, the general planning geography subject to the proposal, is not capacity constrained. The City’s development capacity dashboard, which was last updated in 2022, indicates that greater downtown has zoned capacity for approximately 110,000 additional jobs and 41,000 additional housing units.”

Ketil Freeman, the staffer who wrote the memo, added Wednesday that the city could make other decisions to encourage a more residential vibe for downtown, such as creating more “green streets” like Bell Street in Belltown.

Nelson—not always a supporter of new development—pushed back on the “zoned capacity” argument, citing data that shows a decline in the number of units permitted and under construction the downtown area. (The “plenty of zoned capacity” argument is more commonly used by anti-growth activists pointing out that the city has sufficient zoning to build more than enough housing already—always failing to note that most of this “capacity” isn’t accessible, because it’s under people’s current homes).

Bringing more receipts, Nelson noted that while there may be capacity to build 41,000 more housing units downtown, that isn’t translating into actual housing: According to current data, development permits and construction starts downtown declined over the last year. Finally, she said the green street in Belltown “does have a lot of complaints surrounding it around public safety, and it’s clear that that eyes on the street, more people circulating downtown, is a better way of of ensuring more public safety.”

Several public commenters argued that the legislation would give too much authority to unelected experts, rather than the city council, to—as one speaker put it—”zone the city.” What the legislation would actually do is take away some authority from the unelected design review boards, and the city’s unelected hearing examiner, to delay projects because board members don’t like the brick color, think the exterior walls aren’t “curvy” enough, or decide a new building looks “too historic”—all real examples we covered last year.

The land use committee didn’t vote on the proposal on Wednesday, but could do so at its next meeting on September 18.

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