It’s not wrong to question if we could have done better, but what exactly would have been a better plan? Transit and walkability don’t work well if density and amenities aren’t coordinated. It seems logical to organize density along transportation hubs and with access to neighborhood amenities if the goal is to maximize the advantages of urban living. Should such density hubs be spread more evenly throughout the city? Absolutely. I mean, Phoenix is a sprawl of whatever, wherever, but no one actually loves living there.

@1: A super straightforward answer to "what could have been done better" for all three: equity, affordability, and the environment would have been for all the land zoned "Single Family" which was defined as "35% lot coverage or 1,000 square feet, whichever is larger, and 30' or 35' with a peaked roof" to have simply dropped the "Single Family" part and let any safe residential housing get built within that size and massing. It would be/have been more affordable to stay or move here. More people would live here at greater density supporting neighborhood business, walkability, and transit.

Seattle's claim you need to cram density into tiny areas by law is just made when lots of people want to live somewhere. I grew up back East in a neighborhood built before modern zoning. Seattle would call it a successful urban village. It was a also 2 miles long. It ran from the edge of downtown to the border of the suburbs.

So, people don't remember this, but there were many urban planning meetings open to the public. It literally was the people in the room that decided most of this.

Without the urban villages, Seattle would have crashed during COVID. People defended their neighborhood places, getting takeout from them, propping them up, while we stayed away from the Downtown none of us really wanted to be in.

My one regret is helping create the compromise of only upzoning along transit arterials and near light rail stations. We should have just removed all SFH zones period, and gone back to the pre-1933 65 foot limits citywide.

A lot of this is literally trying to stop wealthy people from suing to stop change. They always do that, but the system can only handle a certain amount of it.

Just in case the map showing Urban Village boundaries in yellow doesn't make this crystal, while there was (and still is) a lot of happy BS talk about how the strategy was intended to concentrate density near local business districts and into areas with strong transit access, what was actually implemented was mostly the reverse.

What actually was done was "limiting how many people could live near local business districts and into areas with strong transit access" by keeping large lot single family zoning as close as a block face away from those areas - the long stringy Greenwood and Queen Anne examples being particularly egregious. Large lot single family zoning was even kept inside some urban villages such as Wallingford.

The whole thing was implemented to be able say some mandated capacity targets were hit while changing as little as possible - local business districts, transit access, affordability, desegregation, and the environment be damned.

Rice's urban village plan was and is a good idea. The basic plan was to group jobs, housing, and shopping in close proximity to encourage walkability, enhance public transit, and discourage suburban style sprawl. There wasn't a "boxing match between two political combatants" as this weird story suggests, there were just a lot of public meetings where people brought up their individual concerns. Even Scott's own link which he thinks incriminates the big bad Chamber of Commerce says "Overall, business comment on the plan is far from negative". Mostly, there was just some concern over parking.

This piece seems to be part of a larger narrative to vilify what we have now so we'll be more inclined to replace it with the 'upzone everything' alternative favored by activists. While I'm not necessarily against more upzoning, the important thing to realize is recent experience shows 'upzone everything' doesn't increase supply. Minneapolis upzoned everything in 2018 and so far in a city of roughly 80,000 residential lots they've had only a few dozen utilize the new zoning, for a net housing increase of roughly one apartment building. From an Aug 2021 Star Tribune story: "Minneapolis shows that change will be slow. Only 23 building permits have been issued for new duplexes or triplexes in places they would not have previously been allowed."

@6 look at more recent news (2023):

No place in the US has put inflation in the rearview mirror quite as fast as Minneapolis.

In May, the Twin Cities became the first major metropolitan area to see annual inflation fall below the Federal Reserve’s target of 2%. Its 1.8% pace of price increases was the lowest of any region that month.

That’s largely due to a region-wide push to address one of the most intractable issues for both the Fed and American consumers: rising housing costs. Well before pandemic-related supply-chain snarls and labor shortages roiled the economy, the city of Minneapolis eliminated zoning that allowed only single-family homes and since 2018 has invested $320 million for rental assistance and subsidies.

That helped unleash a boom in construction of apartments and condos in the region that proved to be a powerful antidote against inflation, given that the cost of shelter accounts for more than a third of the overall US consumer-price index. Minneapolis shelter prices were up at half the nation’s annual pace in May.

“I can’t tell you how many people were like, ‘Oh, look at all this supply, look at all these just brand new buildings,’ and kind of scoffing at it like this was going to lead to gentrification or rents skyrocketing,” said Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, a two-term Democrat, in an interview. “The exact opposite has happened.”

Rent growth in Minneapolis since 2017 is just 1%, compared with 31% in the US overall, according to the Pew Charitable Trusts. Its share of affordable rental units and ratio of rent to income are better than most comparable US metro areas.

Frasier and Sir Mix-a-lot. Tight call.

@7 I read that article. It says basically nothing about multifamily construction on formerly single family lots. Your own quote refers to a boom in "apartment and condo" construction. There is a lot of apartment construction in Minnie, like there is in Seattle. In fact, the numbers are virtually identical:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=1a6zZ

Here is a view of a whole row of new apartment buildings in the Uptown neighborhood:

https://www.google.com/maps/@44.9497917,-93.288628,45a,35y,295.05h,75.31t/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu

If you dig into the inflation data, housing costs in Minnie were reduced by a whopping 18.6% drop in household energy costs, compared with a 10.5% jump in Seattle. These contributed to rent increases in Minnie of 5.6% compared to 9.1% in Seattle.

https://www.bls.gov/regions/midwest/news-release/ConsumerPriceIndex_Minneapolis.htm
https://www.bls.gov/regions/west/news-release/ConsumerPriceIndex_Seattle.htm

Minneapolis is definitely cheaper than Seattle though. You can buy a house there for like 1/3 the price of a Seattle house. But there is no evidence the 'upzone everywhere' policy they enacted has had any impact, and if you look at my Star Tribune quote, which directly addresses this question, it appears there has been virtually no new construction as a result of this zoning change.

Scott’s muddled history aside (the statue of Lenin didn’t arise in Fremont until 1995), in the early 1990s, the crime rate was still high, and to many Seattle residents, “urban” meant poverty, drugs, and crime. Unmentioned by Scott, one key part of Rice’s plan had small busses on circulator routes, running out from the central core of each neighborhood to the surrounding SFH residential streets. To residents of those streets, these busses would have been vectors for criminals and drugs. (It was not lost on anyone that Rice’s plan would have created four urban villages in West Seattle — but none in Magnolia.)

As Seattle’s economy and population continued to recover from the Boeing Slump, young professionals (myself included) began moving to Seattle, and we moved into apartments in the cores of the neighborhoods, where we walked or rode transit; not in the SFH, where we would have needed cars. The resulting urban-centric development, for which Scott gives credit to Rice’s plan, happened all over the city, whether creation of an urban village in each particular local neighborhood had been blessed by Rice’s plan or not. Rice may have been a visionary, but others realized his vision.

Enjoy your urban villages with thousands of people stacked on top of each other in a small area.
My dog and I will be ambling around our acreage. If we’re lucky, we won’t see or hear another soul except those on 4 legs.

@9: "although plex construction represents a small proportion of supply, it is growing - up 40% since 2019, and 480% since 2015, and appears to be replacing single-family development."

What Minneapolis has chosen to do is to fire on all cylinders giving affordability a fighting chance - unlike the 90s planning process, which threw the game (in fact both the Wallingford and Queen Anne neighborhood plans explicitly acknowledge homes are getting more expensive and then state nothing will be done about it).

Without subsidy or incentives 'plexes won't jump to the scale of a magic bullet in the short run, but in the long run zoning matters a lot. The Seattle Times was writing about a single family teardown a day upcycled into a new top of the market single family house in 2016. So zoning's toll just during our recent boom is land near transit and jobs locked up by 3,000 homes catering to the top of the market instead of the possibility of 2 to 6 times as many homes catering to the middle. And my only quibble with the article in that the 90s were far from the original sin - my neighborhood council lobbied to get duplexes made illegal in 1976. And exclusionary zoning started here in 1923.

So because of public policy we're short an unknown number but certainly in the tens of thousands of more affordable homes today (1 out of 10 of today's houses being an average of a 4-plex means a swing from 13,000 less affordable to 52,000 more affordable homes, for example, a fairly big deal in the scheme of things).

Since Seattle intends to be around 20, 50, and 100 years from now, there's no time like the present to change zoning to give more affordable options a fighting chance everywhere.

Minneapolis is just a small part of the twin cities metropolitan area, which is a sprawling place, with plenty more prairie to spread out on, which helps keep housing affordable. Other than lakefront property, it's fairly bland, with terrible weather.

Contrast that with Seattle, which is tall and skinny, hemmed in by water, with much of the land being considered "view" property. The bigger Seattle/Bellevue metropolitan area is constrained by growth management measures imposed in the 80's and 90's, but even without that there's only so much land available until you run into a mountain or body of water.

The current zoning scheme (Single Family homes with ADU and/or DADU's, townhomes) is locking in the single-family mentality for generations. Someone could come and buy our house and do something with the land, but once it becomes (for instance) four to six individually owned units, suddenly those owners have to come to a consensus to sell if someone wants to (for instance) build an apartment building on the parcel.

The Urban Villages were/are an interesting idea, but it lacked teeth. And it was hardly novel, as they were built on existing business districts, many of which dated back to the days of the streetcars and interurbans. So we ended up with low-density density.

@12, What’s the goal with more density? If it’s simply to fit more people into less land, then yes, missing middle gets us there, but that rings empty to me because it creates casualties. If the hope is that we’ll get to affordable housing, keep your eyes on who is benefitting. The 4-6 plexes will be individually owned townhomes, and they may be affordable relative to larger homes but they’re still out of reach for most families (currently in the $800k to $1M range). We can pontificate about conjuring up new cities, but these forces can and have displaced thousands of poorer Seattleites to more affordable places. What’s really the point of this exercise if not to actually help people who are most likely to be displaced?

@13: "which is a sprawling place, with plenty more prairie to spread out on, which helps keep housing affordable. Other than lakefront property, it's fairly bland, with terrible weather."

Thank you for this - my own thoughts exactly. Geography matters.

There are numerous subreddits on Reddit where people can ask: "Where in the US should I live?", followed by a wish list of attributes: affordable, cultural, walkable, good schools, mild weather. Blandness + terrible weather is never on the list.

@12 I read that article too. Note a 480% increase isn't very impressive when you're starting from single digits. That blog post was a decent analysis though, but it often lacked sourcing on its data and charts. One thing it showed was the drop in rents following the George Floyd riots/protests.

It did have a link to another source with data for the 2.5 year period 1/1/20-6/30/22. It showed 31 duplexes and 17 triplexes, both new and remodels, permitted during that period on lots previously not allowed. In a city that permits 3000 units/year, that's basically nothing. Here's that link:

https://www.arlnow.com/2022/10/31/portland-and-minneapolis-allow-missing-middle-housing-so-far-new-construction-has-been-modest/

Also note that much of that new construction is student housing near the U of M. The trend is to tear down single family houses and replace them with "duplexes" where each unit has 5 bedrooms and rents for about $4k/month. Here's a streetview of 3 of these brand new "duplexes" in a row:

https://www.google.com/maps/@44.9853651,-93.2269404,3a,60y,99.5h,94.59t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sHetEhKMDSI8FgB-7ZoxA9A!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu

In the end Minneapolis has always been much cheaper than Seattle, almost certainly because of its frigid winters and its geography, not any zoning differences. But its still a very cool town, and anybody unhappy with housing prices in Seattle should seriously consider it.

@16: "In the end Minneapolis has always been much cheaper than Seattle, almost certainly because of its frigid winters and its geography, not any zoning differences"

Yet the point that actually matters is that Seattle would (and will) be a cheaper city than Seattle with zoning differences.

@14: Well more people living on less land and more people living in "missing middle" homes are both a win for the environment. But we know from even the small steps already taken the prospects for affordability are meaningfully positive.

Wallingford, one of Seattle's more expensive neighbors, was affected by the MHA upzones. in 2022, attached townhomes selling in the $600s outnumbered single family houses (of any age) in that price range by 9 to 2 and in the $700s 43 to 4. Two thirds of house sales were over $1M while 3/4 of attached tonwmhome sales were under that.

Likewise, city-wide, new main houses have started to be accompanied by an ADU and DADU condo-ized and sold independently. When they share a lot based on sales sampled by the city, the ADU/DADU sell for about half and in the very low end of the ownership market - on average in the low $700s versus $1.2M for the main house.

Public school teachers, nurses, UW professors, and skilled tradespeople at the City and County make in the $80s with a few years' seniority, so a two earner couple of essential middle class workers here can qualify for mortgages in the $700s.

In a fourplex or sixplex, condo-ized two bedroom homes would likely sell for the $500s, bringing ownership within reach in a pricey neighborhood allllmmmoost to median household income, $110k (i.e., 50% of households).

And of course purpose-built rentals will be more affordable to more folks across the board.

@17 "Yet the point that actually matters is that Seattle would (and will) be a cheaper city than Seattle with zoning differences."

Spoken like a true believer.

While the case of Minneapolis has shown 'upzone everything' provided no significant boost to supply outside of party pads for U of M students (go Gophers!), there is evidence it elevates property values, particularly at the lower end, potentially making affordability worse, not better:

"In December 2018, the Minneapolis (MN) city council approved a new comprehensive plan that proposed eliminating single-family zoning restrictions throughout the city. In this project, I study the initial impact of this change on the sales prices of affected housing units. I estimate a series of difference-in-differences models comparing the sales price of houses within 3 km of the Minneapolis border in the year before and year after the city adopted the plan. I find that compared with similar unaffected properties in surrounding cities, the Minneapolis plan change was associated with a 3% and 5% increase in the price of affected housing units. In addition, there is some evidence that this price increase is due to the new development option it offers property owners. I find that the plan-related price increases are larger in inexpensive neighborhoods and for properties that are small relative to their immediate neighbors."

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01944363.2020.1852101

@19: The article you are citing is called "Upzoning and Single-Family Housing Prices" which always and everywhere cater to the needs of folks with more money rather than less compared to smallplexes--all the more so lately in places like Minneapolis and Seattle. The median income of folks in single family detached houses is over $100k nationally, in the Minneapolis area, and in the Seattle area. It is 1.7 times that of folks in 2-4 unit homes nationally, 1.7 time in Minneapolis, and 2.1 times in Seattle

RezoneSeattle dear, the entire history of Seattle, from its very founding through today, is a history of catering to the needs of folks with more money rather than less.

Not saying that's good. Just saying that it is.

@21Well, if true, a great way to atone for the sins of the past on the housing front would be to lean in to coming up with something as effective at providing affordable housing to working people in a growing local economy as the Baltimore rowhouse or the New England triple decker.

We've got the growing economy & high wage, let's gooo! :)

Growth management cut off vast areas on the east side now zoned for one house per 5 to 20 acres. A grand idea at the time but it's a cost that all mid to low income residents now bear. Looking forward 20 years we'll have autonomous vehicles and AI models that may either be symbiotic with or obviate the need for mass transit. I don't see futurism here. Technology changes more rapidly than politics can.

@21 Rezone Seattle yes, but why stop there? The money has run already to the eastside, even to the hills.

@23: "Growth management cut off vast areas on the east side now zoned for one house per 5 to 20 acres."

Not really. They (the Seattle city fathers) tried to reserve the east side as a growth buffer. Property owners rebelled, being stuck with those 5 to 20 acre lots they couldn't sell to developers. That's how we got the city of Samammish. Screw Seattle. We'll build what we want, where we want it. Zoning means nothing when the various city councils will roll over for rezone requests like a pet puppy for a belly rub.

All of that east side "green belt" is just some hobby rancher's potential retirement fund. You may think you've got a nice view of a farm next door. But when "Pops" moves out, be prepared to look at a new housing development. It's not so evident yet because there is still so much land.

RicketyRick, you don't get out much, do you? Otherwise, you would have noticed the crazy, unrelenting growth that is happening all over Seattle. In my neighborhood, Northeast Beacon Hill, whole streets are being demolished and rebuilt, and the once sleepy industrial district along Rainier from I-90 to College is quickly disappearing in anticipation of the Judkins Park LINK Station. "The money" is very much still a thing in Seattle.

RezoneSeattle dear, as I said in my earlier post, I think the city's timidity to do sweeping zoning changes has cemented in the single-family neighborhoods, and created that mentality in the formerly working class neighborhoods. Where formerly you had ten property owners, you now have sixty, and ten HOA's. Good luck getting any more density or affordability out of that situation.

Oh dear. I should have said "where you formerly had ten property owners ON A BLOCK, now now have sixty, and ten ten HOA's"

Mrs. Vel-DuRay regrets the error.

@26 You don't need large apartment buildings in order to have pro-environmental and pro-affordability levels of density. Dorchester in Boston is one of the densest neighborhoods in the US and it is mostly triple deckers. Four to six homes per current single family lot would be a viable way for Seattle to grow gracefully. At 6, for example, that's +650k homes which at 2.1 persons per household = room for 1.4M more people. That would be 60% of the way toward the population density of Barcelona.

@28: The problem with taking current SFH neighborhoods and turning them into multiplex neighborhoods is simple: transport. Their current densities depend upon ubiquitous ownership and use of private automobiles, which is the enabling assumption upon which they were built. Putting six times the population onto that same city grid is a recipe for disaster. How will goods and services be delivered? How about commuting — not every job can be worked from home. All transportation into neighborhoods, including public transportation, is at grade. There are currently not even plans to build below-grade public transportation into neighborhoods, and the initial vote for Sound Transit was in 1996. (This is why all growth in density has been along arterials.) What plans have you to address this? Are they environmentally friendly? Go ahead, we’ll wait.

@29: By 2018 according to a city report there was more land with access to public transportation outside the urban villages than inside. With very small tweaks - which would be easy to fund and sustain if current SFH neighborhoods become even slightly more dense - the entire city would be withing frequent access to public transportation.

(And btw all the older Seattle SFH neighborhoods were (1) not built with an assumption they would be single family and (2) built with the assumption of streetcars, not ubiquitous ownership and use of private automobiles.)

@31 Single family zoning did not exist in Seattle until 1923. Neighborhoods like Wallingford were built as what were / are called "street car suburbs."

@33 - As I said, "Seattle's older neighborhoods." Single family zoning didn't exist in the city until 1923. There were also downzones in 1956 and in the 1970s.

But the farther reaches - mainly the parts annexed in from the county - may in many cases built as single family neighborhoods. But what we should not do is let them sit there unchanged in that anti-environmental, anti-affordability mode.

All the city's land, them included, should be treated like urban villages (aka part of a city).

@30: “By 2018 according to a city report there was more land with access to public transportation outside the urban villages than inside.”

First, 2018 was five years ago. Second, quote and url, please.

“…if current SFH neighborhoods become even slightly more dense…”

Making SFH “slightly more dense” won’t help with housing issues. We’re talking about replacing SFH with multiplexes, as in multiplying the number of residents. There is no grade-separated transportation within neighborhoods, and no plans for any. Multiplying the density will therefore multiply the ground traffic. How is that good for the environment?

“…built with the assumption of streetcars,”

Which are still at-grade, and thus will get stuck in automobile traffic. Again, what’s the plan for transportation with greatly increased density?

"There is no grade-separated transportation within neighborhoods, and no plans for any. "

There hasn't been grade separated transportation in the urban villages for most of their existence.
There still isn't very much grade separated transportation in the urban villages.
There are some urban villages with no plans for grade separated transportation in some urban villages (e.g., Wallingford).
Urban villages most be unpossible!!!
Oh no, wait, density comparable to urban villages works just fine without grade separated transportation.

"Again, what’s the plan for transportation with greatly increased density?"

Walkability. Google "15 minute city."

Source: https://www.seattle.gov/documents/Departments/OPCD/OngoingInitiatives/SeattlesComprehensivePlan/OPCDComprehensivePlanUrbanVillageIndicatorsMonitoringReport2018.pdf

@37: Please learn to read. I asked about transport within neighborhoods, not to the urban villages.

Yet again, what’s the plan for transportation deep inside neighborhoods with greatly increased densities?

@38: "Please learn to read. I asked about transport within neighborhoods, not to the urban villages."

What do you think urban villages are? They are neighborhoods.

People get around within them.

Other neighborhoods getting comparable levels of density will work exactly the same way.

@39: Urban villages are not neighborhoods. An urban village is the densely-populated area at the center of a neighborhood. It is where most of the neighborhood’s shops and services, including public transportation, are located. The urban village is often at the juncture of arterials, e.g. 45th & the Ave., Alaska Junction. The surrounding neighborhood consists of narrow streets with SFH and little else.

Due to the availability of public transportation, shops, and other services, the urban village has high walk scores. The neighborhood has none of those amenities. Greatly (4-6 times) increasing the density of the neighborhood will require multiple increases in transportation capacity. The neighborhood’s grid of narrow streets will not support this, and there is currently no plans to put any grade-separated transit into any neighborhood. So how do the 4-6 times as many residents get to and from their homes?

"Due to the availability of public transportation, shops, and other services, the urban village has high walk scores. The neighborhood has none of those amenities. "

But with density, it will. The Wallingford and Fremont urban villages are contiguous today. Folks get around within and between them all the time without grade separated transit. The Green Lake urban village is almost contiguous with them. People already get around within and between the Wallingford and Green Lake urban villages without grade separated transit.

Not look at the map and imagine it with a "Meridian" or "Tangletown" urban village filling in the gap between them, making Wallingford and Green Lake contiguous too. One contiguous "urban village" from Fremont to Green Lake that will work fine without grade separated transit.

Now imagine what the whole city map filled in with urban villages.