The Land Use and Neighborhoods Committee of the Seattle City Council is considering Omnibus bill CB 119835 this Wednesday August 12 at 9:30 AM. This omnibus bill is supposed to be for minor editorial corrections, but several provisions will change all Single-Family lots into Multi-Family lots with no minimum lot size. We urge you to contact your Councilmembers and ask them to remove these provisions.

• The Legislative Analysis of these provisions states: “However, the proposed omnibus language introduces ambiguity into the Code that could lead to unintended consequences for future development of vacant lots that are created through a unit lot subdivision process.”
• The City Council should not be passing bills with ambiguous language.
• Any single-family parent lot could be redeveloped with a house and an ADU and a DADU then subdivided in three unit lots that could be sold separately (as multi-family housing).
• Unit lots have no minimum lot size requirement.
• More trees would be cut to make way for these redevelopments.
• The price of single-family lots would increase further reducing the affordability of housing.
• The City Council should use a separate bill with a full public engagement to consider this major change in land use code.

Tomorrow Monday April 13 at 2 PM, the Seattle City Council will vote on CB119769, an emergency ordinance to expedite affordable housing during the COVID-19 crisis. The bill curtails public Design Review meetings for the next six to eight months to accelerate project approvals. Instead the Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections will conduct only internal administrative reviews.

Administrative Design Review is where the developer can promote variances to set backs and allowances for roof-top structures for their projects. See the Downtown Residents Alliance post for further discussion of the bill.

Express your concerns to the City Council or your Councilmembers. We emphasize these concerns:

• A better option is to eliminate Design Review for the crisis period. All developers would have to follow the land use code without exception.
• Only projects with significant affordable housing units on-site should be given this exemption. Market-rate and commercial projects can wait.
• Six to eight months is an excessive time period for a crisis that may ease in one to two months.