At the end of my first two years chairing the Seattle City Council’s Planning, Land Use & Neighborhoods Committee I feel a little like I’m renovating a house from with a limited set of plans. I mostly pick up a hammer and try to use common sense.

I hear from plenty of people who tell me they have the best house plan and that I should use their instructions. For some people, no change is the right change. For others the change can’t be grand enough. Re-zone, upzone, incentivize, landmark, retain, bulk up, slim down, reward, charge, bonus, demolish, protect… Everyone has a position and a stake in what happens across the street and across town.

As 2009 comes to a close I can say I am proud of the work we’ve done over the past two years with neighborhoods, developers, affordability advocates, historic preservation advocates, greeners, smart city staffers and others to make at least a few smart decisions.

• Backyard cottages are a good and modest step for housing variety and affordability.
• Extending the life of major land use permits makes sense in this economy and the need to open job possibilities.
• Making it slightly easier to demolish derelict housing and when no other solution is possible helps make neighborhoods safer.
• Exchanging extra development potential for housing that’s affordable and environmentally sustainable can be a good deal.
• Collaboratively updating our neighborhood plans and actually using those plans in day-to-day work and long-range planning makes us a healthier democracy.
• Protecting older buildings (whether I happen to personally like their design or not) is good for our character and our economy, and makes our city more interesting.
• Limiting the scale of new houses in single-family neighborhoods fairly protects neighbors while allowing the building of dreams.

The jury will be out for a while on some our initiatives from the past two years. Incentive zoning (giving apartment and condo buildings more height in exchange for more affordability) won’t be truly tested until the economy recovers enough to see new development again. Similarly, I don’t know that we have the formula exactly right on industrial zoning. I’m a big believer in fighting to keep port-dependent and other blue-collar jobs in Seattle, but we need to do more work on whether we have the outer neighborhood industrial zoning right and whether the current rules help owners reuse buildings in the smartest ways.

I regret that we didn’t make it all the way through the multi-family section of the land use code this year. We came close. We finalized improvements to the mid-rise and high-rise sections last Monday. Low-rise (the town house and small apartment and condo zoning) is tricky. We’ve had some of the best conversations about neighborhood character, affordability, sustainability and code simplicity as we’ve debated how to get low-rise right. We’ll take that work into the first half of 2010.

Which brings me to my hopes for the next two years. In 2010 I will continue to chair the land use and planning committee (renamed the Committee on the Built Environment). In addition to solving the low-rise zone town home problems, marquee items for COBE work in 2010 include a decision on the Seattle Children’s Hospital proposed expansion plan, proposed land use changes for our South Downtown neighborhoods (Pioneer Square, the International District, and Little Saigon), proposed urban design changes and zoning amendments for the Northgate neighborhood, and examination of historic landmark building incentives.

Guiding my work will be a few basic desires I hear voiced in most parts of the city

• Let’s continue to preserve history and culture through landmark nominations and cultural district overlays.
• Let’s use major transit stations as the focal points for new, people-centered places.
• Let’s amend land use rules to get buildings shaped better for people inside the homes and outside in the neighborhoods (and the greater world).
• Let’s amend land use and building rules to nurture a mix of housing, businesses, arts and nightlife that sprouts all of those things in our city.
• Let’s be done debating density. Unless the world turns upside down (and we should all hope it doesn’t), more people will choose Seattle over the coming decades for schools, jobs, family and the incredible surroundings we enjoy. The only question is how we adapt to absorb our sons, daughters, cousins, parents and economically-motivated newcomers. Let’s shape our change.

We will be updating Seattle’s Comprehensive Plan, Toward a Sustainable Seattle, in the next two years, while concurrently supporting community-centered neighborhood plans. To invite the new mayor along on that work, I and my colleagues attached a request to the 2010 budget for the mayor’s side of the shop to detail a coherent vision of how the new administration will carry out community planning and development tasks. While some people expect the City Council to run the show at City Hall for the next four years, I can say truthfully that I’m looking for the new mayor to be a true partner in smart land use and planning in Seattle. Despite the recession there’s no shortage of critical land use work to be done. Thank you to all of you who have taken the time to get involved with land use policy work here at Council. We’ve walked neighborhoods in Delridge and Lake City; we’ve exchanged emails about floor-area-ratios; and we’ve drawn heights and setbacks on blank paper. We’ll start again in January.

Sally at the Clean and Green Seattle event in the Brighton neighborhood,
joining area neighbors to clean up the streets.

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