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When townhouses start going up amid single-family homes, Sally Clark, chair of the Seattle City Council’s Planning and Land Use Committee, says she’s the one who hears about it from angry neighbors.
That could be one reason Clark’s committee left most Seattle neighborhoods alone in legislation it passed last week to let more development projects skip environmental review. If the full council passes the bill April 21, however, residents who live in or near one of the city’s six designated urban centers will lose their right to question or challenge unseemly developments under the city version of the State Environmental Policy Act, or SEPA.
The current law requires residential developers throughout the city to conduct a SEPA review — which includes public input — for projects of more than four, six, or eight units in various low-rise and commercial zones and for projects of more than 20 units in mid-rise and high-rise zones. That would stay the same in most of the city, but in the urban centers — downtown, lower Queen Anne, South Lake Union, Capitol Hill, the University District, and Northgate — the legislation would raise the limits above 30 units in most categories and, downtown, developers could build high-rises of up to 80 units with no environmental review.
A final amendment to the bill leaves the current SEPA review requirements in place for projects in low-rise zones that are next to or across an alley or narrow street from a single-family or small-lot residential zone.
Mayor Greg Nickels proposed the higher thresholds last August, arguing that lifting SEPA will reduce developer costs in areas where density is planned and that citizens can still take up issues on most projects with the city’s Design Review Board. That would be a great idea, says neighborhood activist David Miller, if the legislation had given the Design Review Board any teeth — something Miller and a new neighborhood group called Livable Seattle (see page 5) lobbied for and believed Clark’s committee had agreed to do. “We thought we had buyoff,” he says.
Making it easier for developers in the urban centers isn’t necessarily a bad thing, Miller says, “but the problem is developers don’t always like to listen to the people who live there and the [City Department of Planning and Development] doesn’t always do a good job of enforcing the rules they’re supposed to.”
“In these urban centers specifically,” he says, “SEPA was a kind of blunt tool for the neighborhoods to be able to get developers and DPD to listen and follow the rules.”
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