Uh-oh, bad news, there’s nobody steering the Seattle land use ship.

Yesterday night I had the opportunity to attend a North District Council meeting with 40 other folks at the Lake City Library. The guest speakers were Diane Sugimura of the Department of Planning and Development and Mike McGinn of Seattle Great City Initiative.

Mike’s talk was interesting. He showed photos of what the Seattle area might look like in 100 years (very scary) and presented ideas for building smart sustainable urban development. All were great ideas, but I feel like Seattle Great City is more of a theoretical, ‘wouldn’t it be nice’ kind of organization, instead of the in-your-face dog-fight politicking group needed in this city to actually change our zoning and land use laws.

Then Diane Sugimura spoke. And after presenting the DPD’s roles within the city, opened it up to the floor for questions. And boy, she was grilled (especially by a North Seattle audience who wasn’t too happy to begin with since most of them had just been flooded out). And to her credit, Diane handled all the questions with grace and patience. The audience peppered her about ‘crackerbox’ style development, houses built on wetlands and unstable slopes, and developers that level all the trees on the property to build even bigger single family houses. However, while listening to bad development story after bad development story I had a profound thought - the DPD is just a bureaucratic entity and nobody is leading any kind of land use planning within Seattle’s neighborhoods.

In fact, the DPD’s role in city planning is actually pretty small - they’re here to make sure that the pipeline of permits, complaints, and various questions are efficiently processed. Although they may actually think they have some influence, don’t look to Diane or the DPD to propose the kind of updates to the zoning code that these neighbors and others are demanding. Instead, look to the mayor who is choosing not to invest in fixes to our broken zoning codes and to conduct important neighborhood planning.

Sadly, unless you fall within one of the following areas I’ve listed below - you’re pretty much on your own. And if you don’t have the backing of a strong community council, you’re going to have to build up your coalition to fight any bad projects in your neighborhood.

The areas where the city of Seattle is actually devoting its urban planning attention.

• The city is demanding more from it’s own buildings in terms of environmental and community sustainability.
• The city is actively planning growth in South Lake Union and the Downtown area. (note: the Denny Triangle area is strangely outside this area)
• The city is will retain the 65%+ portion of the city that is zoned single family (note: and this is old school thinking too, there are plenty of single family areas that would be ripe for improvement if they could be zoned multi-family. What is important here is to manage the transition between single and multi-family zones)

Anyway, I now believe more than ever that to get the kind of land use planning attention throughout Seattle that the city deserves, that we’re going to have to either change our mayor’s attitudes, or get a new mayor.