Seattle’s Multifamily Zoning update - a page by page analysis

The times I’ve published information from neighborhood groups about the multi-family zoning updates in progress, I generally tend to get one or two responses saying, “Whoa, this process has been 2-3 years in the planning, how can it be a surprise to you?” And my response back is, “Hey, cut me a break, I wasn’t paying attention to land use issues in Seattle 2-3 years ago, I was busy with other important stuff - do you think that 6 seasons of ‘The Sopranos’ were just going to watch themselves?”

But now that I do care (and that ‘The Sopranos’ has ended) I thought it would be fun to read through the entire MF Update…until I saw that it was 94 pages long. And if it took me 2-3 years to watch an entire TV series… 94 pages in one sitting is probably not a realistic goal.

So…I thought, what to do? Should I just skim through the document and focus on a few items, like a City Councilmember would do? But then I thought, ‘Hey, I bet some of you haven’t read through this document either, so why don’t we have some fun and read it together with you, chapter by chapter?’

Sounds fun, yes? So, if you’re game, your homework is thus, grab a copy of the MF Draft Proposal (you can grab it for FREE here) and read the ‘Introduction’ on pages 2 and 3 for tomorrow’s discussion.

And if you don’t want to read the update, that’s cool, I’ll just keep posting some more land-use photos for you (I’ve got some super-awesome Wallingford thermoplastic ladder crosswalk photos just waiting to see the light of day).

In the meantime, here is something fun I did with the update. I searched on a few key words to see how many times they were repeated within the MFZ document.

1) ‘Children‘ are mentioned 3 times in the 94 pages.
2) ‘Parks‘ are mentioned 4 times
3) ‘Condo‘ was mentioned 6 times
4) ‘Schools‘ are mentioned 10 times.
5) ‘Mayor Nickels‘ is mentioned twice, ‘Mayor’ is mentioned 11 times
6) ‘DPD‘ mentioned 15 times
7) ‘City Council‘ is mentioned 16 times (that’s 1.78 mentions per council member)
8 ) ‘Townhouses‘ are mentioned 47 times.
9) ‘Urban village‘ mentioned 55 times
10) ‘Affordable‘ mentioned 56 times
11) ‘Single Family‘ was mentioned 59 times
12) ‘Zoning‘ was mentioned 71 times, ‘Zoned’ mentioned 75 times
13) ‘Green‘ was mentioned 90 time
14) ‘Neighborhood‘ was mentioned 133 times
15) ‘Multifamily‘ mentioned 270 times

So…taking the top terms in their category (’Multifamily’ beats out ‘Single Family’), dividing by 2, carrying the 1…and we get this…

Multifamily Neighborhood Zoning for Green, Affordable Townhouses

It should be interesting to see whether at the end of this exercise, if this is what the document is about.