Statement: Seattle New Liberals Denounce Draft Comprehensive Plan as Woefully Inadequate
SEATTLE, WA (March 6, 2024) - The Seattle New Liberals forcefully denounce the recently released Draft Comprehensive Plan by the City's Office of Planning and Community Development (OPCD). This draft utterly fails to chart a viable path for addressing our escalating housing affordability crisis over the next two decades.
The Draft Comprehensive Plan is an unambitious document that, at best, merely prevents our housing supply crisis from spiraling further out of control and, at worst, represents a blatant disregard for taking meaningful steps to solve this urgent issue.
The plan's vision of "Housing Abundance" is empty rhetoric, lacking substantive policies to back it up. Instead of boldly upzoning and adding sorely needed home capacity, it exacerbates our existing housing shortage problems. This puts Seattle on track to become the next San Francisco - the poster child for severe housing shortages and exorbitant costs of living.
A glaring shortcoming is the paltry 100,000 new homes projected over the next two decades. Incredibly, that's fewer units than the suburb of Bellevue anticipates adding with just one-fifth of Seattle's current population. Rather than leading on housing growth befitting a world-class city, we're being outnumbered by our smaller neighbors. Seattle aspires to be a world-class city, but this plan is wholly incompatible with that vision by allowing a mere suburb to potentially outpace our housing growth.
Such anemic development will only worsen displacement and affordability issues, despite the Mayor's stated commitment to protecting vulnerable communities. In fact, it merely enshrines the same urban villages concentrated in red-lined neighborhoods while leaving the wealthier parts of the city relatively unchanged.
The draft anticipates creating more jobs than homes, worsening our imbalance between housing supply and demand. With single-person households nearing 43%, this mismatch guarantees our housing crunch intensifies. Effectively combating the housing shortage requires a dramatic increase in construction across all neighborhoods and housing types. If adopted without major revisions, this will price out our kids and turn Seattle into a global case study in poor urban planning.
We encourage everyone who wishes to voice frustrations with the Draft Plan and its insufficient plans for housing development in the city to visit the OCPD Engagement Hub at engage.oneseattleplan.com, attend open houses held throughout the city over the coming weeks, and advocate for the necessary changes needed to make the final version of the Comprehensive Plan one more suited for a fast-growing city that already has a housing shortage. As bad as the Draft Plan is, there is still time to put pressure on City Hall to do this right.
About Seattle New Liberals:
Seattle New Liberals are the Puget Sound Chapter of the Center for New Liberalism, a digital-first grassroots organization dedicated to fighting for liberalism during the age when it is most under attack. They are one of over 50 chapters worldwide and advocate locally for pragmatic, evidence-based solutions to housing, transportation, and economic problems.
