The Seattle City Council plans to change the laws regulating townhouses, apartments, condominiums, and duplexes. This weekend, a council committee is hosting a community meeting to discuss proposed revisions to the multifamily housing zoning code. Our friends at Great City sent an informative message about the issue and the upcoming meeting, and we are now sharing the message with you:

As many of you know, Seattle City Council has been updating the Multifamily Housing Code for the past year. While the Mid- and High-Rise zoning components were updated in late-2009, the Committee of Built Environment has dedicated much of its time to finishing the updates on L-Zones this year.

To that end, there is an important community meeting this Saturday, 10 am, at Taproot Theater in Greenwood (204 N 85th St). We hope you can attend.

There are a number of great features in the current version of the multi-family update. The work of the council and other groups such as CORA (Congress of Residential Architects) thus far will help produce housing with better street frontage, more useful open space, and of overall higher design quality. But today's version of the legislation doesn't go far enough.

The council needs to here from you, the citizens of Seattle, to help push this legislation through to the end. Great City encourages you to attend this weekend’s meeting to do just this. Looking for something to say? Here are two issues that CORA and Great City think need more work:

Currently, Seattle has strict density limits in place in all of the L-zones. These limits essentially dictate the minimum size of housing unit in a given zone. As a result the average townhouse in Central Seattle is about 1500 s.f. in size and sells for around $450,000. The limits were created in an era when a single family home was affordable for people with median income and the most pressing concern of our city was fighting density. Twenty years later, the playing field has changed. Single family housing is no longer affordable, while the city recognizes that density is actually a core strategy for more livable neighborhoods.

Parking requirements also act as a form of density limit. Current code requires one off-street parking space for each unit. While this might be a sensible requirement for some neighborhoods and certain types of development, for many of our denser urban neighborhoods, this prevents us from doing the kinds of development that best serve our housing needs. The council is currently studying the idea of reducing or eliminating parking requirements in Urban Centers and Urban Villages - our densest and best transit served neighborhoods (see map) While developers will still have the ability to include as much parking as the market (or banks) require, reducing the parking requirements will allow small innovat! ions to take place. An old home might be split into three flats without turning the yard into a parking lot, or a conventional townhouse project might include a unit or two with small apartments instead of three story townhomes.

In the long run, reducing/eliminating density limits and parking requirements in dense neighborhoods allows for increased affordability while also facilitating a longer term shift to less auto-centric development as our transit catches up with demand. We urge you to attend the meeting this Saturday to support councilmembers in making these changes.