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One Seattle Plan and Middle Housing Update – September 2024

Welcome to September! Many thanks to AIA Seattle for hosting a continuing education seminar this week which features multiple planning managers from Seattle, Tacoma, Bellevue, and Shoreline talking about their cities and how they’re approaching the middle housing code changes. Today we’ll focus on updating you on SEATTLE.

Seattle is making progress on middle housing but also in other types of upzone changes as well. Many other areas besides Neighborhood Residential will be updated for new zoning types and designations, so change is coming everywhere. Some examples of the changes and new names are shown below:

 

For schedule, we previously projected actual codes not in place until winter 2026 or farther out☹.  Below is a timeline provided by Seattle that shows legislation in City Council hands possibly by spring 2025, meaning codes could be implemented and live as early as summer 2025, six months ahead of our earlier (and very) preliminary projections. Note that the timelines below show Phase 1 focus as first on the Neighborhood Residential updates and then efforts turn to Phase 2 which looks at new and expanded urban centers and changes along transit corridors. These Phase 2 efforts do show tracking for implementation out to Winter 2026 – so we were right (sorta).

However – still no draft zoning code changes yet to review. Those are anticipated out sometime in hopefully mid-October. We’ll check back in later to see what we find and share accordingly.