Seattle City Council member Tim Burgess is the latest person to jump on the dogpile of civic leaders and electeds pressuring the Department of Planning Development to beef up the density planning near the Roosevelt neighborhood's light rail station, which is slated to open in 2020.

In a letter (.pdf) addressed to Diane Sugimura, director of the DPD, Burgess states that he's "very concerned" the city isn't being proactive enough about increasing the urban density around light rail stations and other major transportation corridors. Specific to Roosevelt, Burgess says:

Given the 12.5-acre size of the rezone area, its location near a future light rail station, and the fact that many of the affected parcels are currently rezoned for low-rise development, it isn't readily apparent to me that we are maximizing our opportunities for clustered density... This policy approach to density is what allows us to maintain strong protections for our single-family residential areas.

But now the Roosevelt Neighborhood Association, are pushing back in a surprising way: instead of objecting to density upgrades (as many other NIMBY-centric neighborhoods have done), the RNA says that they welcome more density—under the right circumstances.

"We’ll take the density but we expect to have considerable influence on how and where it’s accommodated," says Jim O’Halloran, chair of the Roosevelt Neighborhood Association’s land use committee. Roosevelt residents have a lot of invested in its neighborhood development, perhaps more than most neighborhoods. In 2006, the RNA basically drafted the zoning plan that the DPD chose to recommend in April.

What neighbors fear is that the city will pass a hatch-job rezone proposal with uniform density upgrades that would allow towers and other forms of blanket "maximum density development" in areas neighbors have fought hard to preserve (like around the historic Roosevelt High School, for example).

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In stark contrast to other neighborhoods, Roosevelt neighborhood residents and transit-oriented progressives are lobbying the city to step up and increase density zoning around the future Roosevelt light rail station.

In a letter sent to Mayor Mike McGinn and City Council today, stakeholders argue that the Department of Planning Development's current plan "constrains development in the station area, a 5-10 minute walk, to primarily single family housing," and "will only result in an increase in housing capacity of only 350 units."

Here's an excerpt from the letter (.pdf):

The Planning Commission’s recent Transit Communities Report identified several communities, including Roosevelt, as areas in which more housing and infrastructure should occur to take advantage of the investment in transit. Futurewise’s Blueprint report made similar recommendations related to the Roosevelt neighborhood.

...DPD must undertake a full station area planning effort complete with an Urban Design Framework Plan, similar to the planning efforts in South Seattle, South Lake Union, West Seattle, and other transit-oriented locations. Such a planning effort must include much higher heights and densities than currently exist in the DPD plan, which will ensure the appropriate level of development in close proximity to the public’s $300 million investment in the Roosevelt Light Rail station.

What a fucking joy it was to read that letter (cue the anti-density NIMBY squawking in three, two, one...). The DPD has not yet returned a call for comment.

• Kelly O
• Yesler Terrace as it now stands.

Virginia Felton, a spokeswoman for the SHA, says a final development plan won't be approved until the organization has a chance to digest the project's environmental impact study (EIS), which is slated for release this Thursday. The SHA still hasn't committed to one-to-one on-site replacement of its extremely low income units, as some critics have demanded. Felton says that between 70 and 83* of those units could be relocated two blocks east of the current Yesler Terrace site, closer to the International District. "But we're proposing adding almost 1,000 workforce housing units to the site for people who aren’t super affluent or very low income, which is a big deal," Felton adds.

Some affordable housing advocates are still critical of the plan. "It’s hard for me to understand the emphasis on workforce housing when studies show that the biggest gap in affordable housing availability is on the lowest end of the scale—30 percent and below median income level," says Tim Harris, director of Real Change newspaper. "That said, I think that any addition of affordable housing is a step in the right direction."

Specifically, the housing breakdown looks like this: 561 extremely low-income replacement units (for example, a two-person household would have to make less than $20,600 to qualify); 290 very low-income units (two people making less than $34,250); and 950 workforce units (two people making less than $51,550). The remaining units—3,199—would be higher end market-rate units for families who earn Seattle's median income of $85,600 or above.

*This post has been updated to reflect a new range of extremely low-income units proposed for off site development.

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Slog tipper Paige took this footage around 9:40 this morning. "First Hill smelled like hell," she wrote. "You can see an explosion partway through."

Video coming in a moment here.

When city leaders wanted to tear down warehouses in South Lake Union for the Seattle Commons, people lost their motherfucking minds—partly because it would promote big, tall condos on the park's edge. So they organized against, and ultimately killed, Paul Allen's initiative to redevelop the area. A decade later, a people again lost their shit when Nickels, Vulcan, and Amazon wanted to construct slightly taller office buildings on the same stretch of land.

• SHA's early proposal to replace low-income housing with uninhabitable foam blocks, ridding the city of its "poor problem."

"We haven't gotten a lot of feedback at all," says Seattle Housing Authority (SHA) spokeswoman Virgina Felton. "Almost nobody attended our public hearing. We had more staff members than the public present."

This is striking because next Monday, December 13 is the last day people can log an opinion on the SHA's options for redeveloping the 28-acre site—options that range from doing nothing to the 561 low-income units housed there to tearing everything down, rerouting streets, and building up to 5,000 units of mixed-income housing, along with space for new businesses, hotels, offices, and acres of open public land. In other words, practically building a new neighborhood in the belly of the city. The public's not paying attention now (perhaps because poor people inhabit YT) but in the future this project will be unavoidable.

And despite the public's silence, the move is controversial—YT's current tenants will be displaced during any redevelopment and the SHA won't announce until March just how many new low-income units it plans to generate.

Read about the four choices to redevelop YT after the jump.

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