Seattle Within Reach: Intro to Land Use Planning & the Comp Plan

Hello, thank you for joining us today.

I am Council Member Tammy Morales representing District 2. That includes everything from Chinatown International District all the way down the Rainier Valley to Rainier Beach.

This is the first in a series I am calling Seattle Within Reach.

So I'm looking forward to talking with our panelists today and just want to share a little bit about what I mean by Seattle Within Reach.

We all have ideas about what a vibrant, healthy Seattle can look like.

I'm trained as a neighborhood planner, and so I think a lot about great neighborhoods and what kinds of essential services and what kind of amenities neighborhoods should have within reach.

And that includes everything from housing, of course, but I think we should stop talking about producing units and really start talking about how we create great neighborhoods for people.

And that means neighborhoods that have housing that average workers can actually afford to live in, But it also includes locally owned businesses, groceries, great access to health care and child care, maybe even a credit union.

I would love to see a locally owned hardware store in my neighborhood.

I would love to have another Boosh nursery down in the south end.

And so the series that we're doing here, Seattle Within Reach, is really intended to be a community conversation about how we can do that.

How do we intentionally create well-resourced neighborhoods that are well-connected, that offer the kinds of goods and services that people can access without having to drive to them?

So throughout the series, we'll be focusing on particular topics.

If there's something that you'd like to learn more about or you want to have a conversation about, please drop us a line and let us know.

We'll talk a little bit at the end of the panel today about how you can do that.

But for today, we're going to start with an introduction to land use planning.

Some of you might think that's incredibly dull.

I think it's very exciting.

But land use planning really is the most powerful tool that we have as a city.

It affects how the neighborhoods in our city change and grow.

And so it's really important that we all understand what the processes are and figure out how we engage in those processes.

So today we're going to hear from experts in planning and architecture.

And we're gonna hear from community advocates who have seen what these kinds of decisions mean for people on the ground, and really have a conversation about why it's important to pay attention and how you can engage.

So I hope you enjoy the discussion today.

And now I'm gonna ask each of our panelists to briefly introduce yourselves, and then we'll get started.

So we will have folks from the Seattle Planning Commission, from the American Institute of Architects and from Puget Sound SAGE.

So if the commissioners could start that would be great.

Thank you so much Council Member Morales.

My name is Jamie Strobel.

I use she her pronouns and I am co-chair of the Seattle Planning Commission and I've been on the commission for about six years and my background is in climate and environmental justice and community-driven planning.

I'll pass to Radhika.

I use she her pronouns.

I live in Redford in Seattle, and my background is in urban planning, I work at a local public policy firm called consulting, and I've been on the Commission for a year or so.

This is my second time at the Commission.

Excited to pass it on to you, my fellow Commissioner Rose.

Hi, I'm Rose Luchela Whitson.

My pronouns are she, her.

I live up in Licton Springs up north.

And my background is as a wetland biologist and environmental permitting specialist, currently with Jacobs Engineering.

And this is, I'm entering my second year as a volunteer planning commissioner.

Great, thanks everyone.

If we could go ahead and have Matt, Dylan, and Ab introduce yourselves as well, and then we'll go back to the planning commission.

Sure.

Hi, I'm Dylan Glosecki.

I am with VIA, Perkins Eastman.

My pronouns are he, him.

I'm an architect and an urban planner representing American Institute of Architects Seattle chapter today.

And I've been practicing basically apartment and condo design in Seattle for the past 15 years and also worked in kind of neighborhood design around transit centers.

I'll pass it on to Matt.

Hi everyone.

Uh, I'm Matt Hutchins.

I'm a principal at Cast Architecture.

Uh, I use he, him pronouns.

Uh, my practice has been centered on, uh, kind of creative infill and, uh, sort of looking at how we can, uh, change the zoning code to allow for a lot more housing opportunity.

Um, and let's see, I'm co-chair our housing task force and have just been, uh, focused on a lot of the great changes that we've seen in zoning over the last, uh, over the last decade.

Hi, everyone.

Hi.

My name is Ab Bonaire.

I prefer data and pronouns.

I'm the equitable development program manager at Puget Sound SAGE.

I also live in Columbia City, and I'll talk about my background later.

Back to you, Council Member Morales.

Great.

OK, well, thank you so much, everybody.

So we asked the Planning Commission to come and share with us a little bit about who they are and what they do.

and really to give an overview of what the comprehensive plan is.

That's something that we'll be talking about a lot as a city over the next couple of years.

And so I wanted to make sure that community members have a good foundation for what the comp plan is and why they should care about it.

So with that, I am gonna hand it over to the planning commission to get us started.

Thank you so much, Council Member Morales.

If we can share our slides.

Thank you so much.

So next slide, please.

Thank you.

So just to introduce a little bit about the Seattle Planning Commission.

So there's three of us here today, but there are 16 of us total on the commission.

We are all volunteers from across Seattle with a wide range of lived experience, professional and educational background.

Not everyone is a planner.

Some people have biology backgrounds or public health backgrounds or policy or direct working in communities.

We are an advisory body, so we are not regulatory, which means that we provide input to the city council and the mayor's office to be able to advise them on topics around planning.

We ground our work in racial equity principles and we're committed to acknowledging and addressing the harms that have directly resulted from institutional racism and past racist planning practices, as it has shown up in access to things like housing and transportation, parks, open spaces, services and support, and all these essential parts of livability in our city.

We are also considered the stewards of the comprehensive plan, which one of my fellow commissioners will go a little bit more into what the comprehensive plan is.

This is a foundational document, so Radhika will speak to that a little more.

And we collaborate with communities and city staff to craft a plan that sets a vision for all people to thrive.

And we're regularly getting brief briefings from departments from all over the city.

So we're looking at really a comprehensive picture of all of the planning things that are happening in the city.

Next slide, please.

Thanks, Jamie.

I'm going to spend a little bit of time describing what the comp plan is, what it can do, what it can't do.

And then I'll pass it on to my fellow Commissioner Rose to talk a bit more about it.

And our goal, as Jamie mentioned, is just to make sure that the overall goals of the plan and the purpose of it is a bit clearer.

So the comprehensive plan within Washington's planning framework is at the heart of local planning efforts.

It essentially creates a shared vision for the future for the next 20 years.

It's intended to be inspirational with ideas that can shape development.

And the way it's organized is that it has a series of goals and policies that are topically arranged, and it guides day-to-day decisions of the city, including elected officials and the departments.

It is not something that's optional.

It's required by the state.

It's required for all fast growing counties and it's intended to plan for both current as well as new residents.

And one great value of the comprehensive plan is that it consolidates in one document goals and policies that achieve the vision that the community has and that is coordinated to achieve that vision.

So if you go to the next slide.

One of the ideas around the plan being coordinated and consistent is that it's both externally and internally consistent.

The idea of external consistency is that the plan responds to regional trends, the regional planning framework, what the four-county Puget Sound region is planning for, and what adjacent cities are planning for.

And the idea of internal consistency is that all of the topics and chapters in the plan are all based on the same set of assumptions and they all tell the same story.

And it's also about making sure that adequate public facilities are provided for the growth that's envisioned in the plan.

Consistency also gets around to implementation.

All spending by the city on infrastructure investments should be consistent with the comprehensive plan.

And then zoning and land use code, which are typically regulations, they must be consistent with and they should drive the implementation of the comprehensive plan.

Besides it reflecting the community vision, which is its primary purpose, the comprehensive plan is a key source of information and guidance.

For example, it includes a lot of inventory information, a lot of maps, a lot of information about how the city is changing, and it can be a resource for people who want to understand how Seattle is changing and how it plans to respond to key issues.

And because it guides day-to-day decisions, it can also be a really important source of information for private sector actors like developers who would look to see where public investments would be and what the community vision is and which will help them create more responsive proposals for private action.

The plan is not set in stone.

It can be amended once a year, even though the yearly amendments are more minor in nature.

And it will be amended once in 10 years, even though currently it is amended every eight years.

There is a proposal now that the major updates be every 10 years to align with when the census happens.

And the plan can be amended to make sure that it's evolving, it's adaptive to communities, and it's changing to meet new realities.

Next slide, please.

Something that's important to understand are the limits and boundaries for what a comprehensive plan can do.

It outlines the vision, it outlines goals and policies, but it does not include development regulations like zoning.

Savneet Talwar, Ph.D.: : Has implications for where the city invests and how and the spending priorities, but it does not include a budget and it doesn't commit resources.

So that's an important piece of its limitation that's important to understand Savneet Talwar, Ph.D.: : Next slide please.

As I mentioned earlier, it has the community vision for how Seattle grows, and this is called the growth strategy, and that's included in the plan.

But there are also some required topics that the state mandates should be included in the comprehensive plan, and these include land use, it's housing, transportation, capital facilities and utilities, and we'll go into some detail about land use and housing throughout this presentation today.

But there are other topics that cities and counties can choose to include, which Seattle has included community engagement, has included environment, human services and parks and open space as well.

And while there are goals and policies that are topical and are arranged through these chapters, there are overarching themes that cut across all of the goals and policies and different chapters and constitute some of the foundational ideas of the plan And the Planning Commission has recommended that these overarching themes be for the new update that we are contemplating, be racial equity, be a sustainable quality of life for all, and also climate resilience.

With that, I'll pass it on to Rose to talk a bit more in detail about land use and other topics.

Thanks, Radhika.

So I am going to use this opportunity to talk about land use, land use planning, and zoning.

What are they?

So land use, demystifying a bit, really it's just how we use land.

So are we using it to grow food?

Are we using it for housing?

Are we using it for parks and open space?

All of that is land use.

So land use planning then is a way of guiding the future use, ideally determined by community.

And I think it's important to recognize at this point that we've inherited systems and that's fraught with all sorts of complexities.

And so one of the things that I personally like about the comprehensive plan is that it is an iterative process and we can move the needle, so to speak, change course, and evolve, even if it does feel frustratingly slow sometimes.

So the comprehensive plan is also just one part of land use planning.

There are other things like the Shoreline Master Program, but we won't talk about that now because that would be a lot to take on.

And then So the comprehensive plan, though, it definitely draws upon the future land use map to help highlight the intent for how land should be developed.

Zoning, on the other hand, as Radhika alluded, is not necessarily land use planning itself, but it's about how to implement land use policy.

So zoning tends to be defined in regulatory code Like, okay, so if you have a piece of property and it's zoned as some sort of residential, zoning will tell you, okay, how big of a house can you build?

How, does it need sidewalks?

Does there need to be yard space?

Like sort of the nitty gritty details that go behind trying to fulfill the land use planning objective that's set forth in the comprehensive plan.

So the idea is to kind of weave the pieces together and zoning is just a piece of that puzzle.

And then with those basic terms defined, I want to move to talking about, so understanding a bit more of that helps us figure out how we can inform the process.

So next slide.

So I think the biggest part to emphasize is that you have the power to inform the update process.

Whether you talk to council members or community groups or take opportunities in public comment periods to submit comments, what's really important is hearing from you.

The various government organizations that are, or departments that are working on writing specific sections of the plan also have a certain amount of budget allotted for community involvement.

And they'll be using that to go out to community groups, which again, you can take part in to attend webinars, work groups, workshops, all sorts of parts so that you can give your input.

And our colleagues from Puget Sound Stage will be sharing more on that later.

There are also other mandates from City Council, actually, to do things like equity analysis to inform the plan.

Or even the Seattle Planning Commission, we do put out issue briefs about specific topics that, based on our shared expertise, we think would be good to consider.

And with that, I'm going to pass it back to Jamie to talk a bit more about what the plan looks like for individuals.

Thanks Rose.

So this plan is developed by city departments and partnership with communities so Rose walked through a lot of the different ways that departments are trying to do outreach and community engagement and partnerships, and even contracting with community based organizations.

This draft plan is then going to be produced and available for public comment so there's a public comment period, which then it gets reviewed revised and then sent to the city council by the mayor for approval.

that this plan impacts our lives and our communities, how friends and relatives can stay in place, how can new neighbors have access to our communities, how far we would need to walk or bike to get to a bus or train stop, where our nearest park is, what types of buildings are around us.

And as mentioned before, there are limits to what the comp plan can do, but it is the beginning and it kind of sets the stage.

It's the overarching plans for all the plans.

So I would definitely encourage folks to get involved and learn more about how you can affect your own neighborhoods in this city.

Next slide, please.

So to create a more equitable, livable, and sustainable, resilient city as we grow, that's the opportunity here, right?

Every comprehensive plan update that has come before has kind of had different major themes.

We've talked a little bit about the themes that we are recommending to move forward.

And that this, again, is the plan that overarches those plans and is where you see how all these things interconnect, how our transportation systems are housing systems, our infrastructure, how we can address several major challenges that community in Seattle is facing around racial inequities of the past, how housing costs and displacement pressures, and then climate change and how that is a threat multiplier that may exacerbate some of those things.

And then where investments could potentially go.

This is the opportunity we have to really shape the Seattle that we want to live in and how we can make this a more equitable city.

Next slide, please.

So lastly, a lot of the commission reports that were referenced, you can find on the Planning Commission website.

You can also click on the little box that says One Seattle Comprehensive Plan, and you'll be directed to the commission's current work around updating the plan, which we will be tracking throughout the whole process.

And there's also a link to the City of Seattle's Office of Planning and Community Development website and their work that they're doing that's newly underway to update the city's comprehensive plan.

Next slide, please.

And that's all we have for you today.

I know this is a high-level overview of a lot of complex things, so we're happy to take questions.

Well, thank you very much to all of you.

Yeah, we'll be having more conversations as this process sort of unfolds.

The process for how we talk about the comprehensive plan has begun, but we don't actually make decisions on any of this until 2024. So there is lots of time for people to get up to speed and really make sure that they're understanding what we're doing here.

I have a couple of questions and I'd like to open it up to everyone on the panel, but certainly to the planning commission.

The first thing, Jamie, you mentioned towards the end that the comprehensive plan is sort of an overarching plan related to all the other things that we do as a city.

There's a transportation plan, several different transportation plans.

So can you talk a little bit about what those other plans are and then how they enter act or intersect with the comp plan process.

Yeah, and actually, I might pass this one to Radhika, since Radhika led the comp plan overview section.

Yeah, I think every plan from the city is intended to be consistent with the comprehensive plan.

So the transportation master plan, the modal plans, the sub area plans that the city might do that focuses on different areas.

In theory, they should all be advancing the mission in the comprehensive plan, but one connected plan that I will speak to you is the Seattle transportation plan, for instance, which will.

which has a little bit of a parallel timeline to the current major update to the comprehensive plan.

So the Seattle transportation plan will look at the types of investments and the types of transportation systems that can support the vision that the community has in the comprehensive plan.

And it will be consistent with that.

And it will be one way in which the vision is advanced and achieved.

Thank you.

Excuse me.

I have another question that we hear about a lot, which is the fear of changes to the zoning regulations.

And I know we're talking broadly, but there's a lot of fear that changes there would result in people of color continuing to be displaced from their homes.

priced out of the market.

We're hearing a lot from homeowners of color in particular about being forced to sell.

So I think a broad question is how do we address that?

How do we ensure that that doesn't continue to happen?

And what kind of mitigation strategies should we be contemplating as we move forward in the discussion so that we can ensure it doesn't continue to happen?

Maybe I can kick us off and then Radhika or Rosa or anyone else wants to comment on this question too.

This is incredibly complex.

The issue of displacement is incredibly complex and we have written in our past reports and then also we're working on one of our issue briefs right now around displacement and And one of the things we're advocating for is that anti-displacement strategies need to be incorporated into every aspect of the comprehensive plan.

That, you know, you can't just change zoning without having anti-displacement strategies in parallel with that.

There are a lot of different approaches, services, investments, things that could be done to help mitigate some of those concerns.

And I'll probably, I'll pass to Radhika now while I formulate the rest of my thought.

Radhika or Rose, do you wanna add to that?

Yeah, so I also wanted to highlight in particular it's important to identify and protect our cultural centers and small businesses and also providing opportunities for affordable housing because part of what's contributing to skyrocketing real estate prices in commercial and residential real estate is the fact that there is a bit of a shortage.

And so really trying to weave in and naming that we need anti-displacement policies is important.

And also hearing from community.

I don't want to sit in an ivory tower and be like, you need to do this, this, and this.

We want to hear what would keep you here.

I would just add the point Rose and Jamie are saying.

essentially that the idea is to have growth without displacement.

So some of those strategies might be to think carefully about what the impacts of adding infrastructure in a neighborhood might be, and make sure that when you're doing things like that, that can potentially raise property values and accelerate potential displacement to just think about how you might address that.

And the city already has a map of areas that are more at higher risk for displacement.

So when you are thinking about land use change there to couple that with anti-displacement strategies, I think those are some ways in which the comprehensive plan can head off any chances of the policies trickling down into causing unintended consequences.

Does anybody have a couple of examples of what those might be?

What kind of anti-displacement strategies you think we should consider?

As a community, what should we be exploring?

Well, I will point to ABB from Puget Sound SAGE.

They had a fantastic disaster gentrification report that I think has a lot of really great strategies in there.

assuming that you all will be hearing about some of them later.

But I add, is there anything you would want to add?

I'm going to go into details in my section.

So I want to hear more about like the actual planning process that we have in the city.

Okay, fair enough.

There is a reason why we invited you, Ab, so that'd be great.

Okay, so I do want to open it up to other panelists if you have questions or things that you want to chime in on.

But one thing I will, one other thing I do want to ask about is The, you know, the plan is guided, in order to accommodate growth, is guided by housing targets and jobs targets.

It feels like they might be shifting a little bit or, you know, like maybe that we aren't, we've overshot the growth targets that were projected before.

And so I wonder if you can talk a little bit about how we plan for growth when we, aren't necessarily certain about what that might look like.

I can talk a bit and let Jamie and Rose weigh in.

Typically, we have a growth target that's based on the trends in the region and that we think the share of the growth in the region that Seattle might be expected to hit given recent trends.

And like you were saying with the pandemic and other things, it's hard to predict what the trends might be.

But typically, the comp plan will look at three scenarios for growth.

One could be based on existing trends.

This could be the type of housing and jobs that we might see.

And we would look to see whether the infrastructure and the spending that we have are commensurate with that.

And then there could be one that's a higher growth scenario where we would say, if these trends change and if we have more housing and we have more jobs than we've had in the past, this could be a scenario.

And what would we need to get there?

the third scenario would be like a really book end idea that this is not growth.

This is a number of jobs and housing that we've never seen, but we're going to test in any case to see how sensitive it is to the types of infrastructure spending that we might need to do to accommodate that.

And then Usually the EIS, the environmental review piece is where these three scenarios for growth will be tested to see what kinds of impacts it has on the natural environment, on communities, on transportation.

And then the city looks at the impacts and then works with the community and with elected officials to say that this is where somewhere in the middle is where we think we might lag.

And if we go to the higher range, we know we would need to do this.

And if we are at the lower end, we would need to do that.

So it's a little bit of an iterative process that looks at the range of future options, looks at past trends, and then just tries to see all the possible scenarios that it could take.

And It's not a perfect science.

I don't know that we can adequately capture, but the idea is that it would at least capture a range.

And I know we will have a lot of conversation in the future about whether the comprehensive plan is planning for the right amount of housing and jobs in the next 20 years and what that should look like.

Absolutely.

I also wanted to, we are joined by the Executive Director of the Planning Commission, who is the amazing staff that supports our commission, Vanessa Murdoch, who is going to just add to that.

Thank you.

Thanks, Jamie.

I'll be very quick.

My name is Vanessa Murdoch.

I use she, her pronouns.

I am staff to the commission, as Jamie noted.

I will just add to the conversation, which has been so rich and fantastic, and I can't, I'm really looking forward to the rest of the presenters.

The Comprehensive Plan plans for a 20-year horizon, so plans out for 20 years.

Nobody could have predicted COVID was going to happen when the last comprehensive plan was adopted in 2016, which took several years to put into place.

It is not set in stone in amber.

It is a dynamic document.

It does do its best to anticipate what might happen.

The last comprehensive plan, as Radhika and Jamie and Council Member Morales all noted, did not anticipate the amount of housing growth that Seattle has experienced.

The comprehensive plan sets goals and policies that are pretty high level to guide city departments, city elected officials, and what do we do when COVID happens?

What do we do when we have outpaced our projected amount of residential growth?

by thousands within a time period that we were expected to have 20 years.

So I would like everybody to know that it is not set in stone.

It is, it's like, it sets forth what we hope to do and how we hope to do it.

to how we hope and plan to accommodate growth in the residential and employment areas, and then what services and support is needed to support that growth.

And we will need to adapt.

as we come along, as things happen that were unanticipated, and we can point back to the goals and policies in the comprehensive plan that are pretty high level and say, everybody should have access to healthy food.

Everybody should have access to open space.

Everybody should have access to a place to live.

Thank you, Vanessa.

And again, this is the high level vision, the dream we want for the city.

And within that, it's up to a lot of those individual smaller plans that Radhika was mentioning and Rose was mentioning to really figure out how do we do that.

So this is our opportunity to set that vision for the next 20 years.

That's great.

Thank you.

And thank you for coming on, Vanessa.

Appreciate you being here.

So this is a really helpful kind of table setting for the work that we'll be doing, the conversations that we'll be having here.

through this series.

And so I do want to move to the next panel from the American Institute of Architects to talk a little bit about what, like the nuts and bolts, what this means on the ground and talk about from your perspective as folks who are trying to build the things that we intend, how that looks and what we need to be thinking about.

So I'm going to ask Matt and Dylan to come on and keep us moving.

Okay, well thank you everybody.

It's good to be here to talk a little bit about what we're hoping to see, what we've been looking into these past couple years, what we'd like to see in this comp plan update.

So as Council Member Morales mentioned, my name is Dylan Glosecki.

I'm with the American Institute of Architects.

And my colleague here, Matt Hutchings, is also co-presenting with me.

And we'll be hitting on a couple of topics.

So there.

Be on a couple of topics where we've been spending time these past few years in anticipation of this comprehensive plan update.

So, the American Institute of Architects, Seattle chapter, we represent Seattle's architecture community.

We have a series of ongoing work we do to cover a range of issues beyond just building design.

We look into the quality of urban design and neighborhood fabric.

We look into housing policy, transportation projects and systems and how they affect the areas around them.

We look into at a broad level, big picture level, the buildings that are going in and being built across Seattle.

How do we make these more environmentally friendly for materials to energy use?

And then we also look at the codes, processes that go into creating these buildings and driving these buildings.

So we comment on things like state energy code.

It's pretty wonky.

So there's a range of areas of interest and topics that we cover.

But today, we're going to talk a little bit about livable neighborhoods and housing.

And so we'll get into that a little bit.

So bear with me.

So, again, a major focus of our past year or two and something that we're very curious to advocate for during this comprehensive plan update is working on building a network of livable neighborhoods, and I'll describe a little bit about what that may look like.

So we envision this network of livable neighborhoods to be a series of communities across Seattle.

So, all Seattle's neighborhoods connected by transit.

designed in a way to allow folks access by walking or rolling to neighborhood stores, neighborhood services, with the intent of providing across Seattle equitable access to daily needs and services.

And to get there, there's no set playbook for this, but we have some thoughts as to where we might start.

And it really starts, I think, with looking at What do we have now?

Where are our current neighborhoods, our current nodes of stores and services?

And identifying those locations and then looking at what's missing.

How can we support the growth of services, amenities, cultural assets that are maybe missing from certain neighborhoods?

And how can we protect existing ones?

And then looking at, do we need to create new areas, new little small neighborhood centers to ensure we have this equitable network of access across the city?

So we'll dig a little bit more into this, start getting into the maps here.

So in terms of how Seattle's grown the past 20 years, previous comp plans have revolved around this idea of an urban village growth strategy, which basically means that we've identified roughly 30 areas in our city, 30 big neighborhoods in our city, where we focus most of our housing and job growth.

These neighborhoods have identified where we focused our transit connections as well.

So we've expanded our transit network significantly in the past 20 years with the intent of connecting these roughly 30 node, 30 neighborhoods across the city to each other, to downtown.

And with the idea that by concentrating and focusing growth in these set areas, we create density and we enable a more livable city and we reduce our carbon footprint because we reduce automobile reliance.

And this has been really successful in a lot of ways.

But it's also presented a series of challenges that we're all feeling at the moment.

Some of these successes, we have created a connection or a network of walkable neighborhoods with many services.

We've accommodated significant housing and job increases.

And we've created neighborhoods that are connected to transit.

And if you can afford to live there, it's great.

The issue, as we all know, is that we're dealing with significant affordability issues, we're dealing with displacement, and we're looking at inequitable access to these goods and services.

Many folks that don't live in these neighborhood centers have to drive to get in to access.

So many residents are kind of left out of this sort of convenient walkable access to goods and services with this growth strategy.

So again, we're getting a little wonky here, but if we look at Again, these neighborhoods, neighborhood centers, in dark blue and light blue, these are, again, the roughly 30 areas of concentrated growth for housing and jobs the past 20 years.

And if you look at them in comparison to where our areas of kind of detached homes are, which is the yellow, we have a huge swath of Seattle that is It only allows for detached homes and residential.

It does not allow for neighborhood services or corner stores, dry cleaners.

It doesn't allow for these sort of daily needs and services that we need access to.

So many of these areas that you see in yellow, they lack walkable access to daily needs and services.

So there's kind of an equitable component there and inability to reliance on a car and to access your daily needs and services.

And basically, of the area in Seattle where we can build residential, where we can build homes, of that area, three quarters of it, 75% is devoted to detached homes, to areas where we can only build pretty low density housing and we're not allowed to build or add in corner stores or needs services.

Additionally, only 5% of Seattle's housing growth has occurred in these areas.

Again, most of our growth has occurred in these areas in blue, in these neighborhoods, in these urban villages.

And so we have a huge swath of land that has very little growth in it and that does not allow services to, doesn't allow for commercial services.

And so we're basically locking in car dependents for a huge swath of Seattle.

And our curiosity in looking at livable neighborhoods is how do we look to get beyond that color dependence?

How can we rethink how we're approaching this growth?

And so we want to look at, so we look at this idea of frequent transit network, you know, connecting these neighborhoods via bus, via light rail, by streetcar.

And in 2015, when Seattle Levy was passed with the goal of providing 70% of Seattle households with 10-minute, access to 10-minute buses, buses coming every 10 minutes, the idea that with it, you can walk to, a bus stop, 10 minute walk, we get you access to a bus that comes every 10 minutes throughout the day.

And that goal, we hit that goal in 2019, which is pretty, it's very quick and it's inspiring to see what we can do in such a short amount of time.

As you can see from this map, again, we have lots of areas of gray, so not all of Seattle is covered.

Most of these urban villages and centers were covered.

But our areas of detached homes, which you see mostly in gray, are still left out of this mix.

And so the question again remains, how do we provide access to daily needs and services to neighborhoods across Seattle?

And one way is, well, we expand our bus network, our frequent transit network, so we provide bus service to all these neighborhoods, one option, and one we should pursue.

is we bring these services, we bring these corner stores, we bring these cafes to the neighborhoods.

We allow these neighborhoods to have a small amount of commercial development at very intentional locations.

And I think a combination of those two things is an appropriate route to go.

So with that in mind, we look at, well, That's a fine idea, but isn't that gonna disrupt our entire fabric?

And honestly, we have a lot of nodes where this already happens.

We have a lot of areas that don't necessarily allow for commercial, new commercial buildings, new corner stores, new cafes, but they used to, and so they remain.

And so we have a whole slew of very small scale neighborhood centers throughout Seattle.

outside of these urban villages and centers, outside of the areas that have had all this focus growth, that live on and that serve these areas that attach to single family homes.

And we have a start of these across the city.

There's 80 plus of these throughout the city.

And there's an opportunity here to build out this livable network of neighborhoods building on this urban village growth strategy that has worked and now kind of reached its capacity, as we noted, a series of issues with displacement, with affordability.

We're looking to expand that access to basically fill in the in-between, in between these urban villages and centers.

And with the idea of creating gets to this 15-minute city idea of creating a whole network across the city that allows access to daily meeting services within a 15-minute walk or roll.

And these services cover everything from work, food, health.

I'm talking about education, cultural assets, you know, leisure.

Everything that, most things that you need in your day-to-day.

And so as we look at these two kind of sets of neighborhoods together, we'll look at our urban villages and centers where we've had our, you know, again, most of our growth the past 20 years.

And then we look at the smaller sort of gray dots on this map, our existing small-scale neighborhood centers, we start to see that While we don't have a complete number of neighborhoods across our city, we have a start at it.

And we have a lot of nodes that at least have a cafe, or at least have maybe a dry cleaners, or a daycare, that have some element of your daily needs and services that can be built upon, that give you a start, that are not going to completely disrupt a neighborhood, but are rather just going to further an existing node in a neighborhood.

it would seem that the city's role would be to identify these locations and bring them into this growth strategy so that we're not growing in only 30 areas across the city and concentrating our growth in these areas and furthering unaffordability and displacement issues.

But we're saying, OK, we're going to grow in these 30 areas some more.

But we're also going to bring in a series of small-scale nodes across the city have a little bit of growth there, but really, we're going to look at what do these neighborhood centers need to adequately serve the surrounding residents?

And how can we facilitate, say, adding a small grocery store?

How can we facilitate adding a daycare?

What sort of policy can go into place to curate that?

I think I'm running out of time here, so I'm going to speed through these last couple slides very quickly and let Matt talk about housing.

But one example of a neighborhood center would be kind of on the south end, South Beacon Hill.

And just showing a little bit about what this might look like, what this looks like.

Just a few images of the businesses that are here.

A small-scale grocery store, dry cleaners, cafe.

And then again, just a couple examples from across the city of what we're talking about when we talk about these small scale neighborhood centers.

And just to recap before I hand it off to Matt, this idea of the network of livable neighborhoods, The city's role is to really strengthen its existing network.

It does exist, strengthen and expand it.

And the ask of citizens of residence is to speak up.

for what your neighborhood needs.

Help the city locate your neighborhood center and tell the city what your neighborhood needs to provide access to your daily needs and services.

And community engagement is a key pillar of this whole plan and is essential to success.

And it depends on residents of the city speaking up and talking and letting the city know what it is that they need in their neighborhoods.

I'm gonna hand it off to Matt there.

All right, great.

Yeah, Dylan, you want to just keep the slides going there on your screen?

Okay, great.

All right, so, you know, we talked a little bit about growth targets.

This, the kind of the growth target of like just keeping things as affordable as they currently are is that we need about 152,000 new homes in the next 20 years.

That's equivalent, that's more than we have single family lots in the entire city.

We only have about 128,000.

So we're talking about doubling the density of a good portion of the city to make make space for all the people that we expect to come to Seattle.

And that's and I think you can think about that as a huge opportunity.

We are going to be evolving as we grow.

And the question is how do we do that.

How do we make room for all this new housing and use that as the opportunity to kind of shape the city that we're that we want to live in.

Next slide.

So some of the things that we've done in the past and are kind of an opportunity thus far are backyard cottages.

In 2019, we kind of doubled the number of cottages that could be on site, accessory dwelling units.

And in the last three years, the number of backyard cottages, the rate is tripled.

So we're now building almost, I think by next year, we'll be building a thousand new accessory dwelling units a year.

main growth drivers or main provider for new houses in Seattle.

Next slide.

We certainly do a lot of townhouses.

We also instituted this residential small lot.

So there are other modes where they're not just detached houses.

There's also other ways of kind of subdividing a lot and adding more households.

Go to the next slide.

And we also have this mode where we've got kind of big buildings.

This is Africatown Plaza, which, you know, we might talk about later if we have a little bit more time, but I think people are familiar with these kind of big apartment buildings.

Next slide.

What you see here is that we're building a lot of small houses.

We're building a lot of kind of like big apartment buildings, but there's kind of a big gap.

And so if we go to the next slide, what we see are cottage clusters, garden apartments, infill housing, infill apartment buildings.

There's a lot of opportunity in all these neighborhoods for a kind of a diversity of new housing types and mixes that all kind of will respond to or can be built on the parcels that we have, can respond to the neighborhood context, and I think are going to be great for affordability and also just the cultural vibrancy of these neighborhoods.

Next slide.

Things like fourplexes.

This is a fourplex.

It doesn't feel that much bigger than a single-family house.

It isn't.

Next slide.

Cottage clusters where we have, you know, this is actually 12 units on two single-family parcels.

This is possible under code today, but the amount of area that we can actually build this in the city is very, very small.

It's only a tiny percentage of lots today where we can build at this density.

Next slide.

Infill housing, again, not much land is allowed for infill kind of apartment buildings.

Next slide.

And then garden apartments, you know, three-story sixplexes are currently nearly illegal and economically infeasible.

But if we had more land that was zoned for these kinds of buildings, we would see a lot more of them.

Next slide.

And just like, here's a little bit of that streetscape that we might expect if we were to allow for more six pluses.

Next slide.

And then I wanted to touch, I don't have much time, but I want to talk to all the different opportunities for homeownership and for, you know, sort of a stable occupation of neighborhoods, everything from community land trust to reforming condo laws, adding more co-housing, doing apartments at a kind of a lease to own model, which some developers are doing.

And then this idea of housing swap.

We have lots of people who have land but don't have the wherewithal to do kind of a development.

But if we can trade basically the land for a place, a new apartment and a new building, we can actually make it a win-win situation.

Next slide.

One of the big priorities for the AIA is making any new building as green as it can possibly be.

And here you can think we want to be building where people don't need to drive, where we're building with the least carbon, where we are using the least amount of energy to inhabit, and that it lasts for a long, long time.

Next slide.

Here you can just see this is a little diagram of the distance of your carbon footprint if you live in Lower Queen Anne.

It's about a third of your carbon footprint if you live in Maple Valley.

All of that is time spent in cars, commuting basically to every destination.

All the more reason that we should be supporting infill housing in walkable neighborhoods.

Next slide.

And some of those other things that make buildings more green, thinking about net zero energy, where the buildings produce as much energy as they use.

Passive house, where we're where we're using very, very little energy to heat and cool buildings, where we're using net zero carbon, where we're actually considering how we build these buildings to use the least amount of carbon, and living buildings that are really closed loops where you don't add any energy.

They take care of their own stormwater.

They take care of their own rainwater or drinking water.

Really, really sophisticated sustainability strategies.

And being able to do this at every scale every new building ensures that we have a growth or the growth moving forward is really oriented towards climate change.

Last slide.

So I think the big question is what is the Seattle that you want to live in.

I don't think that we we can't bury our heads in the sand.

We have lots of massive challenges ahead.

But the comp plan and this process is an opportunity to Think about the future and envision what kind of city you'd like to be in.

That's it.

Thanks.

Okay, great.

Thank you so much.

Very exciting.

Matt, I have a question for you.

Sure.

So I want to ask you about the slide that you showed with different ways to finance or, you know, make housing acquisition more financially feasible.

You know, Seattle is so expensive.

And we really risk displacement of local businesses, displacement of organizations that could be providing services to our neighborhood.

So my office is working on the idea of creating an acquisition fund for both small scale commercial and for housing so that folks can stay rooted in community.

So that's one idea.

I would love for you to spend a little bit of time talking about that slide that you had and what some of the other ideas are.

But if you don't mind, I got a message from Vanessa.

She wanted to address, I think there's questions about what the urban village is.

And so I'm gonna let her answer that question first and then ask you to talk a little bit about that slide.

Vanessa, please go ahead.

Thank you so much.

So the urban village, Urban villages are something that has been determined or put forward by like 20 years ago.

And really what they are are places where there are housing and employment and commercial uses And those places that are called and determined to be urban villages are where the city has put, has determined the most amount of housing and employment should be.

So I just want to, highlight that a little bit because urban villages, not everybody knows what an urban village is or if they're in one or if they're out of one.

Urban villages are part of Seattle's growth strategy of concentrating housing and where people can work in certain areas.

That's it.

Just wanted to clarify that.

OK.

Yeah.

Thank you.

OK, this is the slide you wanted to touch back on.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

So I have community land trusts, condos, co-ops, co-housing, all those C words.

They all kind of operate differently, but there are different ways to manage and kind of bite size ownership.

You know, our detached houses, they're running, I don't know, the average house cost is, what, $800,000 today or more.

If you can buy a flat in a building, in a condo or a co-op, then certainly you're able to subdivide the price of the land.

a more affordable way of ownership.

We just don't have enough opportunities for those sorts of buildings to be designed and built.

They tend to be, tend to either be sort of high-rise towers, or yeah, just generally, or super rare.

Community land trusts, there are several that operate in Seattle.

A lot of them basically are providing kind of affordable housing by, at least the ones that I've worked with, by doing kind of a deed restriction where they're developing the land, they're providing the housing, and then they're essentially selling it at a subsidized, at a lower rate, and then kind of locking in its affordability.

So when that resident goes to sell this land that is, or sell their sort of their home that is in this land trust, the land trust still controls it and says that it has to be permanently affordable.

So this is a way for communities to band together, control some land and the housing they're in, and guarantee that it's going to maintain its affordability over time.

So it's limited by the deed, and it follows it regardless of who owns it.

So that's a great model.

We're doing some work like that out in the Meadow.

and I think there's plenty in Seattle.

I wish there were a lot more.

And then one other idea, this lease to own, there is a, we know of one project, and hopefully this happens more, where it starts as an apartment building, and then the developer is actually, you know, is holding it, and then as the people, the residents, sort of like, sort of learn more about ownership, they kind of like, you know, their lease, their rent kind of goes into kind of escrow, and eventually they qualify to own their own unit.

And so this kind of like transition, this kind of support is something that I hope that we'll see a lot more of.

It's kind of a long term solution that would, I think, yeah, benefit a ton of people.

Yeah, I think we've we've got lots of creative ideas.

The question is, you know, how do we put the mechanisms in place to allow for these sorts of things to happen.

You know, I'm hearing, particularly from elders elder homeowners about you know, needing support, converting their home into a duplex, for example, so that they can lease part of it and stay in their home and not get pushed out.

I'm sure we've all heard stories about people, you know, offering cash and encouraging particularly seniors to sell their homes.

And it's really important that we put in place measures to help them stay in their home.

And some of these ideas are things that I think we could certainly consider and understand better how we could facilitate I want to ask one more question.

I think we might need to be transitioning, but I think it was slide six where you're talking about, or Dylan was talking about neighborhood centers and we've got these smaller commercial areas throughout the city.

I've got two within a half mile or so from my home, but they're pretty sleepy.

there's potential uh it feels like there's potential um to expand them to add a few more storefronts that could really make them kind of thriving areas and I'm wondering how we Dylan you talked about facilitating services so if we're looking for a particular kind of service to fill a gap in the neighborhood I think that's one question uh and an important one but I'm also just wondering how do we What do we need to do to expand these existing centers that are only there because of a prior allowable use that may no longer be allowed?

Yeah, a tricky question and a yeah it can kind of be a political hot topic as well, but honestly The idea of areas of the city, of zones that only allow for kind of single use, you know, kind of detached homes is a relatively new idea that was introduced roughly in the middle of the century, about the 50s.

Traditionally, cities have been built around these neighborhoods where you have a mix of housing and services, housing and grocery stores, so that you're, you know, mixed together, it's easy to access.

And honestly, we kind of need to look back into our roots as to how cities were and towns small towns were originally built and designed, which was around people walking from their homes to their jobs to their grocery stores.

to their daycares, you know?

And that's what we need to get back to.

And so by having, identifying where these, you know, these small scale nodes are, like you said, they're pretty sleepy, may only have a cafe, or maybe it's just a daycare and a restaurant.

There's a start to something there.

And we need to build off of the energy that currently exists there and look at the areas around and say, hey, you know, maybe these, you know, this block around this existing center, maybe we need to rethink that and turn that into a mixed use area.

small portion in our huge swath of, you know, kind of our detached home areas.

But look at expanding these small nodes just a little bit so they can really sing and provide access to a full array of daily needs and services.

And so I think it really it is looking at kind of It gets wonky, but it's looking at our zoning and also looking at how we define our neighborhood residential.

Is that only housing?

Or can we have a certain amount, can we have daycares, small grocery stores, can we have corner stores?

I think that's kind of the route we need to go.

Well, I think you're exactly right.

What we need to do is get back to designing around people so that we can talk about what people need and what we need to see in our neighborhoods for neighbors.

Well, thank you for sharing this great slide presentation.

I think I will be perusing that quite a bit as we continue this conversation.

I'm going to move us on to Ab, who's been very patient, from Puget Sound SAGE.

If you don't know, Puget Sound SAGE has played a critical role in supporting community understanding of these processes.

They've got the Community Leadership Institute, a community real estate stewardship program that really helps neighbors engage and understand what these processes are and why they're important.

So we asked Ab to join us today to talk about how community members can engage with the processes and really how to think critically about these conversations when you're involved over the next couple of years in the discussions about how you want your neighborhoods to change and grow.

So Ab, I'm going to hand it over to you.

Thank you, Council Member Morales.

Hi, everyone.

Good afternoon again.

My name is Abwenare.

I'm with Puget Sound SAGE.

Seattle has been home for me for only two and a half years.

But I come here as a child and grandchild of strong-willed immigrant women who came here from the Philippines with hopes and dreams and have called Seattle home for many decades.

I also arrived here with my stories and experiences as an immigrant and low-income worker organizer in Los Angeles and carry with me tools and knowledge from my time learning about urban planning and public policy development in New York City.

And now I'm part of the equitable development team at Puget Sound City.

I first read the Graham Street Community Driven Neighborhood Vision in 2019. This is a community report published by Puget Sound Sage.

I remember reading it, feeling excited and inspired, and I knew then that I wanted to be part of making the neighborhood vision real.

Luckily, SAGE was looking for someone to steward its equitable development program.

So yeah, I saw myself in that community vision as a community builder, community weaver, as a queer Pinay American urban planning practitioner, and a community collaborator.

So I think that's what community planning should feel like.

It must feel real, personal, tangible, and actionable to people.

It must feel empowering for our communities to fully engage in.

At Puget Sound SAGE, we adopted a just transition framework for our strategy that centers equity in our work.

Our long-term vision is to organize, build capacity, develop community leaders, transform policy, and create community-controlled infrastructure with Black, Indigenous, people of color, workers, and families to transition into a living economy where all people can thrive.

Simply put, it's a set of strategies that combine stopping the bad and undoing the harm while actively imagining and creating the new for the future that we want to live in.

So what does building a more equitable city mean and look like?

For myself, it means censoring the ones who have been impacted by power imbalances in public policy, planning, um, planning and developments and market forces in the name of city growth.

Uh, this means understanding, uh, the legacy and impact of exclusionary planning and land use regulations that determined who gets to have homes, who has access to reliable transportation to good jobs, who gets to build family and community wealth, uh, community, driven planning and participatory public policy development is to demystify the planning practice, the planning processes through real democratic processes and liberatory practices.

That looks like planning and policy development that is rooted in community self-determination.

and creating new systems of care economies.

As we know, the COVID pandemic exposed what we have known for a long time, that the systems in place, that these inequities being experienced by our communities have been by design to not make them thrive.

Participatory processes looks into prioritizing collaboration.

beyond just simple community input.

We can all change and shape how our city grows by building the capacity of communities to participate and co-create a shared vision, identify and test solutions, harness their own power to make these visions real in their neighborhoods.

Creating an equitable city means a planning process that is transformational as opposed to just being transactional.

I don't take pleasure in reading 300-page study plans, but I'm very invested and interested to know how it will transform the lives of people.

Is it making our lives for the better?

Will 100,000 affordable housing units be enough to create a stable, thriving, sustainable city?

Is concentrating investments in downtown going to uplift neighborhood commercial corridors?

How does acquiring a few small surplus properties ensure communities will be able to stay once a new light realization comes?

How do we grow our city and take care of our community with climate resilience in mind?

So these are some of the questions that we ask ourselves as we work with our community in building shared visions and doing community-driven development.

For SAGE, community stewardship of land is our solution to anti-displacement.

This means community control of infrastructure and resources to create an equitable city.

Community stewardship of land transforms local land and housing from commodities into shared resources for community prosperity.

This is a way of thinking about land use that centers people and local communities instead of simply just having profit and speculative activities.

Uh, in practice, um, there have already been amazing examples on the ground.

Um, you know, we, I believe it was like, uh, just over a little year ago, we had story participatory budgeting, um, with our, uh, our collaborators, uh, solidarity budget.

Uh, I believe the participatory budgeting is community planning and policy development and action.

We have the Equitable Development Initiative and Green New Deal in the city, which are policies developed from community and resource through public investments.

And as I mentioned earlier, there's also the Graham Street Community Driven Neighborhood Vision.

The Graham Street Community Action Team formed to both envision the future of the neighborhood And also to start building the capacity and infrastructure needed to make the vision a reality.

And the Grand Street Cat has been doing that by planning early, building their capacity to take land out of the speculative market, and to develop their own community capacities to be long-term stewards and a future light rail station.

With the Community Action Team, we are investing in organizing and building community power, centering leadership of people of color, building on existing community assets, planning for policy and systems change to make the vision real, and also planning for self-reliance and community resilience.

And so we need more of these programs, and we need to also think about how we're directing public resources to these communities that are building their capacity to do long-term community stewardship of land work.

I guess I'll just wrap up by just saying that, you know, we see the comprehensive plan as the guiding document to how the city should grow.

But I think people must be centered in the values that drive that guiding document.

And alongside that, you know, we must also think of city budgets as moral documents that must be developed and driven by community as well, because If the comp plan guides where investment should go, then the budget should be reflecting on that as well.

And I will turn it back to Council Member Morales.

Thank you so much.

This is great.

I have two questions and then if others on the panel want to pose any questions, please raise your hand and I'm happy to call on you.

Can you talk about what capacity building means?

and how do you do it?

I know how SAGE does it, and I think it's critically important, the work that you do to help folks understand, but can you just talk a little bit more about what it means to build capacity and how you work on that?

I'll just use Grand Street as an example of how we're building capacity of community partners to do long-term planning and development work.

Part of our work is to do leadership development, engage in how community planning happens through our community real estate stewardship learning circle.

We're also building power through relational organizing.

You know, over the past two and a half years, I spent a lot of time just getting to know who the people are, what their history is, like what their stories are, what their hopes and vision for the future.

And we work from there.

And we identify what's missing, what resources are not available to us, and how do we make those resources real to these folks.

You know the equitable development initiative is an example of a community resource that came out of community partners identifying the need for affordable housing.

a funding source, a capacity building source to help them be community developers and community stewards.

And so a lot of our community organizing work is really tapping into the existing resources and that is the community.

They are experts in how neighborhood development is.

And so we're bringing in all of these talents and stories and looking and the vision and identifying, like, how do we leverage accessing resources?

How do we make local governments see this vision and help us make it real?

Thank you.

And then, because so much of this is about community engagement, can you talk a little bit about what communities need in order to authentically engage in these participatory processes?

You got to meet them where they're at.

That's organizing 101. We can create surveys, but if we're not talking to them directly, then we're not getting to the heart of what these communities really need.

Resourcing communities is very important.

They already have a lot of anchor institutions in Seattle with community-based organizations.

have strong existing relationships.

They know their community.

So the role of government is to ensure that they have the resources they need so that they can talk to their people, so that they can come to the table, so that they can participate.

And that could look like directly providing funding so that they can organize their community, so that they can host their own listening sessions, identifying different methodologies or technical resources so that they can engage in different ways and really making the process transparent, accessible, so that they can really see themselves as actors in the process and as real collaborators and not just checking off a box or identifying where the next playground should be, but really being part of the planning and the activation and realizing of the vision.

Yeah.

Great, thank you so much.

If you haven't worked with Puget Sound SAGE before, I would encourage folks to check them out.

There's so much really critical community engagement work that they do, and that has proven really helpful to me and my work over the last several years, and especially now in this position where there are policymaking opportunities that have direct impact on communities.

So thanks for being here, Ab, and for sharing your expertise with us.

I don't see any questions from others.

So I really want to thank everybody for being here.

I want to run through just a few of the things that I heard today, things that I think are worth keeping at the forefront of our thought process as we move through this conversation.

So, the planning commission is really focused on priorities, principled priorities as we move through the comp plan around racial equity, around resilience and sustainability.

A reminder that the comp plan allows for the roadmap, as Matt said, or it's the vision for how we could be doing things.

And then zoning is really the more sort of regulatory implementation of what that vision looks like.

And that's a conversation that comes later and after.

I was interested to hear Dylan mention that there's still, it looks like 30% of the city that still is without a 10 minute access to regular transit services.

Based on the map that Dylan showed, it looks like that's really along the waterfront.

So this might perhaps not be an equity issue per se, but it is still a really important issue when it comes to our climate goals.

and trying to reduce carbon emissions in the city.

So how we expand our transit access, how we expand our network so that all parts of the city can have that sort of frequency and reliability of transit is really important for us to think about too.

We've said many times it's important to keep in mind that we're designing for people.

That really has to be front and center and particularly for folks in D2, you know, even District 1 up in North Seattle, parts of West Seattle that have historically not been at the table when we're having these conversations.

It's important to make sure that we are actively working to include the voices of renters, of low income people, of people of color, of folks who have typically been excluded from these really important policymaking decisions for the city.

And then something Ab said that I think is really so important for us to remember, which is that community planning should feel real and personal and tangible and actionable.

That's how we empower people to help them understand what these processes are, and help them understand how they can impact the decisions that are being made so that they can drive how their communities change and grow over time.

So I want to thank all of our panelists again for being here, for sharing your wisdom and your expertise.

If folks have comments, questions, suggestions for other topics that you'd like to learn about, you can go to my website, my council website, send us an email, send us a note about what you're interested in hearing about, and we will be happy to include that as we're planning for future segments.

Our next discussion is going to be Thursday, April 14th at 9 30. It's going to be focused on community development and building equitable neighborhoods, particularly that that conversation will particularly include a discussion around social housing, which is something that we are working on in my office as well.

I learned about that a little bit last year when I went to visit our sister city in France, Nantes, and I'm excited that we'll be joined at the next session by Deputy Mayor Pierre Emmanuel Marais.

from Nantes.

There is a French delegation coming here in the next couple weeks to learn about lots of things in Seattle.

We will also be joined at that discussion by Isabel Richard, who's the, it's probably Richard, Vice President of Nantes University, Minneapolis City Council Member Jeremiah Eliason, and Chicago alderman Carlos Ramirez Rosa.

So I'm really looking forward to that conversation and hope you will join us there.

And then finally if you're interested in watching this segment again or sharing it with folks you can find a link to this on my city council website.

We'll be archiving these conversations there and you can go there and make whatever comments you like.

So I just want to say thank you again to everybody for being here.

This is a really important conversation that we are just getting started.

We'll have more conversations to come, and please make sure that you are engaging with us because this is meant to be a discussion so folks can learn and understand the processes that we are embarking on.

Thanks so much for being here, everybody.

Have a great afternoon.