The Sound Transit board voted, and now the funding gap for Ballard Light Rail is official. A Seattle City Council member also put out a blog post saying he’s going to keep fighting — so the question isn’t whether this is a crisis anymore. It’s what’s left to fight with. This is Seattle Politics and Urbanism Daily. Today: what the Ballard loss means now that it’s been formalized, whether the city’s affordability fees survive the push to speed up permitting, and a South Park school community making the district’s “whatever it takes” language very, very specific. And I want to know what lever a council member actually has left after the board votes. A blog post is not a lever. Yeah. That’s the question, and we’re going to keep pulling on it. Here's Dan Strauss at Seattle City Council Blog:
Sound Transit approved a plan last night to address their long-term budget shortfalls. As part of that plan, the Board of Directors fully funded building the Ballard Link extension from SODO to Seattle Center, but did not identify funding to construct light rail from Seattle Center to Ballard.
Friday we were waiting for the vote. Now it’s done — Ballard has a date and a design, but no construction funding. And the council blog post from last night says it straight: “funding has not been identified.” That’s the official language now, not our spin. And notice who’s writing that blog post — a Seattle City Council member, not a South King County council member. Ballard gets the public vow to keep fighting. Boeing Access Road gets a line in a portfolio adjustment document. That’s political weight, and it’s not subtle. The post says he “pushed every lever I had” — and he got two out of three: date, design, but not construction funding. So what lever is actually left after the board votes? I’m not being cute. I really want the mechanism. The post calls it “not the end of the line” — but the line literally stops at Seattle Center. At some point the metaphor starts doing the job for you. Seattle’s been through years of comp plan fights, and now the rezoning is actually happening. But a map change and a home getting built are two very different things. So what has to go right before any of this turns into real housing? Right, and that gap between announcement and ribbon-cutting can stretch for years. Seattle has been working through a multi-phase zoning process: Phase 1 was adopted by Council late last year, and Phase 2 — the Centers and Corridors package covering 30 new Neighborhood Centers, expanded Urban Centers, and frequent transit corridors — was transmitted to Council in late January and is still moving through a Select Committee as of this spring. So the zoning permission itself isn’t even fully locked in yet. And even once it is, per reporting in the Seattle Times, the market is still running into steep borrowing costs and expensive construction materials, which means a lot of developers are sitting on their hands even where the zoning already allows more homes. Then there’s the chokepoint that’s already caused real damage: legal appeals. Per The Urbanist, recent appeals tied up pending citywide zoning changes for months, and even though those appeals were ultimately ruled invalid, the delay was real — which is why Council Member Eddie Lin is now moving to overhaul Seattle’s land use appeals process to bring it in line with limits the state legislature has already put in place elsewhere. And then there’s the question of how generous the upzones actually are — OPCD’s January maps drew criticism for trimming corridor upzones compared with earlier drafts, which matters because tighter zoning envelopes mean fewer projects pencil out financially. So if the appeals loophole gets closed, does that actually unclog the pipeline in a meaningful way, or is the financing problem just a bigger wall that policy can’t really move? Closing the appeals loophole helps at the margins — it knocks out a delay tactic that shouldn’t exist in the first place — but the financing environment is a structural ceiling that zoning alone can’t lift. What I’d watch is whether Mayor Wilson’s “Taller Denser Faster” initiative, which is still being fleshed out and could run into 2028 per The Urbanist, pairs the density increases with any permitting speed or fee reforms that improve the economics for smaller builders who might actually move faster than big developers when rates ease. Ryan Donohue, writing in The Urbanist:
That matters, because MHA is now in the crosshairs. A coalition of nearly 30 developers calling itself the Seattle Housing Roundtable is asking the city to reduce MHA fees by 90% this year, tapering to a reduction of 75% over three years, with the goal of permanent reform.
Ryan Donohue’s op-ed in The Urbanist landed May 30, and the timing is not subtle. The argument is basically: don’t gut MHA fees to juice permitting speed, because those fees helped build Becaley’s home on Capitol Hill. Habitat for Humanity Capitol View. Ribbon cut. Real units, funded by the program now on the table. Here’s the trap, though. The rezoning step-back we’ve been watching all week is asking what has to go right before upzones actually produce housing. And one of the answers people keep floating is: cut the fees so the math pencils out for developers. You do that, you get more units — and fewer of them are affordable. Somebody has to say plainly who loses in that trade, because it’s not a technicality. And now layer in the Ballard Link vote. The board passed the resolution, the funding gap is official, and the units that were supposed to cluster near that transit are already upzoned under HB 1110. So now it’s transit unfunded, fees possibly slashed, and the affordability math getting worse. The density-near-transit promise is losing pieces from both ends at once. Becaley drove buses, did sweat equity, and still needed MHA to close the gap. That’s not an edge case — that’s who the program is for. If the city decides the fee is the obstacle to unlocking market-rate production, they should at least be honest enough to say: we’re choosing speed over Becaley. Here's Torin Record-Sand at West Seattle Blog:
More than a week after the originally planned end of Seattle Public Schools superintendent Ben Shuldiner‘s“community engagement” tour, he met with members of the South Park community Wednesday night. The closest his tour had come to South Park previously was his West Seattle Elementary stop in early April (WSB coverage here).
West Seattle Blog caught SPS superintendent Shuldiner at a South Park community meeting last week, and the headline phrase was “whatever it takes” — a direct promise to a neighborhood that has every reason to be skeptical of district promises. South Park isn’t an abstraction in the SPS closure math; it’s a specific community, and now it has a specific public commitment on record. South Park is exactly the kind of neighborhood that ends up holding the bag when a district says “everything’s on the table” — lower-income, less organized political capital than, say, a Ballard PTA. “Whatever it takes” is a nice thing to say at a community meeting. What it takes is money the district doesn’t have a plan to find. Worth watching whether “whatever it takes” ages the same way Shuldiner’s earlier “everything on the table” framing did — that language showed up in late May as a signal of openness, and now it’s attached to a community that’s directly asking which schools survive. West Seattle Blog is the outlet keeping tabs on whether the follow-through matches the meeting room. From Catalina Gaitán at The Seattle Times:
Mayor Katie Wilson directed the city’s Transportation Department on Wednesday to replace the planters with “temporary traffic calming measures” while her office looks into permanent solutions. Meanwhile, two City Council members are working on a bill that would allow transportation officials to close streets, if the police chief recommends doing so to prevent gun violence and other crime.
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That’s Seattle Politics and Urbanism Daily for today. This is a Lantern Podcast.