Sound Transit just became the most-used light rail system in the country — and in the same week, it buried Ballard under a seven-to-nine-billion-dollar funding gap. This is Seattle Politics and Urbanism Daily. Today: the Comp Plan is law, HB 1110 compliance is on the books, and Doug Trumm at The Urbanist has the ridership crown. Three wins. Let's go find the receipts. Finally. We spent all week cataloguing process — today we get a number. Fourteen thousand two hundred ninety affordable units, 2020 to 2024. RentCafe flags it as the highest of any metro. That's the honest win, Devin. Start there before you sharpen the knife. Oh, I'm starting there. Then I'm asking who actually got into those units. So the metro logged 14,290 affordable apartments between 2020 and 2024. The step-back on MHA also says the mechanism is — quote — under serious stress. Right, and here's my cross-examination: how much of that came from MHA fees versus pipelines that were already there? Because HB 1110 inherits whatever's cracking under that hood. Fair. The fee mechanism leans on a hot market. When the market softens, the fees soften, and you're crediting HB 1110 with a trajectory built in different weather. And the trains are full. Most-used in the country, thanks to the Crosslake extension — meanwhile the Neighborhood Residential fights got punted to Phase 2 in 2026. Look at the One Seattle table of contents. Affordable housing bonus up front, then a whole back half on parking, trees, and design standards. That back half is Phase 2. The bonuses are adopted, though — affordable housing bonus, stacked flat bonus, they're in the record. The October 2024 NR document is the enacted compliance vehicle. Enacted and in court. Same week. That's the part I keep circling. The Court of Appeals reopened the environmental review — so the NR zoning document is on the books and in litigation at the same time. Which makes the SoDo stadium appeal more than a land-use spat. A publicly created authority is in court over the housing rules the city just voted through, on land that's one stop from downtown. It's a stress test of whether the city can hold its own zoning framework together. Pass everything, then defend everything. And on the trains — when a system's number one in the country, the appointed board has to own a 2050s Ballard timeline. The Cruickshank ballot push for board reform suddenly looks less like a niche gripe. Hard to call it fringe when you're running the most-used light rail in America. The system works when it runs. That's the whole argument. So fix who's deciding when it runs. The week started with everything shifting — courts, funding. It ends with a milestone sitting on top of all of it. The fight has moved from passing things to keeping them standing. Fourteen thousand units built, mechanism under stress, trains full, Ballard in 2050. Quite the trophy case. From the source:
HB 1110 requires many cities in the state to allow a broader range of housing types in areas that have allowed predominantly detached homes. In Seattle, these requirements would apply in areas zoned Neighborhood Residential (NR) or Residential Small Lot (RSL).
So here's the enacted framework in black and white — HB 1110, the middle housing bill, requires Seattle to allow at least six of nine housing types on residential lots, four units everywhere, six within a quarter mile of a major transit stop. The October 2024 update for the NR and RSL zones is the compliance vehicle, and it's now law inside the Comp Plan. Read the fine print, though. The bill lets cities delay implementation in areas 'deemed at risk of displacement.' That's the trapdoor. Six units near transit sounds great until 'displacement risk' becomes the new excuse for slow-walking the neighborhoods that already need it most. And the deadline in the document is June 30, 2025. We're a year past that, sitting here in June 2026, and the Court of Appeals just reopened the environmental review on the same plan that's supposed to carry this. The state set a clock; the courts get to argue about it. Here's what I keep coming back to — the restriction on off-street parking requirements and the streamlined design review. Those are right there in the state mandate. So when Phase 2 in 2026 dresses up parking and 'design standards' as open questions, the state already answered that part. Right. The flexibility's in displacement, not in whether you have to do it at all. Though watch how fast 'tailor implementation' becomes 'tailor it down to nothing.' Here's the source:
This report describes a revised proposal for updating Seattle’s Neighborhood Residential zoning, including visualizations of potential outcomes. Neighborhood Residential currently represents Seattle’s lowest-density residential zoning and consists primarily of detached homes.
So this is the document — the October 2024 Neighborhood Residential update, the one that actually carries Seattle's HB 1110 compliance. It's law now, inside the Comp Plan. And it's in front of the Court of Appeals at the same time. Just look at the table of contents. Affordable housing bonus, stacked flat bonus — right up top. Then it's parking, trees, open space, design standards filling out the back half. That back half is where 'neighborhood character' goes to kill a fourplex. Corner stores get their own section. That's the charming part. The off-street parking section is the one that decides whether any of this pencils out. And here's what gets me — the trains just hit most-used light rail in the country this week. Crosslake pushed it over the top. The riders are showing up. The housing that's supposed to ring those stations is still a committee calendar in 2026. That's been the whole week. We passed everything — Comp Plan, this zoning piece, the transit measure. Now the fight is whether any of it survives the appeal. Seattle's been here before — upzone the city, collect fees from developers, promise affordable units. Did MHA actually deliver what it said it would, and why should we believe HB 1110 plays out any differently? The honest answer: MHA delivered some real wins, but the mechanism is under serious stress now. On production, the Seattle metro area built 14,290 affordable apartments between 2020 and 2024. RentCafe flagged that as the highest total of any metro in the country — even edging out New York City, per The Urbanist. So, broadly, the affordable-housing ecosystem was producing. But MHA itself — the program that let developers build bigger if they either included income-restricted units on-site or paid into a city fund — is wobbling badly right now. Permit applications have plummeted. And a coalition calling itself the Seattle Housing Roundtable is asking the city to cut MHA fees by 90 percent in 2026, 80 percent in 2027, and 75 percent in 2028, according to PubliCola. Their argument, laid out by a land-use attorney quoted in that piece, is that MHA was designed for a low-interest-rate world that no longer exists. The Seattle Times confirmed that push is gaining traction at City Hall. And there's a parallel legal challenge: property owners who want to build a duplex or a fourplex are suing the city, arguing MHA fees of $36,000 to $126,000 on small residential projects are an unconstitutional barrier, per Reason. So the policy worked tolerably well in a hot market with cheap debt. In today's market, it may be actively suppressing the supply it was supposed to generate. So if MHA fees are now choking off supply, doesn't layering HB 1110's missing-middle mandate on top of the same cost structure just recreate the same problem at a bigger scale? That's exactly the risk the Seattle Times flagged when HB 1110 took effect. Developers can now build up to four homes on lots that used to be single-family, but with borrowing costs and construction material prices where they are, the market isn't rushing in. The lesson from MHA is pretty simple: zoning permission is necessary, but nowhere near sufficient. The fee and financing structure has to pencil out at current rates, not 2018 rates. So watch whether the city actually adjusts MHA fees for small-scale infill projects, and watch permit-application numbers. That's the leading indicator for whether HB 1110 turns from legal permission into actual homes. The Urbanist, with Doug Trumm:
Light rail ridership in the Seattle region has exploded following expansion of the 2 Line across Lake Washington, which connected Bellevue and Seattle for the first time on March 28. In fact, the ridership boost was so pronounced that Sound Transit leapfrogged its peers to become the most ridden light rail system in the United States.
Doug Trumm at The Urbanist has the number: Link carried 4.8 million riders in April, a 44 percent jump after the 2 Line crossed Lake Washington on March 28. That puts Seattle above LA, Boston, San Diego — most-used light rail in the country. Finally — a milestone with a date and a mechanism instead of a press release. Crosslake opens March 28, ridership leaps to 160,000 daily, and suddenly we're number one. The system works when you actually run it. And after Friday's reset gloom, I'll take it. Though I notice we hit most-used the same week Ballard has no opening date and a seven-to-nine-billion-dollar gap. Right — that's the part that should make somebody uncomfortable. If the trains fill up the second they connect two cities, the appointed board owns the 2050s timeline on Ballard. And the housing that's supposed to surround these stations? Still sitting in a 2026 Phase 2 committee calendar. Number one in ridership, and design-only on the expansion that gets you to number two. the source writes:
On January 29, we released updated legislation to allow more apartments and condos in centers and corridors newly designated in the One Seattle Plan. This “Centers and Corridors” legislation includes rezones in Neighborhood Centers, in new and expanded Urban Centers, and along frequent transit routes and makes minor changes to development standards in Lowrise (LR) and Midrise (MR) zones.
The One Seattle Plan is law now — but the document everyone's skimming past is the Centers and Corridors legislation, released January 29, still sitting in Council for review. There's an Anti-Displacement Memo dated March 2026 attached to it. That tells you the people who wrote it already know who upzones tend to push out. Right — the headline says the Comp Plan passed, but the actual rezones near frequent transit are still in a committee inbox. The trains are full and the apartments around the stations are a transmittal letter. And it's the timing that gets me. Sound Transit just hit most-used in the country, and the housing legislation that's supposed to wrap those corridors is making, quote, minor changes to Lowrise development standards. Minor. We don't need minor. If this briefing helps you keep up with Seattle politics and urban life, take a moment to subscribe and leave a review wherever you're listening. It really helps other people find the show.
If you want to dig further, we've put links to every story from today's briefing in the show notes. Take a look there for the pieces that caught your ear.
That's Seattle Politics and Urbanism Daily for today. This is a Lantern Podcast.