After a week of rules getting cited and numbers never showing up, today, finally, a city department handed us a table with actual numbers on it. Guess which one. This is Seattle Politics and Urbanism Daily. Today: the HB 1110 explainer that says what's legal on your block, an SPD staffing report that beat its own plan, and a builder's guide somebody's selling for money. June 30th is a real date now. So what flips for a renter on a quiet block come July 1st? Let's get into it. The Step Back piece finally pins this down: the HB 1110 compliance ordinance took effect June 30th, 2025. We've been past that deadline for almost a year. A year. So nobody can tell me 'the rules are still settling' anymore. They settled. What got built? And the explainer walks through what's actually legal now on a Neighborhood Residential lot — the duplex, the fourplex, the stacked flat. The 'what changed next door' question is answered on the record. Right, but the piece also names the levers Seattle still controls — parking, open space, trees, design standards. The state sets the floor; city rules can still make those units mostly theoretical. Right, that's where the knob-turning lives. The state says four units are legal. Whether they pencil out depends on choices the city still hasn't had to show us. And the corner-store bonus, the transit-proximity bonus — the incentives are all there in writing. So if developers can build right now, why aren't they swinging hammers? Here's what makes today different. The SPD Q1 report: 43 hires against a planned 31, 20 separations against a planned 27. Net positive nineteen over plan. Wait — a city process that ran ahead of plan? That's the first staffing number all week, and it's good news. Hiring's the one thing not stuck in the permit swamp? Exactly. SPD can publish a deviation-from-plan table. We've been asking SDCI for permit intake-to-issuance cycle times for days — still nothing. So the department people complain about can show its work, and the one supposedly cutting permits in half can't. Cute. On that 50 percent cut, this is where it gets awkward. The PermitFlow builder's guide is a private product. Somebody built a business navigating SDCI's complexity. When the price of understanding your own city's portal is a paid subscription, the promise to cut wait times in half has a baseline problem before it even starts. A dashboard being 'navigable' means a lot less when a contractor's making rent translating it for you. So July 1st came and went, the deadline's a year behind us, the rules are live, and the workaround industry is thriving. Show me the build rate — that's the number I want next. From the source:
Brief Summary of Second Substitute Bill Requires certain cities planning under the Growth Management Act to authorize minimum development densities in residential zones. • Establishes requirements for middle housing development regulations. • Requires the Department of Commerce to provide technical assistance to cities in implementing the requirements and to develop model middle housing ordinances.
So here's the founding document — the 2023 House Bill Report on HB 1110, the middle-housing law itself. Nearly thirty sponsors, including Reed, Barkis, and Bateman, plus a directive to Commerce to write model ordinances so cities wouldn't have to invent the wheel. What jumps out reading the committee report is how much it hands off. The state sets a density floor, and then Commerce 'provides technical assistance.' Three years later, we're still asking what cities did with the room the law left them. Right — sit with that. The bill 'requires minimum development densities,' and then in the same breath it's all technical assistance and model ordinances. The floor is real; everything stacked on top of it is a choice. Read the title back. 'Creating more homes for Washington.' Great mission statement. The rules that matter day to day — parking, open space, design review — those didn't come from Olympia. Those are Seattle's to keep or cut. Seattle's been throwing around 'missing middle' for a while now — but if I'm a homeowner or renter on a quiet single-family block, what actually just changed about what can get built next door? So the short answer is: a lot, at least on paper, as of June 30th, 2025. That's when Seattle's HB 1110 compliance ordinance took effect, basically ending single-family-only zoning across most of the city. Per SDCI — the city's permitting department — most of Seattle now sits in what's called a Neighborhood Residential zone. Under the new rules, developers can build up to four homes on lots that used to hold one house. And the state law, enacted back in 2023, is specific: duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes, sixplexes, townhomes, courtyard apartments, and cottage housing. Seattle Agent Magazine's HB 1110 breakdown says all of that is now on the table. SDCI estimates Washington's housing shortage at somewhere between 140,000 and 250,000 units statewide, so the scale is real. But Seattle still controls a lot of the friction — setbacks, lot coverage, tree canopy requirements, design standards. Any one of those can decide whether a fourplex actually pencils out. The permanent code is where we'll see whether missing middle turns into housing people can build, or mostly stays a bolder-looking zoning map. You mentioned developers aren't exactly swarming. So even where the zoning now says yes, what's actually stopping shovels from going in the ground? Yeah, that's the tension. The Seattle Times reported that high borrowing costs and expensive construction materials have kept the real estate market sluggish, with many homebuyers still on the sidelines. So even with permissive zoning, the financing math often doesn't work yet. What to watch is whether Seattle pairs the new zoning with streamlined permitting and reduced development fees, because those city-controlled costs are where the policy starts to matter or gets stuck. Here's Greg Doss at West Seattle Blog:
SPD’s original 2025 Staffing Plan assumed 120 hires and 105 separations, which are fully funded in the 2025 Adopted Budget. SPD is now planning for between 12 and 49 additional hires and seven fewer separations in 2025.
Here's something I didn't expect to say this week — a city department handed us a real before-and-after table. SPD Q1: 43 hires against a plan of 31, 20 separations against a projected 27. Net 19 ahead of plan. Nineteen ahead. After a week of 'on paper' and 'still settling,' somebody actually shipped numbers. And here's the contrast that bugs me. SPD can publish hires versus plan, separations versus plan, a revised projection — a low of 132, a high of 169. SDCI can't tell us how long a permit takes intake to issuance. Right — one process tracks itself down to the body. The other one is the permit process we just talked about in the missing-middle segment, and we still don't know the cycle time. Same city. Same budget office, presumably. Before anyone declares victory — they're 19 ahead of plan and still down more than 350 fully trained officers since 2020. The plan was modest. Beating a modest plan is still a long way from digging out. Britain Jacobson, writing in PermitFlow:
Most construction projects in Seattle require a permit, especially if they involve: New construction, additions, or alterations to existing structures Demolition of buildings Changes in building occupancy or use Work in Environmentally Critical Areas (ECAs) Grading or significant site work Installation of pools or spas
Somebody built a business — PermitFlow — selling a guide to the Seattle permit process. There it is. When the city's own front door is confusing enough that a contractor pays a third party to walk them through it, the mayor's 50 percent cut promise has a hole in it before the clock even starts. Right. The market just put a price tag on understanding SDCI's rules, and that price is 'hire us.' That tells you more about the friction than any city dashboard has. And tie it back to the step-back we just did — the units have been legal since July 1st. But legal doesn't pour a foundation. If the cheapest way to get a fourplex through review is to pay a SaaS company to navigate intake, middle housing stays theoretical for anybody who can't afford the consultant. What gets me: SPD handed us a Q1 table this week — hires versus plan, separations versus plan, net plus-19. A real variance report. SDCI sells permit history but won't show intake-to-issuance times. A private vendor filled that gap, not the city. If Seattle Politics and Urbanism Daily helps you keep up with the city, take a moment to subscribe or leave a review wherever you’re listening. It helps other people find the show, and it really means a lot.
You’ll find links to every story we covered today in the show notes, so if one of them stuck with you, that’s the place to dig in a little further.
That’s Seattle Politics and Urbanism Daily for this Wednesday. This is a Lantern Podcast.