Tonight the Lynnwood City Council is hearing public testimony on a proposal to increase development capacity in the City Center area around the coming light rail station. The first commenter warned of "turning [Lynnwood] into another Seattle, turning it into another Ballard."
Conversation
The proposal would permit a total of 6,000 residential units in the City Center, after the current capacity of 3,000 units has already been exceeded. One councilmember is calling it "too much housing".
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It sounds like many councilmembers are hearing about this proposal for the first time tonight, which seems strange. Another CM is saying that allowing more housing "does nothing for the people of Lynnwood" & will increase traffic and crime.
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"The winners here are the developers," who live in Mercer Island and Shilshole, CM Jim Smith says. Says adding units won't help for housing affordability, but then goes on to say that if they built the units they'd be rented immediately at market rates.
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CM Josh Binda is asking his fellow councilmembers where they would like the housing to go, essentially. Council President George Hurst says Lynnwood residents have been asking for a built out city center and that they can't stop growth & they can mitigate impacts later.
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"I'm not thrilled with what Ballard looks like", Hurst says, stating that they can shape their growth more wisely.
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CM Patrick Decker says the current development in the pipeline is enough to make the city center viable. "There's no mandate that Lynnwood has to accommodate every person that wants to move to the Pacific Northwest", says people can live "up north".
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"I'm in favor of planned growth, I'm not in favor of forced growth", Decker says. Suggests saying no to housing might lose the county or the state funding opportunities but that's OK since they won't have the added residents.
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Decker is saying that any affordable units in the city center would be negatively impacted by additional market rate units in the city because that will drive up Area Median Income.
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CM Shannon Sessions says "we've done enough" growing up, not out. Suggests they could annex unincorporated areas to comply with the growth management act.
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Staff is explaining the impetus behind this proposal as being exactly what CMs are saying they want, to shape the growth that is happening in the city center rather than having a neighborhood of low rise office buildings.
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The council only heard from one member of the public (a former councilmember) in this public hearing before jumping into this long discussion among themselves that seems to be catching most of them off guard.
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Another Lynnwood staff member is informing that nothing in the ordinance actually changes zoning but rather streamlines permitting in the city center. He's reminding the council they approved a housing action plan that focuses development in City Center.
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In other words, a bunch of councilmembers decided to rail against new housing that's already permitted in their city.
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The City of Lynnwood created this visual that illustrates what a City Center built out to the development capacity being discussed would look like in 2044.
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Oh, so there was only one member of the public commenting on the proposal. They moved onto the next agenda item after a break. They're scheduled to take action on the City Center proposal on May 9.
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I'm done tweeting about Lynnwood for now but just remember that it has two n's.
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