Why Seattle’s housing density plans are a disability-rights issue
The city’s comprehensive plan would shift zoning rules to allow more multifamily and mixed-use buildings, which have accessibility requirements.
by Josh Cohen
/ February 18, 2025
Finding a place to live in Seattle can be challenging for just about anyone. Housing is expensive, competition is high, options often feel limited.
For Cecelia Black, an organizer with Disability Rights Washington, finding an apartment in 2021 that met her needs was a daunting, eight-month process. Black is a wheelchair user and at a minimum requires housing in a wheelchair-accessible building. But ideally she wanted to find housing built with wheelchair-accessible design standards.
In the United States, where multifamily buildings are the only types of housing with any kind of accessibility requirements, that means looking at apartments or condos. In Seattle, where the vast majority of residential land is zoned for single-family housing with no legal mandates for accessibility, accessible options are supremely slim.
“If we’re zoning the majority of our city for housing without accessibility requirements, it makes the majority of our city inaccessible and that makes it so difficult to find housing,” said Black.
Black eventually found a wheelchair-accessible apartment in Roosevelt near the light-rail station. The space itself is an improvement over her past place — features like roll-under sinks and lower counter heights make life easier.
Beyond that, the mix of residential and commercial construction in Roosevelt means there are grocery stores, coffee shops, restaurants and retail stores all within a few blocks and easy access to light rail and buses. As a plus, the area she lives in is relatively flat.
“It’s just crazy how much it impacts your life,” said Black. “I never thought of myself as a hermit, but when I moved to my new apartment, I was like, ‘Oh, my God, I’ve gone out and met friends three times this week!’”
As the Seattle City Council debates the once-a-decade update to the city’s Comprehensive Plan, some disability rights advocates see an opportunity to make much more of the city accessible for people with disabilities, as well as for elderly residents and anyone else with limited mobility.
The comprehensive plan update dictates what, where and how much new housing and commercial development can be built for the next 20 years.
Mayor Bruce Harrell’s proposed plan would double the number of units of housing allowed in Seattle, from about 167,000 to 330,000. Much of the growth would occur in locations similar to those where it’s currently allowed: the tallest buildings in core neighborhoods like Downtown and South Lake Union and mid-rise apartment buildings in “urban centers” like Capitol Hill and the U District.
Seattle’s single-family housing zones will be rebranded as urban neighborhoods and will allow up to six units per lot — likely in the form of townhouse developments — to comply with the 2023 “missing middle” housing law passed by the Legislature.
The plan would also create 30 new “neighborhood center” designations throughout the city in places like west Greenlake, Maple Leaf and Bryant that were, traditionally, zoned only for single-family homes. Neighborhood centers would allow six-story apartment buildings with ground-floor retail and restaurants within three blocks of existing neighborhood businesses and transit lines.
Those neighborhood center proposals have drawn some of the fiercest backlash from existing residents who don’t want to see their neighborhoods significantly change. But they are also, in Black’s view, one of the most exciting opportunities for increasing accessibility across Seattle.
To start, buildings with four or more stories are more likely to have elevators than smaller buildings. Multifamily buildings are also subject to some limited accessibility regulations per the Americans with Disabilities Act and federal Fair Housing Law.
According to those regulations, common spaces, doorways and entrances in new apartment buildings must be wheelchair-accessible. Ground-floor units must be constructed to be adaptable should a wheelchair user or other person with a physical disability move in. Multifamily buildings that receive federal funding must make 5% of the units wheelchair-accessible.
Furthermore, Black pointed out that people with disabilities are significantly less likely to drive than people without disabilities, so building more neighborhood businesses nearby makes it easier for people to get the things they need.
Black also explained that because people with disabilities are disproportionately rent burdened (paying more than 30% of their income to rent), concentrating apartment construction in the core of the city’s most expensive neighborhoods like South Lake Union and Capitol Hill compounds the issue. Increasing the number of places where accessible apartments can be built will increase housing options elsewhere in Seattle.
Tanisha Sepúlveda, a Highland Park resident and wheelchair user, echoed Black’s sentiments at a public hearing on February 5. Sepúlveda and Black were among a handful of disability rights advocates, wheelchair users and other people with mobility challenges who testified in front of the City Council at the hearing about the comprehensive plan.
“We don’t find [accessibility] in single-family housing. We don’t find it in the new housing that’s being built,” said Sepúlveda at the hearing. “We find that in condos, apartments, in places that have elevators and often have closer resources to pharmacies, groceries, plazas. That’s why we need to bring these services more into our towns and not just into neighborhood centers.”
Not everyone agrees that neighborhood centers will improve accessibility. Jennifer Kolar is a Montlake resident and co-founder of Atlas Assistance Dogs, a nonprofit service-dog training organization. She testified at the hearing to oppose the Montlake neighborhood center proposal.
Kolar said Montlake, like many old Seattle neighborhoods, has steep hills, damaged sidewalks and narrow streets. She already sees the struggles her father, who has severe rheumatoid arthritis and uses a cane, has in navigating their neighborhood. She says other clients and friends with mobility issues have the same experience.
Kolar fears that increased density, along with a lack of parking requirements for new apartments, would exacerbate the problems of cars blocking sidewalk curb cuts and driveways and make it even harder for people like her father to safely walk in the neighborhood. Furthermore, she said people with disabilities would struggle with steep hills.
“You could put a three- to four-story building smack in the middle of the neighborhood,” said Kolar. “They’re expecting that putting these big units on top of the hill somehow improves accessibility when maybe [people with disabilities] can be in that specific building, but they’re never going to get down the hill to the bus stop.”
Black agrees that Seattle hills pose a real problem for people with mobility challenges. Before she found her current apartment, she lived three blocks up a hill in Roosevelt. The difficulty of pushing herself back up the hill at the end of a long day meant she was far more car-dependent, which contributed to her not leaving her home as much.
But Black argued that the more housing options the city allows and the more neighborhoods they’re allowed in, the more opportunities there will be to build accessible housing. It won’t be the case that every new home or apartment building will have accessible design or be in an accessible location. But if there are more homes everywhere and some of them are accessible, it will increase the areas of Seattle people with disabilities can live in.
Accessibility advocates are fighting to protect the zoning changes proposed by the mayor, but they argue that zoning is just the baseline for making Seattle more welcoming for people with disabilities.
“On top of [zoning] we need to make it easier for developers to build condos. We need to have some incentives or standards to build more options for accessible homes, for family-sized homes,” said Black. “But if we don’t even allow anything greater than a triplex or townhome in our city, we can’t even get to the other policy levers that we need to build a better, more accessible community.”