Mayor’s Office pushing through Interbay rezone for Seattle Storm practice facility

In the waning days of Mayor Durkan’s term as Mayor, her office is driving a rezone of a property in the Interbay industrial zone to allow the Seattle Storm to realize their years-long goal of building a practice facility there. There are only three problems with her plan: it isn’t legal; it places her in violation of the city’s ethics code; and it flies in the face of the substantial efforts to stop the continual paring-down of pieces of Seattle industrial lands — including one effort that Durkan herself commissioned.

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Two and a half years in, preserving Seattle’s mobile-home parks still proving elusive

In January of 2019, the City Council madly scrambled to pass an emergency one-year moratorium on redevelopment of mobile-home parks when the Halcyon, one of only two remaining in the city, was up for sale. That moratorium has now been extended three additional times, and it’s likely that a fourth extension will be passed next week as the Council struggles to enact more permanent zoning changes to prevent the current residents from possibly being displaced.

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Judge strikes down city’s ordinance preventing redevelopment of the Showbox

Last Friday, King County Superior Court Judge Patrick Oishi issued a “bench ruling” that invalidated the City Council’s ordinance extending the Pike Place Market Historical District to include the Showbox site, in order to prevent it from being sold to Onni Development and redeveloped into a residential tower. This afternoon the judge issued the written version of his ruling.

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