By Gwen Davis

The city aims to plow ahead with its new Housing and Livability Agenda (HALA) which will primarily require all multifamily and commercial development to contribute to affordable housing. New residential properties will need to accommodate more people, and apartment buildings must have subsidized units for those who fall below a certain income bracket. Over the next 10 years, city officials expect tens of thousands of new families to relocate to the region, and HALA was designed to ensure that all people can afford to live in Seattle. Read our previous coverage of HALA.

However, the plan has been criticized. Some residents fear that upping residential density would drastically change the character of neighborhoods.

On Jan. 4, Rene Commons, the director of the West Seattle Junction Neighborhood Organization: JuNO, wrote a letter to Mayor Ed Murray, asking for a six-month delay for HALA's first environmental impact study (EIS). Typically, large projects such as HALA need an EIS completed before the project begins, in order to make sure the project won't harm the environment.

“We are actively collecting signatures for this extension,” Commons wrote. “The community here is stunned at the glaring lack of engagement and guidance in the community outreach process put forth by the Office of Planning and Community Development (OPCD). The timeline OPCD proposes does not allow enough time for our community to assess and respond properly.”

The letter said her neighborhood first learned of the HALA proposal only around three months ago, and there were no efforts to engage the local community beforehand. Since the announcement, there were only three scant opportunities for residents to learn about HALA’s details from city officials. Commons requested that the HALA director speak at the next JuNO meeting on Jan. 17.

"Our neighborhoods advocate affordable housing and we seek to maintain the integrity and character of existing single family areas,” she wrote. "We also want to discuss basic infrastructure for urban villages with targeted growth. The West Seattle junction urban village does not have a local train station included in the plan, nor does it have a library or community center in its walk shed.”

"It is a hardship for our greater community to engage and support a huge proposal such as the HALA draft without healthy dialogue with people that live in our neighborhoods,” the letter continued. "We want the City of Seattle to hear clearly what our specific and consistent recommendations are for our neighborhood - we see this outreach conducted in several meetings over a 12-week period, with a leadership team from OPCD to document our recommendations for future record to the City Council. We want to steward good growth of this Seattle neighborhood for future generations."