Seattle’s Office of Housing has completed another environmental review of its long-planned Fort Lawton housing redevelopment, this time studying a backup option that would move the project’s roughly 500 homes off the Magnolia site entirely and onto a city-owned parcel along Aurora Avenue. The former Army base bordering Discovery Park has been eyed as a housing site since at least 2005, and city officials say the Fort Lawton plan itself has not been abandoned even as this fresh 391-page document works through an alternative scenario.
According to The Urbanist, the second draft supplemental environmental impact statement examines what it would look like to build the same roughly 500 units on a 4.1-acre city-owned parcel near Aurora Avenue and 130th Street instead of the 34-acre Fort Lawton site. That parcel currently holds a tiny house village, a former auto dealer, and four vacant buildings, the outlet reports. The Aurora Avenue alternative is described as a compact urban development on a fully developed site, including nearly one acre of outdoor amenity space, compared with the Fort Lawton plan’s sprawling campus model.
The Aurora option emerged directly from feedback gathered during the first round of public comment, according to Nona Raybern as cited by the same outlet. Fort Lawton housing critics had requested that the city study an alternative that would convert the full 34 acres to park space and build housing somewhere else, and the new document appears to respond to that request by giving planners a comparison point rather than a competing proposal the city intends to pursue.
Why the Site-Specific Fight Isn’t Over
The renewed environmental study comes even after the Seattle City Council passed Council Bill 121215 in a 5-4 vote in July, eliminating Hearing Examiner appeals for broad legislative zoning and Comprehensive Plan changes. That SEPA reform bill, advanced by Councilmember Eddie Lin and signed into law by Mayor Katie Wilson this month, is meant to reduce delays affecting larger zoning changes. But it does not touch project-level reviews like Fort Lawton’s — individual projects will remain subject to administrative appeal, per the same reporting from The Urbanist…