For Seattle’s First Move: The Housing Opportunities Amendments

A quick guide to what HOP does, why it matters for your neighborhood, and how to help move it forward

Imagine a friend tells you they found a great apartment in Fremont. Close to work, walkable to restaurants, 10 minutes from downtown. Then they tell you it was never built. The developer had financing. The zoning allowed it. But design requirements added months and costs that made the numbers stop working, and the project died. Your friend is still looking.

That story is playing out across Seattle right now. Not once, but thousands of times. Applications to build new apartments have dropped 88% from their 2020 peak. Even compared to just last year, they’re down 55%.

Fewer apartments in the pipeline today means fewer homes available two and three years from now. That means higher rents, fewer options, and more people pushed out of the neighborhoods they call home.

The Housing Opportunities Amendments, or HOP, are a set of changes to Seattle’s rules that would make it legal to build more housing in specific places where it makes sense. If you’ve ever wondered why housing feels so stuck in Seattle, this is one concrete thing the city can do about it right now.

If you’re ready to act, skip to “What You Can Do” at the bottom. Otherwise, keep reading. We’ll walk through what HOP actually does, in plain language.

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Quick note on who we are

If you’re new to For Seattle, here’s the short version: we look for the opportunities that can make a meaningful impact.

A lot of the housing conversation in Seattle burns energy on fights that, even when they’re won, produce a few hundred homes on expensive lots where the math barely works. Everyone’s arguing about the $3 million lot in Laurelhurst while legislation that could unlock thousands of homes across the city sits on a desk at City Hall, waiting.

For Seattle exists to focus on results. We pick the fights that aren’t part of the usual culture war cycle but actually deliver: policies where the upside is real, the opposition is thin, and broad coalitions are possible. This past week, you could find us at City Hall alongside progressive homelessness service providers, advocating for shelter investments. Different issue, same instinct. We go where the impact is, not where the fight is loudest.

HOP is exactly that kind of opportunity. It’s a bill that delivers for affordable housing advocates and market-rate builders at the same time. Nonprofits that own land get to build the housing they’ve been trying to build. Developers using innovative construction methods get relief from design rules that add cost without adding value. And Seattle gets thousands of new homes in places where the infrastructure already exists. That kind of alignment is why HOP has already cleared environmental review with no appeals. The policy work is done. What’s left is a political decision, and whether elected officials hear from enough residents to know it matters.

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First: a 60-second primer on why city rules matter for housing

You might be thinking: if Seattle needs housing, why isn’t it getting built? Part of the answer is interest rates and construction costs, which the city can’t control. But part of it is something the city can control: the rules that determine what’s allowed to be built, where, and how.

These rules (called “zoning“ if you want the technical term) dictate things like how tall a building can be, how many homes can fit on a lot, what design elements are required, and whether a commercial building can be converted into apartments. When the rules are too restrictive, even projects that have financing and community support can stall or die.

HOP is about updating specific rules, in specific places, to let housing that Seattle already says it needs actually get built.

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Where HOP stands right now

HOP was developed inside City Hall in 2025 to get apartment construction moving again. Seattle’s comprehensive plan update mostly addressed single-family parcels; HOP focuses on multifamily. It has already cleared environmental review (a state-required process called SEPA that evaluates impacts before a policy moves forward) with no appeals. The policy work is done.

What remains is a political decision: the Mayor needs to send this legislation to City Council, and Council needs to pass it into law. That’s where residents come in.

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What HOP actually does

Three things, each aimed at a different barrier to building homes.

1. It lets more housing get built in specific neighborhoods

Right now, Seattle’s rules limit how much housing can be built in certain areas, even areas that are close to jobs, transit, and services. HOP updates the rules in targeted locations to allow more homes. Not everywhere. Specific places where additional housing makes sense.

Here’s where, and why:

Fremont / Stone Way. This corridor already has the infrastructure for walkable, transit-connected living. HOP adds capacity for more homes in an area where people already want to live. (If you’ve tried to find an apartment along Stone Way recently, you know why this matters.)

Downtown. Here’s something that surprises people: current rules in parts of downtown actually make it harder to build new homes than offices. HOP fixes that, so the most transit-rich part of the city can also be a place where people live.

Belltown. A modest, time-limited increase in height limits to make new housing projects financially viable. Belltown is one of Seattle’s densest neighborhoods, already built around transit. More homes here means fewer cars on the road and more people walking to work.

Public and nonprofit-owned sites. This one is about enabling organizations that already own land, and already want to build housing, to actually do it. Picture affordable housing above the Lake City Community Center. The land is there. The mission is there. The rules just need to get out of the way.

Proposed development above the Lake City Community Center.

Lake City (Fred Meyer site). When Fred Meyer closed last year, Lake City lost its main grocery store. HOP ties new housing capacity on that site to the inclusion of a grocery store or pharmacy. The goal: bring back neighborhood retail and build homes, together.

2. It removes design rules that make better buildings harder to build

Seattle’s land use code can require certain aesthetic elements on new buildings.

“Facade modulation” means the building face has to jog in and out at regular intervals, so it doesn’t look like a flat wall from the street. But every jog means the architect has to redesign the floor plan around it, the contractor has to frame around corners that serve no structural purpose, and the apartments behind those walls end up with awkward layouts or wasted space. Those costs show up in your rent.

“Upper-level setbacks” mean the top floors have to step back from the street. Again, the idea makes sense: keep buildings from looming over the sidewalk. But every floor that steps back is a floor with fewer homes on it. You’re paying the same foundation and construction costs to support a building that gets smaller as it goes up.

Requirements like these come from a good place. Nobody wants a neighborhood full of featureless boxes. But when a project is already struggling to stay financially viable, each added requirement can be the difference between a building that gets built and one that doesn’t. It would be like a city law requiring Safeway to carry ten types of milk. That sounds fine until the store is struggling to stay open, and the mandate is part of why.

Left: Seattle’s current facade modulation rules in practice. Right: without them. HOP removes these requirements for mass timber, modular, and passive house construction.

HOP removes these requirements, but only for projects that use specific building methods that are better for the environment and faster to build:

Mass timber uses layers of bonded wood instead of steel or concrete. It’s strong, beautiful, and stores carbon instead of producing it. It’s still relatively new, and the learning curve makes it expensive to get started. Removing decorative requirements helps close that gap. (Want to see what mass timber looks like? Check out T3 Minneapolis or Brock Commons Vancouver. These are stunning buildings.)

Modular construction means building sections in a factory and assembling them on site, like high-quality Lego. Faster, often cheaper, and the quality has gotten remarkably good. But the current decorative requirements assume you're building on site from scratch. When your walls are arriving pre-built from a factory, being told to add jogs and setbacks after the fact can kill a project's budget.

Passive house is a building standard that dramatically reduces energy costs through better insulation and airtight construction. Your heating bill drops. Your carbon footprint drops. But current design rules add costs that can make the energy savings not worth it financially.

Affordable housing that meets the city’s income restrictions for residents also gets freed from these requirements.

The logic: if a building method is better for the climate, faster to deliver, and more affordable, why require decorative elements that add cost and slow it down? Let architects design good buildings, and they will.

3. It makes it easier to turn empty offices into homes

You’ve probably noticed empty office buildings around Seattle. HOP expands the rules that allow those buildings to be converted into housing, beyond just downtown, into more neighborhoods across the city.

This won’t solve the housing shortage on its own. But it puts struggling buildings back to use and brings residents into neighborhoods that need foot traffic.

Queen Anne Plaza: a vacant office building being converted into 68 apartments.

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What HOP is, and what it isn’t

It is: A targeted set of rule changes, focused on letting specific kinds of housing get built in specific places. It works within Seattle’s existing planning framework. And it’s the kind of legislation that delivers for affordable housing advocates and market-rate builders at the same time.

It is not: A citywide rezone. It is not a complete housing strategy. And it does not guarantee that housing gets built tomorrow. (Housing depends on financing, interest rates, and market conditions too, all things the city can’t directly control.)

What the city can control is whether its own rules are getting in the way. Right now, in specific places, they are. HOP fixes that.

Think of it this way: HOP doesn’t build homes. It unlocks the door so that the people who build homes can actually do their job.

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Why this matters to you

Every year that we fall short on building homes, the effects compound in ways you can feel. Maybe it’s your rent going up again. Maybe it’s a friend who moved to Tacoma because they couldn’t find anything affordable. Maybe it’s the barista or the teacher or the nurse who commutes 90 minutes each way because they can’t afford to live near where they work.

Seattle’s comprehensive plan says the city needs roughly 6,000 new homes per year. We’ve hit that pace in recent years, but the pipeline is collapsing. If we don’t act, today’s shortage of permits becomes tomorrow’s shortage of homes.

So what does HOP actually move? Interest rates, construction costs, and financing still determine whether any given project makes financial sense. Things the city can’t control. But people close to this legislation estimate that, if conditions allow, HOP could unlock somewhere in the range of 2,000 to 3,000 new homes. That’s not a guarantee. It’s a realistic upside if the rules change and the market responds.

That estimate is also a commitment. For Seattle will track whether those homes actually get permitted, and say something publicly if they don’t. Passing the legislation is just the beginning.

HOP is one step. It’s not the last step. But the policy work is done, the environmental review is complete, and it’s ready to move forward. The only question is whether Seattle’s elected leaders will act, and whether they hear from enough residents to know it matters.

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What you can do (5 minutes, real impact)

This legislation moves when elected officials hear from people like you. Two actions:

1. Email the full City Council at council@seattle.gov (this goes directly to all nine Council offices, not a general inbox)

2. Contact the Mayor through the webform: Contact the Mayor

Your message doesn’t need to be long or polished. Here’s what to include:

• You support the Housing Opportunities legislation and want it sent to, and passed by, City Council.

• It’s a strong first step toward getting more homes built in Seattle.

• It has already cleared environmental review and is ready to go.

If you can, add a sentence about your own experience: your neighborhood, your housing search, why you care. A personal line goes further than a form letter. And if this piece was useful, share it with someone who votes in Seattle.