By Sarah Goh, UW News Lab/Special to CHS

Earlier this year, Capitol Hill Seattle reported on the development of Acer House, an affordable housing project with Afrofuturist design and a focus on equity. The project has passed the early stage of the design review process but there are more challenges from City Hall and the community the plan must overcome. The biggest? A tussle over how tall the building can rise to make room for more units of housing.

“The process in Seattle is really lengthy and very expensive.” Ben Maritz, the Capitol Hill developer of affordable housing behind the project says, “It’s a real problem for many small developers.”

The development team behind Acer House has been in the process of attaining a rezone to allow them to build up to 55-feet instead of the 40 currently allowed. Only blocks away, the zoning allows for 55-foot development. They submitted their rezone application to the Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections (SDCI), but received an early negative response.

In the west part of the commercial zone, where the Acer House project stands, the allowed height is 40-feet. However, in the same commercial zone in the east, the allowed height is 55-feet.

Martiz says when you look at the data of the demographics between the east and the west, the west consists of mostly Black property owners.

“Two thirds of the land owners are Black,” Martiz says. “Whereas in the east, only a third of the population is Black.”

When Seattle rezoned the commercial zone in 2019, Black landowners were excluded from the process and were not made a significant part of the conversation, Martiz says.

In a letter to SDCI, Lewis Rudd, president of Ezell’s Famous Chicken with its 23rd Ave location only a block from the proposed development, also thinks the area should be able to be more densely developed.

“I’d like to see the building be bold and strong, not recede or step down. I have noticed that there were no step downs required at the corners for any of the buildings at 23rd & Union,” Rudd wrote. “Those buildings take up the full height they are allowed. It appears that the land use restrictions in the 23rd and Cherry area, populated by more Black businesses, are inequitable.”

The intersection of 23rd and Cherry is also being planned for change on its southeast corner along the Garfield Super Block, a vision that would transform the area around the Garfield High School campus with new amenities and pedestrian pathways. A small portion of savings from reduced Seattle Police spending will go to help shape early planning for the projects.

For Acer House, Martiz said his project will continue to push for the rezone because they want to create an equitable and inclusive development. He hopes that if successful here, the project can be a model for equitable development in Seattle which Maritz believes is community-based and affordable with no displacement of current businesses.

“People will get an initial negative response from SDCI and give up,” Martiz says. “We’re not going to back down on this, we’re going to go all the way.”

Another challenge for the project is design review where a board of volunteers goes through the project and suggests changes via a set of design guidelines. In the first design review of Acer House, the size of the building with its five stories was the main concern for the design team led by architect Sharon Khosla.

Khosla says that the design guidelines ask for a building that is smaller in scale. She says that the corners around the proposed building are not very tall. With nothing equal in size to the building, Acer House will stand out when compared to the buildings around it.

For some residents that participated in public comment, the height of the building was a concern. Acer House will be surrounded by single family houses and some residents are concerned by the shadow the building will cast.

In response to these comments, Maritz says there is much more positive support than negative. However, he says the Acer House team has worked hard to add a lot of modulations to the building, adapting the building more to the measurements of the design guideline. For example, the new design has set back the top floor by a foot. However, Martiz says they are holding their ground on the height of the building.

“A lot of what we do in urban planning in Seattle is to protect single family houses from big buildings,” Maritz says. “It’s a very antiquated way of thinking and it comes from a previous era where it was OK to be exclusionary.”

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