City of Spokane planning department officials are considering residential zoning changes to increase housing density as part of PlanSpokane 2046, the city's comprehensive growth strategy.

As part of the PlanSpokane 2046 update, the city planners are seeking ways to meet housing growth targets mandated by Washington state’s Growth Management Act, which involves planning for increased housing needs over the next 20 years, says city of Spokane Planning Director Spencer Gardner.

The Growth Management Act provides guidance for city and county officials planning for future developments, according to the city’s Comprehensive Plan, which was last updated in 2017. The new iteration of the plan has been in the works for over a year and is expected to be completed by the the end of the year, Gardner says.

The act includes directives to maintain open space, protect the environment, ensure public facilities and services are adequate, preserve land and historic sites, provide affordable housing and multimodal transportation, reduce urban sprawl, encourage urban development, and more.

By 2046, Spokane County's population is expected to grow by 100,000, according to the city of Spokane’s 2025 Land Capacity Analysis, a study mandated by the Growth Management Act.

To accommodate an expected 23,000 new residents in the city of Spokane by 2046, an additional 22,000 housing units will be needed across a range of income levels. State law mandates planning for specific affordability brackets, spanning from extremely low income — zero percent to 30% of the area median — to high income of more than 120% of the area median, he notes.

Spokane has the land to grow, but its current zoning laws limit the construction of enough housing at the lower- and middle-income levels to meet future needs, Gardner says.

“The guidance we’ve generally received (from the state) is that zoning for higher densities, which generally accommodates apartments, is the strategy for accommodating those lower-income levels,” says Gardner. “That doesn’t mean that a lower-income family can only live in an apartment, and it doesn’t mean that a developer can only build an apartment.”

To meet these needs, some zoning adjustments under consideration would allow smaller housing units to be built on more properties throughout the city. These higher-density units would primarily take the shape of smaller-scale, multifamily units including duplexes, townhomes, or small-scale apartment buildings instead of solely single-family homes in neighborhoods.

“What we would be looking at is potentially making changes from zoning rules in certain places that are a little bit more restrictive in terms of height or the size of buildings, and changing that to zoning rules that allow for larger buildings or taller buildings or buildings that take up more space on the land,” he explains.

As a secondary option, the city's urban growth boundary can be expanded by the county to provide more development land if zoning revisions within city limits are insufficient to meet projected needs, Gardner says.

Developer Jim Frank says he'd like to see zoning changes that allow lower-density residential communities to be revamped into high-density, walkable neighborhoods with single-family homes built on smaller lots.

The vision for high-density neighborhoods comes as single-family home construction stalled with fewer than 150 single-family detached residential housing units permits issued last year.

“The medium- and low- density neighborhoods need to be converted to what I call neighborhood-scale mixed-use, and that’s what they’ve done in Liberty Lake,” says Frank, founder of Liberty Lake-based Greenstone Corp. “The size and mass of buildings is similar to what you get with single-family houses, but they allow houses on small lots, so you have no minimum lot size. … You have other dimensional standards that are relaxed enough to allow a variety of middle housing ideas and concepts.”

Greenstone has developed similar high-density communities at River District, a 900-acre neighborhood development in Liberty Lake, and at Kendall Yards in Spokane, which features a mix of residential and commercial space in close proximity.

“What we want to see over time, and what we expect to see over the next 20 years, is that some of those homogenous neighborhoods start to see a little bit more housing diversity,” says Gardner. “We're really looking for incremental change in all of our neighborhoods, rather than a significant change in any one neighborhood, or significant expansion of those homogenous housing types in new areas of development.”

The Washington State Legislature enacted the Growth Management Act in 1990, which requires cities and counties to periodically update a comprehensive plan to meet future municipal needs in areas such as housing, transportation, and climate resiliency, Gardner says.

“The (Growth Management Act) doesn't give us specific language to adopt, but it gives us a framework for studying and considering aspects of these topics, and then we have to demonstrate that we have met that requirement by reporting to the Department of Commerce the aspects of our plan that meet that requirement,” he explains.