SeaTac: Envision SeaTac 2044
Envision SeaTac 2044 represents a comprehensive, two-year undertaking designed to shape the city's growth and investment strategies over the next two decades. This ambitious project serves as SeaTac's mandated review of its Comprehensive Plan, ensuring alignment with King County Countywide Planning Policies and the Puget Sound Regional Council Vision 2050, a guiding framework for the four-county planning agency. At its core, the initiative is driven by a commitment to enhance equitable access to opportunity for all of SeaTac's diverse communities by recalibrating the city's long-term growth and development policies and regulations. This forward-looking plan will fundamentally inform all future projects and development, serving as the blueprint for achieving a stronger, more vibrant community.
A crucial aspect of Envision SeaTac 2044 involves significant updates related to Middle Housing and Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs). Recent state legislation, House Bills 1110 and 1337, enacted in 2023 and 2024, mandates that all cities governed by the Growth Management Act amend their codes to accommodate these housing types. While SeaTac had already begun some of these adjustments through the broader Envision SeaTac 2044 process, additional efforts are necessary to fully comply with the new state requirements. Consequently, the City is proposing substantial amendments to the SeaTac Zoning Code, which involve updating standards and regulations concerning elements such as setbacks, landscaping, tree retention, and building lot coverage. A public hearing on these proposed code amendments took place on April 29, 2025, where the Planning Commission recommended their approval and forwarded the topic to the PED committee, notably without receiving any public testimony.
The vision for SeaTac's future, as articulated through Envision SeaTac 2044, is guided by seven key themes aimed at fostering a thriving urban environment. These themes prioritize overall wellbeing and access to opportunity, strategic growth within urban villages proximate to light rail infrastructure, the cultivation of healthy, equitable, connected, and complete neighborhoods, and the development of robust multimodal transportation systems. Furthermore, the plan emphasizes providing housing for all residents, ensuring economic vitality throughout the city, and fostering resilient built and natural environments.
Social equity is deeply woven into the fabric of the Envision SeaTac 2044 project, with explicit goals to integrate fairness and inclusion into the planning process. This commitment manifests in several ways, including ensuring representative, inclusive, and equitable community engagement throughout the project's duration. It also involves embedding an equity framework into the very process of policy development, with a specific focus on increasing access to opportunity and wellbeing, while simultaneously striving to create healthy, equitable, connected, and complete neighborhoods across the entire city. To further these goals, the project entails the creation of a SeaTac Equity Index, an analytical tool designed to provide a clearer understanding of demographic and geographic relationships and opportunities related to equity within the urban landscape.
The overarching outcome of this project is to amplify equitable access to opportunity, primarily achieved through a well-defined growth strategy. This strategy centers on two main pillars: first, concentrating growth in designated centers, which include urban villages, neighborhood villages, corner stores, and flexible warehouse/industrial areas, thereby providing concentrated hubs for jobs, housing, services, and amenities. Second, the strategy focuses on creating truly complete neighborhoods. This involves ensuring that new growth is adequately supported by essential infrastructure and services, all designed to promote a high quality of life for residents and establish an attractive economic climate for businesses.