The Growth Management Act requires cities and counties to report on development activity that occurs within their jurisdictions. Each city and county must compile information about:
- new housing units
- square feet of new non-residential floor area
- average density of new developments in each zoning category
The term 'buildable lands' comes from the requirement that jurisdictions must also calculate the amount of remaining buildable land and how much more development the zoning can accommodate on that land.
In King County, where there are 39 cities ranging in size from the 570,000 people in Seattle to the 200 people in Skykomish, one challenge has been to come up with ways to report on activity in these very different environments in a comparable way. Another challenge that faced many of the individual cities, including Seattle, was collecting the information in the first place, since systems designed for recording building permits were not always developed with the idea of pulling this kind of data out of them.
DPD's Comprehensive and Regional Planning staff was responsible for extracting data about units, non-residential square footage and densities from the city's permit tracking system and for calculating the remaining amount of buildable land and development capacity in Seattle. The capacity estimates shows that the City could accommodate about 118,000 additional housing units and about 325,000 additional jobs.
King County staff has compiled the data and analysis performed by all the cities into a single report and has submitted that report to the state. The report, which includes Seattle's data, can be viewed in the Buildable Lands Report on the King County Office of Regional Policy and Planning website.
The next buildable lands report is due in 2007. City staff will begin compiling data for that report in 2006.
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