Neighborhood Plans: Madison-Miller Plan now online

In the late 90's many Seattle neighborhoods underwent an extensive and exhausting neighborhood planning exercise, and produced voluminous neighborhood plans, which were adopted by City Council. The Spring 1996 "Miller Times" captures some of the flavor of the process.

(Just found this great 1 page explanation of the Comprehensive Plan and Seattle's neighborhood planning efforts!)

The Madison-Miller area took part in neighborhood planning as part of the Central Area plan: the resulting general plan is posted on the City website together with the scary and incomprehensible "Approval and Adoption Matrix" .

The Madison-Miller area (with the guidance of some very talented consultants) also produced its own Master Plan as part of the planning process, although it was never posted online by the City.

I have now scanned and posted the Madison-Miller Master Plan: see the "Madison-Miller Neighborhood Plan" list of links, on the right of this page, just below the "Miller Links" list.

Most of the people involved in the planning process have moved away (or faded away) and many new and enthusiastic neighbors have moved into the area. After a long period of neglect, the City is now showing interest in revisiting our neighborhood plans, and maybe even in helping us to update them.

I encourage all of you to take a look at the Madison-Miller Master Plan: only limited development has happened along Madison in the last decade, and much of the plan is still relevant to us. It's a remarkably readable and accessible document, and you might even enjoy looking at it.


In her May 2007 Newsletter, Councilmember Sally Clark reported on the audit of the Neighborhood Plan Implemetation that she is supervising. She also wrote a Seattle Times Op-Ed piece about the neighborhood plan audit.

Note that, after the adoption of all the different neighborhoods' diverse plans for their respective areas, the Mayor got the Department of Planning and Development to undertake wide-reaching citywide updates of the building code for multifamily areas and for neighborhood business districts. Those updates seemed to be a "cookie cutter" approach and paid little attention to the requirements & desires expressed in the various neighborhoods' plans. Let's hope that this new interest in updating neighborhood plans may redress the balance a bit. (updated 8/08 to remove obsolete references)