Alcoholic Impact Areas (AIA):

Alcohol Impact Areas were created by the state as a tool to address the problem of chronic public inebriation through limitations on certain types of alcohol sales. The City created an AIA in the Pioneer Square area and in June approved two new AIAs for a larger, Central Core section of the City, including downtown, and one in the University District. In AIAs, communities work with all off-premise liquor licensees (such as grocery stores, drug stores, gas stations, etc. that sell but do not serve alcohol) to develop "Good Neighbor Agreements." These voluntary agreements describe business practices and outline certain restrictions to improve neighborhood livability. They may include restricting the hours of alcohol sales, removing high alcohol content/low cost beverages, and not selling single cans or bottles of alcoholic beverages.  Seattle City Council: Alcoholic Impact Areas 

Comprehensive Plan:
The Comprehensive (Comp) Plan, Toward a Sustainable Seattle, is a 20-year policy plan designed to articulate a vision of how Seattle will grow in ways that sustain its citizens' values. The City first adopted the Comp Plan in 1994 in response to the state Growth Management Act of 1990.

The Comp Plan makes basic policy choices and provides a flexible framework for adapting to real conditions over time. It is a collection of the goals and policies the City will use to guide future decisions about how much growth Seattle should take and where it should be located. The Comp Plan also describes in a general way how the City will address the effects of growth on transportation and other City facilities.

The legislative mandate required that each county and city in the State prepare 20-year comprehensive plans to accommodate targeted growth or “population forecasts” provided by the state Office of Financial Management (OFM).  These growth targets consisted of the number of households and jobs that could be expected and were first released for planning purposes by the OFM in 1992 and recently renewed for an additional 10-year period.  The City of Seattle, as required by the GMA, had to include the following components into its Comprehensive Plan: land use, housing, capital facilities, utilities and transportation, as well as a monitoring component, although the particulars of what each section would include was not specified.

Comprehensive plan is the basic guiding document of the public regulatory process, and is sometimes also known as the general plan or master plan.  Given their long-range outlook and broad scope of development concerns, Comp Plans tend to contain fairly general development objectives and policies.

Growth Management:
One of the major challenges faced by developed nations is the question of how to apply growth management principles to help produce more livable, efficient and orderly urban areas.

In King County there is a body of elected officials called the Growth Management Planning Council (GMPC) from across the county that oversees implementation of the state's Growth Management Act, making decisions about where and how new households and employment should be accommodated. The comprehensive plans of all the cities in the county, and of the county itself, must be consistent with the GMPC's decisions.

Growth management is a way for the public to guide future growth and change to sustain community livability.  Given the tensions between often competing interests, sustainable development is an accepted means for addressing different concerns to managing growth.  Growth management programs, therefore, must acknowledge and reconcile tension between economic development, social justice, and protection of environmental qualities. 

One of the main goals of the Growth Management Act (GMA) has been to “encourage sustainable development, based on having a healthy economy, clean environment, and thriving communities.” 

Neighborhood Planning:
Neighborhood planning allowed residents to have a say in how they would like to manage the “growth targets” established by the GMA for their specific region of the city.  Growth targets were the expected future increases of households in Seattle in the 20-year period of the Comp Plan. (Hauger, 2003)  The City invited any neighborhood that wished to contribute to the process to develop a neighborhood plan.  In exchange, the City paid for an independent consultant to assist each neighborhood, but the residents did the hiring.  Furthermore, aside from some loose guidelines that suggested each neighborhood include the elements of the GMA, the process was very grassroots in nature.  (Hauger, 2003) In the end, 37 Seattle neighborhoods spent approximately 5 years, from 1994-2000, convening citizen, business, and community activist groups together to determine their specific neighborhood’s vision and goals. (DP, pg. 3) 
After 4 years of planning, a total of 37 plans were the result, each driven by the Comp Plan but tailored to the specifics and individuality of each neighborhood.

Neighborhood plans required thousands of hours of discussions by community participants as well as many different stakeholders expressing their interests, but in their completed form, were not adopted as policy by the City.  Rather they were adopted as a “city action,” which did not carry as much priority for the City. In other words, the community’s development strategies and in some cases, the vision of how they wanted to preserve or improve their unique community, did not provide enough uniformity to be adopted into the Comp Plan.  The city, instead, worked with community representatives to extract certain elements from their neighborhood plans using language that conformed to the rest of the language of the Comp Plan- and this is what was adopted into the final Comp Plan.  

Smart Growth:
Generally, smart growth is development that consumes less land by encouraging it to occur in more compact form in communities that provide a variety of housing types, arranged around parks and playgrounds and neighborhood shopping facilities, all accessible by pedestrian walkways and bikeways, and serviced by public transportation, thus reducing the use of automobiles to a minimum.

Sustainable Design:
Since becoming the first city in the nation to formally adopt a citywide sustainable building policy in 2000, Seattle has achieved national recognition for its bold leadership.

Seattle's Department of Planning and Development (DPD), is working internally to incorporate sustainability principles into the daily work of their engineers, plans examiners, code developers, and planners.

DPD staff is also working externally with developers, architects, and private citizens to embrace green building principles in all aspects of development, from small renovations to highrises.

Transit Oriented Development:
Transit Oriented Development (TOD) refers to residential and commercial areas designed to maximize access to passenger transit, with features to encourage transit rider-ship and pedestrians. A TOD neighborhood typically has a center with a rail or bus station, surrounded by relatively high-density mixed-use development, with progressively lower-density spreading outwards.

Urban Village:
Urban villages are the locations where the Comp Plan expected to see the greatest amount of growth and change over 20 years and in exchange for neighborhoods willingness to work with these growth targets, received amenities such as improved streets and sidewalks, more open space, and so on.