Seattle’s climate and housing efforts bottlenecked by … power poles?
By
Greg Kim
Seattle Times staff reporter
Climate Lab is a Seattle Times initiative that explores the effects of climate change in the Pacific Northwest and beyond. The project is funded in part by The Bullitt Foundation, CO2 Foundation, Jim and Birte Falconer, Mike and Becky Hughes, Henry M. Jackson Foundation, Martin-Fabert Foundation, Craig McKibben and Sarah Merner, Mary Snapp and Spencer Frazer, University of Washington and Walker Family Foundation, and its fiscal sponsor is the Seattle Foundation.
It was supposed to be a relatively simple project — a fourplex in the Central District — the kind of “middle housing” Seattle and Washington officials say they desperately need to fix the region’s housing crisis.
But it turned into a nightmare for developer Perpetuity LLC, which said the process to get four homes hooked up to the city’s power utility lasted more than two years, longer than building the homes themselves, and cost the company more than $270,000. The project was ultimately unprofitable in part because of the delays.
The problem, Perpetuity and other developers say, is a ballooning bureaucracy to connect homes to power, an issue that came to a head in February 2025 when Seattle City Light enacted a new policy: new housing with four or more units on a lot was required to plug into the electrical grid underground. Until then, fourplexes could connect overhead through power poles.
Some builders are in an uproar, saying the process of burying wires can involve uncertain permitting timelines with multiple city departments, requiring months to years of design and engineering, and is preventing some housing from ever being built.
“One builder goes through that once and they’re like, ‘I’m not doing that again,’” said Lucas DeHerrera, who worked with Perpetuity on the Central District fourplex through development firm Blueprint Capital. The fourplex predated the new policy and had to bury wires underground due to physical requirements, but DeHerrera said it shows how the process can derail a project.
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Some former city officials have also criticized City Light’s policies. In a memo to city council members obtained by The Seattle Times through a public records request, Marco Lowe, who served as Chief Operating Officer under Mayor Bruce Harrell, wrote that requiring small projects to underground wires constrained the city’s ability to address its housing shortage.
“Many decisions are made primarily from a utility optimization perspective, with insufficient consideration of downstream housing impacts,” Lowe wrote.
Seattle City Light says its new rule was driven by policy changes upstream. In recent years, city and state lawmakers have passed landmark legislation to tackle two of the most pressing issues locally and globally — housing affordability and climate change — by mandating greater density and accelerating the electrification of homes and vehicles.
Those efforts are colliding against an unexpected bottleneck: power poles.
The city’s utility says its poles can’t physically support the added electrical load, so lines must go underground. But that’s not cheap. And experts argue that, under the current system, those costs fall disproportionately on lower-income residents who end up paying more for housing.
The city is considering some creative solutions. But some could result in uglier neighborhoods, or require residents to think different about when they — and their neighbors — use electricity. As a result, officials say they are introducing the ideas slowly and with caution.
## More power, more problems
Seattle City Light’s concern is that power lines will get heavier, much heavier.
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Until last year, most land in Seattle was zoned primarily for single-family homes. Now, builders can add four homes per lot nearly anywhere and up to six in areas next to transit after Seattle implemented the state’s middle housing bill last June.
And each of those four or six new homes could use significantly more power than the single-family home they’re replacing.
Since 2023, state energy codes have pushed builders to install electric heat pumps in new homes instead of gas furnaces. And Seattle has required EV charging capability in new homes with off-street parking since 2019.
Now, imagine all four or six homes on that lot have their cars plugged in at the same time everyone is blasting their electric heat pumps. That scenario is what Seattle City Light says its infrastructure needs to be prepared for.
The utility says a fourplex needs thicker wires that are significantly heavier than a standard overhead line for a single family home. Plus, the utility says it could need larger transformers — the gray boxes sitting on top of power poles that reduce voltage making it safe for home appliances.
That’s more weight sitting on top of wooden poles and heavier lines pulling against them. Add strong winds during a storm and a pole could snap and fall into the street or onto a home.
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“It might hit someone riding by in a car. It could potentially hurt someone while maintaining the pole, and we can’t put ourselves or the public at risk,” said Andy Strong, Seattle City Light’s environmental, engineering and project delivery officer.
Seattle City Light’s solution to avoid that potential catastrophe is to route wires underground and require builders to pay for it. Larger apartment buildings have always had to go underground because of how heavy their cables are, but fourplexes or sixplexes were historically on the cusp, and building electrification and EV chargers push them over the line.
“We don’t want to handicap the developers in this, but you don’t have a choice,” Strong said. “At some point, physics rules.”
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## Who pays for it?
Burying wires underground, sometimes called “undergrounding,” can require developers to build out significant infrastructure, like tubing for wires to travel through and concrete vaults that hold new equipment.
Undergrounding becomes even more complicated when existing power lines are on the opposite side of the street. That can require boring under the public right of way, obtaining permits from the city’s transportation department, restoring pavement and sidewalks, designing a traffic control plan and coordinating with utilities to avoid disturbing existing water and sewer lines.
Erich Armbruster, President of Ashworth Homes, said undergrounding and associated street improvements added more than $700,000 to a $12 million project to build 24 townhomes, around 6% of the total cost to build the homes. At the end of the day, he said builders have no choice but to pass that along to buyers.
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Other builders say the cost isn’t the main issue for them. It’s the long, uncertain timelines. The process with just one department, Seattle City Light, takes an average of 8-10 months, but can sometimes stretch 2-3 years. City Light says this includes time the utility is waiting on the applicant to complete parts of the process.
“You could be in a world of hurt where you have finished buildings and your loans are at full interest and you’re paying like, 30, 40, 50 grand a month and you’re just sitting there waiting for power. That’s what scares small builders,” DeHerrera at Blueprint Capital said.
Seattle issued permits for 9% fewer town home and row house units in 2025 than the year before, dropping from 634 to 579, despite more lots being made available for fourplexes and sixplexes to comply with the state’s middle-housing rules. It’s unclear how much wire undergrounding requirements are responsible for that. Builders are already squeezed by high interest rates and stagnant home prices. But they say the new policy is a definite factor.
“There are middle housing units that are not being built that otherwise would have gotten built because of the new (Seattle City Light) requirements. That is a fact,” said Cameron Willett, a director at Intracorp Homes.
Dan Bertolet, senior director at Sightline, a Seattle-based housing and climate think tank, said the cost of undergrounding wires should be paid through a broad-based tax since everyone benefits from the climate impacts of electrifying homes and vehicles and increased density. Otherwise, he said it could deepen the housing shortage.
“When a cost is added to housing, it reduces the production of housing. It makes the housing shortage worse. It pushes rents and prices up,” Bertolet said. “We can connect it all the way down to homelessness.”
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## Solutions
Seattle City Light is considering ideas that would allow middle housing developers to connect to power poles, while addressing concerns they could snap.
One of those is to build stronger poles.
“It would make way more sense for me to pay $10,000 or $20,000 to replace a pole with a more modern material that could hold a heavier gauge wire,” Willett said, than to deal with the uncertainty of permitting processes with city departments.
Strong said Seattle City Light has identified a thicker fiberglass pole that could be strong enough to hold larger transformers and heavier wires, but said they may run into obstacles due to their aesthetics.
“It might have some unintended consequences, because it’s a different material, it’s a different look,” Strong said.
He said the utility is planning to roll out those new poles with a few developers in a beta-testing phase later this year.
Another technology gaining traction is the “smart panel,” which controls how much electricity gets routed to different circuits in a home.
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Smart panels allow multiple units on a single lot — such as a fourplex — to share a thinner service line connected to overhead power lines. If those properties collectively exceed the limit of the line, the panels throttle or limit electricity to certain circuits that homeowners can predetermine like their EV chargers.
SPAN, one of the nation’s leading smart panel manufacturers, is in discussions with Seattle City Light about data sharing and pilot testing. According to the company, a typical fourplex is only ever throttled less than 1% of the time during peak usage, while sixplex properties reach that threshold somewhat more frequently.
Strong says he’s a fan of smart panels, but says the main barrier for City Light to use them to approve thinner, lighter wires is that they aren’t yet recognized for that purpose under the National Electric Code, a U.S. standard for safe electrical design.
If smart panels are a solution moving forward, Strong said that might mean homeowners will have to consider more than they do today about what time of day they use electricity, and when their neighbors use theirs.
“Maybe the smart panels aren’t really intrusive as a worst-case scenario could indicate, but it is something that needs to be discussed before they’re applied,” Strong said.
_Seattle Times reporter David Kroman contributed reporting._
Greg Kim: 206-464-2532 or grkim@seattletimes.com. Greg Kim is a reporter for Climate Lab at The Seattle Times who writes about the intersection of climate, energy and business. Previously, he worked on Project Homeless.
