Nearly six months after Mayor Greg Nickels first proposed allowing backyard cottages throughout the city—and six years after the commission first started pushing the council to allow backyard cottages—backyard cottages are still verboten in most of the city. (Under a pilot project, 17 cottages have been built in Southeast Seattle).

The debate, like so many about development in Seattle, is more or less intractable. One side believes that cottage housing will modestly expand affordable-housing options without wrecking single-family neighborhoods. The other believes that backyard apartments will be The End of Single-Family Zoning and Civilization As We Know It.

Today, the city's 16-member planning commission weighed in with a letter to the city council, urging them to move forward on the long-delayed proposal (and to ditch the annual limit of 50 new cottages in the current legislation). Cottages, the commissioners noted, provide "lower cost rental housing options, an opportunity for homeowners to offset the cost of their homeownership, and housing for extended family members." They also offered to help homeowners design cottages that fit in with their neighborhoods—an attempt to defray some residents' fears that they'll be overrun by new neighbors.

Next Wednesday, September 9, the council's land use committee will get a briefing on backyard cottages from the city's planning department, and the public will get its say at a hearing at 5:30 on September 15.