Life in the current economy

In case you missed it, Mike Lewis had a great piece in the P-I today about Seattle Architect John Morefield’s creative marketing technique.

The 27-year-old architect, who said he’d been laid off twice this year, has spent the last two Sundays at the Ballard Sunday Market doling out design advice and a chuckle - on the cheap. He set up a booth with a sign that reads “Architecture 5 cents.”

These are certainly scary times for the A/E industry, but, as in the case of Morefield, such times can also uncover unique opportunities when designers use creative approaches. I’ve been working on an ongoing series on the economy and its affect on the A/E industry here at the DJC. The story has gotten increasingly bleaker over the past few months, but most architects aren’t resorting to Morefield’s tactics just yet.

In the most recent installment, architecture industry execs told me they see a lot of opportunity in these gloom times. New markets, urban redevelopment, increasing demand for green design and a chance for Seattle to lead in the next economy topped the list.

Is Seattle getting better? Well…yeah. In my own mind this is so clear that the question is always a surprise.

The discussion is generally about pace of growth. It’s easy to understand slow-growthers’ points, like how cheap everything used to be, the comfort of the familiar, or the ease of parking.

But it’s the big-city traits that impress me, like density, walkability, transit, diversity, and energy. One of the great journeys of life is watching this city turn into something greater.

Some of our neighborhood business and mixed-use districts had better retail in the 70s and 80s, but way fewer people lived there, and these places tended to lack energy. Yes there was parking — it dominated the fringes of many areas, like moats of nothingness. Seattle (in-town) has grown by over 20% since we bottomed out in 1986, and a lot of the growth has gone to urban villages. The difference is even more stark in greater Downtown, where many edge neighborhoods were wastelands.

Of course more stuff in proximity usually means greater walkability. We have physical and policy problems there (the City often doesn’t walk its talk),  but we did then, too.

We’re finally getting light rail, and not just a line but a network. Each new line magnifies the value of the lines that connect to it. Our bus service is less exciting, with service far too limited, due in large part to the 80/20 rule. Because the County might never sober up, we need Seattle to subsidize buses the way the State subsidizes Amtrak, possibly with a levy.

We’ve improved immeasurably on the diversity front. While we’ve lost ground on some fronts as the poor areas have edged southward, Seattle has also had big influxes, such as Vietnamese, Russians, Ethiopians, and others. Today’s Seattle is more worldly and interesting, and as Microsoft can tell you, we’ve gained priceless talent (which I hope we don’t lose due to misguided immigration law).

Parks are another improvement area. Downtown still lacks central green space, but the edges are doing better.

By the way, here is Stephen Cysewski’s astonishingly cool photo collection about Seattle in the 70s and 80s.

Remember in Sleepless in Seattle, when Tom Hanks and his young son were shown riding in a little motor boat from their houseboat on Lake Union to Alki (I think), where they ran along the sand?

I realize their journey is unlikely for a number of reasons. But I remember watching that scene and thinking how cool it would be if Seattleites saw our myriad bodies of water as thoroughfares rather than impediments to travel.

Taxxiiiii! (pic from Wikipedia)

Sure, a lot of people here row or kayak on weekends and others do obnoxious things with jetskis in the summer, but what if we could actually use the water here as a means to get to work or to run otherwise tedious errands?

People living in Bremerton and on Bainbridge and Vashon already live the dream, but those living in the Seattle area decades ago lived a much more ferried life.

For those living in West Seattle, the dream will be realized soon, and other neighborhoods will soon follow suit. Year-round Elliott Bay Water Taxi service from West Seattle to downtown is slated to begin in 2010. The King County Ferry District, which levied a property tax in the county starting last year, also is funding the Vashon passenger-only ferry and is planning up to five new routes. Potential new routes could include Shilshole to downtown, and Kenmore, Kirkland, Renton and Des Moines to downtown Seattle.

Seattle Parks and Recreation, the King County Ferry District, and the King County Marine Division are hosting an open house next week to talk about the West Seattle portion of their plans, including improvements to Seacrest Dock.

The open house will run from 7 to 8:30 p.m. on Thursday, January 15 at the Alki Community Center at 5817 S.W. Stevens St.

Some things never change in Seattle. Like the weather. But wait a minute. The last two years have brought us snow that stuck with a vengeance my childhood self could only have dreamed of. So I guess that’s out.

How about the familiarity of our neighborhoods? There’s actually been a lot of change there. It’s hard to make that old Almost Live seatbelt-hanging-out-the-door-of-the-double-parked-Volvo joke anymore in Ballard, and all the old skid rows now house trendy haunts that stock booster seats.

Dick's burgers are still cheap

What about being a one-company town? The Boeing town that became the land of Microsoft that became Starbucksville is now home to so many little (and not so little) start-ups that it’s pretty hard for us to be pigeonholed as a workforce.

So what hasn’t changed in the last few decades? We still don’t have high-speed light rail criss-crossing the city, but it’s getting closer. And the Viaduct still stands, but supposedly its days are numbered. The Seattle Center and the Market are both growing cobwebs, but Pike Place Market repairs are on the way.

It seems we’re changing a lot. Knute Berger’s Mossback column this month talks about the ways we’ve gotten better. Berger, who admits he more often complains “about more people, more condos, bad traffic, and grocery-bag taxes,” lists “Five things that make even a Mossback happy.”

Among the acheivements: getting greener and making investments in our cultural infrastructure, like the Central Library, the Sculpture Park and neighborhood libraries. Berger says we’re also more diverse, and our food is better.

P.S. Not everyone is happy with all the changes. That irreverent little blog that disses Seattle condos is back up. . .

Aubrey Cohen’s Friday piece on the Seattle housing market got me thinking about paradigm shifts. The shift from faxes to e-mail, for example, took more than a decade. The internet has fundamentally changed business and everyday life –but slowly.

In just the last year, however, we’ve seen collapse of the stock and real estate market, decreases in home values, multiple bank failures (including Washington Mutual) and the potential bankruptcy of the big 3 American automakers.

The typical solution is to loosen rules and allow more borrowing. Credit is the fuel of innovation, driving interest rates lower, inspiring investment, job creation and expansion of the market. But easy money is what got us into this mess in the first place.

And we are in a liquidity trap. Rates can’t go any lower than zero. Despite a bail out, banks are sitting on their cash until things become more stable. Even dropping cash from a helicopter may not inspire spending.

A Keynesian-Obama-New Deal based on infrastructure upgrades might reduce unemployment, but then what? In spite of the many make-work infrastructure projects undertaken by the New Deal, there was the recession of 1938 when the projects were done. Put a shovel in my hand, but will I buy a big screen television? It wasn’t until World War II broke out that that depression ended.

The solutions (and the problems) of the past aren’t working. Since the seventies, taming inflation, not full employment, was the objective of central banks. Ironically, now we are trying to get inflation going with little luck.

Perhaps in 2009 we’ll begin to see a new paradigm, if there is one, take shape.

An economy built on single family homes filled with furniture, appliances and a car out front, all bought with credit, may disappear.

Considering all this, do we really need a rebuilt viaduct? And doesn’t this change our views about affordable home ownership? What does sustainability look like with falling demand for oil and automobiles? Can we cope with getting what we’ve asked for all these years: a less car-dependent culture living within its means in compact communities? Maybe that is the scariest thing of all.

Rendering of the Richland oval, now under construction

Vancouver’s Tyee online newspaper has an article today deriding the design of the various venues being built for the 2010 Winter Olympics and Paralympic Games there. (Thanks to Crosscut for spotting the article first).

After the Bird’s Nest and all of the cool non-Olympic venues that were erected in China for the games there, expectations are certainly high for Vancouver, a city already regularly lauded for its architecture and planning.

But some of the venues seem perfectly designed . . .

But the article says most of the Vancouver designs are “unremarkable” and blames the games’ organizers for focusing more on corporate branding than architectural ambitions.

Of course, China does have its advantages over most other countries when it comes to getting huge-scale work done quickly.

What do you think of the work underway to our North? Check out a gallery of venues at VANOC’s Web site.

Maybe I’m the only native Seattleite who has found herself suddenly having to drive across three lanes of traffic to make it to a turnoff that I’ve consistently missed for the last 12 years, or who always remembers too late, on the way to my parents’ house, that the right lane ends two blocks ahead and I’m stuck in it now.

Wait, did I just miss Olive again?

Just getting from some point North of downtown to some point in SoDo is enough to give me hives: Do I stay on I-5 the whole time or is this one of those streets where I briefly merge onto 90 to get to the exit?  Or is this one of those exits where I follow signs to merge onto 90 but then don’t merge at the last minute?

Part of my driving chaos stems from my taking the bus most of the time (and vice versa). A lot of the rest of it comes from Seattle’s unique geographic layout which means there are seven ways to get to any one place across the city, and none of them are ideal.

But there are also places in the city where street signs are tiny, blurry or entirely obscured by tree branches, or lanes abruptly end or you just can’t tell if that arrow is directing you to go straight or make a slight right.  (Check out the Seattle sign gallery at Morgan Wick’s site. )

My family affectionately refers to this as Seattle sign snobbery because really the best way–sometimes the only way– to get around this city is to know it by heart. Many drivers here have little sympathy for you if you have to wait for a sign to tell you that a lane is ending.

But maybe we’re wrong. A recent comment thread over at the Times has some readers mocking those who admit they think Seattle’s intersection signage is confusing. Maybe it’s my problem. But I get lost in the city of my birth more than I’ve ever been lost on vacation.

Last week the Seattle Great City Initiative leader Michael McGinn hosted an end-of-the-year happy hour to toast the season and thank volunteers and supporters for their work. McGinn and Great City regular Brice Maryman were leading proponents for the successful parks levy that passed in November.

Great City has focused on trying to bring together neighborhood advocates, developers and environmentalists to be more supportive of growth.

There are some tremendous individuals with decades of experience in wide array of fields that are part of Great City. It was good to catch up with a few of those folks and talk about the last political year and the one coming up.

We started talking about the possibly three Seattle City Council seats that may be open next year and we hit on a lot of different topics. What three questions would we ask the burgeoning field of candidates? There were three that I distilled from our conversation that focused on transportation, density and affordability.

• Studies show that 1 new mile of highway construction creates between 1,400 and 2,300 tons of CO2. And a recent Sightline study indicated that “adding one mile of new highway lane will increase CO2 emissions by more than 100,000 tons over 50 years.” What will you do as a member of the Seattle City Council to reduce vehicle miles traveled and limit new highway construction in the city, especially on the waterfront?

• More than 60 percent of Seattle’s land is designated single family. The Puget Sound Regional Council projects that 1.7 million new people will be coming to our region in the next 20 years. As a member of the Council, what would you do to support accommodating Seattle’s share of that growth? Would you support the expansion of Detached Accessory Dwelling Units (DADUs) city wide? How would you create density in single family neighborhoods?

• With the economy in a severe downturn, concepts of affordability are changing and some would argue a major shift that may be systemic or even paradigmatic. What do you think the downturn means for housing affordability in Seattle and specifically what would you do to set definitions and goals for affordability? Please tie your answer back to the recent debate over incentive zoning.

So what would your questions be? What are the answers we should expect and demand? 

The State narrowed the SR99 options down to two last week. Maybe that’s not the final word, but let’s assume it is for a moment.

I don’t like either of them. Both options have big problems. (On the other hand, wouldn’t a decision, good or bad, be a relief on some level?)

In some moods, the new-viaduct option even seems like the better of the two. Kinda leaning that way right now.

That’s not easy to admit. I was on the viaduct-over-my-dead-body bandwagon not long ago. Why build another view-blocking encouragement to driving too much? Why choose to make the same horrible decision that so many of us have regretted for decades?

A tunnel is clearly the best option. It handles most of the traffic, and it does it out of sight. But remember our assumption.

The one-way surface couplet is scary, though it has its benefits. For a few reasons.

For all the horrors of the current viaduct, it gets traffic off the streets, and makes Western and Alaskan pedestrian-friendly. We’re talking about turning both into high-volume throughways. Sort of like Western already is in Belltown, but worse.

The surface option assumes some traffic would go away as transit use grows, and as people make new decisions about where to live and work, telecommuting, etc. But it also assumes more traffic flows to I-5 and other surface streets. We also plan to accommodate more cars on our streets.

I don’t want Downtown Seattle to be a throughways! Let the through traffic stay on the two freeways, and let our surface streets focus on people and their own neighborhoods.

The emphasis on transit is fantastic. We should do that regardless. Taking it a step further, Seattle needs its own version of the Metro and Sound Transit bus improvements that are mostly suburban. A levy in the tens of millions per year would revolutionize inner-city transit.

If you’re concerned about the aerial option encouraging driving, rest assured that it won’t add capacity, and has fewer lanes than the current version, with the plan that Downtown commuters will exit sooner. Actually Downtown streets stand to suffer even in this scenario. It’s a decent balance.

Sometimes pragmatism and compromise gives you a better result than idealism.

P.S. North of Denny, it’s all positive. Anything is better than the mishmash of pedestrian barriers we have now, crossing Aurora, going north-south west of Aurora, etc.

The Pacific Northwest is seen by many as ground zero for the “green” movement and this is perhaps most evident in the built environment.

From northern California through Washington State, builders and developers are working hard to gain certification and recognition through programs such as LEED, Built Green and Energy Star for designing and creating environmentally responsible projects.

This is great progress, and not too surprising given our region’s commitment to protecting and enhancing our precious natural resources. It comes as no surprise, then, that a program relatively new to Washington State designed to protect salmon habitat is gaining momentum as builders, developers and property owners and managers look outside the walls of their buildings to address critical habitat issues throughout the region.

Following completion of the Salmon-Safe assessment, a certain waterfront sculpture park is expected to be certified (Pic by Ben Benschneider)

Salmon Safe, a private, non-profit organization based in Portland, is taking root in the Puget Sound region. Founded in 1996 by the Pacific Rivers Council, Salmon Safe has introduced a certification process for development practices that protect Pacific Northwest salmon watersheds.

In the beginning, Salmon Safe focused on certifying fish-friendly farmlands in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. Today, more than 60,000 acres of farm and urban lands stretching from Marin County, Calif. to the Canadian border in Washington have been certified “Salmon Safe.”

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