Transfers of Development Rights are not new. In 1916, New York City planners zoned the city and included a provision letting owners sell their building rights to neighboring lots. In the 1960s, they changed the law so lots didn’t have to be next to each other to TDR-swap.

In downtown Seattle, the owners of older, landmarked buildings get money for selling their development rights, and downtown developers buy those rights to build bigger on other sites.

King County also has a TDR program that lets developers in areas targeted for growth buy development rights from rural landowners. Vulcan took advantage of that program in 2005, purchasing 19 private TDRs to build 40,000 more square feet at Westlake/Terry. The county’s TDR program sunsets this month.

Now, the Seattle City Council is considering expanding Seattle’s program to other areas of the city. Proponents like former council aide Roger Valdez say other neighborhoods like Capitol Hill and First Hill are also seeing rapid growth and the TDR program will help the city hold on to some of the older buildings that might otherwise get razed.

The Seattle City Council’s Planning, Land Use and Neighborhoods Committee could discuss the idea at its meeting at 9:30 a.m. this Wednesday.

The committee will also talk about raising allowed building heights in Interbay and South Downtown, and about extending the developer incentive program, where developers get to build higher if they build or pay for affordable units.

There’s lots of good fodder for urban development nuts to digest in today’s news. A few selections, in case you missed them:

In a piece for Crosscut, former city council member, architect (and offspring of Pike Place Market advocate Victor Steinbrueck) Peter Steinbrueck sounds off on fixing townhouses. Steinbrueck’s take: disallow certain types of townhouses altogether and make the rest of the code more form and performance based, with more design flexibility. He also suggests the city’s design community create an attractive “townhouse model” developers can work from.

The Seattle P-I has a piece on a new campaign targeting grocery shoppers as a way to reduce miles driven in the city. Feet First is providing deeply discounted personal carts, for now only to people living within one-quarter mile of the Westwood QFC in hopes of getting shoppers out of their cars for grocery trips.

Speaking of markets, the Seattle City Council voted 8-0 to put a $73 million levy for Pike Place Market repairs and upgrades on the November ballot. Council is still in discussion on a $140 million levy for Seattle parks.

This post was updated at 9:30 a.m. with information from Hering International.

Sad to see Seattle’s futuristic stainless steel toilets flushed from our streets? Then bid for them on Ebay!

Five automatic toilets being removed by the city because of maintenance costs and problems with drug use and prostitution will be listed on Ebay within the next week.

The German-made Hering-Bau toilets are being listed separately with a minimum bid of $89,000 each, said Pat Miller, who handles disposal of public property for the city. Comparable new units are now selling for around $200,000, said Hugh O’Neill, Hering International’s North American sales director.

Miller said Seattle has received some inquiries in recent weeks from prospective buyers but none serious enough to move forward with. He said at least 20 cities are in the market for automatic toilets.

The single-stall stainless steel units are accessible and have sensors for hand-washing and flushing. They are designed to seal their pneumatic doors to clean the floor and toilet after every flush, and to prevent people from entering while in use.

The city council overrode a mayoral veto in 2001 to get the toilets installed throughout the downtown area for use by tourists, shoppers and the homeless.

But a report released in March said the toilets are the least cost-effective way for the city to provide public restroom services and said they were magnets for illegal activity. Read more about it at DJC.com.

The toilets cost about $544,000 to install and about $128,000 in annual operations and maintenance costs. In some other cities using the toilets, those costs were offset by advertisements posted on and within the units. Seattle law precluded the ads on our units.

O’Neill said Seattle is the first city he’s seen vote to remove the toilets. Most other U.S. cities offset their costs with advertisements, O’Neill said, and many European cities install the toilets as pay units to cover costs.

Toilets were recently installed in Los Angeles and are soon to be installed in Toronto, O’Neill said. Other cities with the toilets include Detroit, New York and Atlanta.

More than 3,000 of Ebay’s current auctions feature the word “toilet,” but Miller said he thinks Seattle’s Hering-Baus will be the only ones of their kind listed.

The city is holding a hearing at 3 p.m. on Wednesday, July 23 at City Hall to get public feedback on the sale. The toilets will be listed on 20 day auctions by city consultant bidaloo.

Former council staffer Roger Valdez wrote an interesting column on growth and change in today’s P-I.

Growth is coming, Valdez says; lots of it. So how do we accommodate all these new people, their new houses and cars and needs, without losing all of our Sunset Bowls, Chubby and Tubbys, all of our views of Mt. Rainier and Lake Union, all of our Seattleness? Is that even possible?

Valdez says the city would be wise to expand the Transfer of Development Rights program throughout the city so owners of landmark properties could make money, developers could keep building high and we could all hold on to a more diverse cityscape.

That’s an idea council has been kicking around for the past few months, but legislation hasn’t yet been discussed.

He also recommends developer incentives for preserving existing uses, aimed at earmarking some space for the arts, cultural and community spaces that are being pushed out with rising rents and skyrocketing development potential.

Valdez says increasing the type of uses we protect is a good way to protect uses that don’t really “pencil out” but add to the city’s bottom line.

In some cases, Valdez said, the city could even forgo the code and let neighborhoods and developers work together to create innovative projects that fit better with neighborhoods and protect the uses we value.

I’m not sure I really see developers and neighbors joining hands on many projects. But as our region aggressively plans for growth, people like Valdez suggest that more mitigation measures are needed to make sure we don’t change entirely.

In-city density is planning’s penicillin for sprawl. Nobody wants sprawl, but how do we know when we’ve gotten too aggressive with our treatment?

In addition to a bubble-gum story about hot new twenty-somethings and an almost-too-thorough play-by-play of the fall of Bear Stearns, this month’s Vanity Fair has an exploration of the feats of architectural genius and engineering prowess on display at Olympic sites in Beijing.

Accompanied by some really breathtaking shots by Stephen Wilkes and Todd Eberle, the article fawns over Beijing’s “daring commissions” and “creatively humanistic design.”

An interesting point made by Kurt Andersen in the piece: The Olympics often bring a flood of outstanding architecture to its host city, but in the case of Beijing, that effort has bled into buildings that could otherwise be mundane. These type of additions are usually hastily erected, while the gloss is turned elsewhere.

Like Foster + Partners’ new $3.8 billion terminal at the Beijing airport and Rem Koolhaas’ China Central Television office building, building types that Andersen says “very seldom turn out better than mediocre.”

Andersen embarks on an exploration of the architecture and the phenomenon, complete with comparisons to turn-of-the century New York, Koolhaas “snarling” and the author finding himself an “apologist” for the authoritarian regime and its role in the transformation. A fun read.

After three years of review, the city is still working on a proposal aimed at making townhouses less ugly. Mayor Greg Nickels announced Tuesday he wants the proposal to include a required design review for every new townhouse.

Many of the townhouses now standing did not go through design review. That’s because they either didn’t have enough units to trigger a review, or developers permitted different portions of the project separately, avoiding the review.

It’s unclear what exactly would change if city planners reviewed the aesthetics of townhouses. Nickels says it will let designers be more flexible and creative. DPD is still working out the details. Read more about the proposal here, and a critique by Livable Seattle here (townhouse pictures at left and bottom are from Livable Seattle’s own review of townhouse aesthetics, included in the report).

Meanwhile, council president Richard Conlin has a proposal of his own aimed at mitigating the ugliness of a different kind of new construction. His proposal targets “McMansions” and takes aim at specific issues: height, scale and garages.

New formulas and guidelines are set for calculating height and lot coverage allowances. That would stop the practice of averaging neighboring heights to build higher and of using a footprint allowance set for a bigger lot size.

Garages would be limited to a certain amount of the facade and builders would get a size bonus for getting parking and garages entirely out of sight. The proposal had its first vetting in a council committee today. No legislation has been introduced.

The multifamily code update is more complicated, with dozens of prescriptions aimed at improving the look of townhouses, like shorter fences, pedestrian entries and more windows in front. It also cuts out parking requirements for some townhouses in higher density zones, meaning those townhouses could be built without multiple garages and driveways, presumably allowing for more space for yards and gardens.

Interestingly, it also widens townhouse entry driveways and parking spaces, meaning the driveway footprint will be bigger. That’s because some townhouses were designed so badly that driveways are inaccessible.

The proposal does not cut townhouse height limits. In some zones, developers will be able to build higher if they earmark a certain number of units for people making median income. They will also have to use green building techniques.

Read the whole story at DJC.com.

When I lived in Boise, I was four blocks from a greenbelt that took me all the way to downtown or to my office five miles across town. I even got to ride over a cool old railroad bridge and along the Boise River.

This was in a town where the buses (I think there were four total) stopped running at 5:45 p.m. and cars registered in the suburbs did not need emissions testing.

In Seattle, where many people live without cars, I can ride bits and pieces of various lovely trails — but I have to cross into vehicular traffic at multiple points to complete my daily commute.

The Burke-Gilman had a big section completed between downtown Ballard and Golden Gardens just this spring, but many gaps remain there and elsewhere.

A proposed $140 million 2008 parks levy prioritizes filling in some of those gaps. A committee tasked with crafting the levy for the Seattle City Council went beyond green space and parks and recommended spending $8 million to fill in some missing links.

The committee wants to extend the Burke-Gilman and Duwamish bicycle trails, and build an overpass at Thomas Street.

None of these proposals are new. These projects are all included in the Seattle Bicycle Master Plan and in Bands of Green. The committee said in its report it was looking for projects that would promote healthy living and could be completed within the six-year timeframe.

Nearly $4 million of the money would go to filling in holes on the Burke-Gilman in Ballard. $2 million would go to trail improvements along the Duwamish. $1.5 million would go to building an overpass for bikes and pedestrians from Myrtle Edwards Park to Queen Anne. The remaining $600,000 would go to building trails in the Kiwanis Ravine overlook near Discovery Park.

It still leaves quite a few gaps in the system, but targets some of the city’s fastest growing neighborhoods, maybe even making two-wheel commuters out of new Seattleites.

Council will review the committee’s report at 2:30 p.m. Monday, July 7 and hold a public hearing at 5:30 p.m. Thursday, July 10.

Read more about the levy at DJC.com

Heather MacIntosh, president of D.C.-based lobbying group Preservation Action, will be back in her old stomping grounds tonight for a lecture on grassroots advocacy.

The lecture starts at 5:30 p.m. tonight (July 1) at the First United Methodist Church Sanctuary at 811 Fifth Ave. It’s free and open to the public. The event is sponsored by Daniels Development.

MacIntosh was a preservation advocate for Historic Seattle and was deputy director of Historylink. org, the online encyclopedia of Seattle and Washington history.

I love Paris in the springtime. I love Paris in the fall. I love Paris, oh why oh why do I love Paris? Because of all the sidewalk cafes they have there!

Spring has come to Seattle, finally (though it’s officially summer), and with that warmer weather, our mayor’s thoughts have turned to sidewalk cafes and why it is that our fair city is not teeming with them.

Mayor Greg Nickels says the current permitting process for sidewalk cafes is too costly, confusing and time-consuming.

Nickels sent a proposal to the city council this afternoon that recommends housing sidewalk cafe permitting within one agency, the Seattle Department of Transportation (as it is now, DPD and SDOT shuttle them back and forth).

It also recommends simplifying the permit review process to achieve a 10-day turn-around and reducing the permit’s cost by nearly $1,700.

The proposal also recommends establishing design standards for the cafes, including accessibility guidelines, and recommends allowing the cafes in all areas where restaurants and grocery stores are permitted.

The city of Seattle currently has 225 sidewalk cafes, about one for every 3,000 Seattleites.

A master plan for London’s Battersea Power Station reads like a utopian post-industrialist fantasy and a developer’s dream: a power plant reborn as dense community center by 2020.

It’s a non-local story of adaptive reuse that should result in an interesting addition to London’s skyline.

The power plant itself (you may know it from Pink Floyd’s Animals album cover) will serve as more than art deco centerpiece, with a new biofuel-powered co-generation plant in its basement sending water vapor through the 1933 plant’s chimneys. Other buildings of the plant will be converted to offices.

A transparent solar canopy will cover some of its buildings and plazas and, combined with an “eco-chimney,” will reduce the need for air conditioning.

The master plan, conceived by Rafael Vinoly Architects and Real Estate Opportunities Ltd., also features luxury apartments, a waterpark and connections to the tube. (Rendering shown above is by Rafael Vinoly Architects)

The relics of industry can tell a very important story about a city’s past glory and gloom.

Seattle’s Gasworks Park was landmarked, letting us marvel at its grotesque beauty without condos or a waterpark ever competing for our interest (though free concerts by local legends like Pearljam have offered some distraction).

It’s interesting to look at the different tools cities employ to keep these industrial beasts alive.