The compromise stimulus bill that’s received Congressional approval and is expected to fly off the president’s desk this weekend actually had quite a bit of greenbacks for green initiatives: at least $62.2 billion in spending and $20 billion in tax incentives, according to a preliminary analysis from the Center for American Progress.

Is that enough to set us on a path for sustainability? Check out an excellent roll-call of programs and efforts getting dough at Gristmill.

Seattle’s hefty Comprehensive Plan is subtitled “Toward a Sustainable Seattle.”  In the vision section of the plan there is a sub-section called Environmental Stewardship which calls for compact development for  reasons that sound familiar.

The emphasis on compact development is intended to mitigate air and storm water discharge pollution from automobiles, loss of green space, and increases in impervious surfaces that results from non-compact development (page vi)

But what about the Mayor’s latest efforts to put people back “to work and get our local economy moving?” Those plans will include $16 million for sidewalks and repaving.

The City of Seattle has a serious consistency problem when it comes to sustainability. Surface water is probably the best example.  The right hand is working on fixing pot holes and keeping promises of building more sidewalks, while the left hand is writing glowing language about the importance of reducing impervious surface. This is a case where being ambidextrous is a bad thing.

Of course it feels great to pander to demands from neighborhoods for more sidewalks and acknowledge the importance of reducing storm water discharge caused by paved surfaces.

Surface water management is perhaps the most glaring example that the City is still a long way from a real comprehensive plan that moves us toward a sustainable Seattle. We need to ask: What are the actual outcomes of what we do, compared to what we say?

The bottom line must be to limit the creation of more impervious surface, reduce the impervious surfaces we have, and develop safe walkways for pedestrians and lanes for bikes that don’t create more water discharge. Tto do that, we have to know how much impervious surface we have, set a quantifiable goal to reduce it and hold ourselves accountable. Change starts with measurement.

We need to grab the measuring tape before we go for the shovel.

Eds. Note: Words like affordable, sustainable and livable are thrown around regularly in conversations about how Seattle should grow. But we want to know what these words actually mean, and how the city can achieve them.

Today, SeattleScape blogger Roger Valdez introduces the topic of sustainability. An upcoming editorial page will offer 50-word definitions of sustainability provided by members of the community, including elected officials, organizers and A/E/C industry players. Bloggers at the DJC blog SeattleScape will also weigh in. We hope you will join in the discussion.

There are as many definitions of sustainability as there are people who care about the issue.  Platitudes about environmental degradation almost always include the word “sustainability” and now it has taken its place alongside meaningless terms like “proactive,” “value added” and “win-win.”

Sustainability gets used interchangeably with words like “green,” “environmentally sensitive” and “green building.” To builders, “sustainable” applies to material. To a salmon advocate it means sound water policy and to someone working on climate change, it means reducing the vehicle miles traveled in our region. The word has become all things to all people.

Seattle even has the Office of Sustainability and Environment, with the laudable but broad goal of collaborating with “city agencies, business groups, nonprofit organizations, and other partners to protect and enhance Seattle’s distinctive environmental quality and livability.”

The Brundtland Commission defined sustainable as meeting “the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”  This language — borrowed from the Iroquois — is comforting, but can it help us make sensible land use policy?

Mithun’s unbuilt Center for Urban Agriculture

It is time to develop a definition of the word that is tied to measurable outcomes. Change begins with measurement. Sustainability is an economic concept, like return on investment. Economies aren’t just about money, but about the relationships between production, distribution and consumption.  Our bodies, our physical environment and our time all have economies.

We can assess sustainability by asking whether something (a project, a plan or a policy) consumes only as much as it can viably produce or less. Our activities should generate long-term profit whether that profit takes the form of excess energy, materials, dollars or other measurable benefits.

Planning, building, eating and living should generate something extra for future use. For example, developable land should not lay fallow and we should replace impermeable surfaces with permeable ones. Some areas should be up-zoned for more housing and others should be depaved for open space and urban farming.

Imagine a city that produces its own food, energy and goods.  This vision of sustainability is possible with a definition, a plan and a system of accountability.

We often hear the “30% of income” statistic used to define housing affordability. This is clearly inadequate. No one statistic will recognize our wide variables in lifestyle and situation. A suitable housing cost can be very different, for example, if a person doesn’t have a car, has a big family, doesn’t have a family, eats for free at a restaurant job, spends half their income on medical bills, etc.

If your expenses are mostly housing and food, paying 30% for housing seems downright quaint, however admirable and however great for retirement savings.

If a single metric is useful, how about 50% for housing plus transportation? It’s not perfect, but it’s much closer to the truth for pretty much everyone.

Local governments can do great things to encourage affordability. Some are happening now, and some aren’t.

First, take this...

Helping people live well without cars is a big start. It’s already easy for some people, but not enough. This means more housing near jobs and near transit, as well as better transit. It means corner stores, supermarkets, and other conveniences. Car sharing, taxis, and bike routes all help. We don’t have enough taxis because we don’t have enough customers, partially because we don’t have enough taxis. Again I’ll recommend a Seattle-only measure to increase bus service, since many neighborhoods are barely touched by Metro’s and Sound Transit’s planned improvements, and never will be with the 80/20 requirement.

Housing construction is expensive, and some of it is our own fault. Buildable sites are expensive because not enough land is zoned higher than what’s already there. Seattle’s famous “process” adds significant cost and risk for every project. We’re tacking on massive new fees onto projects above the older zoned heights. We’re disincentivizing new construction even though new supply is our greatest weapon to avoid SF/NY prices.

More on that: I don’t mean the new supply is affordable, because construction is expensive. But new supply means less demand for the old supply. That allows the old supply to gradually become cheaper over the years. That’s why the middle-class housing of 1920 or 1970 is generally more affordable today. (And the opposite is why similar housing in San Francisco or Manhattan is still outrageously expensive.)

Major kudos to the City for reducing parking requirements. This is already paying off as developers are developing parking in line with demand, rather than the average nimby’s idea of demand. The savings are dramatic for every space not built, and some projects that didn’t pencil with 25 spaces now pencil with 20 (with garage geometries, even one added space will sometimes trigger new costs in the hundreds of thousands).

In the third-rail department, our own expectations are part of the problem. In the US we tend to think 2,000 square feet is necessary for a family, and 800 square feet is barely livable for an individual. Basically we think we’re entitled to what much of the world would consider out-of-reach luxury. Why can’t a couple with two kids live in a two-bedroom apartment on a quiet street a few blocks from a park, at least until their careers advance a little?

Is Seattle affordable?

Words like affordable, sustainable and livable are thrown around regularly in conversations about how Seattle should grow.

But we want to know what these words actually mean, and how the city can acheive them.

In today’s DJC, SeattleScape blogger Roger Valdez introduces the topic of affordability.

On next week’s editorial page, we will run brief comments provided by members of the community, including elected officials, organizers and A/E/C industry players. (We asked them all to answer the question: “What is affordability and what can Seattle do to achieve it?” in under 50 words.)

Bloggers at SeattleScape will also take on the debate over the next few weeks. We hope you will join the conversation by commenting on the blog or emailing your comments to me at shawnag@djc.com.

While reading about Obama’s plans to pull the economy out of a nose dive, I happened upon this quote from John Maynard Keynes:

“If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with bank-notes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coal-mines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again (the right to do so being obtained, of course, by tendering for leases of the note-bearing territory), there need be no more unemployment and, with the help of repercussions, the real income of the community, and its capital wealth, would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is.”

How long will it be before local officials start touting the tunnel option as a way of boosting the local economy by creating jobs?  The trouble with Obama’s infrastructure plan is that it seems to significantly rely on projects like replacing the viaduct that we don’t need and shouldn’t build.

Now is the time for us to lean into the fact that automakers are facing a downturn in demand for their product.  Why would we keep building infrastructure for single occupancy vehicles?

So my half-serious proposal is we go forward with the tunnel option to replace the viaduct.  Once we’ve dug out the tunnel, we bury bottles with $100 bills, cover it back up and sell the rights to dig them up.  That way, we get the benefits without the downside of more infrastructure for something we are trying to discourage.  So grab a shovel, and let’s start digging!

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.

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.

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 Seattle City Council’s Planning, Land Use and Neighborhoods Committee will have another hearing, discussion and possible vote tomorrow morning at 9:30 a.m. on a plan to extend the city’s incentive zoning program beyond downtown.

This proposal would insure all buildings taking advantage of future upzones come with units earmarked for certain income levels. It has been kicking around long enough to have germinated amid a flood of permits and plans. Now, it’s about to poke out of the dirt in a totally different development environment.

Does the change matter?

With development slowing in Seattle and financing tough to come by for even some of the seasoned pros, will any incentive help? Or should the city just be lapping up any new building plans it can get and putting off hopes of getting more public benefits out of the deal?

Some people testifying at previous public hearings on the proposal have pointed out that economic slowdowns are the best time — sometimes the only time– to right policy wrongs and prepare for the next building rush.

Others have testified that it’s important an incentive actually be an incentive. It may be tough to evaluate what that looks like now.

As suggested in part by the time it’s taken this proposal to move forward, it’s also hard to make development decisions amid huge uncertainty over the future.