If you’re taking a stroll up lively Pike Street sometime, take a right at Seventh Avenue and proceed along that block’s western side.  If you haven’t been there already in the past year and a half, you’re in for a shock.

The Sheraton hotel’s two-tower complex uses Seventh Avenue as its alley, with a block-long blank facade, punctuated only by a metal man-door where you’re likely to find hotel catering staff hanging out on their smoke breaks.  The only good thing about walking on this side of Seventh Avenue between Pike and Union Streets is that you get a great view of the landmark former Eagles Temple.

An April 1983 Time magazine article mentioned the then-new first Sheraton hotel tower as an example of nation’s “worst offenders” among modern buildings that present blank facades to the streetscape and deaden city center street life.  Any of us urbanistas who care about Downtown’s streetscape waited 25 years for something to improve that situation: a remodel, an addition, an improvement scheme - anything.  Well, “anything” came in 2007 when the second Sheraton tower opened, but the the 25-year wait was in vain because things just got worse, as you’ll see on your stroll along Seventh Avenue.

The real question we’re left with is: how was this possible?  Don’t we have regulations against such things?  Isn’t there a Design Review process? Shouldn’t have 25 years of lessons-learned informed the decision-makers this time around? A longer editorial on what went wrong ran in today’s DJC (no subscription needed to check it out).

In this month’s Atlantic, Richard Florida talks about the America that will emerge from the rubble of the current recession.

Too bad he hasn’t spent more time in the Rainy City, or we might have gotten our own cover, like they did in New York, San Francisco, Chicago and Toronto, proclaiming our coming hegemony. No matter. For the America Florida describes is one where cities like Seattle will get all the candy.

Seattle wins.

No one will escape some serious hurt, Florida says, but some cities will find themselves bouncing back a lot faster.

And some might not bounce back at all. Gone are the days of easy credit fueling growth, Florida says. That will hurt some Sun Belt cities like Phoenix and Las Vegas and the fauxconomies that formed there based largely on speculation and flipping.

Also beaten back (again)  is the long-suffering rust belt and its dated manufacturing and distribution core.  Wisteria Lane-type suburbs will also find a hard time attracting people and growth to their sprawling reaches.

Ironically, Florida argues, cities like New York, the financial centers of the U.S., the ones where much of the damage was done that caused this crash in the first place, will emerge stronger than ever thanks to diverse economies and concentrations of highly educated people.

Florida describes a post-crash America where talent clusters in super-dense mega-regions will rule the day, places with lots of intellectual capitol and the ability to keep attracting those types of people. Places like Cascadia (which he actually mentions by name).

He argues the new administration would be wise to divert resources to those areas to keep people and capitol moving and ready for the economy of the future.

AIA Seattle has just given its first Emerging Professionals travel scholarship to Mithun’s Cristina Bump to study innovative seawall design in Australia and Canada.

Sydney's Botney Bay seawall

The $5,000 scholarship will pay for her travel and research. She’ll visit seawalls in Sydney, Melbourne and Vancouver,  exploring the impact alternative approaches have on urban development and natural habitat.

Bump

Bump plans to work with partners at the University of Washington, the city of Seattle and the U.S.  Army Corps of Engineers to develop a series of recommendations for Seattle’s seawall replacement. She will present her research through an exhibition and model at AIA Seattle’s gallery in late 2009.

The scholarship is funded by contributions by Seattle-area Fellows of the American Institute of Architects and AIA members.

Eds Note: Andy Soden of Seattle Parks and Recreation chimes in on defining sustainability

By Andy Soden, Golf Director, Seattle Parks and Recreation

Based on my spell check, even Microsoft does not fully recognize the concept of sustainability. To begin this exercise, we all would have to agree the impacts and effects that we’re having on our planet, our countries our communities and children are not only profound but far-reaching.

Each and every one of us needs to buy in and get in the role and responsibility to sustain and do it together, a feat easier said than accomplished.

A better reason?

The recent war, economic crunch and environmental picture of our world provide another and ample wake up call to the fact that not everyone here in the States is completely engaged and committed to the concept and cause. Just like many things in this land of the free and home of the brave, there is just enough leeway to lose sight of the big picture.

I find it interesting that so quickly after gas prices lowered again, the legions of people who were suddenly riding the bus and the train to Seattle are right back in their cars. Why? They can.

Please let me and other city staffers here in Seattle know what we can do to partner and raise the level of awareness surrounding this issue. Our new Park Superintendent Tim Gallagher is there, I can assure you, and supports all the things we are doing in Parks to raise the bar on this topic.

We’re celebrating Earth Day, March 21, next month at the golf courses in the city to engage our loyal golfers and customers in the leadership role Parks and Recreation is taking to reduce the luxury consumption and use of potable water, fertilizer and pesticides here in the urban environment.

Parks is also rolling out the Green Golfer program this year, which is part of the Audubon Cooperative Sanctuary Program’s Community Outreach component for golf courses. We’ve been participating in this 6-stage process towards Certification for about five years.

These are exciting times, and call for extraordinary and unique efforts towards sustaining our environment, economy, communities and future. Keeping in mind that we’re doing this for our children and their future, we feel that to get there, we’ll need to do it one thing at a time.

Eds Note: These 50-word definitions of sustainability ran in today’s DJC. Agree or disagree, we’d love to hear your thoughts.

For Seattle to become sustainable, it will have to take advantage of the environment we inherited. Preserving open space and protecting the Sound are paramount to a livable and lasting city. The new waterfront will be our next big test. Finding a way to blend the needs of the people with the needs of environment, that’s what will make Seattle sustainable. It’s not a choice between a vibrant urban experience or nature — it’s having both!

Charles Anderson, Charles Anderson Landscape Architects

Sustainability means creating healthy built environments as a means to supporting the larger ecosystems that provide clean water, air and soil for all of us. A collaborative, interdisciplinary approach to designing, building and maintaining buildings is critical to the overall health of the environment.

Yancy Wright, Sellen Construction

We achieve sustainability by fostering long-term cultural, economic, environmental and social health and vitality — by putting all those things together for our future and remembering it is a continuing endeavor, not an end point. That means involving all of our communities in the work, and ensuring that everyone contributes, and everyone benefits.

Richard Conlin, Seattle City Council President

Sustainability requires a vision of where we want to go, and an adaptive strategy to get there in a way that is just for all people and the planet. Seattle needs strong public and private leadership to articulate the vision and inspire all of us to walk in that direction.

Joel Sisolak, Cascadia Region Green Building Council

Seattle must be seen as part of the bioregion and global biosphere. The path to urban sustainability lies in achieving ecological balance integrated with social, economic and environmental regeneration. We will need to retool the urban infrastructure to significantly reduce waste and over-consumption, become less auto-dependent and more walkable.

Peter Steinbrueck, Steinbrueck Urban Strategies

Seattle should broaden the sustainability focus from LEED to SEED: Social Economic and Environmental Design. Environmental responsibility is not a stand-alone issue. Economic equity and social justice are equally essential to creating sustainable communities. If Seattle can achieve this union, we will be the sustainability visionaries we claim to be.

Owen Richards, Owen Richards Architects

Sustainability in Seattle (the cynical version): A term used by politicians and the mostly-white upper class for public appearance or as a business choice, while not actually contributing to sustainability on a broad scale. Real Sustainability: A movement where sustainable actions are an EASY choice and are undertaken by all walks of life, not just the elite.

Rebecca Deehr, Pedestrian Master Plan Advisory Group

Sustainability is grounded in values of stewardship, sufficiency and justice, and includes economic, environmental and community indicators of well-being. Sustainability goes beyond meeting people’s immediate physical needs to creating a just society with laws and policies that allow their needs, and the needs of all Earth’s inhabitants, to be met.

LeeAnne Beres, Earth Ministry

Sustainability is being good stewards of our environment for ourselves, for our community and for future generations. This means creating spaces that give us shelter and comfort in ways that enhance the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the earth that gives us food instead of degrading them.

Christopher Imbeau, Rafn Co.

Sustainability must include our social structures. As the health of our salmon requires sound water policy, the health of our community requires sound social policy: housing appropriate to the needs of the whole community, access to living-wage jobs, and a region-wide transportation plan that provides real options to the automobile.

Richard Bloom, Interfaith Task Force on Homelessness

Sustainability means systemic continuity; it is equilibrium, balance. In relation to the environment, sustainability suggests systems capable of continuing (though not remaining static. Change is constant) indefinitely, perpetuating life (including people). The planet will likely persist for some time; sustainability might enable humans to survive with it.

Gabriel Scheer, Re-Vision Labs, Seattle Greendrinks

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.

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.

The Northwest Chapter of the Congress of Residential Architects (CORA) has been presenting proposed revisions to Seattle’s multifamily code to neighborhood councils. I just attended their presentation at the Sunset Hill Community Association sponsored by the Crown Hill Business Association.

David Neiman of CORA gives an outstanding presentation about how most of the things single family neighborhoods hate about townhouses, are, ironically, driven by the effort to make them more like single family homes; a yard, set back from the street and a place to park a car.

In many respects the puzzle of how to fit four houses on a lot, with private open space, setbacks and parking was never meant to be solved.

But the off the shelf four-pack plans emerged as the solution, making these kinds of town homes profitable. Parking requirements make townhouses parking solutions, not housing solutions. Could we just remove parking and set back requirements from L-3 and L-4 zones and go from there?

CORA’s proposal focuses on addressing the biggest complaints about townhouses. If design is the biggest part of why neighborhoods object to town homes, then why not use design review to free the townhouse from the single family corset so they can be responsive to the needs of the end user, neighborhoods and the region’s need to accommodate growth.

Craig Benjamin from the Cascade Agenda spoke just before the CORA presentation about 1.7 million reasons why we need more density.

CORA’s proposal is trying to get more density through better design. The question is, will single family neighborhoods relent in their opposition to density in exchange for better design of townhouses?

Will the administrative process that is run entirely by DPD satisfy their need to get the outcomes they want? The proposal is likely to come before Council early next year.

On my walk to the Community Center, I stumbled upon these little gems called the 60th Street Cottages. I don’t know how they were received by the neighborhood, but they look like what we were talking about.

Portland, you make it look so easy

Portland’s historic Heathman Hotel already knew a thing or two about sustainability.

As I rode the elevator up to my room there last year, the doorman noticed me admiring the Brazilian rosewood paneling. “We have to be careful with it,” he said. “It’s endangered so we can’t replace it.”

So how does the historic luxury hotel in downtown Portland keep its cache in the midst of a changing world? It goes green, of course. Green Building Elements has a story today on the undertaking.

USA Today also got smitten with the Rose City. A story in today’s paper marvels at how carefree and car-free you can be in our compact little cousin.

Portland rocks, and many of us here have long known it. But an even better descriptor found in the piece: “studiously hip.” So true.

My DJC colleague Lynn Porter reported today that the Carroll’s Fine Jewelry clock that has been on Fourth Avenue near Pike Street since 1913 could make a move to MOHAI.

Carrolls Clock photo courtesy of MOHAI

Carroll’s closed this Spring. The Carroll family has donated the two-ton freestanding cast iron timepiece to the Museum of History & Industry.

The Seattle Landmarks Preservation board will weigh in on the landmark’s move at its Aug. 6 meeting.

Eight other Seattle street clocks are also designated city landmarks. They include the Ben Bridge jewelry store clock at the Fourth and Pike Building and the Greenwood Jewelers clock on North 85th Street.

Read more at DJC.com