This morning on my bus commute, I assessed the newly completed suicide-prevention fence on the Aurora bridge. How’d it turn out? Depends on your perspective.

Aurora bridge lit up. Enhanced photo by Kenji Tachibana.

It isn’t so bad if you’re looking at it close up as the bus whizzes by. The view of the Olympics from the southbound coach was nearly transparent. Due to the speed of the coach and the narrow spacing of the fence “sticks,” I could hardly tell the new fence is in place.

Conversely, looking south and east at the skyline and Mount Rainier, the fence was as clear as the beautiful sunrise. But I do not deem it a disaster because you can still see the view.

Yes, it’s a change, but not too unsettling. People would have something to kvetch had WSDOT put an opaque fence in place

I doubt Seattleites will ever pine for the “good ol’ days.” Think how ridiculous such reminiscences would sound:

Remember back when depressed people jumped to their deaths off this bridge?

Yeah, that was sad, but at least we had slightly better views…

Architect, professor and writer Witold Rybczynski writes in Slate about the “ridiculous way architects talk.” Here is the item.

Photo courtesy of photobucket.com

Portland's Pearl District (Photo free from File Morgue--portland-pearl-district-photo-by-gilbert928)

Let’s say you’re the mayor of a medium-sized city in Washington state —let’s call it Northlakeshoreline —and your city has a problem. The country’s economy is a mess, of course, and the closing of a large factory in your city hasn’t helped things locally. You’d like to be able to make some significant improvements in a part of your city that is really run down. But your budget is tapped out dealing with bigger demands on social services and just keeping up with basic city needs.

You have an idea. Why not draw a line around the part of the city — let’s call it the Sherwood Forest neighborhood — that has some of the lowest property values and the biggest problems with roads, drainage, and basic infrastructure needs. You ask the assessor to give you a snapshot of how much all that property is worth and you partner with a local developer who gives you a sense of how the value of the property could be increased. After a lot of discussions, meetings, and number crunching you realize that if you fixed the infrastructure problems you could attract new development that would significantly improve tax revenue from Sherwood Forest — enough revenue, in fact, to pay for the improvements. But that revenue is off in the future. What do you do?

table-1

What a great solution, you think. Borrow money now to fix up a neighborhood, create some jobs and economic activity in the process, and pay back the loan with the increased taxes you can collect. You’ve just invented Tax Increment Financing (TIF).

table-2

Tax increment financing is one example of something called value capture. It’s the idea that a good with future benefits that is out of reach today can be paid for with loans, and those loans can be paid back with the benefits of the good created with those loans. The increase in property values in the Sherwood Forest TIF district pay for the annual loan payments. This means as mayor you don’t have to make any cuts in order to pay for the improvements. And the best part is that after the loan gets paid off, the city can keep the extra tax revenue for use in the general fund. Tax Increment Financing has been used most notably in Oregon where the Pearl District in Portland is often cited as a big TIF success story.

page1-776px-tif_graphpdf-from-wikipedia-commons1

Of course, in the real world, the implementation of TIF is far more complicated. But the concept is pretty straightforward. Cities and counties in Washington State don’t have access to this tool. Why not?

Washington State doesn’t collect taxes using a rate based system. Believe it or not, part of what makes the story I just told work is that there is a fixed rate of taxes assessed on the property from year to year. Attaching a rate—x percent of tax of the total value of a property—is important because as the value increases incrementally, a city can capture that incremental increase and pay off the debt.

table-3

Washington has what is called a budget based system of collecting taxes to fund the operation of government. That means that our fictional city of Northlakeshoreline would come up with its budget first, then levy a tax on all the properties so that they share the burden equally. That means the tax assessment is evenly distributed over all the taxable properties in the city.

table-4

Under Washington’s constitution a city is able to borrow money to improve public infrastructure and those improvement might result in increased property values. But the taxes that the city collects on those properties are NOT based on their assessed value. Those properties are taxed based on a rate set by the value of new construction throughout the city, the previous year’s city budget, and up to an additional one percent of the previous year’s city budget. That rate is applied, equally per $1000 of value, to ALL properties across the city.

Confused? Join the club. This budget-based problem is what makes TIF in Washington such a challenge. The framers of the Washington State constitution were aiming to create a fair and predictable system for assessing property taxes. They wanted to be sure that some people wouldn’t be unfairly targeted for extra taxes. Taxing all property uniformly—essentially a flat tax—seemed to them the best way to create a fair system. But it also creates other problems.

One problem is figuring out how to capture tax revenue to provide services that benefit just one part of a tax district. If I have a mosquito infestation near the river, why should the people who live across town have to pay to fix that problem? But I can’t tax the folks by the river more than the others because of uniformity. That means I have to pay to fix the problem out of the general fund that everyone pays into, in order to fix a highly localized problem.

But the framers, in their wisdom or by accident, allowed for the creation of taxing districts. So the city of Northlakeshoreline can create a Mosquito Control District (yes they exist!) so that people who live by the river can get taxed—uniformly—to attack the mosquito problem. So they will pay more property tax per $1,000 of value of property, but they also get the benefit of the services their taxes are paying for. A TIF district wouldn’t be providing services but infrastructure—roads, drainage, and parks for example—and paying for them over time. It is possible that the TIF challenge will be met by creating a new kind of taxing district.

And the other option might be to just amend Washington’s constitution to exempt properties in designated TIF areas like Sherwood Forest. There ARE already exemptions (in sections 10 and 11 of Article VII of the constitution) that tax property owned by senior citizens and certain kinds of farm and timber land, and open space at a different rate than other properties in a taxing district. A similar carve out could be made for properties in TIF areas so that they could be taxed with a rate that would allow the capture of additional value.

No matter what, the time is now for TIF. But the next part of the story will be whether the openings left by the framers for creating new districts are wide enough or whether a constitutional amendment is needed.

A developer is converting former dormitory buildings on Long Island into affordable housing, according to a story in The New York Times. In the project in Hempstead, the Community Development Corporation of Long Island, a nonprofit housing agency, and Conifer, a developer based in Rochester, are repurposing two former off-campus dormitories as 94 affordable rental apartments.

The Economist has an interesting article about how some private equity firms are investing in care homes. The firms are hoping to make money from aging populations in rich countries, but they may face obstacles, the story says.

Photobucket.com.

So I’ve been thinking. What would I be willing to take in exchange for supporting the deep bore tunnel? What would it take for me to capitulate and get on board the deep bore bandwagon? Okay, here it is. It’s pretty simple and straightforward: a sensible land use policy. I think it might just be worth the $4.5 billion, the rancor and the power grab by the Seattle City Council if we could get our act together on land use in Seattle. We know compact communities are better for the environment, use less energy, and promote walking, biking, and transit use. So warm up the boring machine but here’s what I want first.

Let’s start with Beacon Hill. About 15 years ago I moved to Beacon Hill and got involved in the neighborhood planning process. It was fun. I learned a lot and the various committees and organizations on the Hill worked hard to develop a vision for Beacon Hill. There was a small, dedicated, and relentless group focused on getting Beacon Hill a station on the new light rail line that would be passing deep under the neighborhood. There was no plan for a Beacon Hill station, or at least there wasn’t any money. But the group persevered, and, amazingly, landed a plan for a station and a commitment for a station shell. They pushed some more. Finally, there was a commitment to build a station—one of the deepest in the world at the time—to serve the neighborhood.

At the time the neighborhood was also planning where to put the library and how to take advantage of the lid going in at the reservoir in Jefferson Park. All of these things were challenging (sometimes controversial) and took a lot of energy from neighbors. But the station seemed to be an unqualified and big win. We’d finally get that core to the neighborhood conceived of in the planning process. The neighborhood could finally grow up with mixed use buildings and retail. We’d exchange the squat and decaying buildings for transit oriented development. Again, not without controversy, but why not take advantage of the rail line to create a compact downtown for Beacon Hill centered on transit.

Well, what does downtown Beacon Hill look like today?

All photos are by Roger Valdez.

I moved to Capitol Hill some time ago. But a recent trip to Beacon Hill made me wonder “what happened.” Then I thought about the City Council falling all over themselves to dig the tunnel on the water front. Why that big project and not Beacon Hill?  Fifteen years after I moved there, Beacon Hill does not have thriving transit oriented development. Instead the station looks like the stump of a felled tree. And that’s about how it feels.

So dig your tunnel City Council. But I’d like to see the rezones on my desk for transit oriented development on Beacon Hill by the end the day. That shouldn’t be to hard, just dust off the plans we worked so hard on. We’d also have a chance to consider things like district energy, affordability, and LEED requirements as part if the legislation. And rezones are free! Write up that resolution for Monday, pass it with a unanimous vote (sure they’ll be a few whiners in the audience but that shouldn’t slow you down. You’re the “get it done gang,” after all).  How exciting! Maybe one day we’ll be able to stand up and say we’re like Redmond. Here’s what they built near their park and ride.

And what the heck, once the rezones are signed, sealed and delivered, I’ll bet we can talk Mayor McGinn into taking a trip out of town so Richard Conlin can do the honors and sign them into law. I’ll even loan him a pen.

How you view homes – as a luxury good or a staple – should affect your perception of where where you think

Photobucket.com.

It’s time to declare Link Light Rail “basically on target” for ridership. July’s weekday ridership averaged 24,145 vs. a December projection (page 17) of 26,600 for by mid-2010, and it’s done so during a downturn in both jobs and travel. It’s hard to guess how quickly ridership will rise from here, but it seems plausible that numbers might hit the 26,600 weekday figure by year-end.

Link Light Rail. Photo courtesy of Sound Transit.

It’s a fairly impressive figure, in context. Many rail lines start with more riders, but they usually have higher densities around them, or park-n-rides, or connecting rail lines, or bigger feeder bus systems, or all of the above. Central Link has neither parking (except Tukwila) nor density, and a moderate amount of connecting transit. It doesn’t even get many in-Downtown trips, because it competes with free tunnel buses.

To be honest, I’m relieved. The projections made sense, including the upward trend as the drivers of ridership came into place, like the connecting bus lines. But it was far from certain. Kudos to Sound Transit for being realistic with your ridership projections, much as you’ve been conservative (in the last decade) about project cost projections.

Now my worry isn’t ridership, but limited capacity. Trains can only be two cars long until 2015 (page 96), when use of the stub tunnel on Pine is no longer limited by construction of University Link. Meanwhile, trains can’t run more often at peak times, due to required separation between trains and buses in the Transit Tunnel. There may be no way to grow capacity until 2015.

Anecdotally, I’ve seen peak-time Link trains so full that riders can’t even board. By 2012 or so, we might need measures to decrease ridership a little, like restoring a couple bus routes into Downtown. Or maybe Sound Transit can negotiate some closer proximities between buses and trains with the feds. Or maybe it would help to move some tunnel bus routes to the street, though the bus riders are important too.

Long term, capacity is a huge advantage with rail. Link is built for trains up to four cars long, which by itself would double capacity. Once the buses are out of the tunnel (presumably 2016, when University Link opens), frequencies can be much better. Of course, when University Link opens, the system will also have a lot more turnover on each trip, i.e. a lot of people who go from the ends to Downtown and vice versa, but not as many who travel the whole length. Capacity will be multiples of today’s in 2016, and much higher still in the early 20s when the line hits Lynnwood, Redmond, and Federal Way.

We’ll need that capacity. I’ll skip the half-pager for now, but in brief, this region continues to grow, a lot of jobs and residents are projected to be added around the new and planned Link stations, and it seems unlikely that voters would pass any major increase in road capacity.

On a side note, Link seems to be doing very well as an airport shuttle. When I ride on weekends, it seems like 30-50% of the passengers have luggage. What an improvement in quality of life for tourists! That might strike some people as unimportant, but given that tourists spend billions in Seattle every year, it seems pretty important to me.

Related to that, here’s some constructive criticism about Westlake Station, for the benefit of both tourists and locals: (a) It’s easy to be confused about how to pay. There are several ways to get to the train platform without walking past a ticket machine, and the signage is woefully inadequate, so improve the signage and think about adding ticket machines on the platforms (can anyone explain that one?). (b) The ORCA card readers are only on the mezzanines, not on the platforms, meaning for example that a bus-to-rail transfer requires going upstairs and back down, which again the signage doesn’t adequately explain (and which doesn’t seem to make sense to begin with). (c) Exiting the station is very confusing, as evidenced by the tourists I continually run into asking how to get to the street, sometimes around the elevator in the center of the mezzanine. A few sign poles in the mezzanine, with maps, would solve this problem. (d) There’s no drinking fountain, and no concession. Give us something to drink!

Seattle Bubble has an interesting post. It says that many homebuyers in King County are apparently unwilling to

Photo courtesy of photobucket.com.

Southern Sudan plans to rebuild cities in the region in the shapes of animals and fruit, according to this BBC News report. SeattleScape blogger Mark Hinshaw sees potential there. Here’s what he has to say:

The World Institute for Anthropomorphic Town Planning announced last week that Washington State will be the recipient of six grants to counties for free-standing urban development.  Each county would be required

Courtesy of photobucket.com.

“We are excited about this prospect because we know that many legislators have been wanting get rid of the Growth Management Act,” said Keefer Bakelite, Palouse County Commissioner. “Who could possibly object to towns shaped like animals?”

Says Professor William “Willy” Grant of CWU’s urban planning school, “Few people know it, but animals make the ideal shape for communities. Civic uses fit nicely in the head, industry fits in the stomach, housing in the legs. Waste disposal systems go, um, well… near the tail.”

A number of counties are vying for the grant, having already selected the Bighorn Sheep, the Black Bear, the Salmon, and the Geoduck for their own submissions. Palin T. McHall, Executive Director  of the WIATP remarked, “Other counties will have to be extra creative as some of the best animal shapes are already taken.”  “Insects are also eligible,” he adds.

For their part, Futurewise and the Sierra Club are in a political quandary. “We hate free-standing communities. But we all love animals. It’s a true dilemma,” one close source who chose not be identified said.

Personally, I think it would be swell to have a town in look like a cicindela tranqebarica.