Does the financial crisis mean the end of the American Dream? What does that mean for the Seattle Dream?

News from Washington D.C. has people baffled, worried and angry.

An economist from Harvard offers an observation in a recent commentary that raises some questions similar to the ones raised in our discussion on Monday:

So what should the government do? Eliminate those policies that generated the current mess. This means, at a general level, abandoning the goal of home ownership independent of ability to pay. This means, in particular, getting rid of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, along with policies like the Community Reinvestment Act that pressure banks into subprime lending.

The right view of the financial mess is that an enormous fraction of subprime lending should never have occurred in the first place. Someone has to pay for that. That someone should not be, and does not need to be, the U.S. taxpayer.

His argument is persuasive and has me rethinking the bailout (cough) I mean rescue.

But abandoning the goal of “home ownership independent of ability to pay” is a prescription easily given by a Harvard economist but not from local politicians. Politicians don’t have the courage to ask people to revise their expectations as Miron suggests. But what if they did?

Is it possible that growth pressures combined with the financial crisis could spawn a local movement supportive of density in and around single family neighborhoods?

Will the crisis push environmentalists, developers and housing advocates closer together? Or will the crisis between Main Street and Wall Street add fuel to the fire of our own local class worries about housing and growth? Could this mean a rematch between the ghosts of Forward Thrust and Lesser Seattle?

Seattle’s five automated toilets are on the road. The toilets were loaded onto flat-bed trucks last night and are en route to an Ebay auction winner who paid $12,500 for the toilets that have set Seattle back $5 million.

Toilets being loaded onto trucks outside Victor Steinbrueck park

The German-made Hering-Bau toilets cost about $544,000 each to install and about $128,000 to maintain. In some other cities using the toilets, those costs are offset by selling ads on and within the units. Seattle law precluded posting ads on our units.

The high maintenance costs and problems with drug use and prostitution meant the toilets had to go after only five years of use.

They were first listed on eBay in mid-July with a minimum bid of $89,000 each. There were no bidders.

The toilets were re-listed Aug. 4 with no minimum bids.

Comparable new units are now selling for around $200,000.

The city council overrode a mayoral veto in 2001 to install the toilets throughout downtown. But a report released in March said the toilets are the least cost-effective way for the city to provide public restrooms and said they were magnets for illegal activity.

Racecar Supply of Rochester won all five auctions, according to the Associated Press. The owner told an AP reporter that two of the units will grace the South Sound Speedway. He plans to sell the other three.

Since most of it was regraded a century ago, the area we now call Belltown has always been on the way to some fantastic destiny. The current vision has been clear since the 80s: Belltown should be a dense spinoff from Downtown proper, primarily residential but with offices too, and with lots of amenities.

Plymouth Housing's new project at at 2119 Third

I’ve always thought Belltown was just one more wave of projects away. After a few waves it’s not there yet. But it’s getting closer.

In many ways, Belltown is a huge success already, and I love living here. It’s vibrant to a point, and every convenience is either here or nearby. Young adults, empty-nesters, and a large poor population mix with less difficulty than some imagine. Half of us walk to work or use transit.

Traffic and street width are a hurdle. Belltown is “on the way to” Ballard in addition to destiny. The narrow streets and low traffic of Portland’s Pearl District magnify the feeling of people out and about, while Belltown needs lots of pedestrians to seem right, and busy crossings discourage strolling. Some avenues are probably unfixable, but Second and Third are low-volume toward the north and could be narrowed, perhaps replacing a lane or two with greenery.

We should concentrate our retail. Belltown is populated enough to have a couple good retail avenues, or one great one, but instead it has a lot of “sort of” retail streets. The culprit is code that favors/requires retail everywhere, and doesn’t require it to be wall-to-wall anywhere. We ought to pick a couple avenues for retail, and sharply reduce requirements elsewhere, leaving space for corner stores of course.

For those wishing for a bigger-city feel, another lesson is that a few hundred new housing units won’t have much effect in such a large area. That’ll take thousands of people, which will take years. Luckily some of us enjoy the journey.

Perhaps we can talk about amenities in another post!

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.

Seattle World's Fair drawing by Earle Duff

Thanks to all of you who have loyally read and commented on the SeattleScape blog for the past five months. We’ve had a lot of fun, so we’re stepping it up.

Six new SeattleScape bloggers are joining the conversation (Read more about them at right). They are architects, planners, neighborhood organizers and others obsessed with design and urban development in our fair city. Their voices will expand our discussion and I hope you will continue to join in.

Have topics, projects or ideas you want us to write about? Post your comments on our site, or email me at shawna.gamache@djc.com.

Thanks for reading.

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.

Insert toilet humor here

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?

Not your grandmother's Seattle anymore

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?

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.

Seattle is already zoned to allow three times the density expected over the next 14 years, according to a report released last week by Livable Seattle.

The report culls numbers from the 2007 King County Buildable Lands Report. It makes the case that the city’s zoning capacity already outpaces projected growth three-fold, so more up-zoning is not needed.

Is Seattle overzoned?

“Seattle’s city government should not make radical changes in our established zoning and neighborhood plans with the idea that such changes are needed to accomodate future growth,” reads the report.

You probably haven’t heard of the group. David Miller, one of Livable Seattle’s members and president of the Maple Leaf Community Council, told me at a council meeting in March that the group had formed in response to concerns over all of the zoning changes council will review this year.

Miller said the group’s goal is to provide data to help people make informed decisions.

According to the report, “overzoning” has serious negative implications, including artificial increases in land and housing costs, and contributing to urban sprawl as families are priced out of the city.

Council will review an overhaul of the multifamily code later this year. Last month, it gave the nod to raising the threshold on how many units a development needs to trigger a review of its environmental impact. But council amended the proposal so the lighter restrictions would apply only to developments in urban centers and alongside the planned light rail.

Read another blogger’s take on the report here.

I attended a City Club forum Wednesday where two economic experts said that Seattle should be able to brave the coming recession– er, downturn– better than most.

Judith Runstad, a lawyer with Foster Pepper and former chairman of the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank, said that’s because of the strength of our high-tech sector and our cutting-edge health care industry.

Runstad

She said city and state management policies have also helped prevent the kind of overbuilding that has the glutted California real estate market, weighted down by foreclosures, in a constant nose-dive.

Phillips

Kevin Phillips, writer, commentator and former Republican Party strategist, said we can thank our geographic position that puts us close to Asia, the coming world power center.

He also said the city should be grateful for its lack of ties to the beleagured financial sector, a relationship that will take its toll on cities like San Francisco.

Still, it could get scary, even for we lucky ones.

Phillips is the author of “Bad money: Reckless finance, failed politics and the global crisis of American capitalism.” (Sounds like a great children’s bed-time book, doesn’t it?) He said the U.S. has made some bad decisions such as over-reliance on the financial sector as a driving industry while letting the manufacturing industry go, and by piling up an enormous amount of debt.

Add to that plummeting housing prices, commodities inflation and oil prices further dragging down the faltering dollar, and “it is striking in how many things are circling us,” he said.

“We don’t know what this is, but the probability is that this is the first downturn of the next economic era,” Phillips said. “This is much more than just some normal recession.”

To really get out of this trouble, Phillips said the country needs “smarter leadership” in the White House, a comprehensive energy policy and some distance from the financial sector.

“People who just worship the free market, you can’t plan on something like that,” Phillips said. “I think it’s time for something that will restore a little balance, like value engineering.”