The City Council appears to be moving deliberately and methodically toward approving an incentive zoning proposal. The morning after the public hearing I wrote about earlier, the Planning, Land Use and Neighborhoods Committee held a three-hour meeting including a another discussion of incentive zoning. Conventional wisdom holds that the Council will pass something.

Councilmember Tim Burgess asked a key question of the incentive zoning discussion: what is our goal? Is it affordable units? How many and where?

Council staff didn’t really have a clear answer.

Incentive zoning is a good concept. A Public Health study from a few years ago showed that developers like the idea, provided that there was a real incentive involved. More density might work but an incentive also might be reduced parking requirements or, as Denny Onslow suggested, an easing of local regulations that could make 85 foot development produce housing as affordable as 65 foot development.

But incentive zoning all by itself won’t get us closer to the larger goals of affordability, sustainability and livability.

Height is a problem. Large chunks of our city are zoned for 40 feet. That height doesn’t work for projects like Jim Mueller’s at 23^rd and Union.

The city needs more projects like Mueller’s. It activates a property that was blighted turning it into a community asset.

Incentive zoning is based on the theory that morepublic benefit will be created when there is less regulation. The current proposals don’t address the problem of intersections like 23^rd and Union. The Council really needs to ask itself, as Councilmember Burgess did, what are we trying to accomplish?

Incentive zoning could be part of the solution.

Finding the problem is something the City hasn’t done yet.

Increasing floor area in exchange for affordable units is only a piece of the puzzle.

Addressing height and other issues that drive cost are also critically important if the concept of incentive zoning is to succeed.

Incentive zoning to create affordable housing had a lengthy public hearing tonight.

Labor likes incentive zoning saying that “development left unchecked [will] widen the gap between rich and poor.” That doesn’t sound very “pro-development.”

But Steve Williamson from UFCW Local 21 said “We are pro development.” But Williamson added that we “want shared prosperity” which means requiring housing for people making 40% AMI requiring union labor for construction.

Labor supports incentive zoning as 'Development with Justice'

Low income housing advocates are in favor of this as well seeing an opportunity for new housing units and new dollars from a pay in lieu element in the legislation.

But there are two unlikely groups aligned against incentive zoning.

The first is John Fox’s Displacement Coalition. Fox in a recent e-mail about incentive zoning he said that “for months, our Mayor and most of our City Council have been hashing over new programs designed to reward developers with tax breaks, more density, and other giveaways.” In the same e-mail Fox calls for a moratorium on growth.

The second vocal group tonight was the business community and developers. Steve Leahy of the Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce said that the proposal is actually a disincentive for new development. Up zones are incentive enough and the best way to create more affordable housing. They don’t see a giveaway here.

What do single family neighborhoods think of incentive zoning? On October 21^st the City Neighborhood Council will be holding a meeting to discuss what incentive zoning might mean for single family neighborhoods.

Will single family neighborhoods join developers and the Displacement Coalition against incentive zoning? Do neighborhoods see incentive zoning as more density at their expense? Does the recent financial crisis make incentive zoning moot since credit has frozen and nobody can build or buy?

Erica Barnett’s column in this week’s Stranger focuses on sidewalks. It is a great rundown of the politics of sidewalks, street improvements and today’s tension between developers and neighborhoods.

But I would suggest that, like many issues, single-family politics drives the sidewalk discussion.

Last weekend I was visiting family in Tacoma. Someone walked in and said “What is the deal; you have the last unpaved street in Tacoma. Gravel? What gives?”

A heated discussion ensued about why the project didn’t happen. “We wanted asphalt and rolled curbs. The City wanted sidewalks that would have slashed into people’s yards and been outrageously expensive.”

I piped up and said “actually the way it is right now is best for everyone, especially for China Lake. If the street was paved, it would create a huge drainage issue because of the new impervious surface. That would create a huge expense and a bunch of dirty water. The road now has much better drainage. Gravel is the way to go. Keep it the way it is!”

Everyone looked at me for a beat with a bit of bewilderment and disdain—as if I had just spoken in Latin—and then continued their debate about sidewalks.

No offense to Tacoma. The opinions expressed there are the same ones that drive the sidewalk debate in Seattle. The bottom line on sidewalks is that they are often needless status symbols creating more impervious surface which is expensive to mitigate. How about those swales?

The next time you hear someone saying “for crying out loud, we don’t even have sidewalks!” think about Palantine NW pictured here.

We don’t always need sidewalks to support pedestrian-friendly and pedestrian-safe neighborhoods. And they shouldn’t be a litmus test as to whether a neighborhood has favored status with the City.

Sidewalks add impervious surface which we have to mitigate with huge drainage projects. Let’s focus on how we move pedestrians safely, not creating more sidewalks. Progress can be less sidewalks!

A recent afternoon walk around Capitol Hill led me from Volunteer Park down 14th.

Along the way I saw this single family fantasy:

Beautiful bricks!

Then not to far down the road yet another study in brick:

This is the Fairhome. Unfortunately there is no vacancy.

The Fairhome is a solid building that recalls a time when apartment buildings looked like they were built to last forever.

If we peek around the corner of the Fairhome we see:

Gasp! Single family!

And across the street are some great looking old homes.

Solid Seattle houses.

And just to the south is this little multifamily number:

Kid on bicycle not included.

And a bit further south, a duplex.

Scale (as in “this project is out of scale with our neighborhood”) is often used to reject multifamily in and around single family neighborhoods. This neighborhood came together when suburbs were not common and when expectations about scale were different. Look at the stark contrast in scale on 14th and Mercer:

This is a Seattle Housing Authority property.

Talk about out of scale! A high rise of low-income housing?

But this neighborhood — old and new, wealthy, middle class and poor–seems to be working.

The mix is what we want in Seattle’s housing future. There isn’t a clear line or barrier between types of housing but a gradual progression of types of housing, income materials and style. This looks like it happened “organically” but couldn’t we plan the same kind of integration? Who wouldn’t want to live in any unit or house between the Park and John?

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?

About 65 percent of Seattle is zoned for single family housing. Is that too much or just right?

In Chicago and DC, all of my friends lived in apartments or condos. In Portland, they all live in standalone houses, even the renters, though some have lots of roommates. In Seattle, it’s a real mix, with townhouses, rowhouses and duplexes increasingly entering the picture.

Does our Single Family majority keep prices high? Are we ill-equipped for all this growth people keep predicting? Does Seattle have too much single family land?

I asked two SeattleScape bloggers to take on the debate. Their pieces ran in today’s DJC and can be read here without a subscription.

Irene Wall argues that Single Family housing is Seattle’s Golden Goose and we’re doing great on density already. Roger Valdez, a new blogger at SeattleScape, makes the case that preserving all that land for standalone homes hurts the working class.

What do you think? Is Seattle’s house in order? HugeAss City weighs in here.

September has been a busy month for Seattle land use. Here’s your primer on what’s going down and what’s going up.

South Lake Union looks up: The Department of Planning and Development released three up-zoning alternatives for South Lake Union. These are being studied in advance of the rezone there.

Inside the beehive

In one, residential towers could reach to 30 and 40 stories in most of the neighborhood. In another, most blocks would be up-zoned to 240 feet for both commercial and residential buildings. That’s about the height of 2200 Westlake.

In a third vision, commercial height increases would be minimal, with residential towers allowed to be 160 feet and 240 feet outside the Cascade blocks.

Most blocks in South Lake Union are now zoned at 65 to 85 feet.

Private improvements for Magnuson: Full council gave the nod to private renovation and leasing of two buildings at the Warren G. Magnuson Park at Sand Point.

Building 11 will get $8.5 million for environmental cleanup, seismic upgrades and fire protection. Building 11 LLC would pay $235,000 in annual rent to the city under a 30-year lease.

Arena Sports will invest more than $5.5 million in Hangar 27 for improvements and seismic upgrades. Arena Sports will pay $225,000 in annual rent under a 20-year lease.

Fort Lawton gets Green Light: A plan to turn the formal army reserve center into housing is headed to federal officials for approval. Council said OK to the semi-finalized proposal to build up to 79 single-family houses, 150 apartments and townhouses, and two new neighborhood parks on the 31-acre site.

The project could cost between $60 million and $80 million and is heavy on low-income housing, including three duplexes for Habitat for Humanity and 85 other low-income units.

McMansions reigned in: Full council is scheduled to vote Oct. 6 on design changes for single family zones aimed at curbing McMansions. Heights, lot coverage and garages would all see changes.

Looking ahead: Council’s transportation committee could voice its support for a streetcar network Monday morning, Mayor Greg Nickels gives his budget address Monday at 2 p.m. and a hearing on making the downtown developer bonus citywide is scheduled for Oct. 7 at 5:30 p.m.

Council will also vote on comp plan amendments, set the budget, likely rule on citywide incentive zoning and more well before the star is up on the old Bon Marche building.

Maybe you can rest your eyes in January. . .

National Park(ing) Day was Friday, and it was quite an effective spectacle. A parking space at First and Spring became a lawn, one of hundreds set up and staffed by volunteers around Seattle and the US.

The park was the first open lawn anywhere near First and Spring in decades.

As the meter ran out, First Avenue lost its park

Perimeter districts around Downtown Seattle are improving quickly park-wise due to a lot of hard work, generally northward, with the Olympic Sculpture Park, South Lake Union Park (phase II coming!), Cal Anderson Park, the new pocket park at Queen Anne & Roy, and the refurbished Cascade Playground – all great additions. Also exciting are the proposed pocket park at 8th & Westlake and the proposed skybridge that will “add” Myrtle Edwards Park for Lower Queen Anne residents. But what about Downtown Proper…the area with the most people?

A little would go a long way. A quarter block is enough room for a big fountain, some trees, and a couple patches of grass, fertilizer-free of course. It’s easy to imagine a spectacular design, whether traditional or avant garde. The park would stay active all day by encouraging pedestrians to pass through and by being both interesting and pleasant. The City’s promising new Park Ranger program would help keep it friendly.

Two parks of this size would be even better. Or three, since I’m dreaming, including one in Belltown.

The elephant in the room is our fear of drunks, panhandlers and noisy teenagers. Forget that much of our fear is unfounded; perception might as well be reality if it keeps you from using a park. But parks don’t create drunks. If a few of our parks seem overrun, it’s because we don’t have much public space, so the drunks seem concentrated. To continue this non-pc thought, adding more public space would reduce the concentration.

With that, plus more parks nearby, perhaps a lot of us would use parks more. Maybe we’d regain a lost aspect of our culture.

Downtown’s growing mixture of uses would be a boost. A growing residential population, lots of shoppers, rising tourism, a huge office population, and scattered event crowds are combining to keep parts of Downtown active all day and, in some areas, all evening. The best park locations would be places that serve several of these groups.

Wow, another topic that’s far too complex for a blog post. More later.

A recent study determined that at least 220 midrises have been built in the 2,000-acre Greater Downtown area in the last 20 years, including those now underway. That’s in the CBD plus fringe districts like Lower Queen Anne, around Seattle U, etc.

OK, it was an obscure and imprecise study. Basically yours truly counting new buildings between 3-9 stories off the top of my head. I’ve been trying to invent a reason to write about this, and not coming up with one. So … quite a lot of midrises, eh?

One of 220: Cabrini First Hill Apartments

Well …. yeah. 220 really is a lot. Greater Downtown has changed dramatically in that time, and midrises have been a major reason, perhaps as much so as the 76(?) taller buildings built in the same period.

You can argue about architecture, or zoning, or what got torn down. But there’s no question that the edges of Downtown have gotten a lot more populated, with midrises bringing thousands of hotel rooms, millions of square feet of offices and labs, thousands of housing units, nice college buildings and a lot more retail. Far more people now live the sort of walkable, sustainable lifestyles many of us encourage.

Housing affordability should benefit long-term. First, midrises tend to be a bit cheaper to build than taller buildings. Second, look at today’s low-moderate-price housing: it’s generally the market-rate housing of past decades, whether the 70s or 20s. Because buildings tend to move downmarket over the years, buildings from the 80s should be following their 70s brethren.

Of course, the biggest requirement for affordability is keeping supply ahead of demand, and Seattle’s influx of midrises is a big reason why we have avoided San Francisco-type prices. (And kudos to our array of non-profits, who both house the poor and improve neighborhoods.)

Same story with retail. New buildings tend to be populated by established retailers and chains, because of lease rates and other requirements. But as long as there’s more retail space than the big guys want, there will always be cheaper spaces for the funky local stores, primarily in older buildings.

So, yeah, that’s a lot of midrises!

The city of Seattle is currently evaluating its Design Review process, aided by Weinstein A|U.

I was anxious to see what the review would look like. I helped craft the initial program, managed it for most of the 1990s, and then served on the Queen Anne/Magnolia/South Lake Union Design Review Board for four years ending in April.

Should we leave it to administrators?

The review conducted by city staff and the consultants is very thorough and presents many compelling observations and recommendations. What I wonder, after reading the report, is whether the recommendations go far enough.

When the Mayor and City Council began the process of creating Design Review in the late 1980’s there was very little trust in the community for the then Department of Construction and Land Use.

Little did folks realize that it wasn’t for lack of talent or compassion that DCLU was approving ugly stucco boxes in Wallingford, Ballard or the U District. It was simply that the department had few tools to deal with design. But because of this lack of trust, the group-think of the moment was that DCLU surely could not be entrusted with an administrative design review process.

(more…)