There was an uproar when HALA proposed to rezone single family homes, as nobody is looking forward to being displaced or living in the middle of a construction zone. The fact is that even if you are supportive of low income housing, few people want to live like Edith Macefield, and many people have an attachment to their home and neighborhood that is more than fiscal.
The mayor and city council back tracked, and the Seattle Times ran triumphant stories like “Mayor Murray withdraws proposal to allow more density in single-family zones” and Danny Westneat declared victory. Other news outlets then echoed the sentiments, with the Stranger howling in disgust.
That left people thinking that single family upzones were off the table for HALA, but that’s not the case at all. Upzoning single family to low rise multifamily (condos, apartments, town homes) is still planned inside urban villages (recommendation MF3) and possibly along arterials (MF4). Further, Low Rise Multifamily is also planned to be changed to favor apartments and condos over town homes (MF6). See pages 22 and 23 of the HALA report for more detail.
In other words, Wallingford is going to be impacted by HALA to a great extent, as we have a lot of bus routes and a very large “residential urban village”. Upzone boundaries are unclear- If you’re in the urban village (colored areas on the left map below) then you’re definitely in the upzone target area (source: Seattle 2035 multifamily housing maps). If you’re in the purple area on the map on the right then you’re at risk, particularly in Fremont where urban village enlargement is proposed (source: HALA rezone map):
It’s also worth noting that Wallingford already has a lot of capacity for new buildings with higher density, particularly along 45th. Some landlords, such as the owner of the building with Murphy’s and Mejara, are holding out for the higher height limits HALA will allow before redeveloping. According to the WCC land use committee, these property owners are seeking 6 stories of condos, whereas current zoning is mostly limited to 4 stories along 45th street.
For background, here is the current generalized zoning map for Wallingford, which mostly dates back to our 1998 neighborhood plan:
I spoke with Esther Handy, O’Brien’s representative, to verify the facts in this article and to get a timeline for HALA adoption. This is crazy complicated legislation that’s been partially withdrawn and left a muddle, so some aspects like whether the mayor withdrew the arterial upzone recommendation aren’t even clear to them.
The most consequential parts of HALA for single family are in the timeline section entitled “Mandatory Inclusionary Housing & Mitigation for Commercial Development”, including:
- Zoning changes allowing approximately one additional story in all zones that allow multi-family development
- Rezones of single family areas within urban villages to residential small lot or a Lowrise zone
- Activating the mandatory inclusionary housing/ commercial mitigation programs
The plan is for the rezone to be discussed next year, with the groundwork being laid now. Here is the timeline for zoning changes:
| Mandatory Inclusionary Housing & Mitigation for Commercial Development | Dates |
| EIS structure & consultant selection | 9/2015 – 11/2015 |
| EIS evaluation including impacts, urban design, massing etc. | 12/2015 – 12/2016 |
| Community review and engagement | 10/2015 – 3/2017 |
Draft and refine zoning code changes:
|
9/2016 – 6/2017 |
| City Council review and action (Packages of rezones by zone category or geography are expected) | 3/2017 – 9/2017 |
Click to access the full timeline document.
Clearly Seattle is in a housing crunch, and it is desirable to have more affordable housing. How that should be accomplished is the key question. We are sympathetic to certain ADU / DADU changes being made in HALA- incentive zoning that puts more people in the existing zoning envelope while demanding affordable rents is a good thing, as can be more town homes and other forms of living smaller. Portland is leading the way there as they always do (see greenways), for instance by waving fees for ADU permits.
On the flip side, HALA is also packed full of developer giveaways in neighborhoods like ours while asking nothing of the neighborhoods with the lowest walk scores and largest home lots (single family 9600). That means that if you live near the coast in places like Magnolia, Laurelhust, or Wedgewood then HALA leaves your car-centric neighborhood completely untouched.
What HALA could have done was go into neighborhoods that were car-centric and look to convert them into walkable neighborhoods like Wallingford. That would mean splitting lots larger than 5000 square feet, creating new urban villages in areas where it is not possible to walk to amenities, creating bus lines that would network urban villages, and building out bike and pedestrian infrastructure in those places.
None of those ideas were touched on by HALA. Instead, HALA is looking to concentrate all development in already walkable places like Wallingford. Here are two maps of Seattle- walk scores on the left (green is more walkable), HALA residential upzone areas on the right. All the green, walkable areas are what are being targeted for redevelopment:
Seattle used to be considered a great city as it had modest bungalows on little lots that the middle class could afford. Seattle was a city of neighborhoods. That legacy could be embraced if HALA looked to create more neighborhoods like Wallingford.
Instead, HALA is being set up to convert the city into a place where the ultra-rich live in mansions on the coast with multi-car garages, and everyone else is packed into condominiums along transit lines. That’s the vision of 26 developers and low income housing advocates that Murray appointed to write HALA, but is that really the vision we want for the city?
Mike O‘Brien‘s office was very helpful in providing information for this article, so I wanted to give them a chance to respond. Here is Mike O’Brien’s statement:
The City’s comprehensive plan sets the framework for guiding growth and development in the City. Seattle has adopted an Urban Village Strategy which plans for most of the new growth to occur in designated urban villages like Wallingford. Those villages, by design, are the City’s most walkable and service-rich areas, with access to transit. This strategy allows the city to create great places and cost-effectively provide transportation and other services where there is a concentration of housing and/or jobs.
The HALA recommendations build off the City’s urban village strategy to advance affordability and accommodate additional growth. As Eric notes, over the next two years, the City will look at single family zoning inside urban villages to determine where there are opportunities to add density. The City expects to convert approximately 6 percent of the single family zones across the city to multi-family zoning, in order to implement the new mandatory inclusionary housing program. All new development in these new multi-family zones will have an affordability requirement and collectively, the program will create 6,000 new affordable housing units in new development over ten years.
The City is planning to engage all neighborhoods in 2016, including Wallingford, to determine the scope and specifics of these potential zoning changes. We want to hear your input about how Wallingford can best welcome new people into your neighborhood. No zoning changes will come before the Council until 2017. I expect each neighborhood will have unique approaches to how they want to manage growth in their urban village and our process will be designed so that communities have meaningful input on how they grow.
Wallingford is a great, walkable neighborhood that we hope will continue to grow so that more new neighbors can access the services and amenities of there. I look forward to this conversation with your neighborhood in the coming year.
I am for the upzone, or at least a partial upzone. I live in one of the historic apartment buildings that’s one of the few affordable places to live in Wallingford. It’s been here longer than many of the bungalows and adds charm and visual interest to the area. Many people have lived here for years and love this neighborhood.
To people who claim that upcoming won’t do anything for prices because people keep moving here, I disagree. Here’s an analogy for you:
The snowpack is low this year and it’s unlikely that we’ll get enough snow to make-up for it this year. So it’s likely we will have a mild to severe drought next year. However, people should still do what they can to help conserve water because it makes the drought next year less severe. Every bit helps.
Saying building new units is pointless because rent is going to go up is like saying you should water your lawn at noon because you can’t prevent the drought. Yes, prices are very likely to go up, but building more can help them go up less.
Buidling new units, even the fancy-shmancy apartments, controls rent increases for everyone. If a new apartment goes for $X and there are some available then it means an equivalent older unit must rent for less than $X.
The problem with your analogy is that the clouds don’t care whether we save water or not – rainfall and snowpack will be the same either way, so a gallon not used today is simply a gallon available for use later.
Housing on the other hand is certainly a limiting factor for growth, so as soon as more units become available, it’s very likely that more people will move here to live in them. The only way our housing supply can ever catch up and make room for everyone, is if growth slows down. Jobs must start going other places, and there are many places around the country that desperately need them. Seattle needs to end the developer give-away programs and start making growth pay for itself.
Hi Donn. The analogy works because we have reservoirs in the mountain. Every gallon not used this year stays in the reservoir (minus evaporation etc) and is available next year to drink, water crops, or maintain river flows.
The snow is like the people moving here – the item we can’t control.
Suggesting that jobs and people “just go elsewhere” is a very easy thing for someone to say who (presumably) already lives here….
No easier than someone who doesn’t live here telling those of us who do to just bend over and take it.
I do live here, in a SF home, and I support the upzone. My husband and I were extremely lucky to be able to afford a house, and it would be a dick move to tell people who aren’t in the position we’re in (two good incomes, able to pay for college without loans, good credit scores) that they can’t live here because we want to keep our nice block exactly the way it is.
If someone wants to put a duplex, triplex or multifamily unit next to us, we’d welcome it. Certainly makes more sense for urban growth than the $1 mil+ homes going up across from us today.
^^ like
The analogy does not work because there is no profit incentive motivating more snow. How will you feel when you quit, older apartment building is sold off to build a new high-rise?
It is a fallacy that one can build NEW affordable housing. Most developers only wish to subsidized affordable housing that they still collect full rent on with the balance picked up by Seattle taxpayers… many whom are past and current single- family homeowners.
Many folks can embrace taking steps to encourage more ADU and DADU units, e.g. relaxing parking requirements, creating standardized plans so folks can save consulting costs, or creating pathways for owner financing.
Older homes are affordable homes. Allowing developers open season on single family zones will create increase speculative building, tearing down the older affordable, mom-and-pop stock to build higher- profit multiple units. These new units will NOT be cheap housing.
Finally, we were promised during the neighborhood planning process that there would be NO UPZONING in the Urban Villages in order to get resident buy-in on the plan. Current zoning in Wallingford allows many hundreds of new units as-is. Some bad-apple developers have a horrible track record of expensive and insensitive development in single-family areas as currently written. We do not need to make it any easier for those folks to tear down our affordable stock to create more million-dollar McMansions.
Write your council-people. Nip up zones in the bud. Encourage thoughtful ADU and DADU incentives to maintain character, assist seniors to stay in their homes, and help new homeowners subsidize their own mortgage payments.
OK, but what do I say? They’ve got their thoughtful DADU incentives all ready to go in the work plan. More units, get rid of the onerous owner resident provision; the new section for splitting a house into multiple units. I have a strong feeling some of these things are unnecessary and undesirable, but honestly, I don’t have the experience with these things to be able to draw the line. I wish we had an organization like One Home Per Lot that could take an alternative stand people could rally around. I have the impression that was very successful (but when I checked, they’re not taking this one.) Without more acute analysis than most of us can manage, the council can just jettison the inflammatory initial HALA verbiage and move on with the plan. liveableballard.org seems to be the closest thing currently, though right now focused on the election.
Greg, the analogy does work as the limiting factor is the amount of land available to develop. The economics show that builders will consistently respond to market demand, if there is availability. They are the rain in the analogy. Increase the supply of land and builders will compete to put up as many units as inexpensively as possible. The supply of land are the weather patterns that bring the rain.
When the units being built exceeds the demand, it will drive down the premiums they are charging now. Rents are artificially high right now because of a lack of supply and high demand. Thousands of peer reviewed studies has shown that to be the case.
Older homes are only affordable when new homes are keeping their prices down, and that isn’t the case right now. Housing prices in my neighborhood have jumped from the low $300k’s to $600k in the last 4 years. They are all homes built in the building boom of the 1910’s, and they sure are NOT affordable now. People that are ensconced in a house and safely on the “life raft” of owning a home in Seattle need to realize that everyone else (especially young families) cannot afford to move to Seattle unless they are making high tech salaries.
The only solution is more homes.
Increasing the amount of urban villages is a key component that doesn’t get mentioned nearly enough. Having a multitude of small commercial spaces available increases the number of desirable neighborhoods as it increases the ability of people to walk/bike/bus shorter distances to services they want/need.
As it stands today, our requirement of mixed use is failing miserably as developers fill the residential units and then hold on to massive commercial spaces in the hopes that a corporate entity will come calling and fill up the entire space in one fell swoop.
If the city were to work to create more commercial spaces along commonly used roadways thus increasing the number of villages in place the demand for housing would spread to additional areas and reduce ability of developers to set commercial rents well above what most small/start up businesses can afford.
We need more housing but we also need more commercial areas where one can get the things they want/need. Having to get to one of a handful of neighborhoods to eat/shop/live is a severe limiting factor to Seattle’s success.
The catch there is that you need the market to support the businesses in these new commercial areas. If you want a number of small, neighborhood businesses, you’re going to need sufficient density in the adjacent area, which isn’t the case in many places.
Maybe. But I look at an area like Tangletown as a good example. Handful of small businesses supported by the surrounding neighborhood of predominantly single family homes with a handful of apartments thrown in.
Not to get into the old Portland vs. Seattle game, but Portland seems to do just fine with lots of commercial areas interspersed with their residential areas. I don’t think the Seattle plan of mixed use with massive residential above is really working based on the occupancy rates I see around town (which is a totally subjective data point I admit)
Actually Tangletown is a great example of a pretty well-mixed neighborhood. If you walk through the whole stretch from Green Lake Way to Kirkwood, and between 50th and just past Tangletown proper, there are quite a lot of duplexes, triplexes and small apartments (especially on corners, like Portland) with townhouses and larger apartments thrown in to boot. And the vast majority of single family homes are on small lots (including an older generation of god forbid skinny house infill).
BK has it right. The developers can’t fill the commercial spaces because of lack of demand. They are required to put in commercial spaces due to zoning then they sit vacant because of lack of demand. When you have commercial along the entire Stone Way corridor you have too much commercial square footage. Sorry Tim, you have it backwards.
Oh boy. Plus ca change. Climate change. More people, more needs, competing needs for resources like land, water, roadway, and best way to make a fast buck. It’s actually a good analogy in that if you dive in deep enough, it’s far more complex than economic 101 supply vs. demand. Otherwise, Vancouver wouldn’t be wrestling with growth issues and Detroit wouldn’t be tearing down neighborhoods to survive which brings us back to realizing those watersheds aren’t sufficient. Not to mention how lack of snowpack affect the farmers and ranchers on the other side of the mountain and the need to invest in infrastructure to better conserve and manage large scale irrigation to realize WA’s economy isn’t just based on Amazon and Zillow and MS and government employers.
What? infrastructure support? No need. Just change car centric neighborhoods to more walk zone by analogy battles and HALA (affordability and livability- where living admidst such brand words becomes evidence of oxymoron?).
Looks like I’m losing my home.
Couldn’t you already lose your home? But for the purpose of one mega big single-family house for one super wealthy household.
Wallingford could be a textbook case study for how more options make a neighborhood more affordable: per Windermere 91803 listings there’s a 2BR 888 SF unit in a 4-unit small condo building fir $334k. The cheapest SFH is $450k and it is a 1,000 SF teardown, specifically advertised as “value may be in the land” and “conventional lending might be a problem.” The next cheapest SFH is $510K for 1,020 SF. And of course SFHs get much more expensive from there.
Small scale multi-family can create options to own in the neighborhood for the 300s vs 500s and up. That’s not affordable to everyone but is a big difference from the price of entry being half a mil plus.
It is good to see careful attention to the details of HALA, but I wish our neighborhood blog were less explicitly biased against increased density. There are pros and cons to every approach–including good reasons for increasing density in already walkable neighborhoods, but the blogger writes as if those writing and supporting HALA are stupid. The anti-density position also smacks of NIMBYism. If we need more density to make Seattle affordable, why shouldnt Wallingford be a leader in that effort?
Yes indeed. I applaud the criticism of HALA for not going far enough in areas outside the present urban villages, but in contrast to this statement “Seattle used to be considered a great city as it had modest bungalows on little lots…” one might instead say “The Wallingford we all say we know and love has nicely intermixed diversity of homes including houses on small lots, row houses, duplexes and triplexes, and small apartment buildings most of which could not have been built under today’s SFH 5,000 zoning.”
The HALA team aren’t stupid, but that doesn’t mean they’re acting in our interests.
Wallingford’s population density IS increasing, rapidly, and there’s plenty of room for a lot more, under current zoning.
The bias charge is a little unfair, too – refer to the previous article on this subject, where the same author explicitly voices support for HALA. I think many of us like HALA where it’s directly aimed at affordable housing, but to fully understand the attitude towards the developer give-aways, you might need to have the kind of long experience with local development and the DPD, how that’s changed over the years. For me, this blog had a lot to do with it, when it covered the “small lot” back yard towers and we learned how that works, but some people in the community and in particular the community council have been working with these issues for a lot longer. So they could appear biased, but maybe they’re incredibly optimistic – apparently they think we can insist on better development, and get it, or they wouldn’t continue to put in the time.
Yes, the HALA team was extremely biased in favor of developers. Ever since they got shut down on the small-lot shenanigans, residential developers have been drooling over any other way to get a foot in the door of our single-family zones. “Trust us”, they say, “we’ll do the right thing to create affordable housing.” Truth be told, they screwed people then by building $800,000 homes on sub-standard lots and calling them “affordable.” Given the chance, some will tear down our diverse affordable housing stock and create even more $800,000 homes… because that is where the profit lies and that is what floats their boat. Do not be naive that new multi-family homes will be more affordable than the 1200 sq ft rundown home it replaces. The math simply does not work! Some developers simply do not give a crap, so those are the folks one need to legislate against.
Great article, Eric. Thanks for the information. I live in the Fremont urban village overlay. Really I consider this area lower Wallingford but for some reason it was put into the Fremont overlay. When I moved to this neighborhood they would tear down houses and put in four townhouses per lot. Then the rowhouse designation was added to the zoning laws and they now squeeze five units on each lot. To me that is about all the density we can take in this very old lovely neighborhood. Under the old zoning, we each have nice sized green areas full of trees in front of our units. With the rowhouse designation they get about 8′ x 8′ green space at most. In other words, there are trade-offs. The neighborhood is becoming less green and leafy. I fear Seattle is perhaps heading towards becoming yet another unappealing large American city, sort of a brutal approach to trying to squeeze in more residents. There are no simple answers.
Evon,
I grew up in Woodinville, watching subdivision after subdivision being built by clearing out forests. Where once an abundance of wildlife existed, there are now large lawns, large houses, and wide curving streets and cul-de-sacs. They averaged an acre per house. They would cut down over 100 acres of forests for 100 families. In contrast, cutting down a couple of second growth, non-native trees to house an additional 4 families has a greater positive impact on the larger environment of our state than cutting down a similar 4 acres to build them houses in the suburbs.
People are coming because there are jobs here, the only question is whether we are going to bring them to neighborhoods that are walkable, close to mass transit, and have a very small impact on the environment. Or will we tear down forests and pave long stretches of roads to do it instead.
Will people sacrifice some of their personal convenience for the much greater cause of limiting our impact on the environment? The younger generations seems to be willing to do so, but from my observations, the strongest resistance is coming from the Baby Boomer generation.
You know what keeps me up at night? The idea of rooftop decks. Can we just ban those. I might be able to live with density if it weren’t for those.
I’ll just leave this here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2015/10/06/there-is-no-such-thing-as-a-city-that-has-run-out-of-room/
Change is the only constant in life, so it’s best if we approach it rationally, and the HALA recommendations are long overdue.
Yes, there are people who really believe, as suggested by the comparison they make there, that the 112,700 per square mile population of Dhaka, Bangladesh is an exciting goal, that quality of life is a function of things like Peruvian food joints, and there’s no such thing as a growing too much – or too fast. And they’ll call those of us who don’t “NIMBYs” – as though it’s some kind of slur to say you care enough about our neighborhoods to fight for them, and as though we have some moral obligation to cut down our trees and bulldoze our old houses and erect cheesy barracks for the stampede of tech workers.
Or the exciting goal that seems to elude you, is to have some neighborhoods with enough density to provide even more public transit options. Some neighborhoods that can sustain even more fun and exciting shops and restaurants that are within easy walking distance of their homes.
The moral obligation you seem to miss, perhaps because you already own a home and can enjoy the huge runup in home values, is to make housing affordable to those who want to live in Seattle. While also stopping the buildozers tearing down the forests and farmlands outside Seattle.
Quite frankly, you are missing the forest through the trees.
True. Dhaka, Bangledesh just keeps growing. And Mexico City too.
Why was there such a negative response to HALA? Could it be because it lacked transparency? It didn’t include representatives of the stakeholders who were going to be affected the most. It didn’t give the sense of cohesive planning which shows consideration toward transportation needs (which aren’t here yet) and an acknowledgement that this city has lost far more affordable units than it’s replacing. That only until now in full blown media coverage, it was ok for rent to be jacked up knowing full well tenants can’t managed such rent increase and wil leave which in turns allow owners to do whatever they want because that’s market economy.
Yet somehow market economy in Seattle doesn’t ask developers to pay for all the infrastructure needed for such growth. Guess who pays? Vancouver ask for and get impact fees from developers. That city is planning to tear down 2 viaducts and replace them with a wider street with park and bike paths along the way. The city plans on using public money and money collected from developers who’ll benefit from the improved infrastructure change. ($200 million costBTW). HALA brought derision and a great deal of mistrust upon itself which continues today. It didn’t touch impact fee. The one thing which would bring legitimacy and shows all the pain wasn’t one direction while the gain$ were going to those who (coincidentally?) were well represented on HALA.
Urban villages are a great idea. Kinda reminds me of old Seattle with its many neighborhoods with defined commercial core which anchored and gave the neighborhood its identity and community. Community is what make places livable. It’s not the changes in themselves. But when you don’t consider and plan for growth by including better connected, faster, and more reliable transit so growth isn’t loving certain neighborhoods to death while neglecting others, it shows laziness in system planning.
There’s a lot of love which can be spread throughout the city. We didn’t have to give away Yesler Terrace public housing. If there’s a $5 million budget for Pronto bike from the city, and another $10 millions from the Feds, there was money for Yesler! (And did anybody consider in all the outreach to get the poor to bike these things, you need a credit card, not to mention the high price of such daily rental?)
Is the charmless density of Ballard the best HALA can give us to for replication?And using the Othello station or waiting at bus stops on certain bus routes shouldn’t mean you have to be prepared to fight or flight. This city needs to do better now on these basics first otherwise affordability and livability will be only for those who can afford to live the nice life in the safe zone. Those marginalized are forced out to the peripherywith equity talk in full form court of course. You ever wonder why city workers and big corporate/quasi govn’t employees get free or heavily discounted ORCA cards while low paying janitors and parking lot attendants working two jobs pay full fare?
“Yet somehow market economy in Seattle doesn’t ask developers to pay for all the infrastructure needed for such growth.”
This is incorrect. Every project has a City Improvement Plan which details the improvements to the infrastructure that projects are required to provide, including upsizing utilities in streets, adding transformer vaults for future capacity, improving and updating sidewalks, adding street lights, etc.
Projects built also have to pay sales tax which exceeds the amounts charged by Vancouver. Seattle has benefited in the hundreds of millions, money that has been spent not only on infrastructure improvements, but also on social programs. The new buildings also add to the tax base, which puts even more money into the transportation and low income housing levies.
Well of course renters and people who don’t live in Wallingford support giving more special favors (sorry, “incentives”) to developers. Unlike those of us who own our homes here, they haven’t invested hundreds of thousands of dollars to live in a nice neighborhood. They’re what you call “useful idiots.”
I guess saying that makes me a NIMBY, right? Well pardon me for putting the quality of life of my family and I above that of someone I don’t know who doesn’t even live here.
By being forced to give something up just so more people live here, and by giving all manner of tax incentives to developers, homeowners are being compelled to subsidize the destruction of their own neighborhood. It’s no different than being forced to subside the timber industry’s destruction of roadless areas in National Forests we all know and love.
So perhaps Mr O’Brien and the rest of the lackeys on the City Council can tell me, why should we support HALA? We know what some people get out of it; what’s in it for us? If they’re unwilling to answer that question, we homeowners need to stop blindly voting them back in and make them pay at the polls next Election Day.
What’s in it for existing homeowners? More walkable shops and restaurants. More frequent transit service. Greater diversity. Satisfaction development is being channeled away from sprawl.
If none of those things matter as much to you as “not living near renters” or “not having to look at row houses” perhaps living close in to the center of a large city isn’t really your best long-term options.
Oh? Are they planning to build shops and restaurants where SFH’s now stand on 46th, 47’th, 48’th, and 49’th? Thanks but I think we have plenty of options already, that’s why I bought here.
More restaurants? Really? Tear down my home and this 100 year old neighborhood for more restaurants is your answer? And I don’t give a rats ass about sprawl on the Eastside. They can change their zoning to SF 5000 and strive to be as walkable as we are now. Ridiculous.
If you own a single family home, no one is going to tear down your home unless you sell it to them.
Our neighborhood would not be as walkable as it is now if it had mostly been built under SF 5000.
Perhaps if more people didn’t need to “shop until they drop” or try cooking their own food more often they might be able to save enough money to buy a house with plants and trees that provide habitat for birds and animals. What will happen when we pave paradise to house all of these people who are supposedly coming? What about our urban gardens. They are what I need to enrich my life, not shops and restaurants…..
Wallingford is a blessed with parks as any urban neighborhood anywhere, and no one is proposing to remove any of them.
“Urban gardens,” trees and multi-family can co-exist quite happily, The 3-flat on a 3,500 SF lot I grew up in had an apple tree, a pear tree, and two gardens – a little one for the kids and a bigger one for the adults,.
BK, it is a problem of fragmentation. I see many birds and bees in my yard but really very few at the parks in my area. Too many people disrupt their sense of safety. But that is the other subject that no one wants to discuss. Population growth and the demand on limited natural resources.
Parks, especially frequently used playground type parks, are biological deserts compared to many Wallingford SF lots. If I remember right we had at least 3 species of bumblebee, leafcutter bees, honeybees, and some small green bee, plus at least three species of beneficial wasp (not hornets, though unfortunately those too.) And the sidewalks often rival any arboretum for botanical spectacle.
Agreed. When I moved to Seattle I loved all the neighborhoods and the parks and greenery. Although I don’t oppose density, I certainly want to preserve what makes this city special rather than a concrete jungle.
This is the rare occasion we agree hayduke (I guess we are both homeowners in the 6% that the city of Seattle wants to displace for housing projects). Did you vote for those responsible for this?
I probably did vote for them, although I don’t recall for sure. I won’t make that mistake again.
I did, for McGinn in 2009, but would Mallahan have been any better?
Supposedly this is a process that will happen over the next couple years. We have a chance now to slightly influence the makeup of the council, but not many candidates will come right out against any of this, the best we can expect is less zealous support for it. Then it will depend on real public involvement. Even O’Brien isn’t going to really fight for this stuff, they all expect it to just sail through, and if there’s a big backlash they’ll be pretty easy to work with – that’s my opinion, but you saw what happened after the Westneat articles in the Times. That might mean some trade-offs, like much more careful rezoning, more limited changes to accessory dwelling unit code, etc.
In our district. less zealous upzone support apparently means Maddux. (Or for sure Weatbrook if you’re in 6.) Bradburd in at large district 9, and in 8 we don’t seem to have a friend – Grant is apparently not the developers’ friend, if that matters, but neither does he care about SF neighborhoods.
Well of course people who own their own homes support constricting supply of new homes, to drive up the value of their own home.
Blind emotional responses and a refusal to accept that we have a real housing crisis isn’t a means to trying to find a real solution to this problem.
Like all toxicologists say, it’s not the type of poison but the dose that matters. The zoning to tiny
“apodments” &/or 6+ story monstrosities is quietly but quickly destroying the Wallingford, Fremont, & Ballard neighborhood character. It seems the only choices are ultra-expensive exclusive “Beverly Hills” type zoning or Soviet Union era type block-house hovel apts. Can’t a reasonable medium density zoning be enforced or is the $ contribution kick-backs (political corrupting influence) of developers just too strong?!
There is the townhouse approach, but that means tearing down a LOT of single family houses to build 2-4 townhomes. Where a large 6-story building can house 5 times homes that many on the same area of land. If we want to keep large portions of the city untouched single family, the only way to absorb the middle class is in higher density buildings that can be built abundantly and as inexpensively as possible.
Lot of astroturf.
Bah! I just bought my first home here in Wallingford to get out of the apartment life I’ve been living for 12 years :-(. I came to Seattle in 2007 with no money to my name (and in debt). I worked really hard, saved up my pennies, and bought a house in Wallingford just this past summer! And now I’m finding out they want to turn the neighborhood into apartments?! Aaaaaagh!
Welcome to the new republic of seattle comrade! That’s not dissent in your tone I trust? Your choice to purchase a single family home betrays your “exclusionary and racist” nature…according to HALA, our new glorious leader.
One other note… If they are targeting areas with great communities and excellent walk scores, then why are none of the wealthy neighborhoods being looked at?! Funny how if you go to richblockspoorblocks.com you can use the same map to identify the HALA up zones.
Because the rich neighborhoods you reference don’t have good walk scores. Take a second look at the map.
It also makes sense to put more people where there is already mass transit and walkable stores. We obviously don’t have room to build more freeways and widen roads in the city, so it makes sense to make it as easy as possible to take mass transit by building in areas with lots of mass transit. The logic is quite sound.
My wife and I have literally shed 20 years of blood, sweat and tears to achieve home ownership in a nieghborhood we cherish. It never would have entered my mind 20 years ago to whine about nice neighborhoods costing too much for me. Instead we worked. Hard. Sacrificed. I feel like we’re now being made out as evil because we own a home in a nieghborhood the Council and developers are eyeing like a cat eyes a mouse. Building 3 boxy 800,000 dollar town homes where my 100 year old piece of Seattle history sits is not meaningful to affordability, but it is meaningful in terms of gutting what makes Seattle distinct. Stop the bully mentality a keep your hands off my home.
Hear hear! My family has only been here 3 years in our 100+ yr old home, with the plan to stay 20+ years, until the kids are off on their own, or longer. Now we’re not sure it’s worth investing even more blood, sweat and tears than we already have since moving in. We’ve made sacrifices and worked hard and saved for more than a decade to get this home, our second (we sold our first; no we don’t own 2 homes). If HALA has people like us second-guessing the value of investing in the house and neighborhood, that doesn’t seem healthy for said neighborhood as if we eventually move out it could mean insta-townhome or condo for our current neighbors.
The prospect of duplexes on your block would cause you to second-guess the value of investing in your house why?
I didn’t see anything about duplexes. Good question, though, it is kind of a common story among urbanists, is it not? that we oppose upzones because we’re looking out for our property value. Even though the upzones put some SF owners into MF which ought to be if anything more valuable land, and leaves the rest in possession of an even smaller supply of SF homes. If you believe in the density fairy, it seems you’d expect SF values to go up with the upzone.
(I personally expect to see them go up on the average either way, for a while, then slip in and around the areas full of deteriorating apartments built during this developer gold rush.)
Land in Wallingford is and will continue to be valuable. The question is what hosing we allow.
Same lot, same yard, same envelope, our 3-story 2400 SF single family home which would sell for $1M plus could be instead 2 side-by-side 1,200 SF townhomes which would get the price per unit down into the 600s. Or 3 stacked 800 SF units which could get the price per unit down as low as $350k.
Same massing as existing housing, no less green space, but more affordable to more people: why should that cause such agony and lamentations among people nearby?
Hosing is the word for it. The fantasy that three structures on your SF lot would preserve the same amount of greenspace is a cruel jest and belongs with some of the more preposterous promotions of upzoning.
Why are people agonizing? Maybe it is because all the curb to curb cube-building going on around us is dramatically reducing the greenspaces and gardens in our neighborhood. Maybe because we have enough apartments and duplexes already in our neighborhood. Maybe because the notion that hosing down single family neighborhoods and replacing them with high density podments is a developer’s w*t dream.
If there are any lessons worth learning in the 21st century they revolve around conservation, restraint, and the precautionary principle. Contrary to what the density boosters proclaim, we – and our families – need gardens, trees and tree cover, birds, bees and places for wildlife right here in the city as much or more than anyplace else.
Walkinroun, thanks, that is what I’m talking about!
@walkinroun you didn’t read my post. The same exact building. Other than adding doors nothing on the exterior would need to change. Neither would the yard (including my wife’s garden). Internally you’d either be dividing the same exact structure front to back (into 2 x 1200 SF) or floor by floor (into 3 x 800 SF).
The big old house kitty corner from us could probably be turned into 4 or more 2 BR units – once again with no changes to the exterior or to the yard.
I did read it, BK, I’m just not buying it. You are talking about townhouses and stacked units and I just don’t see any evidence that builders are building into current SF footprints.
They can’t build in existing footprints because it is *banned*. We’er seeing LR1 development -but HALA proposal SFH in same envelope is prohibited. Would you oppose turn existing ground floor footprint into 2-3-4 units by going up, down, or internal division?
Yes
In all of this back and forth, I have not heard one mention of the quality (both substantive and aesthetically) of what these new, high-density units should be. What you see going up around the city, and there are many examples already within Wallingford of this, are low quality structures made with cheap materials and no design creativity. Everything looks the same and starts falling apart after 5 years. The standards for these additions are poor. If they are going to force high density this one way, how about at least requiring an ounce of true investment and long-term respect for the community. Seems folks have no issue with low-income housing being crappy. I expect zero percent of these developers to live on the neighborhood. And given their only goal is profit maximization, not care for neighborhoods or the people living in their structures, how am I suppose to trust their recommendations for my neighborhood?
I have seen houses that after 5 years start looking really crappy and run down as well, when someone who doesn’t care to maintain the home moves in. That seems to be a reflection of the owner. The city is full of groups of people who want to improve their property, groups of people who just want to maintain it, and groups of people who neglect it. That transcends what is being built.
As for the similar look, I personally prefer the craftsmen style. But those who like the modern style complain that craftsmen houses are everywhere and there are few modern homes they can find to purchase. They have a point, there are more craftsmen style homes than any other style (by far) in Seattle.
As for materials, that is personal preference. Most houses, townhomes, and apartments are built with fiber cement board. It is more durable and longer lasting than cedar, slightly less expensive, and a lot more sustainable. It can also be installed as lap siding and look indistinguishable from cedar lap siding.
Actually the HALA document does concern itself with construction quality. Section MF.5 is all about making “Type V” wood frame construction possible at greater heights, because that’s cheaper. They’ll look at changes to fire code, for example. Of course that’s not exactly the opposite of what you have in mind, but close enough to see where they’re coming from.
Those many examples already within Wallingford – medium gray boxes, with some wood accents and roof decks, am I right? I’d bet a quarter they’re all built out of Blueprint Capital, run by the same Duffus who’s infamous for small lot backyard towers. He’s one of the founders of Smart Growth, etc., but his cheesy (but expensive) buildings have likely done as much damage to the developers’ cause as his advocacy money has helped it.
Upzoning is the way to prevent Wallingford from turning into a place with only million dollar houses that only rich people can enjoy its convenience, not the other way around.
Most people in the greater Seattle area would love to live in such a good location, especially with the commuting traffic getting worse and worse. What’s stopping them? Low supply therefore high price. Anti-density people should stop pretending they are for modest housing middle class can afford. Without changes, Wallingford is rapidly becoming a place with rich people living in houses constructed worse than ghetto in some other cities. To get Seattle back to the “good old days”, you’d have to wish for some kind of great recession in Seattle to reduce overall wealth in the area.
HALA isn’t even going near the million dollar houses. Queen Anne, Magnolia, and Montlake are all super close to downtown and not included in the HALA proposal. This means all the estates of the rich will sky rocket even further. The rich are pitting the middle class here against the lower class while they laugh at us from atop Queen Anne! HALA is a great way to kill anyone’s dream of ever owning a home in Seattle except for those of the uber-rich. Your choice will be a multi-million dollar estate or renting an apartment at some over-priced rate from a developer. You can kiss the $400-$800K homes good bye entirely.
In addition, I would really like to own a home on top of Queen Anne!! Do you think we could maybe add some additions to HALA that some of the lots atop Queen Anne be split in two, and given to those displaced by HALA?! After all, I just really want a home with a view but the prices in this city have gotten out of control!!
What $400k homes? We haven’t had those since 2011. What $500k homes? We haven’t had those since 2014. You can’t find anything for less than $600k, and those are disappearing fast. If we do nothing, every home in Seattle will be $1m in the next 5-10 years. This will at least give a chance for townhouses or condos to provide some housing for those who desperately want to live in Seattle, but can’t afford the spiraling costs of houses.
Eric – thanks for this info & to all – for this conversation!
I love the idea of creating urban villages where there are none – like Magnolia – instead of turning the current urban villages into Manhattan. We considered Magnolia when house hunting as it is close to downtown/ SLU, but then dismissed it when we realized it didn’t have the little “main streets” that Capital Hill, Ballard, Wallingford, Fremont, U District, Ravenna, ID, etc.. have.
Regarding affordable multi-family housing – it ain’t family if it is not at least a three bedroom.
We looked for three bedroom apmts. in the downtown area – and guess what? not there!!
Regarding affordable multi-family housing – the 3+ bedrooms should be within two floors of each other (to clarify – putting a bedroom on the first floor and then two more on the third creates all sorts of safety issues and anxiety for a family with more than one child of different genders).
Regarding Parking: I like to visit my friends, I like to have my friends visit me. My friends live all over the region, not only in Wallingford. We need parking until either the uber model changes transportation or the Star Trek transporter becomes common. Also – want to talk about Affordable? how affordable is it for someone to have a job that they have to drive to when the cost of parking eats up a good portion of their paycheck? Travelling 2-4 hours a day using public transportation when a car can knock it down to 30 minutes to an hour… quality of life says – Car!
Regarding Incentives for Developers: IMO – they are going to build with or without the incentives. (and now I have that Georgia Satellites song about “free milk & a cow” in my head – doh!).
When & where are we to go to make our concerns heard? You may have posted – but I am not finding it. Sorry for that, and thanks!
There is no reason a family must have 3 bedrooms. The average per person residential floor space in the US is five times of those in Hong Kong. Not saying we need that kind of uncomfortable extreme, but this is really a lifestyle issue. Higher density means more shared resources and shared space. Instead of everybody having big fridges and freezers to store a week worth of food, higher density would be easier to support quick and fresh food access within walking distance, due to economy of scale, therefore people can shop quicker and more often, therefore needing smaller space. All public spaces are also therefore used by more people, therefore they’ll get more use and more advocates for better funding, as opposed to everybody buying things they need for themselves to put in their own big yards while not caring for the neighborhood. That’s the main reason why suburbs and places like Magnolia are horrible really. Same situation for public transportation: the best way to improve it is to force more people to use it. Car is an option of choice right now, exactly because we don’t have enough people being forced to use public transportation to make it better.
Some of this does make sense, in principle. There are economies of scale, that transit and other desirable things depend on. And no one’s saying no, to the growth that will after all inevitably change the current scale of the city at least in places. But the current level of development, even without the proposed give-aways, is unsustainable and far outstrips the ability of the civic infrastructure to adapt in the ways you’re talking about. We’re going to have a better city if we can find some way to slow the growth down, rather than feed what’s already a gold rush frenzy.
TJ, your view requires a lot of “force” to make people do things your way. People should give up their car, live in smaller dwelling like in Hong Kong ( have you been in HK? you can find many ex-HK living in Richmond, BC in really BIG SF homes with garages), walk to shop for their food daily instead of shopping a week’s worth of food and get rid of their big freezer and fridge. To do that you better offer people shorter work day, reliable and fast mass transit, cheap, quality childcare, a generous paycheck so they can shop at quaint farmer’s market instead of Fred Meyer and don’t have to buy in bulk or stock up on basics when things go on sale for starters.
It’s easy to go for the low hanging fruits of materialism and rampant consumerism as reasons to force people to do things to conform with your view. But you know what, when I look at my neighbors,I would say most work awfully hard, juggling family and jobs, volunteering in their community and schools while trying to keep it all together each day so they can get up and do all over again. If some like to shop for a little therapy, hibernate on their day off to find some solitary time, work in their garden, or relax in their garage by building a bookcase or fixing their car, I say good on them. They’ve earned it.
You can still bike, walk and shop for grocery daily, live in a small place, and enjoy your life as you wish to live it.
I am not advocating for those changes. I am stating what would naturally happen if we go higher density, and how the idea of “middle class living in Wallingford” can be sustained. Right now if we insist on low density, the way of life going forward in Wallingford would be closer to Magnolia and Laurelhurst, where all houses too expensive for middle class to afford. It’s just a result of restriction on supply coupled with demand increase. All the talk about how it’s OK to live in smaller houses is just to tell people how people can live that way also, and there is no need to insist Wallingford to stay as is.
Seriously – family does not mean 3 bedroom, I’m with TJ on that one. My husband and I have 2 kids and are considering a 3rd and we’re still only looking for 1000 sq ft 2 bedrooms. Unfortunately we’re having to compete with single people and couples who need the space for who knows what reason.
The problem is that there aren’t enough incentives to build enough 2 and 3 bedroom units. The HALA proposal has several areas where they would encourage more 2 bedroom and 3 bedroom units to be built. Right now 90% of new apartment units are studios or 1 bedroom units. We need to incentivize more 2-3 bedroom units to keep the pricing on those units down, which will in turn help to support more families in the city.
You’re right. I implied that all families want three or more bedrooms, when there are those that want less (and those who want more). Thank you for speaking up. 🙂
For me – it is misleading to say, “multi-family,” and then not require that many of the units reflect the preferred “life style choice” of many families by requiring three or more bedroom units as part of the “multi-family” mix. Especially, if you are pushing for urban density.
Without units like that included as a requirement for these urban density plans, you push many families to either buy two units and tear down a wall (which raises the “is it affordable” question), or you push them to consider other areas which do offer three + bedrooms. Which, incidentally, is how we ended up in Wallingford! 🙂
Assuming Eric is right about SF5000 changing to multifamily in the Urban Village then these are the sections of Wallingford that will go from only single family to allowing rowhomes and townhomes.
http://imgur.com/Sm68XV1
Thanks for drawing that map. It really never occurred to us until the HALA dust up (we’ve been here 12 years) that the Wallingford-to-Stone-between 46th-and-50th had in fact been downzoned to SF 5000. There are row houses at 48th & Wallingford, the Mari-Don is right nearby, and there’s a duplex at end of our block. The majority of SF houses on our street are on lots smaller than 5,000 SF. We assumed it was still zoned – as it had largely been built. This would be a “restoration”, not an up zone.
Hardly anyone understands much about HALA. Council member O’Brien’s a big fan and would no doubt welcome an invitation from a local neighborhood organization like WCC to explain how it’s good for us.
I heard Rob Johnson on KUOW say something about expanding the boundaries of the urban village. So if you happen to be in the yellow zone, you should also be worried.
I thought I heard something like that in the “debate” last night, too. Taken literally it’s ambiguous – many blocks of Wallingford are in the urban village boundaries, and up to now it hasn’t affected them. The HALA “grand bargain” upzones are vaguely supposed to enlarge lowrise multi-family zones to the urban village boundary (and along corridors.) The effect of enlarging the urban village boundary itself would depend on when you do it – before the grand bargain give-away, or after. Like any council member, Johnson will be in on the HALA work, and could use it to embark on a crusade to spread LR zoning all over the map, with or without enlarged urban village boundaries.
More likely, he’s confused, and he’s really talking about the grand bargain as currently conceived. During the debate he did offer up the notion that the community could play a role in configuring its growth – as long as it adds up to the amount dictated by the council. livableballard.org thinks Maddux is at least a lesser of evils here, but that’s all about what will happen when one of them is elected and released from his pledge to not disagree with the other.
Or – looking at the 2035 comprehensive plan land use map – I see that the Roosevelt urban village has a small proposed boundary enlargement, as do a couple others, but not Wallingford.
Looking at this map, I am coming around to the main point Eric makes in this article. He brought it to the candidates last week, and they naturally dodged it, but the interesting thing is that it came up twice. The first time it was someone from the Wedgewood blog who seemed to be complaining that they were unable to get the upzones they worked so hard for. ?!! The point: no one is well served by the current focus on existing urban villages. It’s a good idea, recognize and support walkable neighborhoods, but don’t limit them to just a few and then flood those few with development bloat. Keep recognizing and supporting these neighborhoods until there aren’t so many vast areas barren of anything but houses. Maybe every block in Seattle ought to be in some urban village. Remember that within our urban village boundary there are many blocks of SF zoning, and making, say, Wedgewood, Sand Point and Laurelhurst into contiguous new urban villages wouldn’t mean changing all the zoning, it’s just a planning focus that may allow these neighborhoods to become the kind of walkable paradise that Wallingford already is – while maybe absorbing some of the development that we already have a little too much of lately.
Eric,
Not sure why you would disagree that higher density shouldn’t align with walk scores. If we put additional density in areas that are poorly served by mass transit and walkable shops, that will force people to use a car and in turn will increase congestion. It is already gridlocked as it is. It makes sense to add greater density around mass transit, especially light rail stations.
Upzoning is also a net positive for those who live in the upzone. If their home values don’t increase from the upzone, that means that developers aren’t buying up their property because it is already too expensive. If it does increase, those homeowner get a boost. They can sell their home for a premium, buy a house down the street for the amount their house was worth before the rezone, and pocket the difference (Edith Mayfield turned down a reported $1m). The lot gets built with higher density and more people live in Seattle.
I was displaced out of my Wallingford apartment when the B $ C crackwhores bashed down the block and put up their new outgassing monstrosity where studios go for $1500 starting. One beds, $3000. My God, who are they renting too, other drug dealers?
Seattle is going the way of San Fran where only the uber rich can afford to live. And our taxes built this place! Shame!
….I was also supposed to get a City of Seattle “Displacement Payment” for being kicked out of my home so they could build higher rent housing. Everone on the block that was sold was supposed to get $3000 from the City of Seattle, to relocate. I filled out the paperwork for that and submitted over 50 pages of documentation, including the postings that they plastered on my door, to leave due to “demolition impending.”
I never got the money and the department in the City said “they lost my paperwork.” They lost it.
Utter utter utter criminal corruption. Utter. Total.