The Wallingford Community Council meets this Wednesday, November 4th, at 7:15 PM in Room 202 of the Good Shephard Center, 4649 Sunnyside Avenue North.
Greg Hill presents an analysis of the “Seattle 2035” Comprehensive Plan revisions. The current proposal completely modifies every section of the present Comprehensive Plan. There would be major impacts to Wallingford, particularly within the Residential Urban Village boundaries. Greg will present a motion for a formal comment letter by the WCC before the comment period closes on November 20th.
Reid Haefer & Angelique Hockett present “An Overview of the WCC Parks Committee”. This agenda topic will include an overview of planned parks committee efforts, input from audience on other parks-related topics, and a call for volunteers to serve on the committee.
Please come meet your neighbors and work with us to improve our neighborhood.
7:15 Minutes (Kim England)
7:20 Treasurer’s report (Paul Willumson)
7:25 Summary of the “Seattle 2035” Comprehensive Plan revisions (Greg Hill)
7:40 Waterways & Shoreline report (Reid Haefer for Norm Davis)
7:45 University Relations report (Brian O’Sullivan & Jon Berkedal)
7:55 Transportation report (Eric Fisk)
8:00 RPZ report (Mary Fielder & Catherine Smith)
8:05 Appoint Frank Fay as Communications Chair
8:10 Appoint Angelique Hockett as Parks & Recreation Chair
8:15 “An Overview of the WCC Parks Committee” (Reid Haefer & Angelique Hockett)
8:45 Adjourn.
Well, this is probably as good a thread as any to remind people that if you care about the future of Wallingford, YOU NEED TO VOTE TODAY. Why do I say this in such stark terms? Because while both district 4 candidates support more density, Rob Johnson has made it very clear he wants to tax us out of our single family homes to accomplish his goal. Remember, he stated this a month ago in his debate with Michael Maddux: “So, if you’re in a neighborhood that is assessed to be able to go to 3 stories, (Wallyworld is ground zero for that) and you’re in a single family home, we’re gonna charge you as though you’re a two-story BUILDING. That’s gonna encourage more turnover in places where we want to see higher density.”
While Michael Maddux supports more density, he agrees that’s totally unfair to existing homeowners, and he favors charging impact fees to developers. In other words, make developers pay for necessary infrastructure improvements, rather than force those of us who already live here to subsidize the destruction of our hood.
So there you have it. Johnson wants to kick you out of your home by dramatically raising taxes on you. Do we want to continue to be a neighborhood of nice Craftsman homes where we know all our neighbors? or do you want Apodments and other microhousing and expensive condos popping up on either side of you as your neighbors start giving in and selling off their homes?
How is paying taxes on what one’s property is actually worth “unfair?”
Because those of us who live in proposed upzone areas will be made to pay on what our property could be worth in the FUTURE if a building were to be built our our homes currently sit. Meanwhile, everyone else gets to pay as we all always have, on the CURRENT assessed value of the land and structure.
Not that that matters to you.
As a general principle of fairness taxing everyone on the value of their land “as if it were” fully built out is the most socially and environmentally constructive approach.
To do otherwise is what I would call an unfair “under building discount” which shifts the tax burden from someone “consuming more land” in an SFH to (for example) a family living on the ground floor of a 3 flat while renting out the upper two floors from someone in a SFH. (It’s bad for commercial properties too…it encourages land hoarding and leaving surface parking lots sitting undeveloped.)
“Land” is the constrained resource which we want to encourage people to consume responsibly.
I support developing Stone Way and 45th, and perhaps some other main streets as well, to provide more housing. But those maps are sobering because there are many blocks of single family homes/apartments that are slated to be destroyed and replaced by what are essentially going to be expensive apartments/condos for young, migrant, single tech workers.
I hope the WCC can comment on this proposal, but with developers so firmly in control of city hall, it’ll be tough to change this.
Nobody can “destroy” a single family home until its owner makes the decision to sell it.
You’re right. If they enjoy living surrounded by multi-story condos or apartment buildings, Edith Macefield-style, then they should have no problems at all. What was I thinking.
I can’t speak for or against Edith Masefield’s decision – for whatever reason she had an attachment to that specific SFH that led her to reject every offer.
But let’s look at her case objectively: for what she was finally offered for it she could have paid cash and owned a different SFH either a few blocks away in Ballard zoned SF (or for that matter almost anywhere in the city). (With a good chunk of change left over if she chose.)
The burden of “pocketing a huge profit and moving a few blocks to preserve my aesthetic preferences” doesn’t seem like too heavy a cross to bear for housing affordability (and the environment).
The whole point of increasing the area zoned for multi-family is to temporarily reduce the price developers have to pay for land. Under those conditions, it’s absurdly optimistic to think you could sell your house for a tear-down and use the proceeds to buy an equivalent house nearby.
Ha, if you subsidize a home for me on Queen Anne, I’d be happy to move. Unfortunately, after you bulldoze my humble home, all the other single family homes will sky rocket as the supply diminishes and I will never afford a single family home again otherwise. I will be Edith Macefield if I have to and can still afford the outlandish taxes that get imposed on me. This isn’t fair to push the middle class homeowners out while the rich in Queen Anne, Magnolia and Montlake, despite being closer to downtown, get to keep their mansions.
I agree that anyone who espouses density as a cure to a lack of low-income housing, but doesn’t support impact fees on developers, is a fraud. These are the same people who called zoning racist in order to make more money. Really low.
At a council hearing on the subject of developer impact fees last year, it was pretty clear to everyone that it’s past time for this in Seattle, but a year later we’re still studying it. It’s easy to say you’re for developer fees, but anyone who’s been in office for the past year – mayor, council – is clearly not all that hot to make it happen.
Just want to follow up that I’m talking about linkage fees.
Donald L. Russell
Professional Civil Engineer Retired
75 year Seattle resident
4739 Latona Ave NE
POSITION RE REZONING
Anyone who owns a single family home and wants to continue to live enjoyably in it should oppose any change in the zoning because:
1. It is the tip of the iceberg, if we support any change the City Council, Mayor and City Planners will use our acquiescence as the basis for even more changes in the near future.
2. The change will give developers the go ahead to build as many low cost ugly apartments as possible as fast as possible without the City providing real solutions to the added traffic before the traffic jams occur.
3. The rezone will dramatically increase traffic problems because the current transportation planning, which relies on bicycles and busses, is a pipedream.
4. This rezoning demonstrates the unspoken support by the City Council, Mayor, City Planners and City Engineers for Seattle to become another world class city with the according very high cost apartments downtown, masses of low cost ugly expensive apartments in the outlying neighbors and horrific traffic congestion in both places.
5. I categorically oppose changes to the current zoning and ask those interested in maintaining an enjoyable living environment to do the same.
If somebody wants single family home with no traffic issues, why would that person live in a city?
I think they really don’t, which is at the heart of the problem.
Wanting to freeze a stage of Seattle’s development during which large parts of it felt suburban is as out of place as folks who lived in Manhattan in 1811 wanting to freeze “the city” as it was forever as a bunch of villages and farms separated by woodlands.
And if someone wants to live in the city, why would they want to live in neighborhoods with SF homes, and not downtown in a high rise?
We currently HAVE SF homes with relatively OK traffic issues, that’s why we bought here.
It seems cheap and easy to say “if you don’t like it, you should live somewhere else.” Lots of folks in these houses have lived in Seattle for 10, 20, 30 or more years, and may feel they are being forced out by these changes. This is being done to them, without much or any input, for the benefit of others.
The kind and ways Seattle is currently growing is not an act of god, or inevitable, it’s based on the material interests of developers who don’t particularly care what the end results will be for affordability or livability. It’s not surprising the biggest sponsors of prop 1 were Vulcan and Amazon. We’re literally paying to fix problems they’re introducing into the region.
Seattle is growing because people want to live near jobs.
(Since most people moving here to live near jobs are neither carpenters or property developers, “Developers” are an incidental middle man.)
As someone who appreciates both history and a sense of place I am disposed to empathize with people struggling to adapt to change.
But statements that range from the offensive (e.g., I don’t want to live near renters because they are inferior human beings) to the bizarrely histrionic (e.g., if I have to live within sight of a duplex I need to move!) make that very difficult.
For me, the Comprehensive Plan is getting to the higher level, where we have to change direction. Given the current planning imperatives and mentality, we will see the unsupportable growth that drives these lower level initiatives, and that growth will be the central fact that guarantees every developer give-away.
I’ll be interested to see Greg Hill’s analysis. One problem with the Comprehensive Plan in my opinion is the Urban Village – not that it’s a bad idea entirely, but – as Eric brought up in an earlier blog article – the way they’re treating it force-feeds development in already walkable neighborhoods like Wallingford, and already overdeveloped neighborhoods like Ballard and the University District, while outlying neighborhoods like Sand Point have poor transit connectivity, “food deserts” and so forth.
At an even higher level though … who read the Seattle Times editorial gushing over “Challenge Seattle”, which is where the local captains of industry and Christine Gregoire team up to promote growth, whip up an advertising campaign to tell the world how Seattle is a special place to live and work? Please tell me this is a joke. We’re looking at growth forecasts for 5 years hence that we can’t provide for – housing, schools, transit, you name it, we’re in deep grease – and they pitch in and help by promoting more? Let’s make it clear that we are not able to manage with even the forecasted regional growth – while places like Bremerton await it with open arms.
There is plenty of room for growth outside of my single family home zone. Unfortunately it’s cheaper for a developer to bulldoze my humble home than it is to bulldoze anything else in the city, so that’s their motive. The homeowners of Wallingford need to stand up to this else the rich will only get richer and the poor will only get poorer. Protect the middle class!!
This story linked below tracks to a comment made by Angelique at the WCC meeting last week – that Portland is not necessarily the model that we want to follow here… While Seattle (and Portland) need to adapt to the growing pressure on housing as more younger workers move in, etc., Seattle also has to look ahead to where those same people are going to want to live in 5-10 years (and beyond) as they start families, etc. In short, we need to add housing while also adding (or at least preserving) what prevents families from fleeing to suburbs — things like open space and parks; housing suitable for families not just single bedroom apartments; strong schools.
http://www.seattlepi.com/news/us/article/With-rents-skyrocketing-Portland-s-creatives-6623929.php
This story really leads toward Seattle and Portland should do the same thing, increase the supply of affordable housing – toward the end:
“City officials say the construction of new multifamily housing will ease the crisis….
The best solution? Experts say it’s shifting policies to make building new housing easier. And accepting change — including the city’s popularity and the fact that adding higher-density housing ultimately benefits everyone.
“People hate new development,” he said. “But it’s the price of success.””
It’s the price we pay for someone’s success, that’s for sure.
I do not disagree that we need more housing. But we also need to avoid solving one present problem without consideration of other issues, including the impact on the destruction of open space (both horizontal and vertical). If some or all of our urban village is to be “up” zoned to allow for more multi-“family” housing, the developers making $$ on such development should have to pay to mitigate the impact on our transportation systems (so perhaps buses do not stop for waiting passengers because they are overloaded) and parks (so perhaps we get a real solution to the dirt that poses as a playfield at Wallingford Park and the shortage of athletic field space at Lower Woodland). The urban village strategy was not just to shove more housing into the urban villages, but to offset or accommodate that growth with other amenities and services. While the SSNAP Report 2014 applauds that the urban village “is working” because “75% of Seattle’s total,residential and employment growth has been directed into targeted urban villages,” this same Report acknowledges that “City investment in urban villages receiving disproportionate share of urban growth has been uneven, lacking strategic focus.” The present HALA plan is the result of a “Grand Bargain” with developers (increased density allowed in exchange for mitigation for more affordable housing). But first (or at least contemporaneously) how about the bargain struck 20+ years ago when the urban villages were first created?
The concentrated diversity in cities helped gay marriage go from anathema to mainstream
The economic prosperity of a city like Seattle is enabling us to raise the minimum wage to $15
I have nothing against folks who want to lead a suburban lifestyle, but using in-city land to do so undermines other things that in large part “only cities can do”
Have you even been to Wallingford? “Suburban lifestyle?” Have you been to any suburbs? Why the BS?
We’re an “urban village” because we already have the density to support transit, retail storefronts, etc. The buses leave people behind at stops because they’re overflowing. We’re presumably a destination for Japanese cuisine, hampered only by too much competition for parking spaces. This in advance of the thousands of prospective residents in new apartments in the Fremont/Wallingford grey area on Stone.
This is no suburb, it’s a very walkable urban neighborhood. The Comprehensive Plan’s focus on dumping future growth into such areas is potentially harmful to the urban villages (see Ballard) and also arguably to the excluded zones – Sand Point recently described as a “food desert”, View Ridge that has to beg for zoning support for retail areas.
We might agree more than usual 🙂 ….
“Single family exclusive,on 5000 SF lots” is suburban lifestyle in my book.
Most of Wallingford was built before the 1957 downzone, so most of Wallingford indeed doesn’t look like that. Our area of North Wallingford is mixed SF and small multi-family. I think 2 houses total on our street are on 5,000 or more SF lots – the bungalows are on 3,000 SF or so.
That’s also why it’s much more walkable (likewise Tangletown, Meridian from 50th to 55th is very mixed with SF plus small scale multi family).
Its is indeed a very walkable urban h’hood, also why we chose to buy here, in contrast to (say) Bryant, where we also looked at homes.
“We can’t have multi-family near single-family” is the suburban-ism in the Wallingford HALA debate.
I am not wedded to any policy (e.g., urban village expansion, though I don’t inherently oppose it) other than this: abolishing single family exclusionary zoning, because single family detached homes on large lots here will never again be affordable to people who aren’t either rich or already here.
In addition to affordability in our n’hood, it would help places like Sand Point or View Ridge have more n’hood businesses and be more walkable (they aren’t dense enough now to support it).
There is nothing “BS” about calling Wallingford a suburb. I grew up in a neighborhood very similar to Wallingford, about the same distance north from the downtown core of an east coast city. In fact, it was even right near the zoo! It was a suburb, not part of the city itself. They’re called “inner suburbs” back east. There are other suburbs which resemble Issaquah further out. Wallingford is very much an inner suburb of Seattle, only the city annexed all this property back when they incorporated so it is technically part of Seattle.
OK, sure – while we’re at it, maybe it would be interesting to see how Wallingford would be classified, if it were in Hong Kong.
Used in context without qualification, though, the “surburban lifestyle” that would be an option in this region has nothing to do with settlement patterns on the east coast, nothing to do with Wallingford, it’s just ideological BS.
The concept of upzoning single-family properties will do little or nothing to create affordable housing and will only create design review loopholes for “bad apple” developers to exploit. The small-lot development fiasco affected far fewer properties, had a far smaller pool of bad actors, using much the same claim that they were building “affordable housing” (yet were typically priced at $800k to $1 million), and took over two years of hard-core lobbying by volunteers to ultimately close the loophole. Upzoning will create far more candidate properties and certainly create new abuses.
Much has been made about the large area of Seattle zoned single-family, but it turned out that HALA added all the areas of parks and schools into the single-family area calc. The report also appears to say that changing zoning from single to duplex or triplex will possibly increase housing units by at most 10,000 units if all upzone properties are developed fully (not likely).
For comparison, existing capacity for multi-family zoning appears to be well over 250,000 units, again, if completely developed. The City says it wants to create 70,000 units in the next twenty years (2015-2035). It is also worth noting that housing stock was increased by 58,000 units in the period from 2000 to 2015 UNDER EXISTING ZONING.
Changing the zoning of SF properties does not appear to be worth the risk of opening these neighborhoods to abuse by the small number of developers that could not care less about the community. Doing so will only increase speculation and prices, making housing even more expensive. Far better to consider encouraging more ADU and DADU construction for owner-occupied properties, which could provide seniors or others struggling with a tenant to help pay expenses. Less opportunity for abuse and poor taste, while providing similar numbers of new units.
A similar analysis comparing Seattle to Portland property zoned SF has also been quoted in the press and HALA documents, but the area used for Portland appear to be based on FARM property located within the city limits, i.e. comparing the area of all Seattle SF property + park property + school property to Portland’s in-city farm property. One needs to question why HALA felt it necessary to distort the SF area by adding in the school and park property and also why other “studies” quoted appear to feel it necessary to distort the figures. Why?
“New affordable housing” is an oxymoron. Seattles’s affordable housing stock consists of older, run-down EXISTING single-family and apartment buildings. Claims that older homes can be torn down and rebuilt to be more affordable should be questioned because it is simply not logical. Yes, SUBSIDIZED housing can be more affordable to a tenant, but the developer still gets full price while the taxpayers pick up the difference, ironically using property tax money from the same SF properties that were upzoned.