The effect of the upzone to urban villages that HALA proposes is clear as we have already seen it happen in Ballard. Older homes and apartments will be shredded and displace thousands, driving out current residents and turning neighborhoods into unlivable construction zones as the transformation takes place. Further, all the new people that move in will swamp our already overloaded transportation systems and schools, driving up property taxes as we try to catch up and further damaging housing affordability and livability in our city. Do we really need to destroy Wallingford in order to save it, as Rick argued?
The main argument in favor of HALA is that the “do nothing” vision is similarly ugly. Doing nothing amounts to driving up rents ever more and replacing older single family homes with lot-maximizing modern boxes that sell for millions. Being able to buy a single family home in Seattle is already the exclusive privilege of the upper classes. Seattle as a whole is becoming an unaffordable place for teachers and police officers to move to, even as renters. Even if you disagree with the cure, the disease HALA is trying to address is real.
So what key goals is HALA ignoring? It’s ignoring the goal of preserving older housing and business districts. It ignores the need to create more urban villages and to convert car-centric neighborhoods into ones that are built for walking and transit. It ignores the goals of funding transportation, schools, and infrastructure. There is a pathway to fix HALA and provide for all these goals, but it requires a dramatic change of course.
To begin with, HALA needs to look to create new urban villages on cemeteries and golf courses. A key advantage of building new urban villages rather than upzoning existing ones is that they can have new infrastructure designed and built using developer impact fees. Seattle government officials repeatedly say that developer impact fees are too difficult to impose as part of redevelopment of existing land, but the same is not true for an entirely new community. Developer impact fees are being used in new communities all around Seattle to fund infrastructure. In a master planned community, new transit, schools, and parks can be part of the urban village plan that is funded by developers, not after thoughts for which there is no land or funding available.
A map of Seattle shows several undeveloped locations that are clear candidates to become new urban villages. The dead people in Washelli Cemetery are not going to protest if their land is displaced by a new urban village. Private, invitation-only country clubs and golf courses like the Seattle Golf Club, Broadmoor, and the Sand Point Country Club are luxuries of the ultra-rich that can be rezoned and taxed to encourage redevelopment. Public golf courses like the Jackson Park Golf Course, Interbay Golf Center and other golf simulator business are located on or near light rail lines. Each of these large areas could be redeveloped as new communities with space for an urban village, schools, and transit. The impacts of redeveloping these areas will be far less than what is involved with shredding an existing urban center, and the end result will be entirely new neighborhoods where people can walk to groceries, restaurants, transit, and schools.
Second, HALA proposals to encourage more housing units on existing properties (ADUs and DADUs) need to be extended to encourage the preservation of existing housing. The program should create financing and provide contractor assistance in exchange for the insertion of affordable housing units alongside older homes. Current plans provide no incentive to preserve existing housing, encouraging the destruction and waste involved in tearing down older homes to put up new ones that invariably have higher occupancy costs. If HALA was done right, single family neighborhoods throughout the city should see more affordable homes alongside older housing instead of giant new boxes displacing older homes.
Finally, upzones in older neighborhoods should be allowed if neighbors agree to it. If the adjacent neighbors of a residence agree to that location being upzoned or subdivided, then why not let that take place? As a homeowner or renter in a property, if your choice is between the lot next to you becoming a giant new modern box or giant new condos plus you also get $10,000, perhaps you’ll be happy with the condos. In this way, when the economics for an upzone make sense and the neighbors are in favor, more housing can happen.
In the end, developing under-utilized open space makes a lot more sense than going down the path HALA currently proposes. Instead of displacing thousands from existing housing, we’ll be displacing golf balls, dead people, and backyard grills. Instead of pretending that more people will have zero impact on schools and roads, we can have developers pay for new schools and transit solutions. Instead of envisioning a city divided into rich drivers in mansions untouched by HALA and everyone else crammed into apartment blocks without cars, we can envision a more unified city that preserves and builds on what has been best about Seattle- affordable, walkable neighborhoods that are built at a human scale and that are networked with transit.
Develop in cemeteries? Eric, didn’t you ever see “Poltergeist?”
On the other hand, your golf course idea is intriguing. It would be nice to see these rich communities assume some of the burden of dealing with HALA that us peasants here in Wallingford have.
However, I don’t think your golf course proposal would make the HALA boosters happy. There’s no established, SF home neighborhood for them to destroy.
I’m hoping the poltergeists will nail the developers.
The idea would be to relocate the cemetery, which is not that uncommon. After the civil war, everyone who was buried on the battlefields got moved:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/transcript/death-transcript/
And it happens pretty often for eminent domain reasons- better to displace the dead than the living.
I like the golf course idea, too. At least using a portion of the courses (maybe not all). It’s along the lines of using the air space above the light rail stations, which I think is also a great idea. When the City or State already owns the land, it greatly decreases the cost of building affordable housing.
I’m not too keen on the Evergreen Washelli idea – I’ve got three generations of family there, plus a little spot for myself. It’s actually a kind of pleasant place to walk around – green and tranquil. But the golf courses – absolutely yes. Developing more urban villages, improving transit for the areas that are poorly served now, thinking creatively – absolutely yes. Putting more housing in areas with good transit doesn’t get people in the rest of the city out of their cars. No one ever mentions how much it would cost to develop a truly comprehensive transit system that serves the entire city 24/7 instead of the downtown commuter centric system we have now.
Please don’t compare the salaries of teachers and police officers. Cops in Seattle make about twice what teachers do. Of the reasons SPD officers don’t live in Seattle, money isn’t high on the list.
Hi Doug! According to the city Web site, police officers make 69 to 91K, while teachers make 47K to 91K. Also, teachers can work summer jobs if they want, e.g. teaching summer school. Sources:
Police: http://www.seattle.gov/policejobs/benefits-and-salary/salary
Teachers: http://www.seattleschools.org/cms/One.aspx?portalId=627&pageId=15838 (see total compensation at the bottom)
Please note that police officers are also eligible for overtime at 1.5x their rate and may also work off-duty events, which can push their take home pay much higher. I am glad that they are well compensated for their dangerous and necessary job; wish I could say the same for teachers!
This link provides a much more accurate picture of what Seattle Police actually make. For instance, the cop who illegally cited me on my bicycle a couple of years ago, David Ogard, had a 2015 base salary of $105,000, but his actual pay was $177,000. Good luck finding a Seattle teacher who makes anywhere near that.
Holy crap! We’re paying these guys $177,000, *AND* we get to pay for the lawsuits that their thuggery creates? Seems like a good place to look for cost savings for affordable housing.
The council is up in arms about out of control SPD overtime – there’s been some coverage, and some hearings lately. It’s a mess, we’ll see if anything changes
good lord. develop over cemeteries? nice and respectful….I thought this guy stopped writing for wallyhood?
You don’t develop over the graves, you move the people buried there. It’s not that unusual. Better to displace the dead than destroy the homes of the living. Nothing is forever except death itself. See:
http://sacredtothememory.weebly.com/
Why not look at cemeteries and golf courses as visually appealing and eating greenhouse gases for the living, sort of like lungs of the city only the reverse process, producing rather than consuming? My mother, god rest her soul, used to take her lunch breaks at a cemetery near her work to eat the lunch she brought. As has been pointed out many times, we have capacity in our current zoning. We don’t need to upzone everything. Do not assume everyone wishes to live in the more leafy parts of town. Many prefer an urban environment such as south Capitol Hill. Downtown, SODO/Intl., Belltown, SLU, U-Dist to name a few, in other words, large swathes of land that currently often have parking lots on them even today. Continue improving transit and build more there. Otherwise Seattle soon becomes just yet another ugly unpleasant American city.
Moving the cemeteries really does seem like a non-starter and I think makes your argument much weaker. A look at the list you’ve provided shows that while there are a few modern examples of moving burial locations, they are often out of environmental necessity and often on a much smaller scale than something like the one up on Aurora. Others were not intentional but rather sites that were found by mistake during construction.
Cemeteries may seem like a less important space to you, but they are an important cultural resource as a place of memory and history, while acting as public space for the people who live near them. They’re used as parks because that is essentially what they are. And I would hope you aren’t going to suggest we start ripping out our parks and green spaces in the city. We need them.
This headline is right out of The Onion
In fact public cemeteries only began in the early to mid-19th century, when there were few or no urban public parks. Victorians, who had such a romantic conception of death, would use them as parks all the time. However, I think the fact that they are even suggested for the use of housing just shows how insane this purported housing crisis is. There is still plenty of undeveloped or reusable space in Seattle. It’s just that the techies appear prefer to live downtown or close in and thus drive up prices for everyone. And builders at the moment can afford to turn down work that doesn’t make their desired profits.
Eric – As you know, I appreciate the audacity of this proposal. However, there’s a small constitutional problem. I believe it’s called the public taking of private property.
That said, while I personally support cremation, the cemetery proposal is over the top. The golf course proposal is more believable. While some support the environmental benefit of golf courses, I believe (though unsupported by research on my part) that practices used to maintain the courses (fertilizer, weed control, etc) are environmentally destructive.
Our City Council representative Rob Johnson has an answer to the public taking of private property issue. You’ve seen the video where he describes it – we only need to tax the golf course at the value it would have, were it covered with condos, and this criminal land hording will quickly come to an end. In keeping with the general HALA motif, the city wouldn’t take any property, the spoils go to the development capital sector.
As for keeping dead people here? Like other long time Seattle residents without high tech salaries, this city isn’t about them, they should move on.
If people didn’t want condos on their graves they shouldn’t have died there in the first place.
There is no need to move the cemeteries. They don’t have to be laid out like single family houses. Build towers instead. That way you can fit way more corpses with way smaller piece of land.
Vacating public golf courses to provide land for housing. I’ve been wondering about this for a while. There really isn’t much excuse for a city with a housing crises to operate 4 publicly owned golf facilities. Jackson, in north Seattle is enormous and not far from the proposed Northgate light rail station. It is ideally situated for a housing project that could include mixed market/subsidized housing, apartments, apodments and multifamily. It could also be car free and truly walkable/bikeable. Why isn’t this being discussed at city hall?
Perhaps because neighborhood councils are screaming bloody murder about concurrency and green space, so folks at City Hall assume that ripping out civic amenities and green space might not be popular?
Perhaps but I doubt it since they seem to have little regard neighborhood wishes regarding either green space or concurrency. If the development of Jackson resulted in less up-zoning for villages I suspect neighborhood councils would support it. Could it be the council is more afraid of the golf community than of neighborhoods?
If folks who lived near Jackson suggested that we have more than enough baseball fields in the city so lets put residential towers on two of those at Green Lake, do you think the WCC would be onboard?
No but are the two really analogous? The Greenlake field seems to be in use even when no one is playing softball. Golf courses are only used by golfers, only during the day and only during fair weather. I’ve never heard anyone suggest hanging out at Jackson, going for a stroll or having a picnic, have you? I’m not sure the public is even permitted to use the grounds for any other purpose. Seems like a waste. It’s kind of amusing that you complain about housing being built on underutilized land near a light rail station.
I have really never seen anybody hanging out on baseball field who wasn’t playing baseball.
Really? I see kids messing around the bases, people playing Frisbee with others and with their dogs and there is often Volleyball in the outfield. In addition, softball seems so much more egalitarian than Golf. Softball is free, it only requires a glove, a bat and a ball. I don’t play Golf but I know it requires clubs (expensive I think), and fees which I looked up and are $40 per person. More important I think is the area required to play. It appears you could fit several fields on a single fairway. Do you really think an enormous golf course near a light rail station is the best use of public property, or that it compares to a single softball field in a public park? How about converting just 9 of the 28 holes at Jackson to mixed housing? I don’t understand resistance to that idea. Especially not when we are talking about losing approximately 700 single family homes in the Wallingford UV. No one at city hall seems to blink an eye at that.
Perhaps but I doubt it since they seem to have little regard neighborhood wishes regarding either green space or concurrency. If the development of Jackson in less up-zoning for villages I suspect neighborhood councils would support it. Could it be the council is more afraid of the golf community than of neighborhoods?
I thought people in Wallingford wanted MORE trees and MORE green spaces. Now we’re behind proposals to eliminate golf courses (and maybe cemeteries?) So are HALA objections really about trees? Or is it about protecting our SF neighborhoods?
Well, I thought HALA proponents wanted maximum use of the limited land close to transit. So is HALA really about the best utilization of land and transit or is it just about poking a stick in your neighbor’s eye?
Seriously, isn’t a golf course a significant waste of green space? If Jackson were an actual park, and not one of four public courses reserved for the exclusive use of golfers I wouldn’t consider converting it to housing. Jackson is near the proposed Northgate Transit station. New housing could be built on the fairways without removing existing trees. It could be beautiful I imagine. Weird that Urbanists around here get freaked out by this suggestion. Do you all play golf?
Urbanists (generally) and HALA proponents (possibly) would likely agree that golf courses in a city are a poor use of land. I’m all for it. And I’m rather open to displacing cemeteries.
What I find interesting is that the anti-HALA contingent have used “we need to think of the trees” as a concern for less density and growth. However, in the case of golf courses, anti-HALA and anti-urbanists are receptive to removing a large number of trees & permeable land.
This makes me wonder: are the anti-HALA contingent *really* concerned about the trees? Or are the primarily concerned with preserving the single family home lifestyle?
First, who’s anti-HALA? HALA is a long list of proposals. I’m against a few items on that list. Am I therefore anti-HALA? A nitpick, maybe, but just to avoid confusion.
Anyway, many of us do care a lot about the character of single-family neighborhoods. People who come to realtors with million dollar signing bonuses in their pockets, people who’ve managed to find a way to live here even though they could never afford to buy even back in the ’70s. Trees are part of that. There are single-family neighborhoods that don’t have so many trees, and for me that makes a difference, but maybe it’s a cultural thing – I’ve heard that Scandinavian immigrants tended to dislike trees, for example, and that’s why they’re not as common in Ballard as in Madrona. So … what was your question? Well, trees do also have a significant moderating effect on rainfall storm surges, and a bunch of other good things – good things that might not matter so much in the context of golf courses. The way I remember it, golf courses have fairly carefully engineered drainage, usually very porous soil, and they tend to be kind of ecologically unsound as Rick mentioned earlier – that soil doesn’t retain water or nutrients very well, so they use a lot of water in the summer and rinse a lot of chemical fertilizers into the groundwater.
In any case, if we can manage to restore the tree protections that our pro-developer mayor removed from the proposed comprehensive plan, perhaps the MF developments on these big sites will work around and preserve the big trees.
Go for it: lead the movement, city-wide, to have people who care about baseball vs soccer/football vs golf duke it out to see whose play fields gets turned into buildings. I look forward to the spectacle.