I’d like to tell you a story about the life and death of our Neighborhood Plan. The story starts back in the 1990’s. It was a time when Seattle was still a small big city before Amazon took over a whole neighborhood, when we were the center of a musical grunge scene and flannel was everywhere (well, maybe that last part hasn’t changed).
If you are old enough, you may remember this version of Seattle. But while the cool kids were listening to grunge there were some other groups, of likely the more bookish variety, that were involved in some very inspiring, bottom-up neighborhood planning, which in hindsight sounds like absolute nirvana compared to the top-down planning we are dealing with now.
One of the people we have to thank for this golden age of neighborhood planning is Jim Diers. He was appointed the first director of Seattle’s Department of Neighborhoods in 1988 and he continued in that role for the next 14 years.
Jim played a key role in instituting an organized approach to neighborhood planning that allowed residents of a neighborhood to truly impact a vision for how their neighborhood grew. According to Jim’s website: “The Neighborhood Planning Program enabled communities to hire their own consultants and involved 30,000 people in developing 37 neighborhood plans between 1996 and 1999.”
When I spoke to Jim to find out more, he had this to say: “What was wonderful about the Seattle model is that the City was able to meet its growth goals while neighborhoods were empowered to identify ways in which that growth could make their neighborhoods more livable, not less. As a result, there was good buy-in to the City’s policies (no neighborhood contested its growth targets and two neighborhoods actually recommended higher targets) and the City reciprocated by providing more open space, community gardens, libraries, community centers and other amenities to support the growth.” Jim now travels around the globe teaching this Seattle model of civic engagement.
Wallingford’s Neighborhood Plan was born out of four years of hard work done by volunteers of the neighborhood; our group was named “Team Wallingford.” They had a dedicated liaison at the City for guidance and questions. They were given funding to carry out their work, including a consultant and funds for outreach. The plans were not just decided on by a small group but were required to be vetted with the neighborhood at large. The Wallingford Neighborhood Plan is an inspiring document that you could read here, and is still very relevant today.
All of this worked well until Mayor Greg Nickels was elected. Nickels was mayor of Seattle from 2002 to 2010 and during his tenure he unfortunately cut funding for neighborhood planning. So there were no resources to stay focused on implementing and updating the plans. A lot of good will and hard work was lost.
Under Mayor Nickels and subsequent mayors, our Neighborhood Plans suffered many years of neglect. And when we got to 2016, Mayor Ed Murray and the City Council really did their best to take any life remaining out of our Neighborhood Plans with the adoption of the Seattle 2035 Comprehensive Plan. The Comprehensive Plan acts as a roadmap for urban planning over a 20 year period. In the old plan, an adopted version of the Neighborhood Plans are part of the Comprehensive Plan and changes in zoning were supposed to first go through the neighborhood planning process.
In 2016, in a very political and deliberately misleading move, the City repeatedly told concerned citizens that the Neighborhood Plans would remain, unchanged, as part of the new Seattle 2035 Comprehensive Plan. While this was on its surface true (there is a very clearly marked section titled Neighborhood Plans), the misleading part is that the City knew the new Comprehensive Plan neutered the Neighborhood Plans of all their authority.
In the updated 2035 Comprehensive Plan, the City simply removed the language from the old plan that required upzones and other such significant changes to go through the neighborhood planning process first. So, while the City responded to concerned citizens by telling us that the Neighborhood Plans were still in the Comprehensive Plan (why all the fuss?) they were not telling the public that they were removing language that gave the plans their power.
Seattle 2035 Comprehensive Plan is a massive 575-page document and so it is not surprising that there are still inconsistencies between the adopted Neighborhood Plans and the Comprehensive Plan that need to be sorted out. And the City has its radar on any Neighborhood Plan that says it values or wants to protect single family zoning because that language is in conflict with the City’s plan to upzone these neighborhoods to allow for larger buildings.
The Neighborhood Plans of bygone days were developed in a bottom-up process with the residents of the neighborhoods having a real impact on how their neighborhood grew. What is happening now is that the City has determined it is going to implement citywide upzones without a neighborhood-directed planning process such as the successful program we had in the 1990s.
And subsequently the City is pushing through these upzones that allow for larger buildings without concurrent planning for infrastructure and amenities, and without street level concern for its impacts. And frankly, without justifying that these upzones are really needed at all (upzones are not the only option to provide affordable housing and our development capacity with current zoning is more than sufficient). This is NOT neighborhood planning and is an insult to all of us.
The City is having a meeting on October 26th (details at the end of this piece). They will be asking you to rewrite the part of our Neighborhood Plans that say we value single family homes. Specifically, these are the two sections relevant to the Wallingford Urban Village that the City wants rewritten. The first is in the adopted Wallingford Neighborhood Plan:
W-P1 Protect the character and integrity of Wallingford’s single-family areas.
And the second policy is in the “Wallymont” area. This section, which refers to an area inside the Wallingford Urban Village, is included in the Fremont Neighborhood Plan:
F-P13 In the area where the Wallingford Urban Village and the Fremont Planning Area overlap (the area bounded by Stone Way on the east, N. 45th Street on the north, Aurora Avenue North on the west, and N. 40th Street on the south) maintain the character and integrity of the existing single-family zoned areas by maintaining current single-family zoning on properties meeting the locational criteria for single-family zones.
The above policies in our Neighborhood Plans do not conform to the City’s desire to rid urban villages of all single family zoning, and the City is telling us that these sections need to be rewritten. And if the City dictating what parts of our Neighborhood Plans we should rewrite is not brazen enough for you, the City also gives us instructions on what we should not say when rewriting these sections:
New policies should avoid references to all specific zoning designations in a neighborhood plan policy… calling for maintaining qualities such as “integrity” of single-family areas should be avoided…
So, I guess integrity now is a bad thing. At this meeting on the 26th, the City will invite you to write new language for our Neighborhood Plan, as long as it conforms to what they want you to say. Did anyone else realize that Seattle was the new Moscow? Make no mistake that this means our Neighborhood Plan is alive and well, it’s all a facade, the City has killed it.
You should come to this City-hosted meeting on October 26th, but come in your best dark suit, your somber black dress. I’m serious, I will be wearing my best funeral garb and you should too. Tell the city you mourn the death of the Neighborhood Plans. You mourn the loss of trees and our history and cultural values. You mourn for a time when the City asked for our opinion about our neighborhood and actually listened. We once had a Neighborhood Plan we could celebrate. Now we should throw it a funeral.
- Comprehensive Plan Amendment Meeting: Meeting announcement
Thursday, October 26, 2017, 6 – 7:30PM
Hales Brewery (in the Palladium)
4301 Leary Way NW, Seattle, WA 98107
Two topics covered: (1) City asking you to write single family zoning out of our Neighborhood Plans, (2) What impacts should be studied for proposed backyard cottage/in-law apartment legislation - Have comments and can’t make this meeting? Contact email for this event is: [email protected]. You may also email the City Council at [email protected].
- The City wants to remove single family zoning language from the following Neighborhood Plans: Aurora-Licton Springs, Fremont, Morgan Junction, Mt. Baker/North Rainier, Northgate, Roosevelt, Wallingford, West Seattle Junction, and Westwood Highland Park. For more information, click here and download the “Meeting in a Box” document.
- Email the City Council at [email protected] and ask that they provide funding for neighborhood planning in their budget.
- Unfamiliar with HALA and the City’s plan to upzone to allow larger buildings? Read this blog post for more background.
- Upzones are not the only option for providing affordable housing! For alternative options, visit the Seattle Fair Growth website.
wusanna, What a great summary! It is very accurate. We must continue to call them on the intent of the city to destroy our neighborhood plan. Even though they already have used their power to silence the citizens. i was out of town, could not attend, but plan to write to each member and the mayor.
sorry, typo! Susanna!
Thank you for doing a lot of work. Our neighborhoods are impacted by homeless people living in their cars— as of yesterday one is a block from the Wallingford P O and another is in the parking lot by the Aqua Theater ( south of Green Lake) . How can issues like this of today, right now be handled in this report/plan writing? Yes, I reported the one at Green Lake to the appropriate city offices 2 weeks ago- it is still there.
From page 16 of the 1998 Wallingford Neighborhood Plan: “Install a pedestrian signal at NE 50th St and 1st Ave NE (near-term).”
If that’s near-term, I’d hate to think what long-term is!
Yeah, it was the death of an old process, one that makes no sense now. Neighborhood organizations of this sort in this day and age have become symbols of upper middle class blocking out poorer families. It’s not what it was, but it’s what it has become. Good thing to see it go. New York Times just had quite a few articles about this topic a few months ago.
This was a public process “30,000 people in developing 37 neighborhood plans.”
This was not just a small neighborhood group, it “involved 30,000 people in developing 37 neighborhood plans.”
so half a million people didn’t participate, and the city has grown by 200,000 since then – most of the new residents being renters.
the majority of the participants were likely self-interested homeowners. the anti-housing zoners gerrymandered the new housing away from themselves…
super inclusive process. the neighborhood plans have displacement baked into them by preserving single family zoning.
it’s long past time the absurdly classist neighborhood plans were abolished.
Typical YIMBY whining. 30,000 people participated, which on a local level is an enormous turnout, even by today’s standards. And they didn’t simply send a pre-printed postcard, send an email, or sign a petition. They took time out of their busy day going to endless boring meetings and hearings and spoke up for not just their neighborhood, but their HOME. And plenty of your hypothetical renters would have supported the Neighborhood Plans, regardless.
You’re no different than people who couldn’t be bothered to vote, but still complain about who is in the White House. You want a voice in the process? You’re not special. What makes you think those of us who live here should have less of a voice in the process than those who haven’t even moved to Seattle yet? You seem to think we should roll over and let your developer friends destroy the place we love and the community we’ve helped build because you think you somehow deserve it. You’re not entitled to squat. The least you can do is put in the time like us evil “classist” SF homeowners did and PARTCIPATE. But no, you think a top-down executive diktat and a “grand bargain” that deliberately silenced the voices of those who are most impacted by these decisions is what passes for community outreach.
Do you realize your argument is the same as those voter ID laws designed to disenchant voters? The issue isn’t expecting you to just roll over. The issue is asking you to not relying on an outdated process to systematically force others to have no voice.
Mike Eliason is special because he makes his living designing housing and thus has a financial stake in maximizing upzones. When he calls people concerned about their neighborhoods “classist” he is the pot calling the kettle black.
This is actually why this is an out of date system, similar to how caucus is inferior to primary in terms of representing the general public. These neighborhood plans always over-representing the will of the well-to-do-more-time-and-resource-in-hands. This style of system had its use in the past, but has now became a major cause of suffering for those who cannot afford to participate in the process. It’s the same as how many good programs in Seattle school district benefits the middle class and above much more: because many of them require some level of active participation from the parents for the kids to benefit, which is hard for the poor.
What you say about Seattle Schools is true — middle class families take advantage of programs and struggling parents do not. The solution however for that very real problem is not to disband the PTA. So once again, how is insulating our politicians from taking into account the very people impacted by their policies a good thing?
No, you don’t disband the PTA. Strong PTAs can help schools in a variety of ways. But at the same time, a school board concerned with providing equitable programs won’t let PTA members dictate most of the policy. Doing so leads to an unfair emphasis on programs that benefit the children of the well-to-do at the expense of funding for programs aimed at the children of parents who don’t have the time to go to PTA meetings because they’re working two full-time jobs just to afford rent.
The same applies here. Growth is one of the biggest topics in every local election I’ve lived here for. Candidates who want to follow the “neighborhood” lead in slowing down on growth have run for plenty of city council seats in recent elections, and they tend to lose, often by wide margins. The majority of voters doesn’t quite agree with the majority of people who have the time and energy to go to a bunch of neighborhood planning meetings. The policy should reflect that.
This comment is hilarious. Do you have kids? Are you on the PTA? I’m a member of the PTA for a local Seattle public school. We are trying to raise up all kids. We volunteer a lot of time. We donate money to better every student. I imagine our community councils are full of altruistic charitable individuals too. I know for your premise to work there has to be this big bunch of meanies who are trying to put down the less fortunate, but it is so far removed from reality. The achievement gap is a very real problem — but reducing this very real problem to a battle between good and evil is ludicrous. I’m imagining our PTA rubbing our hands together to figure out how we can screw over kids and it’s hilarious. Look, it isn’t about good and evil. This is not an opportunity for you to be self-righteous. We are talking about keeping community involved in the things that directly impact us. Come back to reality.
My son is not old enough for school yet. Once he is I’ll probably volunteer around the school in some capacity, whether through the PTA or otherwise. I don’t think anyone on a PTA is a “meanie” who is consciously plotting to put some kids down, but I also realize that as parents we have inherent biases toward making sure that our own kids have the best possible education. Other kids, especially if they’re at schools that we never visit, matter less to us deep down. If we chose to allocate school program resources based on a poll of what the most vocal, engaged parents wanted, you’d probably end up with something different than if you polled all the parents at all the schools.
Same thing applies to neighborhood growth issues. We have elections every couple of years to elect city officials. The voters have consistently chosen representatives who openly support things like HALA. And yet if you listen to some of the “neighborhood activist” types on Nextdoor, this whole thing is being enacted with no community input. I strongly dispute that notion. The voters have made their intentions clear. Sometimes when you’re in the minority you don’t get your way. That doesn’t mean your opinion hasn’t been heard.
Dontcha know, IO? Obviously the answer is some city-council-led government mandate that school volunteers spend an equal amount of time at some other school that’s disadvantaged….
You’re right. You don’t disband the PTA and you don’t disband neighborhood groups. There is a balance there to be found and removing any piece of relationship is not the right balance.
The idea would be reduce the power of PTA, since strong PTAs would mean the rich north Seattle neighborhoods get to dictate policies that overall would hurt poorer south Seattle students. We surely can keep the PTAs.
There is no right answer to this, and the balances are always very hard to get right. If you don’t give the north Seattle PTAs enough power, than many richer parents might just abandon the public school system, which would then hurt everyone staying in the system. If you give them too much power, then the south Seattle schools will continue to suffer. We all want to help others and want to be selfish at the same time!
Your zero sum games are tedious. Not everything that benefits the north schools hurts the south schools, and vice versa. This false dichotomy is another one of your class war fever dreams.
In which way am I saying it’s a zero-sum game? I am saying that the systems can be designed to balance things a bit. For example, right now a lot of public school programs are partially funded by donation. That means the north Seattle schools would have those programs and south Seattle school programs wouldn’t. Public schools around here always got way way way more money raised than those in the south, simply because of the wealth gap. So how about making programs less dependent on donations by more tax ( which would effectively have north Seattle families help paying south Seattle programs)? Or how about having those donations not school based? However, we also know if we push in that direction too much, people would donate much less and some people would just move to the East side.
It’s not a zero-sum game but it is a big factor in perpetuating existing inequality from one generation to the next. There is not a good answer here. Stopping parents who can provide extra money or time would reduce the total amount of resources in the public system. Trying to gather the same dollars through tax to spend them where there are needed wouldn’t be accepted. What we can do as parents and residents is admit this is happening. Then we can do what we can to give poorer kids a chance.
TJ: “These neighborhood plans always over-representing the will of the well-to-do-more-time-and-resource-in-hands.” I didn’t realize that making $45,000/yr makes me well-to-do.”
Yeah, there are some specific individual cases against the trend, therefore the trend must not be there.
I said “over-representing”, not “only-presenting”. And I am curious how much have the value of your house increased? Do you think you really represent an average $45,000/y earner? You think you are speaking for a person who just got a teaching job with about that salary and is currently renting?
As usual, TJ, you haven’t done your homework. What research have you done on this issue here? Wallingford was never upper middle class and it still isn’t. I was able to buy a house here in the 70s when I made $11,000/yr. The many people who moved here between the 70s and 90s would not have come to Wallingford when they could afford better. The last five years are not at all representative of the nature of the neighborhood. You should join the Wallingford Community Council if you want to know what’s actually going on before you make baseless claims.
I would think you haven’t done your homework, not me. Houses on my street for example used to have a relatively slow turnover rate. This year, due to the huge jump in market, suddenly half a dozen of them are sold within half a year, with all of them but one over one million. What does that make my street anything but a row of million dollar houses? All the new comers are obviously upper middle class. If you keep looking back to the 70s and 90s as inspiration of how to deal with the current issue, how can you claim that you did your homework? The last five years surely don’t represent the nature of the neighborhood now. We are talking about a situation that’s only a couple of years old. You are definitely not talking about “what’s going on”. If you want to keep using the 70s as reference, I can start talking about the seventeenth century!
I’m talking about the international of people who live in Wallingford NOW who purchased here because they could afford it. A few new richies does not the majority make. You would benefit from taking a logic or critical thinking course, with all due respect. You do not seem to be able to read text without distorting it to suit your point of view. If you keep looking back to the 70s and 90s as inspiration of how to deal with the current issue, how can you claim that you did your homework? Ex – “If you keep looking back to the 70s and 90s as inspiration of how to deal with the current issue, how can you claim that you did your homework?” I didn’t say that. And why is this neighborhood only affordable to rich people now? Obviously, the market controls that. We are in no position to control how the international financial economy works — unless we work at the top levels of Wall Street or we can convince the people with money to move elsewhere.
Looking back in history is exactly what got San Francisco into such a horrible housing situation. In what way is 70s or 90s any kind of inspiration for the current problem? The reason why real estate price in places like Seattle is well-studied, and I think it’s obvious you didn’t do your homework to read any of those studies. It’s not “the market”. It’s the strong restriction put in place to suppress the creation of new housing stock. As I stated many times that studies showed that Tokyo has effectively dealt with the housing issue by having regulations that makes tearing down old houses to build new houses easy. So in Tokyo it’s not a good investment to buy houses: there is nearly no growth.
As previously discussed on other threads, there are already plenty of existing places in Seattle zoned to build apartments, high-rises, etc. without changing the zoning rules.
As previously discussed on other threads, few if any of those neighborhoods are as convenient in terms of traffic comparing to Wallingford, and it makes more sense to build up Wallingford than places like Aurora. Any many places zoned for is not a good excuse for not adding more zones. A place doesn’t suddenly become available to build simply because it’s zoned to do so. The question should be if there are enough places in Seattle that’s building up, not if there are enough places in Seattle that’s zoned to do so.
Aurora is just one example but there are existing lots zoned for exactly the kind of housing advocated for, just not in the center of a SFH neighborhood. I don’t think Wallingford is all that convenient, in terms of traffic. There aren’t many buses that go through Wallingford (certainly not any that get you somewhere quickly) and we don’t even have light rail here.
Agree we ought to have light rail.
But the 44 gets you to central Ballard or the UW in 15 mins, every 15 mins, and the 62 to central Fremont in 10, and SLU/Downtown in 30 every15 minutes as well.
Easy trips to tons of jobs at all wage levels (including food service, hospitality and maintenance etc)
My experience is that bus service has never been all the great and depends on exactly where you live. I recall it taking longer to take the bus (actually 2 buses) to UW than it did to walk and that was before all the bus service cuts and reroutes, etc.
Fair enough. The new routes centered on 45th & Stone in my experience are massively better than +/-1 year ago. 62 inbound kicks ***, as does 44 to Ballard. 44 to UW seems good (don’t know about 62 outbound as I don’t take it).
44 and many buses like that these days are designed to take people to the UW Stadium lightrail station. I am pretty sure when the U district and Roosevelt stations are up, the bus routes would change again and Walingford would get more and better east-west bus routes going to those stations.
You do realize “bus service cuts” dates you terribly. Bus service has increased since Move Seattle and Proposition 1.
Didn’t the 16 recently go away, or was rerouted away from Wallingford? And the 26 became the 62 and lost the express? If you’re close to a convenient bus route, then you’re lucky. I don’t think there are too many buses going through here compared to other neighborhoods. Certainly not enough to claim that Wallingford has good transit options. As for the 44, as I recall, by the time it reached Wallingford after all its Ballard stops, it would be full and blow past its stops here.
Before:
16: Meridian, 44th, Stone, Bridge Way, Aurora, Lower Queen Anne, Belltown
26: Tackeray/Latona, 40th, Wallingford, 35th, Fremont Bridge, Dexter, SLU
26E: Tackeray/Latona, 40th, Bridge Way, Aurora, Belltown
Now:
62: Meridian, 44th, Stone, 35th, Fremont Bridge, Dexter, SLU
26E: Same route, more frequently.
The pros of the new scheme are more frequently service to downtown from east
Wallingford. Better service to SLU i.e. Amazon, from west/central Wallingford.
A con is no Aurora service to downtown from west Wallingford although the E line
from 46th & Aurora is a good option form many.
Exactly.
Bus service has increased, but not enough to keep pace with expansion of Seattle’s population. If you haven’t seen buses crowded to the max and leaving people standing at bus stops because there is no room on the bus, you probably drive a lot. At Sound Transit’s present pace of buildout it will take decades, if not a century, for Seattle to have the light rail we need.
Because many part of Wallingford is still mostly single-family-house zones, therefore low density and therefore not ideal for public transportation services. However, places like Stone Way with all the build up now has frequent and convenient bus to downtown. Also if you live close to the 45th highway entrance, you actually got access to the best bus options to downtown: many long distance buses from Everett or Lynnwood would have that place as the last stop before going into downtown. So you got a direct highway bus to downtown there.
I’ve suggested countless times to the YIMBY’s/urbanists that we should significantly upzone Aurora. There’s plenty of vacant lots, run down and abandoned properties that could be purchased by the city or private interests. Land costs are somewhat cheaper there, so you’d get more affordable housing for your buck than you would in the heart of Wallingford (and developers will all build market rate instead of affordable housing in Wallingford, regardless) Aurora is also very close to downtown and on a BRT line, close to GL park and has market and stores. Plus, developing it would help clean up the riff raff. And you would have little, if any, pushback from neighborhood groups.
Yes, all those possibilities and benefits. But, the YIMBY’s complain it’s not fair and “equitable” to suggest people could live on Aurora.
There is a reason why you see so many new Amazon people living in Wallingford, because its campus is just across the Lake Union. And Wallingford always enjoyed the easy access to UW. It’s sandwiched between the two biggest north-south traffic paths of the city also. You might not think it’s convenient, but many other places are way worse.
Also east Wallingford is getting lightrail. You can draw walk zones to the UW and Roosevelt stations, and east Wallingford would be within that. That will mean guaranteed reasonable commute time for east Wallingford to downtown even when the streets are jammed.
Yep, and I think those Amazon folks are driving to work.
Sure, other places are worse, but that doesn’t make HALA a good idea.
“Yep, and I think those Amazon folks are driving to work.”
Nope. Take the 62 inbound like I do M-F.
If you’re over 40 you’ll feel like sombody’s grandparent, but the Amazonians are bussing it.
You are clueless if you don’t know that huge numbers of tech employees don’t drive to work from SnoCo and the East Side.
How much better would it be if we can build up Wallingford so more of them can live here instead of driving from that far?
Amazon specifically has high percentage of its employees living close by. Many of them got the money to afford that. Not so much for lower paid people serving them.
I personally never lived more than an hour walk away from any of my jobs, and that’s five companies in three cities. To have more people like this, we need more housing closer to job centers.
I’m clueless as to how to interpret this double negative.
Some of us won’t live long enough to see Wallingford get light rail.
What are you talking about? I live in East Wallingford and I’m getting light rail soon.
True dat! Roosevelt station is due to open in 2021 and most of us are mortal.
Single family housing in Wallingford is luxury housing.
Single family zoning in Seattle is luxury zoning.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/bca6c60780cc1e8d4da1b9b7d3f6b63407215ba1c54b5b8fe47f49086da2af1d.jpg
I don’t know about luxury housing. Sure, it’s gotten more expensive lately, thanks to supply and demand. Reducing the number of SFHs available (through rezoning) will only serve to increase the price as an increasing number of people chase a dwindling supply. Many people are commuting longer and longer distances because they *want* a SFH and are expanding their home searches to outside of Seattle.
Property values have gone up and they’ve gone down. Some people may profit today. Tomorrow, some could end up losing money.
People don’t need SFHs. They need homes.
Some people may want, and then decide to choose an SFH, cost or commute be damned. But if we allow other choices, many people will have the option of more affordable options closer to their jobs.
Legalize the choice, everywhere.
Utter baloney. If you don’t limit some land to lower value uses (per sq ft) it will inevitably increase in cost and uses that need that lower value to survive will disappear in large areas of the central city. This principle applies to industrial land as well as residential; that’s why labor unions and maritime businesses have fought so hard over the years to prevent BINMIC from being zoned for non-industrial uses.
The end result of your (and Paul’s) zoning desires is a city core with housing affordable mostly owned the wealthy except for publicly or NGO owned units. And 250 sq. ft. closets.
You claim that increasing the zoning will result in “a city core with housing affordable mostly owned the wealthy except for publicly or NGO owned units. And 250 sq. ft. closets.” I claim that leaving the zoning the same will result in the same thing, minus the 250 sq. ft. closets. How is that better? Isn’t the choice to live close to the center of town in a small apartment better than no choice at all?
Sure, if all you want is a large urban dormitory for 20-something tech workers.
But we agree (to some extent)! The zoning itself is largely irrelevant to the end condition. The problem is the dumping of capital (jobs) into the urban core. I disagree to a larger extent: the conversion to that dormitory will be much slower if the zoning is not changed. More of the existing affordable housing will continue to exist (along with the neighborhoods that they are part of, like small local businesses instead of chains).
Jobs in urban cores are unadulterated good things for the planet and humanity.
Really, that’s the best argument you can make? I’m going to bed.
And even the 250 SF closets rent for at least $1,000 per month.
Don’t kid yourself. As much as 90% of the new housing built over the past few years, currently being permitted and on the drawing board is luxury housing. These high end apartments are great for people making at least $100K, but utterly unaffordable to tens of thousands of Seattle residents who make substantially less.
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/seattles-record-apartment-boom-is-ready-to-explode/
However, it’s necessary to have a lot of these units built, because the most common form of affordable housing in all major cities around the world are old apartments that used to be luxurious.
After the crash of 2008 30% of Seattle’s homeowners went underwater. In addition, upzoning SF lots to MF resulting in 4-, 6- and 8-packs of townhouses that sell for $800,000 is not exactly “affordable” to average working people.
And Wallingford was one of the neighborhood with the lowest percentage of underwater owners. See the reason for building up in Wallingford over other neighborhoods?
Tell the folks in Rainier Beach—the only neighborhood that managed to get the City to work with it on a neighborhood plan update in the past ten years—that they’re a bunch of “upper middle class blocking out poorer families.”
Considering there are hundreds of duplexes, triplexes and other apartment that predate the downzoning in the 1950s and certainly the 1990s neighborhood plans and are part of the Wallingford fabric right now, I’d say Susanna is being a gigantic drama queen. Funeral, indeed, but for the fear mongering insinuations that hundreds of thousands of Seattleites are lesser citizens if they have to live in anything but a detached house.
Oh, what a surprise, a YIMBY dude has joined the party with his clever, sexist comments. Nice one, Bro! And, look, I see your buddy was quick to give it a “like”. Maybe when Susanna gets over her silly lady drama, she can go make you a sammich.
Kaydal, you’re absolutely correct. I was out of line. I responded to the author’s rhetoric with a personal attack and I apologize to her.
Thank you.
“Funeral, indeed, but for the fear mongering insinuations that hundreds
of thousands of Seattleites are lesser citizens if they have to live in
anything but a detached house.” This is an unsubstantiated opinion and no doubt untrue. Give us some evidence and we might believe you. Otherwise, it just sounds like sour grapes.
Look at the comments for almost every design review, and you’ll see the stereotypes of future residents played out: Transient, apathetic, higher crime rate, not committed to community, etc etc.
Speaking of ‘unsubstantiated opinion and no doubt untrue’ from the acticle above:
‘Did anyone else realize that Seattle was the new Moscow?’
really those heinous comments only come up around wealthier single family zones. you don’t see those comments in denser areas to the same degree.
the solution is to abolish single family zoning. the solution has always been to abolish single family zoning. https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/e8d5e8cfeba68cdc3780f79e3b4446b8906621a7a6f098af83ed18a042575177.jpg
Jsut remembered I got a uS mail letter from some city department regarding tearing down of a hous eon Whitman N & 43rd to make a triplex.. blah blah re comments. On Woodland Park N mid way up 4300 s is a newish 4 plex where a single family home used to sit… then up and around the corner are thsoe 3 floor condos.. then go up and to left down a block is another and south another block is a huge construction site.. It is all over this little swatch of the neighborhood.
The vision from those who were here twenty years ago holds true today:
“We envision Wallingford as a community: Where neighbors are encouraged to know one another, to celebrate together, and to join in making decisions about the future of the community.”
This is a pretty wonderful & inclusive statement. I love that the rest of the Vision Statement is just as inclusive. By using the term, “neighbor,” all residents, non-profits, schools & businesses within Wallingford are included. Thank you to those who put so much thought and effort into this back in the 1990s.
Susanna, Thanks for the important explanation of neighborhood plans. It’s too bad that some have to use this background as an excuse to denigrate those that have invested their time and energy (at the request of the city) to work on neighborhood and public issues. I wish more people would participate. I also wish that everyone would vote. Just because often a majority don’t choose to vote is no reason to eliminate the right. Instead of citizen participation, the mayor and council each appoint a handful of like minded people as a replacement for community involvement. (A brilliant idea by Mayor Putin.)
A few years ago the Wallingford Community Council spent almost its entire annual income to mail every resident in our zip code. A large part of that mailing (by a professional mail service) was incurred because it wanted to make sure that its invitation to become involved went to every apartment building – which cost a lot extra.
I’d like to remind everyone to keep comments polite and respectful. Thank you.
Interesting history. You point out that under the process that happened back in the 90s, every neighborhood was happy to find ways to meet growth targets.
Do you honestly believe the same would be true today? Every time I see discussions about growth here or on Nextdoor or other forums, I see that most of the people who might be inclined to sign up for a neighborhood planning committee tend to disagree with the very idea that growth in their neighborhood is a good or necessary thing.
Given that, how can we expect that a similar process to what we had 20 years ago is likely to result in neighborhood committees accepting growth targets and happily welcoming more growth into their neighborhoods?
This city needs to make room for more people. I’d love to see that happen with more participation from neighborhood residents, not less. That said, every time I’ve seen neighborhood groups inserting themselves into the process in the past few years the goal seems to be to grow slower. I’d rather have top-down process than no progress.
Interesting question. I actually had a section that talked about this, but ended up cutting it for length.
The idea of “growth targets” is something interesting to understand. As part of the state’s required planning process, there is an estimate of how much our city is expected to grow over a 20 year period. This number can then be divided up among the neighborhoods so that each neighborhood has a growth target and it can be determined if the neighborhood has enough zoning capacity to accommodate its share of the growth, or whether zoning changes are needed.
This is how it worked 20 years ago during the neighborhood planning processes. But over the years and with subsequent zoning changes, the City is now currently zoned to accommodate about three times the expected population growth. Even if the population growth estimate was low (which it very well may be) we still have beaucoups of wiggle room.
The City is not very forthcoming about this excess of development capacity we currently have. But if you ask them they will tell you it’s true.
So what is the justification for the upzones? As best as I can tell, the City has decided on an amount of zoning capacity that it needs to generate a certain amount of funds from developers to pay into its affordable housing piggy bank (realistically close to zero of the affordable housing units from the HALA upzone will be built on site, developers will opt for the in lieu fee).
So then we must ask, if we do not need upzones to accommodate our expected growth, is trading upzones for fees from developers the best method of getting funds for affordable housing? Are they fair to the neighborhoods who had no say and are most impacted?
If the City had a neighborhood planning process such as what we had in the 1990s and the City had to justify why certain neighborhoods were being asked to accept a certain amount of growth, perhaps it would become more clear to the public that we already have enough zoning capacity to reach our current growth targets. I can’t help but wonder if this is why the City is doing things differently.
The top-down process may work well for now for those of you who agree with what the City is doing. But what happens when the City does something you don’t agree with? The neighborhood planning process of the 1990s was very inclusive and involved 30,000 people. I want an inclusive process so your voice and mine can both have a say.
Reference: Seattle Development Capacity Reports, which states:
“Based on current zoning, DPD estimates that the city has development capacity to add about 224,000 housing units and 232,000 jobs, a sufficient amount to accommodate the 70,000 households and 115,000 jobs the Countywide Planning Policies assign to Seattle for the next 20 years.”
link: https://www.seattle.gov/Documents/Departments/OPCD/OngoingInitiatives/SeattlesComprehensivePlan/DevelopmentCapacityReport.pdf
I’d justify the upzones by the fact that home prices are growing out of control. This is a clear indicator of an imbalance between supply and demand, whether we have enough “zoned capacity” based on the official estimates or no. “Zoned capacity” is not a very useful number, as explained by this article: http://www.sightline.org/2016/09/12/no-seattle-does-not-already-have-plenty-of-land-zoned-for-new-housing/. Furthermore the estimates used to establish the current zoning were clearly a gross underestimate of what actually occurred. Any capacity numbers based on these estimates are inherently suspect.
Upzoning many SF blocks won’t make home prices go down. By significantly reducing the supply, upzones do the opposite.
You and Sightline can attack the capacity estimates till the cows come home, but the facts show that development of new housing is proceeding at a very high rate. The problem is most of the new housing is not as affordable as the housing it displaces: “Despite rapid growth of new housing from Tacoma to Snohomish County, rents and home price continue to climb, largely because the construction hasn’t kept pace with job and population gains.”
We will never stop gentrification and displacement so long as we allow forces that want job growth to control land use policy. This is a systemic problem present in numerous places and at higher scales as well.
As you state, we’re building housing fast but job growth is happening faster. I agree.
I’ll even agree that upzoning single-family neighborhoods could cause single-family homes to increase a bit more in price because the supply of these homes will go down. People who want this type of luxury housing already have to pay luxury prices for it. If that type of housing gets even more expensive as a side-effect of getting more “missing middle” type duplex/triplex units on the market, that seems like an unambiguous net win for affordability.
As to your suggestion that the real solution is to cut back on job growth so we won’t have so many people to house, we’ll have to agree to disagree there.
Not only is that the real solution, but it’s the one we’re going to get, sooner or later. The high tech industry has been elsewhere, and it can and will easily go elsewhere. The only question is what we’ll have left, and what we’ll have thrown away by then. We should take some responsibility for the causes of this “crisis”, rather than just using it to promote developers’ agendas.
If what we’ll have is the greater public transportation system that density sustains, and what we’ll have thrown away is car dependency and all the mandatory parking, et al., that sustains it, then that will be a pretty good result by itself.
Possibly, but timing is everything. When will we have a transit system capable of moving all these people around the region in a way that isn’t beholden to buses and street cars crawling thru traffic?
Depends on when the people who believe transit to be a priority become a greater political force than the people who believe cars to be a priority. Many of our current transit problems are political, not physical.
We could have dedicated bus lanes within two months on most major routes, which would keep buses from crawling through traffic, but that would be waging “the war on cars.” Creating all-new rights of way, without taking from existing uses (elevated and tunneled rail, for example), is orders of magnitude slower and more expensive.
“only a ceiling on energy use can lead to social relations that are characterized by high levels of equity. … Participatory democracy postulates low-energy technology.” Ivan Illich, 1973
Some transit is much lower energy per passenger mile than cars, but buses do not do better than cars overall in the numerous studies I’ve looked at over the years. Rail generally compares well, from light to heavy.
Depends on what sort of buses compared to what sort of cars, and whether we’re looking at buses at maximum capacity or average capacity for a particular city. The study I’m looking at says that a bus with more than 11 passengers outperforms a car on emissions per passenger per mile.
However, buses are meant to be part of a system which minimizes the amount of travel people need to do in the first place, as well as complement ultra-low-energy transport like cycling. To that aim, emissions per passenger-mile can increase even as each person’s overall emissions decrease, so energy/emissions per passenger mile is only one metric of several that should be used.
Have you not noticed that people bring their bikes on Link trains? Each bus can carry a maximum of three bikes, so they’re hardly superior to Link in this regard.
I wasn’t comparing buses to Link…
“Overall in numerous studies” is misleading though, since it varies a lot by case. It’s common to have huge occupancy rate discrepancies for buses. Rails generally compare well, until you start looking at cases like remote villages in Japan where rail lines would fail due to extremely low ridership: basically the same occupancy rate issue.
Metro bus route 62 is for sure way better than cars. You DO NOT want those people commuting from Stone Way to downtown to start driving.
I think the measurement/comparison problem is bus systems are not as efficient as individual (packed) buses. So yes, it’s an “occupancy rate issue.” I agree we don’t want people on the 62 to start auto commuting to SLU. However, Vulcan/Amazon did build many thousands of parking spaces for the many thousands of Amazon employees who live beyond ready transit access.
I was surprised by some of the data when I dug into it (not recently).
Buses and trolleys also get jammed in traffic along with the cars. I lived in NYC for 8 years and only took the bus once for this reason.
Are you actually denying the city is engaging in a War on Cars? Read the link I’ve posted below from today’s KOMO News about how CM Rob Johnson’s plans to deliberately make it much harder to park and drive in Seattle to encourage transit use, without actually DOING anything to improve transit. And then tell us the War on Cars is a myth.
If Johnson wanted better transit, he would take the money from what will be yet another painfully slow and underused mile-long streetcar line they’re tearing up 1st Ave to build (along with parking on either side of the street). We’re shelling out $177 MILLION (not including overruns and lawsuits from bicyclists who get hurt or killed by the rails) for this boondoggle. Think of how many busses that money would get us. But no, rather than actually improving other bus service, Johnson and the rest of them are obsessed with making it as difficult as possible to get around town by car. They are deliberately killing Seattle’s livability, all so they can force us onto bikes and busses and impose their HALA Borg cubes agenda on us.
http://komonews.com/news/local/seattle-city-council-proposes-reducing-parking-city-wide-to-increase-public-transit-use
It’s only war on cars if you perceive car-driving is a right. Making it harder to park is by default an improvement on bus service, since that means fewer cars in the streets, therefore the buses wouldn’t be stuck in the traffic so much.
Car-driving is the opposite of livability. Car-driving was what killed many American cities at first place and making them ghettos, and European and Asian cities often get to maintain great city cores because they were built before cars and not designed for cars.
As long as you obey driving laws, car driving IS a right. And one that the vast majority of people here use and support facilitating. It’s the well connected bike lobby that represents barely 3% of commuters who are trying to ban cars from the city. I thought you were all about the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few?
Really? Is it also my right to drive a tank on the street? Where is this right enshrined, and what are its limits?
No, because tanks are not street legal. Like zoning, there are rules and regulations prohibiting them. That too, is a good thing.
Great, glad we agree that this ‘right’ is subject to the needs of other road users and general public safety. Now, as I asked before, I’d be very interested to see where it says that driving a car is a right, but operating another type of vehicle is not.
Whatever, I’m not going to split hairs with you on this. But have fun biking in the rain and taking the bus every time you want to go hiking or skiing, bring back some furniture from a store, make your flight, etc…
That’s a pretty incredible dichotomy you’ve set up: either I support the city intervening to make car ownership easier, or I want cars to disappear from the Earth. No middle ground at all.
Have fun taking your kids everywhere they need to go on buses. It will take you a substantial amount of time and, ironically, cost more than driving.
As long as you obey the laws, littering is allowed. That doesn’t make it a right. There is nothing stopping the government from taking driving away from you as it see fit through regulation.
Car lobbying is way way way way more powerful than bike lobbying, and cars surely does not represent the interest of many. It is really intentionally made necessary in the US through government planning and subsidies. Roads are paid for by the public, and in most other countries the tax on cars and gas are much higher so car driving are not as subsidized as they are in the US thanks to the power of car lobbying.
“As long as you obey the laws, littering is allowed.”
Please identify the neighborhoods or cities in which littering is allowed. And no, the illegal trash heaps that the city tolerates at homeless encampments don’t count.
This oughta be fun…..
You can litter in your house or in public trash cans. It’s not that different from car driving really. Cars can only be driven on specific pathways following specific rules, same as littering of everything else. The regulation on driving and on littering can be changed as we see fit, and there is no specific right preventing them from being severely restricted. The restriction on what kind of vehicle is legal where is really not that different from what kind of trash is legal where.
“Car-driving is the opposite of livability.”
Yep. Literally shortens all our lives. This study is from Phoenix but there are tons from all over the world. (NB N02 is largely from vehicles). Less VMT, longer (and healthier) lives!
Total mortality was significantly associated with CO and NO(2) (p < 0.05) and weakly associated with SO(2), PM(10), and PM(CF) (p < 0. 10). Cardiovascular mortality was significantly associated with CO, NO(2), SO(2), PM(2.5), PM(10), PM(CF) (p < 0.05), and elemental carbon. Factor analysis revealed that both combustion-related pollutants and secondary aerosols (sulfates) were associated with cardiovascular mortality. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1638029/
And yet, Bryan, you own two cars. Don’t you want to live?
“And yet, Bryan, you own two cars. Don’t you want to live?
Yep
20 years ago both my wife and I each drove ~10K or more a year
Now we drive less than ~5k a year combined
(In ultimate testmony on my will to survive, 2 years ago I gave up my Beemer for a Smart Car. I prefer to avoid but driving if I can, but THAT still hurt…)
Then whose blue BMW is that sitting in front of your house day after day?
Besides if you supposedly gave up one of your cars for safety, you should have given up your Smart Car. The BMW is much safer. In fact, pretty much any car is safer than a Smart Car.
My wife’s. As you said, we own 2 cars at the moment. (If she has her way, which she probably will, we’ll go down to just the BWM, since her logic that I could Lyft everywhere I might need to go when she’s using hers and it would be cheaper per month even that a Smart Car).
Bryan may not mind, but I don’t feel comfortable reading such comments on an individual poster’s personal decisions.
Kat, in asking him whose BMW that is I’m simply asking Bryan to clarify his comment. If he said didn’t want to answer, I understand. But we live close by, and I see the BMW. So I was puzzled as to why he’d say he sold it. Now that’s he’s cleared it up I’m fine with that. And I was pretty sure he’d be fine with answering it, anyway, given that he’s previously been OK with answering other questions. For example, just as I’ve been asked by urbanists (and maybe even Bryan) about personal decisions like “why don’t you just move to the suburbs if you don’t want aPodments being built all around you,” I’ve previously asked Bryan why he bought here if he knew it was zoned single family. And he had no problem explaining why then, either.
This is not about Bryan. I don’t want to read personal details about others, especially when used to forward a point of view. What one person does is hardly ever generalizes to the overall question.
I don’t want anyone to have to decide whether to answer a personal question. The few people who are brave enough to use their real name here should not suffer for it.
Johnson is pointing out, quite rightly, that when you give people incentives to own and drive cars (like forcing property owners to provide more parking than they would otherwise, or using public right-of-way as free or subsidized storage for private property), people will respond to those incentives and own and drive cars more than they would otherwise. He proposing to roll back some of those incentives, bringing us slightly closer to neutrality. Reducing existing incentives is not the same thing as creating new penalties, and hardly constitutes a “war.” The current system still heavily favors cars, as I explained the last time we had this conversation.
How you equate cars with livability is beyond me. To me, livable places are those that are healthy and pleasant to live in. Cars contribute to neither the healthiness nor the pleasance of a place.
I suppose next you’ll tell me that ending tax breaks for private plane owners, so that they pay the same taxes as everyone else, is a War on Aviation.
Johnson is the grinch who wants to reduce parking at parks for chrissake. I hope someone good runs against him in the next election.
Don’t kid yourself about how long it takes to acquire right of way, carry out necessary environmental permitting and actually build light rail. Seattle should have gotten going on this back in the 1960s and 1970s like SF and Portland, but NO…it preferred to let its share of generous federal transportation funds for mass transit be reallocated to Atlanta.
You know what will improve our transit system in a hurry, Marie? Make every damn one of these city council members who insist on telling us how to live our lives take the bus to work everyday!
You know Johnson does exactly that, right? Used to see him on it all the time when I lived in that district.
Decades from now, if not at some point in the 21st century. Seattle’s transpo system is pathetic compared to average European cities. I would even argue that Mexico City has Seattle beat in this regard with its robust mix of buses of various sizes and its light rail system that is as large as NYC’s. Bus rides are dirt cheap, and the subway is even cheaper: 30 cents per ride.
I predict that once Jeff Bezos gets Amazon’s second headquarters built he will yank his first headquarters out of Seattle. And why shouldn’t he given that cities will readily grovel for the opportunity and shower Amazon with massive tax breaks. Boeing did the same thing.
“this type of luxury housing” — Calling the now $600,000+ tear downs (2 BR, 1 bath, 1200 sq ft) “luxury housing” is insulting. They were in $200,000 range until 20 years ago.
Yes, we’ll have to disagree about the “benefits” of job growth. Putting job growth ahead of other considerations (like long term sustainability) is just one aspect of our difficult as a species to think ahead. I don’t know how old you are, but I think about time frames longer than my life or that of my 30 year old daughter. As a policy analyst focused on ecology and sustainability my look forward is in terms of centuries, not years or decades. Climate scientists do the same thing, which is why so many of them of so freaked out. Maybe you should think about why that is as you go rah rah for more jobs and the economic metabolism that goes with them.
Our history as a ‘civilized’ species started about 10-20 millennia ago. I really wish people could think beyond themselves because we are in the process of creating hell for those who will be living from later this century (if not sooner) through the next millennium or two. Assuming we don’t screw up the ecosystem so hard we extinct ourselves. I won’t give that dismal path a percentage chance of coming to pass (aside from the fact that none of alive today will know whether it does), but it’s clearly more than 0.
There are lots of good arguments against increasing the housing density in Wallingford, but environmental sustainability is not one. Dense cities are the best way of providing housing with the least impact on the environment.
Read some of the studies I’ve listed below and let me know if you can find anything better. My conclusion from reading most of them (I have not gone through the list at Seto) is that increasing density in the core has marginal GHG/enviro benefits. The real problem is overall growth; increasing density in the some suburbs is helpful, but increasing density in the core beyond where Seattle already is in most close in areas doesn’t solve much.
I am seriously interested in having a dialogue with someone who takes the opposite position without being ideologically rigid. I’ve argued about this with Dan Bertolet at Sightline; he’s so angry and unable to engage about it he’s banned me from FB sites and recently blocked me on FB. Other “urbanists” have been even ruder.
—
http://www.ucdenver.edu/academics/colleges/Engineering/research/CenterSustainableUrbanInfrastructure/CSISProducts/Workshops/Documents/Attendee%20Publications/Hillman_2010_GHG%20emission%20footprints%20and%20energy%20use%20benchmarks%20for%20eight%20US%20cities.pdf
Jones and Kammen 2014, “Spatial Distribution of U.S. Household Carbon Footprints Reveals Suburbanization Undermines Greenhouse Gas Benefits of Urban Population Density”
dx.doi.org/10.1021/es4034364
http://www.naefrontiers.org/File.aspx?id=47316
Fragkias 2014, “Does Size Matter? Scaling of CO2 Emissions and U.S. Urban Areas” “Contrary to theoretical expectations, larger cities are not more emissions efficient than smaller ones.”
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0064727
Oliveira 2014, “Large Cities Are Less Green”
http://www.nature.com/articles/srep04235
Conor K. Gately, Lucy R. HutyraIan, Sue Wing, 2015, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2015, 112, 4999-5004, “Cities, traffic, and CO2: A multidecadal assessment of trends, drivers, and scaling relationships,”
http://www.pnas.org/content/112/16/4999.full.pdf http://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1421723112/-/DCSupplemental
Seto Lab—“Urbanization and Global Change,” Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies
http://urban.yale.edu/research/theme-4
You can’t get any denser than building it downtown. Think about it, if density is the goal, it makes sense to eliminate height limits downtown and put it all there. That’s where we should concentrate the growth. Too bad MHA is a measly 2% there.
That’s what Vulcan and Jack McCullough’s clients got in the “Grand Bargain.” Good deal for the rest of us, huh?
Huh? I know you know more than I do about this stuff, but I’m pretty sure downtown only got a 1 or 2 story height increase, right?
I was thinking about the % contribution, not the height. Without digging into the ordinance etc I don’t know the height provisions for downtown. Everywhere else for sure it’s c. 1 story in each LR and NC (also C?) zone. (Plus the increases due to changing zones, like from SF to LR3!)
It’s not about picking somewhere to stick all the newcomers. The question is what is the best compromise for the current and future residents of our city, i.e. real people with hopes and fears. Arguing in absolutes on any side doesn’t help.
Yep, times change. A back yard in Wallingford or Fremont wasn’t a big luxury 20 years ago. Now it is. A back yard is an expensive luxury now whether the house next to it is 1,200 square feet or 5,000. Our zoning policy should reflect that, not some fantasy where today’s high prices are just a temporary blip. The only way to go back there is a massive collapse of the local job market, forcing tens of thousands of families to uproot their lives in search of decent wages elsewhere. Again, that’s not something I would welcome.
Our current economic system requires people to exploit natural resources in order to afford to eat and have a roof over their head. It is what it is. Maybe, just maybe, making room for more people to live closer to where they work, in dense, walkable communities, means they’ll do less environmental damage commuting and otherwise living their lives.
Whether you welcome it or not, there will be another downturn in the economy. There always is.
Aside from that, I don’t disagree that times change. My point is that the rules governing increased density should be developed with all affected parties at the table. Not top down. It’s as simple as that. Many of the promoters of increased density simply refuse to acknowledge the legitimate interests of people who are or will be adversely impacted by those decisions. Up to and including displacement from their homes.
“It is what it is.” You, like most people, simply wish to remain oblivious to the fact that “our current economic system” cannot continue to “exploit natural resources” at the current rate. Simple physics. Biologists call it population overshoot. The short term solutions in your last sentence are well and good, but they do not solve the systemic problems inherent in “it is what it is.”
There is no refuse to acknowledge the legitimate interests of people. It’s an ideology difference of how much we weigh the interest of different groups. There are groups that want to weigh existing home owner’s interest very high, and there are groups that want to consider the interest of more people more evenly. Those who argue for density increase are obviously considering the interest of people who want to live in Wallingford but not currently owning houses in Wallingford much more than those who are against density. It’s really not that different from your typical close society vs open society debates.
That’s your perception (first sentence). I think you’re wrong based on the behavior of commenters here as well as of certain elected (and not) City officials. Around the bush we go.
Aside from the fact that you (like Paul and Bryan) continue to mis-state others’ position. I am not “against density.” I am against have little to no voice in how it is achieved.
Your reference to “typical close society vs open society debates” is interesting. Got some references you’d me to look at?
It’s not about you having no voice in my view. It’s more about the sacrifice I think you should make in my view is much bigger than you want to make.
And what I mean by the close/open society debate is this: you are more advocating for taking care of the interest of existing Wallingford residents first, just like how some Americans think it’s more important to take care of American citizens first. While I think the interest of existing Wallingford residents does not have to be put at a higher place than other generic Seattle people or even just people who want to move to Seattle, just like how some people think it’s OK to help unfortunate third world countries a bit more before addressing every single need of American citizens.
It’s about how tribal people are.
You clearly don’t have a clue about my values. How arrogant and presumptuous of you to say I don’t want to make enough sacrifices by your standards (“should make”).
I am one of the most “open” persons you will ever find: my interests extend not only to everyone in the world, but also to the billions of people who do not exist yet. And likely won’t if people with your narrow perspective—focused tightly on the here and now—succeed in keeping the human enterprise from considering and acting on the bigger picture.
Yes, it’s about people being tribal, and I find you to be quite that. I don’t think you consider the systemic and increasingly global nature of our racist, imperialist, greedy (capitalist) political economy and how it is foundational to the problems we are experiencing in Seattle.
> ‘I am not “against density.” I am against have little to no voice in how it is achieved.’
What rate of growth do you think is right for Wallingford?
How would you achieve it?
Difficult question. Got time for a beer?
We’re exactly not making room for people to live closer to where they work. Seattle is already far over-booked, there’s no conceivable way everyone can live here. So they commute, from “wherever.” That’s how you get the sprawl no one likes. If these jobs were in other cities – say, Expedia stayed in Kirkland, for example, Russell Capital stayed in Tacoma, Weyerhaeuser stayed in Federal Way – their employees would have a much better chance of living like you want, like we really all would want if we had the choice. Thousand-a-week growth in Seattle is insane, and harms the entire region.
It’s not that simple though. The problem is that the new rich likes to live in dense urban areas. Many companies move offices into downtown areas all over the
US not because they somehow enjoy higher cost associate with that, but the fact that many highly valuable and highly paid talents of those companies want to work and live in crowded cities. And that’s why it makes little sense to build up at Aurora instead of along the UW-Wallingford-Fremont-Ballard corridor, where it’s close to downtown jobs and the lifestyle is already half way there. Instead it should be people who crave quite single family house lifestyles that should move to the suburbs. Wallingford indeed isn’t what it is, and I don’t see it going back to what it was.
Usually you and I agree, but TBH much of the Northern Hemisphere was glaciated 12-20 millenia ago, and people lived in small, very low density groups of hunter-gatherers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_of_Forgotten_Dreams
Try telling people in South Seattle that their houses are “luxury housing.” Many of them are modest 2 bedroom, 1 bathroom dwellings owned by people making half of Seattle’s area median income who bought them years ago and who are still struggling to make ends meet. If these folks are forced to sell it’s likely they will have to leave Seattle because new apartments rent for more than their mortgage payments.
You are correct. Brand new townhouses right across the street from the BNSF tracks in East Magnolia are going for $800,000.
Thank you, Susanna for this well-researched and thoughtful article.
Certainly, Wallingford because of the vast influx of people, Amazon, and
gentrification is nothing like what it was. Neighborhood and city
planners could hardly have anticipated this when there wasn’t even a
commercial Web to speak of in the mid-90s. From my involvement in and
study of the HALA program, it is clear that the high rise density
solution here and in South Lake Union was designed primarily to placate
developers and real estate people.
Just five years ago the land
was much cheaper and the profits have been a windfall for them.
Otherwise, why isn’t there an out-of-control scramble for property in
parts of the city that don’t have a view — like Greenwood, for
instance, where lots are 5,000 sf and a Rapid Ride bus puts it within
15-20 minutes of downtown. In my view, most of the development was
never intended to help make housing affordable here but rather bring in
profits for developers, fees for the city and secure careers for the
Murray crowd. Now that he’s gone, let’s reassert the control of our
neighborhoods we once had. We can no longer pretend to be a
“progressive” city unless we do.
So thanks to the strong neighborhood organizations and strict limitation on growth, the windfalls went to existing homeowners instead. In my view, the resistance for density increase was never intended to do good to the neighborhood, but rather bring in profits for existing home owners. Let’s hope we can get rid of that and have plans that help the have-nots not the haves.
“In my view, the resistance for density increase was never intended to do good to the neighborhood, but rather bring in profits for existing home owners.”
If that was the case, we’d all be selling now. Has it occurred to you that most of us didn’t buy our homes for profits, but because we want to actually LIVE in them?
No, it doesn’t mean you’d be selling now. It just means you’d keep advocating means to limit supply. Isn’t that what you are doing?
If we keep rezoning the areas with single family homes, there will be *fewer* single family homes, which will necessarily raise their value, especially as demand will only continue to increase.
Of course. Single family houses in the center of Tokyo are very expensive. The goal isn’t about prevent that, but to have reasonable housing for all.
“windfalls went to existing homeowners” Yes, to the people who invested in the property, improved it, maintained it and made it into what it has become. Same as anything else bought and sold.
“Made it into what it has become” by encouraging Amazon, Adobe and Google to expand. People in my hometown in Michigan invested in the property, improved it, and maintained it. My parents sold my childhood home in 1988; you can buy it for about what your down payment would be on a small house in Wallingford.
Great! So there is plenty of affordable housing. It may not be exactly where you want it but it exists.
I think the issue is that life isn’t fair. We can’t make everything in life fair and equal. Some people make good decisions, some people make bad decisions. One person buys a house that goes up in value while another person buys a house that goes down in value.
No, the point you were attempting to make is that somehow people who kept up their houses were worthy of the value they gained here, while I was pointing out that the value was increased by the surrounding jobs in the city, not the work they did on their houses, so they didn’t earn it as you suggested. Your comment back simply shifted the entire argument so some word salad platitudes.
My point is that you’re saying they don’t deserve the increase in value of their property. My point is that the home is bought and sold, like many things, and we can’t always control the value of what we own. Just like we can’t control where we were born or who our parents are. I feel like some here are trying to argue that we have to take things away from some people to give to others and keep doing this until everyone has exactly the same things. Take away all SFHs just because not everyone can have one. Take away parents’ ability to give time and resources to their kids just because not every parent can/will do so.
I’m all for taxes to fully fund education and building affordable housing. I just don’t think we have to punish some people to do it.
I think you’re arguing against a straw man. Nobody is suggesting that we should bulldoze all of the single-family homes. Nobody wants to take your house away from you.
What many of us are suggesting is that single-family zoning is not appropriate for such a large swath of the city. When an existing single-family property is being redeveloped anyway, it would be better if there was at least an option to make room for a few average-income households in that new building rather than having one high-income household be the only option.
There was one person here who did advocate for eliminating all the SFHs in Wallingford, however, the argument keeps getting made that SFH zones need to be eliminated and that’s not sitting well with those who purposefully bought a home in a SFH neighborhood.
As far as when a SFH is replaced, we’re seeing what is happening right now. The SFH is knocked down and then even more expensive housing is taking its place. Developers are keeping their eye on the bottom line. They’re not building the nice, yet affordable, housing for average-income earners, and the proposed zoning changes don’t guarantee that they will.
No one is arguing that we can’t make room for average-income households. We just don’t think that something has to be taken away from someone else to get it.
“No one is arguing that we can’t make room for average-income households”
How do you make room?
I’m not trying to setup an argument. This is a hard problem. I’d like to hear your ideas.
More than a hard problem, it’s an impossible problem. If you aim to wind up with the problem solved, during the current employment boom. After it, sure, but not during.
We can however recognize that our neighborhoods currently house lots of average income households – who will be displaced by new construction. The process we call “gentrification” when the displaced are low income, but since they’re just average, no one cares.
So sfh owners shoulder all of the risk (as well as the ever higher property taxes), but realize none of the gain?
I agree with hayduke. The fact that many of us have lived here for decades shows that we weren’t buying solely to cash in on equity. Tell the prospective home buyer now that they can’t earn equity and you wouldn’t have many home buyers. But you’d have a lot of renters subject to the greed of many landlords. You would also have many lawsuits from home owners who bought in a SF neighborhood only to have bait and switch performed on them. I can’t imagine this rezoning holding up in court, at least not for many years when the current SF owners are gone.
of course not “solely to cash in on it”. But how does that change the fact that the stance you are arguing for is effectively increasing the wealth for existing home owners while blocking access of the community to others? There are tons of studies done on this. That’s the homework you can do if you want.
And yeah, it’s well documented that using laws and regulations to keep the wealth segregation in tact is everywhere in the US, because many many laws are designed to help the rich.
You don’t think you are among the rich because you don’t have a high salary, but that doesn’t change the fact that you are arguing for the rich side.
The stance is not “increasing the wealth for existing home owners.” The stance is continuing to enjoy one’s own home and neighborhood. No one is trying to block access to the community. We’re trying to preserve the attributes that make it so attractive to us as well as many others.
Home values may have recently increased but that is not our motivating factor, however it is the thing you keep focusing on.
“No one is trying to block access to the community.”
Except to people who can only afford a duplex, triplex, or staked flat on a small lot rather than a SF 5,000 home.
Many “SF 5000” lots are already well under 5000 sq. ft. And many of us in SF zoning would like to make ADUs easier. DADUs too to some extent, but they are not as affordable, and they cause more problems. Same story: Specifics need to be negotiated, not crammed down our throats.
Note that the Wallingford Neighborhood Plan didn’t mark out the whole of Wallingford for Single Family zoning, there’s a mix. That mix wasn’t much changed from before, because Wallingford had already exceeded its growth targets. If we went back and updated the Neighborhood Plan, which would be the legitimate alternative to what the city is doing now, would we as a neighborhood fight any changes and in particular preserve the existing single family block for block? We won’t know, until we go to the trouble to find out.
Only by presuming you know the outcome of a legitimate neighborhood planning process, can you make this a question of yes/no single family.
Why “we as a neighborhood”? Why not “we as a city”? Or some even bigger group? Do you realize that when you say “we as a neighborhood”, you are already defining a group with some distinct characteristics different from the general population, therefore effectively a special interest group that blocks out others?
There is a lot of very interesting history in this article. However, this lacks some balance and context. 90s Seattle did have great music but very bad clothes. The early 90s the job prospects for a graduate without a technical degree were poor. Area unemployment rate was 6.6% in 1992. [1] The unemployment would have been higher if it were not for Microsoft who was the Amazon of the 90s. Every job at Microsoft supported 3.4 jobs elsewhere in the economy. [2] While the neighborhoods met growth objectives, were the objectives high enough?
Much the employment growth was supported by the destruction of farmland and forests in the foothills instead of in the city. By the late 90s Seattle had 6-8% annual rent changes, just like now. [3] People who came to Microsoft too late for the stock option windfalls of the 80s left the company to find their own gold mine. By the end of the 90s anybody who could spell HTML could get a job until Jan 2000 and the doc-com crash. Unemployment when back to 6.9% by 2002. [1]
Around this time people were becoming concerned with harm population growth was having in rural areas. The 1995 State Growth Management Act lead to the King County Critical Areas Ordinance in 2004. [4] People we also changing from wanting to live in suburbs to wanting to live in cities again. [5][6] This put more pressure on Seattle to support future growth. It was in this environment that Greg Nickels took office.
This article is about housing and I’m mostly talking about the economy. Just as before the current growth in need for housing is tied to the growth in employment. People talk about affordability but the real building which will happen is to house people who can afford rents and mortgages. Any discussion about housing must also address what rate of increase in employment we want and need to have to support our local economy. Schemes to address affordability are never big enough to make a difference. Only supply and demand matter.
Several factors work against finding a workable compromise. Questions of housing lead to immediate, obvious and very local results. Questions of the economy have slower, less obvious and region wide results. This means both local and top-down planning usually favor one side of the equation.
The conversation has been polarized because a lack of trust. This distrust is largely because during time you describe the city went for giving neighborhoods a veto to having little say at all. The city needs to listen to the feeling of existing residents and build the trust need to find a compromise. Existing residents do need to compromise.
The vision statement you shared contains key values we should consider when thinking about changes to the neighborhood. It also misses the need to be flexible to accommodate change.
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SEAT653UR
[2] http://mail.economicforecaster.com/uploads/visitors/studies/Microsoft%20Impact.pdf
[3] https://www.duprescott.com/articles/article.cfm?ArticleId=2719
[4] http://www.historylink.org/File/7949
[5] https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/data/seattle-added-more-people-last-year-than-all-king-countys-suburbs-combined/
[6] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/usanow/2014/05/22/census-cities-population-growth/9377901/
Good research.
“Any discussion about housing must also address what rate of increase in employment we want and need to have to support our local economy. Schemes to address affordability are never big enough to make a difference. Only supply and demand matter.”
The GMA supposedly requires local governments to address the need for housing, schools, transit, etc. when making decisions that will allow or encourage the economy to grow. This is called concurrency and it doesn’t happen much. The City wants revenue from
“during time you describe the city went for giving neighborhoods a veto to having little say at all.”
This is not accurate. I have been involved in neighborhood land use issues for forty years, including a few working on Fremont’s neighborhood plan along with representatives of land owners, business, developers, schools, and artists. I later served on the Neighborhood Plan Advisory Committee that was intended to set the framework for ongoing updates. It’s report and archives has been deleted from Seattle.gov. The neighborhoods did not have in the 1990s, and have never had, anything close to a veto over final decisions adopted by the City Council. Even when they have a seat at the table, final actions are the result of lengthy negotiations with lots of compromises.
So, for example, in Fremont, the existing residential community accepted extensive up zones. In exchange we thought we were getting some protection for a historical row of housing (36th by the Troll) and other green canopy low density multi-family blocks. And we and other neighborhoods expected to get the infrastructure needed for a much denser residential community. We did get traffic improvements and an RPZ, but little of the rest. And by 2010, as you do accurately observe, we had “little say at all” and the multi-family zoning was significantly changed—up zoned to allow more density—to the detriment of our residential community (loss of tree canopy, no parking required in already over saturated blocks, no design review).
Thanks for the clarification on how it worked. I stand corrected.
Just to confirm that Toby’s account of the process in Fremont matches the process in Wallingford – the city always had the veto power. You can see this quite clearly if you read the Neighborhood Plan presented here, the one produced by Wallingford, and compare to the “adopted neighborhood plan” in the Comprehensive Plan, that the city intends to modify. The council under Conlin made substantial changes and omitted key parts, when they adopted these policies.
One of the advantages of grass roots neighborhood planning, is that people who live in a neighborhood care about it (and care less about developer profit margins), and are likely to be a little more conservative with the bulldozers. That doesn’t necessarily mean no change whatever, but it means not plowing up the neighborhood in a futile effort to provide barracks for 1000 people a week. That’s a problem that needs to be solved some other way.
Is Toby and anotherneighborhoodactivist the same person?
Yes
News coverage of the funeral protest:
http://komonews.com/news/local/funeral-procession-roles-through-seattle-zoning-meeting
http://komonews.com/news/local/wallingford-residents-push-back-against-seattles-plans-to-upzone-neighborhood
Did the plan ever include having a burnt out Kitaro’s for 5 years on 45th? did the plan ever include the temporary closing of the Guild 45th Theater and the temporaty closing of the Iron Bull? Did th e plan ever include a homeless shelter city down below JSIS?