The letter below, from City Councilmember Lisa Herbold, was sent to me here at Wallyhood unsolicited. Although Herbold represents District 1 which includes West Seattle and southwest Seattle, the issue she addresses here — the amount of parking required for new housing developments — has been hotly debated in the comments and forums here and throughout the neighborhood more generally. For that reason, we’re bending our usual rule, about content needing to be neighborhood-centric, to bring you this perspective.
On Monday, the City Council will take up Council Bill 119173 which was passed out of the Planning, Land Use and Zoning (PLUZ) committee on March 21. This bill seeks to change the parking requirements for new housing developments. An excellent, detailed discussion of this bill can be found here at SCC Insight. According to SCC,
The bill, inspired by a HALA recommendation, does several things:
- it forces parking to be rented or leased separately from housing or commercial space in buildings above a certain size;
- it allows for off-street private parking to be handled more flexibly, including allowing excess parking spaces in a residential building to be used as paid “flexible use” parking available to non-residents of the property;
- it rewrites the definition of “frequent transit” as it applies to areas where the minimum parking requirements for new developments are removed (because of close proximity to frequent transit service);
- it expands the distance that off-site parking can be from a use;
- it adjusts parking requirements for affordable dwelling units;
- it limits exceptions to maximum parking requirements.
While the bill contains a mixed bag of recommendations, some residents fear that the overall effect would be to require developers to provide even less parking than they are currently required to. Herbold believes that some of these changes need a little tweaking.
“To insert a little common sense,” as she puts it, Herbold plans to introduce amendments to the bill which, she believes, are grounded in requirements put forth in the State Environmental Policy Act (SEPA). Finally, the SDCI which she refers to is the Seattle Department of Construction and Inspection which handles building permits and, obviously, inspections, and is thus in a position to enforce compliance with these City rules.
Email from Councilmember Lisa Herbold
Greetings Jack,
I’m writing to you today regarding legislation before the City Council to expand the areas throughout the city where developers, because of legislation passed in 2012, can build projects with reduced or no parking. To get a quick overview, here is a piece SCC wrote about the topic as well as my blog post, here.
As you’re likely aware, the PLUZ committee voted this parking legislation out of committee last Wednesday. But as the Council expands the areas throughout the city where developers can build projects with reduced or no parking (because of legislation passed in 2012), I’m trying to insert a little common sense, based upon data that others, I think, may not be considering, based also upon the lived experienced of people living all over the city.
I have attached two constituent letters signed by folks in neighborhoods throughout the City to pass on their perspective. I am contacting you because two of the signers of this letter Donn Cave and Susanna Lin are residents of the community that your blog covers. Since the signer, is a resident of your neighborhood beat, and they are writing about an issue that impacts your readers, I thought I’d ask you to consider writing about the issue, as well as my proposed amendment. Donn and Susanna are copied here on this correspondence so that you can get in touch.
[Author’s note: While addressed to me, this email actually came to me through our writer Susanna Lin who, along with Donn Cave, another Wallingford resident, and several other City residents, had twice written to City Council President Bruce Harrell outlining their objections to Council Bill 119173. These are the “constituent letters” referred to. I have linked to them here and here.]A quick description of my amendment that I will be bringing to the 2pm Full Council meeting on Monday April 2:
Allow (not require) SDCI to mitigate parking impacts in urban villages with frequent transit service, where no parking is required in developments, in locations where on-street parking occupancy exceeds or would exceed 85%, this is the capacity threshold that both SDCI and SDOT use.
State SEPA policies require consideration of parking impacts. However, the City has entirely removed the authority to mitigate the parking impacts of projects that have impacts when those projects are in areas where the City has removed parking requirements, areas referred to as “Frequent Transit Areas.” In other words, State SEPA is requiring developers to do parking studies as part of the permitting process, but even when those studies show that a development without parking is going to create a problem, SDCI can’t require mitigation. In those instances this is what SDCI tells (see the attached email for an example) the public:
“while impacts to parking could be substantial, we are unable to mitigate the impacts by requiring additional parking on-site.”
The spokesperson for SDCI has been quoted by the press saying “[W]e have said that when on-street parking capacity exceeds 85 percent, finding parking becomes more difficult, and parking mitigation (in areas where we have authority to mitigate parking impacts) may be appropriate.” But again, SDCI does not have the authority to mitigate on-street parking impacts in Frequent Transit Areas.
Some say that SEPA should only mitigate for environmental impacts. However, the reality of SEPA in Washington State is that it requires us to look not only at the impact of decisions on plants and animals, air quality, and water; but also on housing, public services, and historic preservation. The state requires that we look at parking as part of that comprehensive analysis of impacts of development. Also, Seattle is the city that is 5th in the nation for time spent in a car looking for parking. I think that’s an environmental impact.
Other opponents of my amendment have referred to it as an “exemption” to the parking reductions. Again, it is not an exemption because it does not obligate SDCI to require mitigation, it only gives them the flexibility to do so under some very, very narrow conditions. Additionally, mitigation under SEPA may include, but is not limited to
- transportation management programs,
- parking management and allocation plans,
- incentives for use of alternatives to single occupancy vehicles, such as transit pass subsidies, parking fees, subsidies for participation in car share or bike share programs or similar mobility choice programs, and provisions of bicycle parking space,
- increased parking ratios, and
- reduction in non-residential development densities.
As you can see, while increasing parking is one of the available tools, SDCI has many tools to mitigate parking impacts in a number of different ways.
I also asked central staff to look into the impacts this amendment might have. They found that last year, of 136 projects, only 6 were projects in areas at 85% parking capacity. Of those 6, 3 projects provided some amount of parking – meaning SDCI would be unlikely to require mitigation in those instances even if they had the authority to do so. So, if last year is typical, then over the course of a year, maybe 2% of projects would be impacted by the amendment I propose.
In general, I have a problem with a one size fits all strategy. But, in the specifics there are lots of bad conclusions – without good data to support them – being reached with this policy:
1) There is lots of unused parking capacity throughout the city because people are getting rid of their cars.
They have demonstrated that this is the case in a couple neighborhoods, but it doesn’t track to the areas designated as “frequent transit areas.” This map shows quartiles of renters by census tracts and the numbers are the percentages of households that do not have a vehicle. Finally, this map overlays the two previous maps to give a clearer picture of where new frequent transit service will be in comparison to renters as well as car owners. The significance of these maps is to show that the oft reported statistic, that is being used as the policy basis for this legislation is misleading. The SDCI Director’s report says that “For the one-quarter of Seattle census tracts with the highest proportion of renter households, 40% of all renter households have no vehicle.” For instance, in the Freemont urban village there are car ownership rates of 83% and 92%, but no parking minimum in the urban village and a 50% reduction outside of the urban village. Additionally, in the Wallingford urban village there is a car ownership rate of 79%, and again, no parking minimum.
2) Access to, and use of, good transit results in less car ownership.
There are no Seattle studies that support this conclusion. Again, the law that allows developers to build projects with reduced or no parking passed in 2012, car ownership in Seattle has remained pretty flat since that time.
Another interesting objective of this bill that has been revealed to me in the debates in committee on this topic is that the goal is not just to get people to drive less – which as a bus commuter, I whole-heartedly support – but to not own vehicles at all because vehicles take up space that can otherwise be used for living. Though Seattle Household Median Income is about $90K a year, more than half of our population earns less than that, and nearly 70% of renters earn less than the Seattle median income. The point being, is it good public policy to make car-ownership difficult for people who need their cars (because they are already struggling financially and the car plays some useful role in their lives – either because a car is a job requirement or other reason) in the hopes that in our making their already difficult lives more difficult we will make them get rid of their cars?
I hope that you consider covering this issue in your publication by Monday morning if you haven’t already.
Best,
Lisa Herbold
District 1 Councilmember
The above email from Herbold came with two other emails in the chain. These are alluded to by Herbold in her email. I reproduce them here because I feel it offers the rest of us a “view from the trenches” when average citizens try to interact with the Seattle bureaucracy. In the first email, Timothy Boyd tries to offer up his opinions on a housing development going in near him. The second email is the City’s response. (At Boyd’s request, I have redacted his contact info.)
Email from Resident Timothy Boyd
From: Timothy Boyd [[email protected]]
Sent: Wednesday, August 23, 2017 3:25 PM
To: PRC <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> >; Herbold, Lisa <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> >
Subject: Single Family Neighborhood Apartment-Barton Street, West Seattle
Hello Neighborhood Planner!
The neighborhood review is coming up for the 66 unit complex proposed for our single family neighborhood. Since the proposed building represents a 17-fold population increase from the current complex, I, along with every neighbor on our street have serious concerns about the additional traffic and pressure that will be put onto the parking situation in our diverse and already dense neighborhood.
After attending the last design review meeting we learned that that meeting is not the venue for discussing these matters, so please let me know what venue, time, place, paperwork, office, etc. we need to contact in order to raise our concerns!
Thank you for your help on this matter!
Timothy Boyd
Resident
Response from City of Seattle
———- Forwarded message ———-
From: “Guillory, Carly” <[email protected]>
To: ” [email protected] ” < [email protected] >
Cc: “Herbold, Lisa” <[email protected]>
Bcc:
Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2017 15:53:32 +0000
Subject: FW: Single Family Neighborhood Apartment-Barton Street, West Seattle-3024558
Mr. Boyd:
Thank you for your email.
Yes, the authority of the Design Review Board is limited to evaluating the design of the structure and providing guidance, while environmental impacts, such as transportation, parking, or construction impacts, are evaluated by staff. So, the place to submit your comments is here, to [email protected] or straight to me at [email protected]. Staff reviews all comments and evaluates the application documentation against city codes and policies.
You can find all application documents, such as the traffic study, here. As you’ll see, the applicant conducted an on-street parking utilization analysis and estimates that during peak residential demand times, there will be a future parking utilization rate of 40% (counting this project as well as other nearby projects currently under review), with an average future demand of 173 cars parked in the 434 spaces available within 800-ft of the site. Should you have specific questions about the traffic documentation, we can loop in our SDCI Transportation Planner, Michael Houston, to answer those questions. Important to note is that our environmental regulations (SEPA), do not allow for mitigation to parking impacts for development within an urban village at least 1,320-ft from a street with frequent transit service. So, while impacts to parking could be substantial, we are unable to mitigate the impacts by requiring additional parking on-site (for example). You can find those regulations in Seattle Municipal Code 25.05.675.M
I hope this information is helpful.
Thank you,
Carly Guillory, Senior Land Use Planner
Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections
700 Fifth Avenue, Seattle, WA 98104
[email protected]
” is it good public policy to make car-ownership difficult for people who need their cars (because they are already struggling financially and the car plays some useful role in their lives – either because a car is a job requirement or other reason) in the hopes that in our making their already difficult lives more difficult we will make them get rid of their cars?”
Bingo. The YIMBY/urbanist crowd want to force us out of our cars. They don’t care if you’re poor and and you’re dependent on your vehicle. While only some of them will actually openly admit this, this is their end goal. They say they’re trying to help people who are struggling financially while ignoring basic realities of getting around town. But with them, ideology trumps reality.
Make no mistake, they won’t stop until cars are completely kicked out of Seattle and we’re all forced to travel by bus or bike. Some have even suggested we should tear down I-5 from the Ship Canal Bridge to I-90. It is time for the silent majority to stop being complacent and start start standing up to the tiny and vocal minority that’s dictating city transportation policy.
If you care about the poor, why aren’t you supporting putting more Apodment-like development in the neighborhood?
More parking spaces in this million dollar house neighborhood isn’t going to help the poor much.
Why is sticking people in those inhuman cells your response to “the poor” (monolithic much?) instead of family-friendly and actually affordable housing?
she is yet another bad joke of a councilmember with seemingly no interest in what regular ol’ citizens want/need.
that perpetual smug smile doesn’t help either.
I won’t speak to her other policies, but she’s spot-on with this issue. It’s Rob Johnson and Mike O’Brien who are the real problems.
If they were the only problems, we wouldn’t be hearing about this today – they’ll be only two in the council vote Monday. Herbold is taking a position on this, and arguing for it, that’s pretty bold for a council member. She’s going up against not only Johnson, but the environmental organizations, urbanists, etc., and speaking for her electorate, ordinary people who are politically ineffective and have been historically very unlikely to reward people who represent them. Maybe it’s different in West Seattle (maybe partly thanks to the West Seattle Blog?) Council members generally know better than to disappoint the small but well funded and effective minority that’s behind Johnson, so Herbold needs massive public backing at this point.
Johnson’s ideology certainly does represent a minority. He’s a perfect example of how you can do that and get elected in Seattle. Maybe not in West Seattle, and maybe not in Wallingford (our precincts didn’t vote for Johnson), but those seem to be the two major exceptions. Even here, you won’t find one person in a hundred who can explain what TCC is and what they do, even after extensive recent coverage in the Seattle Times.
LOL. The other candidate to make it into the general was Maddux, who if anything is more urbanist than Johnson.
Do you not recall Michael Maddux?
“Herbold needs massive public backing at this point.”
Donn, since Mayor Durkan has just announced she’s putting the money sucking pit known as the First Avenue Streetcar on hold, I wonder if that will give Herbold a boost. After all, she was the only CM to oppose this particular boondoggle.
And the icing on the cake, of course, is that Mr. Transportation Choices Coalition championed this project.
If the streetcar project is eventually canceled I wonder how the streetcar lanes on 1st Ave will be used.
Ideally they’ll be reverted back to the general purpose lanes that they were rather than being wasted on a shiny expensive toy that no one will use. Best to pull the plug on the project now before we’ve blown $200 million on it. No harm, no foul.
Reverting back to motor vehicle use would be such a missed opportunity to do something transformative downtown. We could convert the avenue to a boulevard with a 30 ft wide park stretching from the Pike Place Market to Occidental Squares. There could be space for plants, open air café seating, performance and art public spaces. A farmers market and street art sales. That’s just one idea. I’m sure there are many better uses for this public space than more car lanes.
“Though Seattle Household Median Income is about $90K a year, more than half of our population earns less than that..
That sentence makes no sense. Does she not know what “median” means?
She probably meant to say “average.”
The weirdness is not in “median”, but in the mixed up of household and population. Those two are completely different concepts, and I have no doubt that vast majority of the population don’t earn 90k. Within a typical $90k household, there is probably three to four people with nobody earning that.
Why are parking requirements ever only about new developments, where we don’t even know if the new residents would have cars or not? The parking requirements should be attached to cars. No car ownership allowed without a home parking space also attached. Existing houses are the ones creating existing parking problems.
There is a regulatory mechanism that governs street parking per car, the Restricted Parking Zone. As it is now, it doesn’t address the present question, but it could easily be changed to do that, to restrict street parking to the delight of anti-car environmental activists and neighborhood residents alike. The number of permits could simply be limited per lot by the lot’s street frontage.
In areas where there’s plenty of parking, it isn’t an issue because they don’t have RPZs. Where residents don’t have cars, it isn’t an issue, obviously. If you’re trying to limit the number of cars in the city, then it’s perfect, because it really does clamp down – it doesn’t just shift parking to the street, it really eliminates parking as an option, in over-parked neighborhoods.
The odds that this will ever happen are pretty slim, though, because there’s no question that residents really do have cars, and there’s no serious intention to do change that. The object is to increase developer profit, by externalizing the cost of parking onto the neighborhood, despite the problems that this creates for existing residents and businesses.
” Existing houses are the ones creating existing parking problems.”
Um, no. Parking was fine until the aPodments and bike lanes started popping up. Someone who bought a home here years ago didn’t create any new impact on the neighborhood. APodments, on the other hand certainly do. If people feel they HAVE to live in Wallingford, then they should mitigate their impact somehow. It’s not up to the rest of us to do it for them.
“Parking was fine” because the general public are generous enough to let people use public land that didn’t worth too much.
And yes, my point is exactly that, people who have to live in Wallingford, including people already here, should try to mitigate their impact. That means existing owners should stop using public land, since we now have way more people in the city that can have use of those land. If they can’t, they should move away, regardless how long they’ve been here.
The native Americans who used to be here moved away and we’ve not tried to keep them. Somebody who’ve been here for thirty years aren’t exactly who we must keep either.
Oh wow. I really hope I am misreading this statement, because it has a frighteningly Nazi-ish feel to it. Who exactly determines “who we must keep”?
You are misreading this statement, but you knew that already.
Governments use all sorts of incentives and policies to encourage groups of people to stay or move to place. They rarely works.
I know who aren’t determining who we must keep. The poor that got forced out of Seattle or forced into the streets surely got no say. The only people truly using the “must keep” argument are limited number of current homeowners trying to play up their own importance. There are quite a few people trying to argue that since they’ve been grown into a certain lifestyle, they must be entitled to that and can’t be asked change.
Hi Jack, Thank you for sharing this information with the community and keeping everyone informed.
If you’re confused about the legislation, basically our Councilmember Rob Johnson is pushing through legislation to expand the areas where developers do not have to provide parking in their new buildings.
Councilmember Lisa Herbold has an amendment that would allow the City to require mitigations in areas where 85% of the parking spaces are occupied. To read about the legislation in more detail, visit the Seattle City Council Insight blog (https://sccinsight.com/2018/03/21/parking-reform-bill-moves-forward/).
I encourage you to write the City Council and the Mayor to voice your opinion on this matter. Since our Councilmember Johnson will most surely vote for it, I would encourage you to write each Councilmember today (before the vote on Monday, April 2nd). Here are the email addresses:
[email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] , [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]
If you would like to testify in person, the full City Council will vote on this at the April 2nd, 2:00 meeting. It’s at City Hall in the City Council Chambers. Come early to sign up to speak (public testimony is first and you will likely not be able to speak if you come late).
We need leaders who have the vision to make the bold policy changes needed to keep our neighbourhoods joyful to live in. More parking spaces, more inconvenient for pedestrians, and faster speeds on our streets will make our neighborhoods horrible. We need to design neighborhoods which you truly don’t need a car. We need more, faster and nicer transit options. We need all streets in our neighborhoods to be safe and pleasant to walk on, without requiring people go walk out of their way, press buttons and beg to cross the street. We need to stop giving 30% of the public space in our neighborhoods to people to store private cars which don’t move most of the time. We need policies which help local businesses stay open on our neighborhoods business streets. We need local community centers, senior centers, dog parks. We need to stop requiring parking in apartment buildings which young people don’t need.
Imaging if you could get to downtown in 25 minutes including the wait on a clean bus with an open seat. Imaging you kids being able to walk to Seattle Pops by themselves without having to worry about them crossing 40th or 50th Street. Just imagine kids playing in the street like we did. Imagine running an errand was also exercise, an opportunity to bump into a friend, or glimpse the mountains. We need leaders who make it a priority that people will enjoy moving around their neighborhood, not an inconvenient.
Need to go QFC, use Uber. Want to spend a day at Snoqualmie Pass, rent a ReachNow. Infrequent car-share and ride-share will be cheaper than car ownership. We also need to provide very convent ways for older people and people with limited mobility get quickly around town without requiring their family own a car. The 17% of households who don’t own a car should have the same access to the city as everyone else, including making it easy for them to get to work or school.
This doesn’t mean forcing people out of cars. Nobody is coming to take away your cars. It means using public money and public policy to prioritize people in the city and not cars.
“We need leaders who have the vision to make the bold policy changes need to keep out neighbored joyful to live in.”
I’m pretty sure that most of us who already live here think it’s pretty joyful to live in as is, no urbanist meddling required.
And Ubers and Reach Nows need someplace to park and drive too. Of course, Mike O’Brien, Bruce Harrell, and others on the council are hell-bent on kicking Uber out of the city in their effort to have their friends in the Teamsters be in charge of Uber here. And then what all are all the millennials and hipsters, not to mention tourists, disabled people, and seniors going to do to get around?
What’s the base for “most of us”? Don’t you feel that people with views like you is reducing in percentages? It’s very obvious there are more urbanists among us now than just a couple years ago, and as far as I can tell many long time home owners are already cashing out the million dollar houses they originally bought for very low prices. The typical home owner in the neighborhood is slowly turning into rich tech guys.
I fixed the typo. It should have said “our neaghbourhoods”, not “out neighbored”. Thanks.
People who are financially struggling but need cars are the most likely to need to save money by parking on the street. (I appreciated the fact that parking was unbundled back in the day in my first apartment on Capitol Hill – my girflfriend paid ~$100 a month for a garage spot, I didn’t, and parking was a royal pain but saving the $100 was a big deal)
If parking on the street becomes a big hassle, then more people who have the money to do otherwise will spend some money to make other arrangements. People with more rather than less money will be less interested in apartments without spaces, even though (because of mandatory unbundling) they are cheaper. (Back in the day when I had more money and bought my first condo, I paid extra for a space even though there was an identical unit without a space that was significantly cheaper.)
Thus, people with less rather than more money benefit by eliminating parking requirments, unbundling etc in every possible way.
The city intends to eliminate all on-street parking, everywhere.
They will then work to eliminate all car use in the city.
And then they will put a parking meter in your driveway
Eventually your very existence will be a crime –
Eliminating on-street parking isn’t quite the same as eliminating car use. The vision of car use in the near future is that private ownership of cars wouldn’t be needed, with shared vehicles being norms. Today at any given time there are a lot of idle cars, hence the need for a lot of parking. The low utilization rate is a pretty big waste.
You can’t use your car if you can’t park it anymore. And you don’t have any standing to talk about a “low utilization rate” when you keep pushing these low uutilized bike lanes on the rest of us who don’t want them.
You can park your car on your own land. It’s pretty common in cities around the world where parking spaces are more expensive than cars. If it’s worth if for the owner to do that, they will. There just isn’t a need for the government to provide them as free. The low utilization of bike lane is still easy used by more people than most neighborhood street parking, which only serve the few households around them. For the million dollar house neighborhood like us, not sure why the government would need to subsidize anybody.
Funny, I saw the preview in the sidebar and I thought the whole post was:
You can park your car on your own land. It’s pretty common in cities around the world
CB 119221 passed on a 7-1 vote.*
“Seattle Council Bill 119221 aims to ensure that only drivers will have to pay for parking, which seems fair,” said Donald Shoup, author of The High Cost of Free Parking. “People who cannot afford a car or choose not to own a car should not have to pay anything for parking. If drivers don’t pay for their parking, someone else has to pay for it, and that someone is everyone. But a city where everyone happily pays for everyone else’s free parking is a fool’s paradise.”
– Councilmember Johnson’s statement on the bill passing.
http://council.seattle.gov/2018/04/02/councilmember-johnson-on-councils-passage-of-efficient-flexible-approach-to-parking/
* Councilmember Sawant was absent.