The gears of change will grind up another couple of single family homes and churn out another townhouse / rowhouse combination along 50th. If you would like to chat with someone in person about the project, there are drop-in hours today, Monday September 30th from 5:00 – 6:00 pm (sorry for the short notice!) onsite at 1925 N 50th St, just across from Meridian Park.
According the project’s description,
Blackwood Builders Group and JW Architects are collaborating to design the redevelopment of 1925 N 50th Street. When it’s complete, the new homes will be 3 stories tall and will include 10 rowhouses and 2 townhouses with 8 parking stalls in the courtyard. We’re just getting started planning now – construction could start in Summer 2020 and the building could be open as early as Winter 2021.
If I’m not mistaken, the existing structures just had a facelift and some work done within the past year, so I was surprised to see scheduled to be demolished.
If you don’t have a chance to stop in, but want to weigh in, they have posted a survey soliciting neighborhood feedback. The survey will be open until October 14th.
(Thanks for the tip, Megan!)
Funny, today the property is the much demonized (and somewhat inaccurately labeled) “triplex” (3 homes on one lot).
Marty Kaplan’s screed is just priceless in light of the picture of this quite large 3 story house and outbuilding that’s clearly larger than 1,000 square feet. (Hey, but there is plenty of parking.)
O’Brien’s change allowing triplexes could result in your neighbors demolishing their single-family home, garage and driveway and replacing them with two buildings; one duplex containing a 1,000 square-foot apartment attached to a house of unlimited size and 35-foot high, together with a backyard or side-yard house (Detached Accessory Dwelling Unit) that could be 23-foot high and 1,000 square feet.
https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/neighborhoods-deserve-a-say-on-backyard-cottages/
I believe the existing home would be described as two-story under land use code. Floors below grade usually do not count as a “story”… and again, it is a double lot.
The old harp house, sad to see it go. They had a beautiful full size harp in their window for years, where they taught students how to play.
Parcel is a double lot with no alley easement. Not aware of anyone demonizing duplex/triplex, but this is not that. Developer plans to build 12 living units, which a fair bit denser that a duplex or triplex.
I think BK asserts that the present use is triplex, not the proposed use. I don’t know, but if it is, the observation is something along the lines of “the exception that proves the rule” – if this were the kind of thing we can expect from O’Brien’s triplex/ADU changes, there wouldn’t have been such determined opposition, but it’s “much maligned” because of what we expect from non-resident speculators, and it’s nothing like this.
My intended point for BK was that opposition to the MHA upzones had nothing to do with allowing “a few duplexes and triplexes”, but that CM Johnson and his buddies were misinforming the public because MHA actually allows projects of much, much greater adverse impacts.
Thankfully this builder recognizes that 2/3 of residents will still own cars, even in so-called “car-less buildings”, and is providing on-site parking.
“I think BK asserts that the present use is triplex, ”
Yes that’s right, per Zillow there is house / unit B / unit C presently. I forgot Wallyhood still allows links otherwise I would have pasted it in –
https://www.zillow.com/b/1925-N-50th-St-Seattle-WA/47.664785,-122.334016_ll/
“Developer plans to build 12 living units, which a fair bit denser that a duplex or triplex.”
Yes, thank goodness – three homes on 10,000 square feet of expensive central city is way better for affordability than one, but if we cap out at 3 per 10k square feet in an urban village we might as well tell everyone who is not rich to give up all hope of living here in the future.
You don’t have to factor that in – you can go ahead and inform them, if they don’t know already. Zoning won’t make the least difference, until it gets to the point where it detracts enough from Wallingford’s desirability that values go substantially down.
“Zoning won’t make the least difference,”
You think one of the 3 household living there today could have afforded to have the whole property to themselves?
The 12 or so once it is redeveloped?
Zoning makes a monumental difference. Three bang-on median income families (instead of one making $250k+) could share our property once we downsize or die and divide it into three homes.
Anything can happen on your lot, but for the general case, that’s a fantasy. The last townhomes on my street were listing for near $1M, as much as a house. Rents follow a similar logic: the only variable that matters is how much people can pay. The upzones are here. Watch housing costs not go down.
“as much as a house”
Try buying a new or newish detached house in Wallingford for $1M. Not gonna find one.
OK, does it also have to look like it was inspired by a cereal box? “New or newish” isn’t relevant to Wallingford SF stock, most of it is at least a half century old. That townhome won’t see a half century, which is what I find amazing about that price.
Zoning itself obviously wouldn’t be enough. The real impact would need to be from increased supply. That means we need to create incentives for existing home owners to sell their house to developers. Some incentives already existed in the form of increasing property tax for example. Incentives can also be provided for developers so they are willing to pay higher to buy existing houses. That can be done through things like speeding up the licensing process.
If we make it easy enough for new buildings to be built on top of zoning change, we can make pretty significant improvements on affordability. That’s how Tokyo do it.
Contrary to the City’s party line, the most affordable housing is older housing stock that has been repurposed for continued use. This is also the most environmentally-friendly and climate-friendly use, by far. In Wallingford, this could take the form of repurposing an old “four square” into a 3-flat, which also has the advantage of being family-friendly and age-in-place friendly. Wins all around, especially as the envelope, setbacks and yard that make living here so attractive.
However, Rob Johnson and his minions instead wanted to provide huge profits to developers as part of his and Murray’s Grand Bargain, which will likely end up being not much of a bargain at all for the residents of Seattle.
Yes, the most common source for affordable housing is from older apartments. Older town houses or similar medium density houses can do that too, but not single-family houses. Single family houses aren’t good sources of affordable housing because there are always people buying them to fix them up and maintaining the high price.
The problem of Seattle is that it grew slow in the past, so maintained low density and never built enough multi-family units, so there just aren’t enough aging units that are naturally low rent units. I do think anything that increases density will help, and even the brand new expensive studios will help affordability long term ( way more than single family houses), because with time they’ll get older and cheaper, with some of them being updated to be multiple bedroom by merging units. Seattle situation is already bad, but at doing something today would prevent the San Francisco situation.
And we are doing this for neither the developers nor the current Seattle residents. We are doing it for people who should live in Seattle but couldn’t. Most of the younger folks having jobs in the communities today can’t afford to live in the communities. We should at least have some housing that can be afforded by the local school teachers and baristas.
I’m all for subdivision of existing homes into three-flats where it makes sense, and am glad that recent zoning changes have made that option available to more homes in more parts of our city. I agree there is an environmental cost to demolishing buildings and building new, but I also acknowledge that there’s only so much population growth you can accommodate by subdividing existing residences into smaller units.
How many more people are you really going to house in a 2,000 square foot duplex compared to a 2,000 square foot single-family home? At some point you have to add some square footage. What better place to do that, environmentally speaking, than in walkable neighborhoods such as ours where most errands can be accomplished without a car?
Let’s not sell rezoning short! 🙂 We can see progress right here and now:
Right on 46th there’s a big old house on a 5,000 square foot lot that Zillows for $1.8M – meaning you need an income over $250k assuming you can come up with the down payment.
Right next door, a 5,000 square foot lot now has 5 new town homes that have been selling for high sevens to $800k; call it $800k, and, assuming you can come up with the down payment, you need less than half that income (about $110k – that’s two decent middle class jobs).*
And as a SCALE oogah boogah web page pointed out, if we removed limits on units for that size lot, a building with a bunch of $900/month micro apartments would make total economic sense – enabling a group of renters who not only don’t have the wealth for a big down payment, but could be earning as low as our minimum wage to compete for a home almost anywhere they want to live.
*And for the record the little old houses on small lots on the street Zillow for 7s and 8s, so we’ve done no harm to the price of entry level ownership while increasing the number of households with the opportunity to do so.
Are you talking about that house on the south side of 46th, about a block West of QFC? I believe that’s slated for 18 microunits. I spoke a while back with a couple of residents of that place. They’re renters, and they’re not happy about it. These are not “the rich” living there, they are young renters who are starving artists and musicians.
And each unit will be sold for $700K or $800K. But keep pushing your pipe dream that upzoning will somehow make it affordable to live here.
No, they townhomes are already built – 1400 block, between Woodlawn & interlake
No, microunits will not sell for $800k because a block away you can buy a whole townhome for that, and at the new condo building on 45th you can buy a one bedroom for 1/2 that
That’s what both residents told me they were was the asking price somewhere around $770K, I believe. Now that was quite some months ago, and I haven’t seen any activity on the site. So perhaps the price has dropped. But I take their word for it, since they live there. Here it is:
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/e82c3fad318d096c8073374d05d64a9e4654f913f044da97ada95e81d3c7244c.jpg
Yeah, no, these won’t be homes that sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
These will be homes minimum wage workers can afford to rent at 30% – 40% of income.
“….we need to create incentives for existing home owners to sell their house to developers. Some incentives already existed in the form of increasing property tax for example.”
Wow, are you actually reincarnating the ghost of Rob Johnson? Johnson tried to backpeddle on his infamous statement during his campaign that we should significantly raise taxes on single family homeowners to “encourage more turnover” for developers. In other words, let’s tax the hell out of those eeevil NIMBY’s and force them to sell their homes. And who gets hurt by your new taxes? Middle class residents and seniors on fixed incomes who’ve lived here for a long time and love the neighborhood. So the people you claim to advocate for are the ones who will be forced to move out because of the taxes, all in the name of “affordability.”
Actually the middle class homeowners aren’t hurt at all. They already enjoyed huge wealth boost from the rising housing price. I personally saw a massive wealth increase myself, and I don’t think I really contributed to that other than being at the right place at the right time.
I love this neighborhood also, but I have no problem if my house is torn down and turn into some high rise instead. I’m OK being just one of the family in the high rise. This neighborhood is so good that I’d like to see more people being able to live here.
The rising price is actually a key factor of people living this neighborhood, even home owners. There was a bigger wave of people moving away in the past few years, because they were trying to cash out. If you want to keep middle class residents in this neighborhood, you’d want to see density going up. None of the new people moving in are middle class. A house on my block was constantly in remodeling because it kept getting sold at higher and higher price every couple of years, and the new owners always remodel to have the interior match the purchase price. Something perfectly fine for a 600k house would be considered not good enough for a 900k house, but then what put in for a 900k house would then get torn away to fit a 1.5m house.
Well that’s you. I’m guessing that most people middle class and seniors currently living in the neighborhood in their single family home have no desire to move into a high rise with their family. That’s why they chose to live here, and not downtown or in Capital Hill.
And as for all that “massive wealth increase,” that is meaningless until the day they sell their house. The only thing that rising property value means to them is ever higher taxes. And those taxes would be way higher still if YIMBYs like you and Rob Johnson ever got their way.
“And as for all that “massive wealth increase,” that is meaningless until the day they sell their house. ”
Not if they are allowed to subdivide their lot.
Or they add an ADU.
Or they tap a reverse mortgage.
Or they downsize in place to DADU while renting out the main house.
The wealth increase isn’t meaningless if a meaningful range of cheaper alternatives to a detached single-family home exist. Townhomes, backyard cottages, condos, duplexes…all these offer ways to allow current homeowners to take some equity off the table to use for other things while remaining in the neighborhood they’ve come to love.
Since “massive wealth increase” is meaningless until people sell, wouldn’t making them sell a great help for them?
“No desire to move” surely isn’t a good argument, otherwise the black population wouldn’t have moved away from Central. I am not even asking people to move away, unlike the Central situation. I am just saying people should move to higher density housing. Remember my idea of turning half of Wallingford into parks and have people only living in half of it?
A very common way to increase density would be something like building a unit for 50 families from a lot that original had five families, and then give the original five families a number of units each. The original families can easily stay in the neighborhood by living in one of the unit and then either cash out or rent out the additional ones. The other additional units would be the ones the builder get the profit. It’s like ADU times ten.
Spoken like a true socialist. Hello, comrade, Imfrom the government, and I know what’s better for you than you do. Now fork over more taxes, to “help” you, of course 😉
I do remember that idea of yours. And how I talked about how many of our neighbors are friends and we all socialize regularly. And what was your solution to not breaking up our community? Why, you would have the city “assign us” to live together on the same floor in one of those high rises of yours. It’s all hypothetical of course. This is still America, not North Korea.
Ah yes, America, land of the free, where it’s totally cool, according to some, that the city requires people to attach 5,000 square feet (or more) of expensive urban land to their homes, whether they want it or not, and prohibits by law four families who want to share one structure from having their own kitchens and private entrances on 20,000 acres of residential land.
I’m just disappointed that the new zoning still prohibits commercial uses at this property. Seems like the corner of two arterial streets across from a popular park would be a great spot for a cafe or something. A missed opportunity for sure.
Yes, especially since there’s a little school operating along 50th not far toward Stone on the same side of the street, and of course, St Ben’s school and church mixed in with the nearvy residential area between arterials–all without ruining everything.
Excellent! N 50th St badly needs more density, which hopefully will then result in the city looking at it as more than just a car sewer connecting I-5 and SR-99 (bike lanes would be great, but I would settle for just some traffic calming so that being a pedestrian doesn’t require tempting death), and Metro to consider running a cross-town route from Phinney to Bryant.
I only wish that the developers didn’t feel the need to include parking, but given the nature of 50th I guess we just have to accept it until the neighborhood density improves and corresponding urban amenities (transit, biking, pedestrian, etc.) arrive.
So sad. I remember the two Harps in the window and the mother-in-law apartment over the garage and the Beautiful Garden. Don’t like the new homes are scattering through Wallingford they’re ugly. I don’t see whatever they’re going to rebuild their being any nicer than what’s already there probably going to be another ugly house
Say, you know how people like to complain about modern architecture not fitting in with the Craftsman character of the neighborhood? Well, this “harp house” is not Craftsman either! You should be happy it’s being torn down. I’m sure when it was built the bungalow-dwellers complained about how ugly it is. “Ugh, brick! No overhanging eaves! Look at that hideous steep roof! Gross!” Now it’s considered positively charming!
Give it a few decades and those of you who can’t appreciate modern architecture will love today’s “boxy” houses.
(Not to mention that the original bungalows did not exactly fit in with the existing surroundings, either).
Change is inevitable.
I agree! “Neighborhood character” should be about people, not architecture esoterica.
“Oooh I love this neighborhood with it’s big boxy hardipanel architecture!” Said no one, ever.
But you know what people say to me when I tell them I live in Wallingford? “I love Wallingford with it’s nice Craftsman’s and bungalows.”
I’ve never heard that. I’ve only heard people envy me for the convenience. We just hang out with different people.
The only time I got people telling me about the housing style of Wallingford was this, “It’s the same as ghetto in Tacoma.” The person who said that refused to buy in this neighborhood because of that, and now regretted it so much.
“Don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining.”
With all the complaining about the neighborhood not having enough density, one wonders why some of those folks did not buy a condo or rent an apartment in one of the neighborhoods that meets their wishes?
Ten 3-story row houses has to be one of the least efficient housing forms. Far better to build flats where a single stairway can serve several residences. Flats have the additional benefit of accommodating singles sharing a flat, families or age-in-place seniors (on the ground floor). It is poor policy to allow the housing form dictate who can live there.
The City made a serious error when it chose to incentivize tear downs and encourage building high-profit SEDU projects. But here we are…
Heck yes! Triple deckers (aka Three flats) FTW – 6 family-sized homes per 5,000 square feet of land!
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/b7c2fa3f3d8f1d8aeb941679eccc018d639813553af325a7fbc78bc7e4d071bf.jpg