Home sweet home?

Over at Seattle Transit Blog, what started out as a rallying cry for supporters of smart growth, density, and transit to consider whether reforming elections and government rapidly became a discussion about the sacred form, single family.

Seattle is a town that is full of people who are progressives and environmentalists who think nothing of calling a developer “greedy” for turning a parking lot into a mixed use building. But when someone dares to call out the financial interests of single family homeowners, then lots of people show up to cry foul.

There are two examples of the hew and the cry. First, is the “apartment dwellers can be NIMBYs too” and the worry about “demonizing” single family residents.

As others have noted, this “single family homeowners are the enemy” approach is absurd, pointless, and ultimately self-defeating. The enemy are NIMBYs. Some apartment dwellers are NIMBYs and many single-family homeowners are supporters of greater density.

The thing is I have never said, anywhere, that “single family homeowners are the enemy.” I’ve simply stated that there are financial interests the lie behind opposition to growth and new development. That’s important, because too often opponents of new projects are cast as honest citizens with no financial axe to grind. That isn’t the case typically.

I really appreciated commenter Same who chose to ask the question rather than flailing his arms about wildly.

Is a pro-TOD individual who chooses to live in a single family suburban neighborhood that isn’t, and never will be, zoned for TOD, and he frequently lectures others about the value of TOD and density, an us or a them?

Yes, Sam, you’re in. You are us.

That’s the hew, now here’s the cry.

As long as you urbanists keep pushing this “density uber alles” idea where life elbow-to-elbow; no cars; no kids etc. is the morally superior way to live – you’re going to get blowback. And deservedly so.

The problem with this comment is that my post and my effort to stir up dialogue about reform never assumed a juggernaut of finger wagging density nannies descending like the plague on Seattle’s neighborhoods, singing hymns and waving copies of the Growth Management Act.

Single family people are very sensitive about the choice of where they live. That’s fine. I would love to live in single family too. Many people would. But we have to start shifting our norms away from that form and toward courtyards, cottages, and multifamily. That doesn’t mean a person is evil for living in a bungalow and owning a car.

Rod N commented with concern and a question:

I love the Seattle Transit Blog. I love choo-choo transportation. I love good bus service. I always vote for the aforementioned.

But, GASP. I love my smallish 1949 rambler on a 5000 square foot lot. I love my annual vegetable garden. I hate kids running around a condo/townhouse, shaking the floor. I am an old mo-fo. What’s a mother to do?

Yes, mother, you can keep your house. Just keep voting for transit and people on your city council that will take bold votes on land use, even if your own financial interest and comfort get pinched.

My point in debriefing my post is to remind that this is a fight, but its mostly an internal fight. Nobody wants to face the brunt of anger or misunderstanding. The truth is that it isn’t people living in bungalows that are the enemy, it is our own reticence to tackle tough problems when it means challenging people’s comfort in having right ideas, but bad practices.

Everyone is afraid of change. People have worked hard to get what they have, and change often seems like it puts that work and investment at risk. Sometimes it does. But this fight is about the future, not about whether you live in a walk up or on a farm. It means we have to work together so we can change the way we live so that it is more sustainable.

Lastly, I have heard people repeat something I heard a lot from my days as Tabacco Tsar: you can’t tell people how they should live!

Really? Think about that for awhile. What argument for social and political policy worth listening to doesn’t call for a change in lifestyle? It’s precisely the fear of asking for change or diminishing the importance of that change that has us where we are: believing that transit and density is for those people over there, not for me. Until we recognize that we’re in this together, we’re not going to make the big changes we need.

Oddly, sometimes, that requires calling out our differences and, yes, even disagreeing with each other. I’ll give the last word here to the appropriate eponym Lack Thereof who was arguing with (yes, Seattle that’s OK) Joanna :

Your restrictive zoning is pricing me out of the damn city. Our shortage of affordable rental units is EXTREME. I make 22,000/yr. last year 10,200 of that went to rent, in what is (from what I can tell) the absolute cheapest 2 bedroom apartment in the city. And my rent went up on January 1st.

I don’t care if I have to share a wall, or a roof, or whatever. I want a garden, but I’ll give it up because I NEED HOUSING. With our shortage, any new units that get built in city limits are renting for 2-3x what I pay in my old triplex.

I LIVE IN YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD, JOANNA. I am a real person, and I am suffering at the hands of people with your mindset.

What follows is my response to a forwarded e-mail by my friend (I hope he still is) Tony Provine who sits on the City Neighborhood Council. The City Council today will pass the rezones that have been much ballyhooed, and tonight the CNC will meet with this topic on their agenda. 

I felt that even though I happen to get the e-mail third hand, that the CNC deserved something to counter the comments of Jon V. Fox. Now you might be surprised to know that I have a great deal of respect for Mr. Fox. He’s consistent and not afraid to follow the logic of some of his opinions. I think he’s wrong, but at least he’s honest. 

Hello Tony,

It’s been too long. I hope all is well with you. It seems like a decade since the Friends of SPL days.

I notice that you forwarded a letter from Jon V. Fox on to the CNC. I thought I might share some thoughts with you on that message.

There are a myriad of problems with it.

First, Richard Conlin and the Council have been incremental with big up zones. I can imagine when one has the perspective, as does Fox, that we ought to literally close the door to further growth, any up zone seems like a give away. Again and again, the Council has in fact been largely influenced by calls for less height, bulk, and scale, and more affordable housing. Your voices are being heard.

Second, when it comes to affordable housing, Fox is living in an alternative universe of sorts. True, if the City of Seattle mandated no more growth, that is no more new people moving into the city and further mandated a “unit” of housing for every person living here, affordability might not be an issue. But that isn’t the world we live in.

As more people move into the city they are looking for a variety of options for housing, and today especially, they are looking for rental housing and apartments. Because of the downturn in the housing market and the recession many potential home buyers are avoiding mortgages and staying in the rental market. Fox says:

Even if we accept that is true, there is no better way to assure affordable housing than to overbuild. Fox is caught in a logic loop: there is no affordable housing, therefore we shouldn’t build anymore.

That doesn’t make any sense. If it were true that the Council secretly wanted to up zone Roosevelt to 10,000 feet and an FAR of 1 million, developers will only build what they think will produce a return on their investment. To talk about overbuilding at this point is counter to the main argument that Fox always makes about housing, that there isn’t enough of it and it is too expensive. If there was more housing–more than we had people who wanted it–then the price would certainly fall. Increased housing supply may not be sufficient to lower price, but certainly is necessary.

I realize that neighbors in Roosevelt legitimately hate Hugh Sisley. But we can’t afford to build our land use policy around the desire to spite one man anymore than we should hand him a golden ticket. Sisley will make money, that’s for sure, but the construction of new housing on the site will eliminate the blight and open the neighborhood to new families and customers for local businesses. This is progress, and years from now nobody will remember this zoning fight, they’ll just know when they get off light rail in Roosevelt there is a “there, there.”

Fox surfaces “quasi-judicial” rezones in his missive. This is a canard. The developers, RDG, were, in fact, seeking a contract rezone which does require that nobody talk to or attempt to influence the outcome. But that effort was scrapped in favor of a legislative rezone a process open to influence by everyone, including the neighborhood.

Now some of your number on the CNC are former colleagues of mine from neighborhood planning days when I was both a citizen planner and a city employee paid to make those plans happen. Perhaps I am a “pro-density” zealot. But even people who are in favor of density live in neighborhoods. Everyone, including Conlin and Fox, keep talking about “polarization.” I don’t know what they’re talking about. Where I come from it’s called “debate.”

But the debate shouldn’t be about who can and who can’t weigh in on density in neighborhoods. Light rail is bringing us together in a way that makes the old distinctions about who should have a voice about zoning and density break down. We’re all part of this city and region. Sure, we disagree. I think Fox has a very consistent position. He is explicitly anti-growth. I don’t have a problem with him holding that view.

However, as a person who lives in a neighborhood myself, I find it unfortunate that disagreement calls into question one’s legitimacy as a person who believes in livable neighborhoods. That kind of thing, questioning one’s bona fides as a neighborhood person, is polarizing. And I hope you and the CNC won’t indulge in it.

Debate on this issues based on our competing visions for the city is a good thing. Sometimes we win, and sometimes, unfortunately, we lose. I don’t see Roosevelt as a massive victory for our side. I also think RDG made terrible mistakes by not knowing who Sisley was and not talking with the neighborhood early enough. I’ve expressed my irritation with developers directly about their frequent lack of planning and consideration of local history and sensibilities when they buy and develop a property. But we’re all in this together, and we have to talk and argue our way through this as best we can.

Fox and I agree on one thing, the Council has to change. I think we might all agree that the nine Councilmembers are pretty disconnected, and, as I often say, seem to hold the views of the last person they talked to. I’ve suggested elsewhere a bigger council with small districts distributed geographically across the city. We could call them boroughs rather than districts, but I think that we’d get better results on land use and on issues related to growth than we currently do with our at large system.

Thanks for your ongoing work for the community, city, and your neighborhood.

All that is shaped by land use policy. So maybe the numbers from my blog started on a whim gathered so much steam. Thanks for reading, commenting, and sharing your ideas and thoughts. Hear’s to the hope that land use policy in 2012 gets better in Seattle!

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 25,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 9 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

TOB or TOD: More apartments are part of the answer

Instead of presenting it like a Christmas present for Seattlites worried about housing affordability, The Seattle Times’ Eric Pryne indulges in some rather bizarre Christmas Day alarmism about the growing number of apartment buildings.

A year into the Seattle area’s biggest apartment-construction boom in decades, some analysts say it’s in danger of getting too big.

They’re starting to use the “O” word — overbuilt.

Overbuilt! Oh no! If it wasn’t so funny, it would be serious. The economics of this are simple, and Pryne covers them in his story. A developer he quotes points out that because of the possible glut of apartment buildings, “the higher rents developers are banking on may not materialize if wages remain stagnant.”

That’s called a drop in price, which means that if wages stay the same or even go a up a little bit then living in Seattle just becomes more affordable. That’s what we want, right?

But Pryne’s story adopts the view that is often taken by the Seattle City Council and others, that somehow building too many apartments will be a bad thing, even worrying that it might lead to “ghost towns.” It’s true that overbuilding might be a bad thing for developers, but that’s their problem. If they miscalculate, their loss is the city’s gain. More apartments than people wanting them means the prices for those units falls, making them more competitive housing options for people moving into the region.

And even more strange that the headline and subtitle of Pryne’s story–”Building boom for Seattle apartments may be overdone”–is the subtitle for it:

A year into the Seattle area’s biggest apartment-construction boom in decades, some analysts say it’s in danger of getting too big.

Now if the Seattle Times was a trade journal for apartment developers one could see the reason for taking this angle. “Watch out folks, prices for apartments may be coming down. Be careful what you build!”

But the subtitle could just have easily been:

A year into the Seattle area’s biggest apartment-construction boom in decades, recent data points to possible fall in apartment prices, making Seattle more affordable.

The reason I am hassling Pryne here is that too often his story’s mindset is the one that informs the anti-growth sentiment. “Why grant these people a rezone to build more apartments, we already have too many!”

But that’s exactly when we should be opening the permitting spigots, permitting even more apartments. Private developers take the risk in these cases. If they “overbuild” it just means more affordable units for prospective renters. When supply goes up that’s good for people in the market for housing.

That’s why many of us pushed for more height in Roosevelt. The proposal there will result in more apartment buildings. This argument isn’t just about the whims of local neighbors who don’t want the view of the high school blocked, but about regional issues affecting the housing market and affordability. Roosevelt with 65 feet can be part of the affordability solution, rather than Transit Oriented Blight which is what would be guaranteed if the neighborhood opponents of a rezone got their way.

For everyone worried about affordability these days let’s be clear: an “overbuilt” apartment market just means that living in dense, mixed use neighborhood gets easier. It means that people struggling to make ends meet can more realistically consider living near transit than they could otherwise. Stories like these make the point that economics is complicated for sure, but when it comes down to it, the principles are pretty simple. More housing means lower prices; but you can’t create more housing when land use policy makes it more difficult to build those units.

The details are still emerging with the project, but Touchstone Development is proposing a new development on the site that would have a pretty significant increase in building mass. The concerns that are most often voiced at these meetings is how the existing historic structures will fare with all that new construction. That means having to push the available productive square footage in order to “pay respect” to the existing building.  All of this process makes sense. The last thing the city of Seattle needs is exiting historic buildings overshadowed by big bulky buildings that diminish the form being preserved.

But there is often a tendency to take big steps back from historic buildings, like the buildings are spotted owls, a delicate and endangered species. In the debate over rezones in Pioneer Square these same issues came up. I don’t believe there is a conflict between density and preservation. I think ideas like Transfer of Development Rights for historic buildings would resolve many of the issues that arise. But sometimes we have to be bold, pushing the limits of height, bulk, and scale in order to accommodate future growth.

Here’s what I said in the public comment period:

I live on Capitol Hill. This site is within my regular walkshed; I often pass by this site on my way to South Lake Union.

I would urge the board to allow the maximum use of this site. There’s a reason that this is an area that I just pass through — there’s no there, there yet.

The proposal to do more with the site would begin the much promised transformation of this area from a place one passes through into a destination.

You all know that preservation isn’t about putting buildings under glass. It’s the opposite. Preservation is about activating historic structures and keeping them part of the urban fabric.

Limiting development now would simply slow down positive change and perhaps retard it. An active and well utilized site is just we need to make the Troy Laundry property part of a vibrant, active, and sustainable neighborhood

This is an important site, and the push to maximize usable space for more people to use the site is a game of inches and feet. The proponents and committee will have to wrestle with many issues, but making this site work is a once in a generation opportunity. But as a city, we ought to be more aggressive because what we don’t build here will have to go somewhere else and with a Council reluctant to upzone, we’ve got to get everything we can from new projects.

I don’t like the idea of giving these guys a lot of free publicity, but I figured it would draw some positive attention to STB and I guess Metro didn’t want to talk about it.

Unfortunately I can’t embed the video, but here is a link to the KOMOTV online version of the interview.

It’s a fine story, and I don’t think it helped the Free Riders at all and it did feature a screen shot of STB. What it didn’t do is get my comments about land use in there.

It’s weird how the little sound bites one practices for these sorts of things can get picked up so quickly, but other ones fall flat. As soon as I said something about the Free Rider movement being “pointless” it was a wrap.

But I also made the point that transit doesn’t work like a taxi cab, extra long rides or routes that cost more to service don’t charge higher fares. The problem, I said, was that if we did land use right, putting lots of people in a smaller space, transit would be more efficient and economical and even cheaper.

They did pick up on the point that if fares went away, the costs just go up other places. And I think the way the numbers looked on the screen it was pretty clear to any viewer that if the Free Rider movement caught on it would just mean higher prices for everyone else when the shortfall has to get eaten by another part of the budget or service drops.

I think the We Won’t Pay movement is a good foil for those of us who are trying to explain to the everyday person what we know intuitively: there is no free ride when it comes to transit, we need to invest more, and live more compactly.

During the last half of the 1990′s I was pretty heavily involved in neighborhood planning on Beacon Hill and in South Park. I wrote a longer piece on the arrival of light rail on Beacon Hill when I was at Sightline.

In February of 1995, I moved to an apartment on Beacon Hill and got involved in neighborhood planning. A group of dedicated people pushed hard for a station on Beacon Hill even though Sound Transit, at the time, said a station there would be too deep and too expensive. The group persisted and finally got a station worked into the plan. Shortly after that group collapsed from exhaustion, a new group arose on Beacon Hill opposing the station claiming that it would destroy the character of the neighborhood.

During those years (and later) I did what I could to support efforts to consider more development capacity around what would become the station. There was a neighborhood matching proposal to support an envelope study, and later, when I was at Public Health, we funded a charette with developers to consider what could be built around the station.

In every case, the verdict came back the same: 40 feet won’t cut it. The existing zoning around the station just won’t support more development, the kind of development that is needed for Transit Oriented Development. Years went by without any serious movement on upzones for Beacon Hill that would create density. The vacant property around the station has become emblematic of the failed process in Seattle that tends to favor doing nothing over making big changes.

There is now a proposal on the table to increase capacity around the transit station. But that proposal seems too narrow and preservationist, putting a heavy emphasis on blunting the effect of tall buildings. On Seattle Transit blog I responded to criticism that I was being unfair about how I characterize neighborhood opposition or support of density:

While there is language that appears to embrace growth, there are a lot language that would lend itself to attenuating big boosts in density. From the document you linked to:

“Higher density development surrounds the light rail station and is responsive to the neighborhood context at a variety of scales, from single family houses to multistory buildings”

and

“A Town Center urban form that transitions from denser development at the Town Center core to less dense and single-family residential neighborhoods in a manner that is responsive to the context and character of the North Beacon Hill neighborhood.”

Where exactly is this transition zone supposed to be, when the project I am talking about is 40 feet and across the street is SF 5000. Most of the blocks that are going up to 65 are similarly surrounded by Single Family. The increases here are not that signficant and they aren’t particularly broad. This is really threading the needle, especially because it’s going to be hard to “transition” from 40 feet to SF or from 65 to 40 to SF in the space of a block.

Here’s a link to my full comment. The commenter I was responding to sounds an awful lot like speakers in Roosevelt who talked about how much density they were willing to “take,” as if it were poison. I get that there are height increases proposed and that there might even have been consensus about those increases. But picking some parcels here and there and boosting the zoning by 20 feet and then requiring transition zones is not a loving embrace of density.

I don’t think this one project that the Committee will review is enough. In some ways I’d almost rather see nothing happen on the site than to have it underdeveloped. The station box is in place, and there isn’t much room on the site, but it would be better if the whole site could be developed all at once. I worry that this small piece locks down the station site further, making bigger projects less feasible.

So I am conflicted. On the one hand 30 units seems better than what’s there now, nothing. On the other, I’d rather have us pass big changes to state law, to the zoning code and even to the city’s charter so we could get lots of density at Beacon Hill and other station areas. What we’re doing now is not working, and parking 30 units on the edge of the station block seems problematic when I consider the bigger picture.

So I’m going to the meeting to see what happens. I’ll report back later somewhere. But I hope by the end of the evening I’ll feel less conflicted about the project. Beacon Hill is a great neighborhood with lots of opportunity to show the rest of the city and region how to make TOD work. But it has also been the epitome of public process gone awry and the paucity of real leadership at the City to take advantage of the chance to make Beacon Hill the best it could be. Maybe some of the people that move into these 30 units can help change that.

Don Quijote and Sancho Panza, drawn by Honoré Daumier, Detail. C 1868

You love it and you want more of it: my thoughts on the Occupy (fill in someplace here) and other things economic. Now you can get that kind of stuff at Folkenomics, my blog about supply and demand.

I decided that it’s a bit of a long trip to lead any readers with an interest in land use away from that, through various historical side tracks, and then back to land use. And I have Folkenomics.com all to myself. Why not start posting there.

By the way, I don’t know anything about economics. So, like land use, I am mostly self taught.

The point of the Folkenomics writing is more about someone who doesn’t know much about economics explaining it back to himself in public. I know, I’m going to get rich doing this. But I will remember all my fans when I do. And when it ties back to land use, I’ll try to cross post.

Time to bring Seattle's future into focus

Today is a busy day on the intersphere: two posts are up that point out some ways we might start to get busy on big changes to the way we plan and regulate land use in Seattle.

The first, at Crosscut, looks at Seattle’s neighborhood movement. Inevitably the comments will be filled with people saying “It’s not like that here in (fill in the blank) neighborhood.” I know, not all neighborhoods are created equal. But my point in the post is to highlight the ways in which neighborhood activism has become more about protecting what we’ve got, and making it slightly better. That’s a far cry from where that movement started and where it should go. Here’s a sample:

Seattle’s neighborhood movement, which started as a collaboration between neighborhoods starved for infrastructure and a city seeking to lead the region in growth management, has degenerated into a growth-resistance movement. What began as a social justice movement has become a bulwark of the status quo.

At Seattle Transit Blog I reprise an argument I made here, quite awhile ago, that we amend Seattle’s Charter to take away most land use decisions from Council and vest them instead in a newly empowered Seattle Planning and Development Commission. I think everyone of our Councilmembers is a good person with good intent in their heart. And they work hard to solve problems. But even the biggest pro-density, pro-growth Councilmember would run headlong into the local politics of land use, making getting big things done next to impossible. Giving the Commission more power would help.

Wouldn’t such a powerful and unelected body be undemocratic? I don’t know. But today’s governance model is breaking down. Nobody has ever been to the future, so making decisions about it is hard, especially when we’re afraid to take risks. Land use democracy now favors people who show up today, not people coming in the future. Big land use changes are about as popular as someone coming to your house and totally rearranging your furniture for a houseguest that’s coming for a visit in 10 years.

One of the big themes here is about what we consider to be “democratic.” Over the years, the pendulum has swung in favor of lots of community process, listening tours, town halls, and even polling. It’s time for it to swing back toward action, and getting things done. This view is likely not to be popular. And some would say my opposition to the tunnel is an example of inconsistency. Maybe. But nobody wanted that discussion to end more than me, so that we could have this one.

So all you density foes will have to take out your old Smith-Corona to bang out your response. Or you can use your phone to light up the switchboard with “I can’t believe such a reputable publication would allow…”

Or you can put all that in the comment section here. Haven’t read the article? Don’t let that stop you. I’ve got a pretty good guess what the comments will be:

• You haven’t read the neighborhood’s plan;
• We are “taking density,” more than there was planned for before;
• The neighborhood should decide what happens, not some bloggers; and
• How much density is enough for you people?

That last question was asked in the comments section.

it seems for some people it would never be enough: Make the sky the limit and let the market sort it out…… unfortunately, this would leave us all living for decades in a jumble of high-rises next to single-family houses — not the sort of livability or quality of life we should aspire to.

Yes, let the market sort it out. I think whatever demand indicates should dictate supply of housing and retail in station areas. And yes, even if what’s built is sky high.

As for the argument that such an arrangement would be unlivable, I’d simply ask “have you ever been to Capitol Hill, or even Queen Anne for that matter?” Roosevelt neighbors have confounded “livable” with “preferable.” Those aren’t the same.

And this is not, as Jim O’Halloran put it “your train,” as if light rail was an unexpected house guest. The train belongs to all of us, and parochial interests ought to give way to greater regional needs.

Frankly, I hope we build enough housing so the supply completely overruns demand. So much housing that developers have to put it out on the sidewalk with a “FREE” sign on it.