Aubrey Cohen (Facebook)
Go and read Aubrey Cohen’s piece in the P-I on density and NIMBYs in Seattle, itself a response to this East Bay Express column that’s been been circulating around in the internet recently. Cohen:
My response was that most area residents already had internalized the lesson the event seemed intended to impart: that growing up makes more sense than growing out. The problem was that there was always a reason why their neighborhood wasn’t the appropriate place for more development.
That’s what makes examining local races so difficult. Everyone is for density and opposed to sprawl, but what varies (and what really matters) is how much they prioritize density over all the other interests.
At one extreme, you can put essentially no restriction on densification and get a lot of it, but then you have little affordable housing (in the short term), overburdened infrastructure, and fewer amenities like parks and parking. On the other hand, load the responsibility for that on developers and you get less development, and shift those infrastructure costs out to the periphery.
The whole subject of purity tests for “true” environmentalists is of limited use and should be ridiculed in its own post, but suffice it to say that someone who isn’t willing to sacrifice some of their other interests for environmental reasons isn’t communicating very much with the “environmentalist” tag. For instance, I’d be inclined to live in a dense, transit-oriented neighborhood even if it were environmentally neutral, so doing so doesn’t, in itself, make me much of an environmentalist. Similarly, supporting environmental measures as long as they only impact “greedy corporations,” or some other neighborhood, or don’t alter the affordable housing stock at all, is the cheapest form of advocacy.
Seriously, go and read Cohen’s whole piece.
Now wait a minute.
None of the things you’ve listed at the ‘extreme’ really have anything to do with building higher. Sure, removing parking is great – but you can’t talk about overburdened infrastructure and removing parking in the same breath without addressing the fact that removing parking improves traffic.
As for water, sewer, and electric, they’re all cheaper per capita in density. The taxes coming from residents in high density pay for more services than the taxes from residents in low density.
Parks are parks – public land isn’t in the running for a 10 story condo tower.
Affordable housing is often in the requirements for density already.
It hasn’t been shown that putting some of these costs on developers reduces their willingness to build – each of them, like the infrastructure and affordable housing points, are given in exchange for increases in square footage and height that wouldn’t otherwise be available. A developer wouldn’t be picking these optional upgrades if they weren’t lucrative anyway.
Your logic doesn’t hold up Ben. Environmental extremism is a fact, used to justify very negative personal attacks that start with the word NIMBY and proceed from there.
But let’s look at your cost arguements, even though by your own standards you aren’t worth the effort. Sure, many infrastructure elements are cheaper in density – but transportation is not. This is a complicated question as how do you balance autos and transit in your cost model – prescriptively or descriptively. Prescriptively there is no chance that light rail can be used to serve everyone, nada. Descriptively removing all parking is just a major hassle to single family neighborhoods who will have their on street parking ’stolen’byt the developer a few blocks over.
Affordable housing bonuses in Seattle are a joke – 17% of the **added bonus area** – which in a lot of project is going to be a single unit.
The price of a piece of land should be solely determined by the salaries of those living upon it. Anything else is just distortion. Some subsidy might be justifiable – such as a park and ride used by both shoppers during the day and residents at night. In any case that subsidy should be comparative to the subsidy in building new rural units.
But subsidizing development on the basis of personal attacks has another name – it’s called conspiracy to commit extortion, second degree. A class ‘C’ felony.
-Douglas Tooley
Transportation is certainly cheaper in density if you count all the trips you can now walk to instead of driving. For me this includes parks, restaurants, shopping (including farmer’s market and grocery stores), and sometimes work (depending on whether I’m in SLU or not).
Oh, Douglas. Your ranting brightens up my day. :)
Ben,
You’re presupposing strict zoning restrictions on height and square footage. In the true laissez-faire limit, there are basically no restrictions on this, and you get lots and lots of development, with no affordability provisions, fewer parks and parking per person, and the rest of it.
Don’t you think the density of parks has to increase as population density increases and backyards shrink?
Personally I strongly believe in public amenities including more parks and better schools, but I also think laissez-faire development could be done right. It depends who the developers are trying to attract. Until recently in downtown Seattle there’s been little reason to build playspace. No one lived there, it’s was an 8-5 downtown. In more neighborhoods with more residents you see developers competing, though, and buildings include things like swimming pools or private courtyards. You can see this taken to the limit in the retirement condos that have private libraries, art studios, restaurant-style dining, and so on. There are no zoning requirements for any of this.
I don’t advocate true laissez-faire, I accept that we have existing legal frameworks within which we have to work.
I do think density of parks has to increase – but I also think sidewalk widening and some side street closures can do this quite well.
I guess I just question the logic of some of the NIMBY rationales. Do people in single family homes really prefer the ugly, high-fenced townhouse squares to rowhouses? Really? Has anyone asked them, or is the planning department just working from old assumptions or listening to a handful of out-of-touch advocates?
Like Aubrey Cohen, I live in a townhouse, and given the choice, I’d trade the garage for an actual backyard in a heartbeat. (Last weekend I was tempted to sleep in the garage–seemed like such a waste of ground-floor coolness.) I might even sell my car. But I’m not sure I’ll feel the same way in 2010 or 2011 when Metro is forced to cut service. If we’re going to look at the city holistically, it’s pretty hard to argue for less parking when people’s ability to switch from owning a car to using transit is impeded by transit funding cuts.
No, the problem is that for real NIMBYs would prefer nothing, but 4-pack townhomes meet existing zoning requirements and fall below the SEPA filter for design review, so there’s no legal way to stop them.
Out of curiousity, are you close enough to walk or bike to things? Because that’s uh kinda the point of density.
I’d trade my apt for a classic manor house with lots of servants and groundskeepers. I don’t even need the noble title. :)
So who enacted those zoning requirements? Maybe it’s a moot point because they’re undergoing changes right now, but it just seems illogical to zone to eliminate something you might not like and not even consider what sort of crazy things you might get instead.
And yeah, I live two blocks from the grocery store, a couple from the drugstore, restaurants, library, etc. So that eliminates a lot of trips. I’m in the lowest mileage category for my insurance company. But I don’t live in the same neighborhood as a lot of my extended family and the neighborhood to neighborhood connections on metro aren’t great. If I didn’t have the garage than the inconvenience of owning a car might be higher than the inconvenience of transferring once or twice to go to my Aunt’s house for dinner. But if Metro service cuts mean you transfer twice or more and wait 20-30 minutes at each transfer for the bus, and have to leave early because the buses don’t run as late, that’s a lot harder to deal with.
I don’t think it’s that they prefer the ugly townhouses. I’m guessing the ugly townhouses are a result of people trying to use zoning laws to keep those sorts of things out of their neighborhood entirely. They make a bunch of requirements for height and distance from property lines and the ugly townhouses are what they managed to squeeze into the lot within those parameters.
Personally, I would LOVE more density in my neighborhood (and less parking) but it does depend on how they do it. I want it along the major streets (15th Ave NE and NE 125th St) not just thrown wherever it’s cheapest and easiest. Honestly, the townhouses on the small (no sidewalk) side streets do bother me sometimes. Though I’m not sure how I’d feel if they were better designed. I’d have to see some examples maybe…
Not just walking becomes more effective in a dense neighborhood, as we all know transit is much easier and cheaper to provide in dense neighborhoods, car sharing services like Zipcar are more likely to pencil out, and delivery services for groceries, packages, etc. are more cost-effective.
In fact the ONLY transportation mode that becomes more expensive to accommodate as density increases is the single occupancy vehicle. At a certain point it is simply not possible to attempt to provide road and parking spaces for roughly 1.2 vehicles per person.
It would seem Mr. Tooley would somehow want to take us back to the time in Seattle where one could drive a single occupancy vehicle everywhere, never encounter a traffic jam and find free parking directly in front of your destination.
There is one catch: long-distance transit becomes more expensive to build in a a dense neighborhood, unless you reserve space for it *first*. Luckily Seattle already has its mainline train route established under downtown.
Excellent point – that’s why you build your transit and let the density come in around it, rather than waiting until you’re “dense enough” for transit.
OK it is much cheaper to add rail in a cornfield than it is in a built-up area such as Capitol Hill. But from a ridership perspective it is hard to justify putting a line in a cornfield.
Something like the Bel-Red corridor is a rare opportunity where you get a chance to put the transit in while the land is still cheap and have density built around it. However there is a major activity center on either end to justify building the line in the first place.
The current design of homes seems to put the garage as the main accent of a house. In older parts of my city, we have alleys or laneways located in the rear of houses where the garage is. In the front, there is grass and a porch leading to the entrance of a house.
Today that alley or laneway is the street. That is just about all one sees, a garage followed by another garage, broken only by a narrow passage of an entry into the house located behind the garage. There is no porch, because there is no space left for it.
Personally, I’d like to see the zoning laws encourage more medium density apartment block (3-6 story) buildings as opposed to townhomes. I think these scale better into most parts of the existing neighborhoods and offer a much more friendly urban experience. Large enough building allow for much better parking alternatives if they are desired / the possiblility of some usable open space as opposed to nearly completely shaded 10×10 squares hidden behind a cedar fence.
More than anything, the NC zoning allows for retail on the bottom floor. It’s the mix of uses that really makes a neighborhood good. To really do that, you do need 6ish, though.
The NC zoning is nice but it isn’t necessarily appropriate to an 8 unit building on a non-arterial.
We really need something beyond the 4 residential land-use choices currently being built in Seattle: single family, “4-pack” of ugly 3 story townhouses, half-block 5 over 1 “bread-loaf” with ground floor retail, or high-rise luxury apt/condos.
On the other hand the zoning laws need to be written with an eye to what actually pencils out for developers. For example all of the NC-40 zones where the height limits really need to be bumped up to allow 4 stories without having to squeeze everything in. Sure the developers could build 3 stories but that doesn’t really pencil out for them.
I’m not sure I understand your first sentence. You don’t have to build an NC-maximum building, but that zoning allows a lot more flexibility than the townhouse zoning.
I think you’re talking about these: http://noisetank.com/hugeasscity/2008/04/24/we-dont-build-these-anymore/
Dan covers the reasons: mainly parking, but also developers gross more on $500k townhomes (well, they thought they could if they’d sell).
I’d like to see some sort of special “no-parking” lowrise housing that would have low parking maximums and would not be eligible for RPZ street parking. I suggested this to the Roosevelt Neighborhood Group land use people and they sounded interested. This would obviously have to be in walkable neighborhoods with good transit access (and ideally zipcars), so it might work for any of the urban villages.
I read one of those articles from Oakland along these lines and they were looking to Seattle as a good example! I’ll note that when visiting Oakland, it was very walkable and there were actually things worth walking to even in the more residential neighborhoods.
Ironically, a huge number of the people who vent and posture on all sides of this argument live in single family houses, sometimes a single person in the house, in single family zoned areas. A huge problem in my view is that we have no reasonable low end to the multifamily zoning code, so you just will not see people willing to jump that gulf and up zone one step from a single family structure to a duplex or triplex.
On the other hand, we need to understand that if we decide that an area should be a focus for massive development, basically it’s pretty much a tear down proposition where it is drastically up zoned, property becomes more valuable than the buildings, folks are pretty much encouraged to leave either due to rising property taxes or lousy speculators who buy what are now tear downs and rent to lousy tenants. Eventually, the area sort of stabilizes. Would have been better just to buy it all up and tear everything down. Sure people resist that experience based on seeing it happen before. That is what a lot of the fighting is about.
We need to figure out how to grow up from where we really are at. I would think an overall plan for an area that calls for a net end result of average building scale without changing zoning at the planning stage, but rather lets developers up zone specific lots in a first come first served manner, would result in infill of higher buildings, while leaving many existing buildings. Sounds like a mature city, that grows up from what is, and understands that zoning and planning do not happen at the same time as development, not like a place where we act like we are starting from scratch.
CriticalWonk, I live in a single family home. It’s not about forcing people out of them, it’s about not obstructing the efforts of others to live in multifamily housing or to serve that market.
My neighborhood is primarily apartments and townhomes and I love it. I wish there were more.
Martin I do not know how large your house is or how large your family is. But, if you live in a single family house in a single family zone inside an urban village, then you are being a NIMBY when you use terminology like ‘not obstructing the efforts of others to live in multifamily housing or to serve that market’ if you are not seeking to have your single family zone up zoned. That is based on the Urban Village strategy which predates station areas, but is the places where we intend to focus infrastructure resources.
To be fair, if you wanted, and I think since families are so small now, to actually turn your single family house into a duplex, not upsetting the applecart by building a structure larger than a large house with a shared yard for two families, it would not be legal in the city of Seattle given that there is no zoning for that. There is such a designation, but it has been up zoned under the covers to be much more building than single family areas will accept. Not talking about ADUs and DADUs, nice as they are. I’m talking about the true duplex, triplex forms of a single structure per 5000 sf lot that abound in Seattle, now termed non-conforming and not replaceable without a lot of grief.
I live in a multifamily zone outside the Urban Village BTW.
I supported the legislative effort to upzone the station areas, which would have affected me.
I don’t think failing to be activist enough for an upzone qualifies you as a NIMBY. I think you have to actually work against it.
You realize that I was speaking about the contradiction of people I know who do live in SF zones inside Urban Villages taking the targeted infrastructure resources, and to people who live in SF zones in general speaking for those of us who made the choice to live in MF zones. Not to you specifically. While you live in a SF home, it’s likely you are in a MF zone, based on your description of existing MF right by you.
There are real strengths and weaknesses in our city zoning laws that affect the situation. Laws call for higher density and up zoning around light rail without any debates about state legislation. But, the zoning designations are not effective for different contexts and are not always clear. Thus, the horror people have about what they end up with. There are gulfs and jumps between zoning levels that are a problem for a number of reasons.
The other gap is that between planning and the time that someone comes to do development. Not a good idea to just up zone. There needs to be creative ways to plan to allow simple up zones when someone comes with a real building to develop, else the impacts of up zoning are destabilizing.
Finally, people who do care and think about this stuff need to get involved in neighborhood planning. Really engage. I know you are interested in transit, but I see the interest in how land use works with that. It’s more than zoning. It’s how neighbors together evolve neighborhoods that are all sidedly economically, socially and environmentally sustainable. It takes a complete turn around of our modern, rootless, nuclear individual ways of being. And, it can be the most frustrating and rewarding way that we create roots and our sense of our place on this earth.
Have a BLAST riding the light rail tomorrow!! I’m just not a hub-bub type person, so I will experience the reality of this sea change with a quiet ride later this month. I’ll share what that feels like OK?