In King County, in the most recent years, only five percent or less of the new housing units are springing up outside the urban growth boundaries. But in Snohomish County, since 2000, the share of new housing units outside the urban growth boundaries has steadily increased. In Kitsap County, the number of new housing units outside the Urban Growth Area in recent years has bounced from year to year between 40 percent and 60 percent. In Pierce County, recent information shows that 20 percent of the new housing units are now arising outside the urban growth boundaries. Another telling indicator is that for Pierce County as a whole, growth in the unincorporated areas — some inside and some outside the urban growth boundaries — accounted for almost six out of 10 new residents in the entire county!
I assume that his data is correct, and agree that it’s a big concern. Befitting a former WSDOT (i.e., “Pavement Inc.”) chief, he completely misdiagnoses the problem:
What will be necessary to turn the tide against, well, the spread of sprawl across the region? Better urban public schools! Higher-quality and lower-cost housing in the cities, especially housing that will make all kinds of families with children eager to live in city neighborhoods! Friendlier, convenient main street shopping for shoppers of all incomes! Good streets and sidewalks, safe bike lanes, and enjoyable parks for people of all ages! For all the citizens of the entire region, these needs in the cities now are front and center as the essential, critical measures of “green.”
The underlying assumption is that we can’t find enough people to buy housing in Seattle, so we have to create more incentives for people to do so. That is, of course, nonsense: over the past decade demand has exceeded supply, and in fact developers can’t build enough units to satisfy market demand. Why is that? Because of zoning restrictions, design review boards, and NIMBYism, not because Seattle is such a rotten place to live. If you want more households in Seattle, you have to increase the number of homes, and there’s no place to put up vast new tracts of single-family housing.
Because this is Crosscut, there’s a gratuitous swipe at Light Rail:
Has anyone not yet noticed that it’s standing-room-only on principal bus routes all over the very areas where better transit services can help attract new residents? What is so hard about the obvious fact that today we must take the path of securing the Vision 2040 goals by radical, imaginative, and cost-effective improvements in bus and van services to strengthen the entire network of public transportation? Can we see the numbers, please, for our public transportation alternatives, including innovative bus and van transit services and modern park-and-ride centers, as compared to just a few light rail stops? It’s time to take action, guided by real data, to deliver transportation solutions to help hundreds of thousands of people move more easily and inexpensively everywhere in the designated growth centers.
Again, Mr. McDonald assumes that the problem is that no one wants to live in Seattle, rather than supporting transit options that support density. As we’ve reviewed time and time again, the permanence of rail attracts transit-oriented development in a way that non-capital-intensive buses never can. And since rail can carry more people than buses, the sheer number of people you can fit in a space is larger.
I’m not sure how he plans to improve bus service where articulated buses already run every 5 minutes or so during peak hours. Maybe he would take away general purpose traffic lanes on arterials, but that would be pretty unprecedented for a WSDOT guy. What he needs is a larger vehicle that can run with shorter headways, i.e., light rail. But I guess his “real data’ doesn’t support that.
The problem isn’t zoning.
Seattle is already zoned to accept 3x the number of housing units necessary to meet its projected 2022 population targets. It is already zoned to just shy of 2x its commerical space necessary for projected 2022 job growth. These surpluses are higher than any other cities in King County.
Whether we are talking about affordability, density, or ‘better’ population distribution the problem cannot be solved by upzoning. We have to be more creative than that and look beyond a mad drive to add more units to things like improving schools, bringing our police force up to national staffing levels, far better transit service, and creative development that provides affordable “Starter Homes” outside the condo/townhome model.
The sheer number of ugly townhomes going up outside the design review process indicates it is not design review, either.
NIMBYs? A common wail for people who don’t care what our neighborhoods look like. Last I checked, however, a person already living in a neighborhood has the same rights as someone trying to build or move into a neighborhood. Are you saying just because someone lives there already they shouldn’t be able to comment on a development that affects their home?
I think that you’re barking up the wrong tree. He might not like light rail as much as the next guy but we need to stop attacking people when they have problems with your favorite mode of choice. In fact I think that should hold true for more of the discussion on here.
Doug wasn’t a normal transportation secretary. He spoke at a TCC event a few years back when he was still secretary and I floored by some of the things he said. He flat out said that SOV’s are the problem and we need to stop accommodating them.
He was also the biggest proponent of system wide tolling, and now that he has left I think that the Sierra Club and Ron Sims have lost a very important ally.
Also FYI he was the only secretary of transportation in the country that could not drive! He rode his bike to work every day.
I think the obvious rejoinder to MacDonald is that the Vision 2040 doesn’t necessarily posit that the growth has to occur in all areas of Puget Sound linearly. The exurbs will fill up first because gas is still relatively cheap and that’s the low-hanging fruit.
We’re only 7 years into the 40-year plan. I expect those urban centers will indeed absorb much of the population as time goes on, they may simply absorb the last half-million instead of the first half-million.
I would say the two biggest issues with getting more people to live in city or in dense urban areas is
1. Affordibility (This may change with the present housing bust + increased gas prices)
2.A general dislike of dense urban areas.This is more prevalent than one might think. I know of plenty of people in Snohomish County who never come down to Seattle because they can’t stand it for whatever reasons(i.e, too crowded, no parking, fear of crime, etc.)
The other reason in his essay that more homes are going up outside the urban growth areas are zoning rules. I dont know what the zoning is for rural Snohomish County, maybe 1 house for every 3 acres or 5 acres, but there’s still a lot of lots bigger than that that can be subdivided up into smaller lots. Also their’s the fact that the county councils and city councils are half bought and paid for by builders and developers or the BIAW and nothing ever gets built in the UGA’s of these outlying cities except single family homes. There is almost no mixed use development that ever happens. Due to the lack of planning by these cities, the UGA’s fill up pretty quickly and than they go to the growth management board complaining that they have no more room to grow and ask for an expansion of the UGA and the cycle repeats.
Another problem is places like Snoqualmie get developments foisted on them by the land barons, but the citizens won’t pay to build the schools to support the onslaught of new students.
Sno Valley School District has voted down the last two ballot proposals to build new schools, and the board races now are all about getting new schools built vs no-new-schools.
Other than that, places like Trossachs and Snoqualmie Ridge are super places to live.
The realtors prolly don’t point that out.
Part of the problem is zoning. But it’s also transportation. In order to reach the zoning limits, there needs to be a way for folks to get around. This is where downtown streetcars, regional light rail and commuter rail come in. The buses can only do so much and at some point you need modes that speak to the development that is happening. Look for example at the Seattle Streetcar and the development in SLU. Portland’s downtown was only developing at 50% of FAR before the Streetcar, still is more than three blocks away from it. But the closer the block to the alignment, the greater the FAR is utilized.
NIMBYs are a problem. They are the same when they live in 40 units to the acre in San Francisco as they are at 2 units per acre in the suburbs. Nothing new they say. Design should be better, but is that really a reason to be against things?
If there are lots and lots of buildings at exactly the maximum zoning height, and developers are buying off the city to waive restrictions by building low-income housing, that tells me that the zoning laws are preventing the construction of housing capacity that would otherwise be built.
Certainly, there are quality-of-life issues that discourage certain people from living in the city. But that has no effect on overall sprawl as long as there aren’t large amounts of vacant or underutilized housing in the city. That simply isn’t the case here.
I’d also suggest that a problem with this approach is that it counts people, not households. If people with kids are fleeing with the city, that has little effect on sprawl but skews the headcount pretty badly.
I’ll echo Frank, give it some time.
It took us, what, 45 years of sprawl development, to get us to the point where we decided this was a trend that needed to be reversed. It may well take us another 45 years to get where we want to go with denser urban centers (and urban villages) and transit.
I’ve noted some anti-rail pro-sprawl advocates point with concern that we haven’t had instant results in growth management, so they say abandon it and go back to sprawl. Everyone needs to take a longer time horizon.
“lamenting” is such a polite way to put it. “Whining” would be more accurate.
"He was also the biggest proponent of system wide tolling, and now that he has left I think that the Sierra Club and Ron Sims have lost a very important ally."
Yippie! Maybe sanity will return!
"Also FYI he was the only secretary of transportation in the country that could not drive! He rode his bike to work every day."
While this may sound commendable and politically correct, I wonder if we really want someone who is advocating for less than 1% of the population while 99% of us are stuck in cars everyday.
Give me a break with that 1% crap. If we had real transit alternatives and real estate alternatives instead of this subsidized auto oriented society we wouldn’t be in this situation. Guess what, In Washington DC where they have a subway, 41% of people walk, bike or take transit to work if they live within a half mile of a station. They made their choices accordingly.
I say if you’re stuck in traffic its your own fault for making the choices that got you stuck there. That means choosing where you live, choosing your means of transport to work, and choosing who you vote for to implement these highway schemes.
“Give me a break with that 1% crap.”
Sorry, I was being too generous. ONE HALF of one percent…MAYBE, but a very militant and vocal 1/2 of 1%.
Actually, the percentage of people who commute by bicycle in Seattle is 1% to 1.5% (depending on time of year), 4,000 to 8,000 per day. Those who are counted at least.
And we use the buses too – “Number of times cyclists put their bikes on Metro buses every year: 300,000+.” (These facts can be checked on the City of Seattle DOT Bike Plan site)
I don’t drive to work and I live 8 miles away from downtown. And yes, I think that gives me a unique perspective on alternative transit (bike, pedestrian, bus, SLUT, whatever). And yes, it’s sad that the administration lost someone who had that perspective.
Density is good, but how much is that new condo going to cost? Where is the grocery store (Seattle’s doing better)? If I don’t have a car, can I get around easily? If I have kids, is there a school/park nearby?
don’t feed the trolls, in Seattle 20% of people commute to work on transit, and in King County its 12%.
I stand corrected, Al. I really didn’t have any statistics, I was just guessing off-the-cuff.
Don’t get me wrong, I HUGELY support mass transit and think we should keep focused on that as a priority and goal to work towards.
No offense, Al. I admire you for biking instead of driving. But I am not sorry to see this guy go. I’d rather see someone who is more in touch with what the masses of us are dealing with. I pay his salary too. It’s good to have someone like this around to get their perspective, but not as director. I think of it as reverse-elitism. Recently many bicyclist have become radical and self-righteous and I’m not impressed.
BTW, a new IGA supermarket is going in on 3rd and Pike soon! No parking, but their target is pedestrian/transit shoppers.
Actually, Anonymous, the market has picked up a lot. But thanks for your concern. Anyway, I’m not upset about anything. Just have an opinion and I’m voicing it.
[Jim’s response to “anonymous” refers to post that was deleted for being an ad hominem attack.]
One day in the early 70s I was in the District, looking at a very large car (3+ tons) with state plates and wondering why the Highway Dept would have a car like that. Then four men, each well over 300 pounds, came out of a restaurant and got in the car. It must have settled about six inches under their weight.
I knew then that change would be a long time comin’.
It would seem to me that somebody who wanted to upgrade the urban experience, and improve transit, would install more streetcars.
I generally agree with Jim. I like bikes, I bike to my mom’s house, but not everyone can bike (my mother’s a disabled, for example) and it’s not really a people mover like cars or trains are.
To Jim’s second comment:
Was the market here really bad? I guess it’s worse than it’s been in the last few years, but things seem a lot better than in California or Florida.
If nothing was different about Mr. MacDonald’s article except that he praised the plan to extend light rail linearly parallel to two existing high capacity transportation facilities (I-5 and Sounder), I would hazard to guess your reaction would have been one of deep admiration and respect for the man.
The intelligence I’ve heard is that Paula Hammond is equally supportive of tolling.
Take this w/ a grain of salt:
(From SkyscraperCity Forums)
According to my trustworthy source, towers in the Triangle and SLU that arent already being constructed should be considered “on hold” until a solid light rail plan is developed.
also
And the term used for on hold was “future development is going to be light rail’s b*tch”
Professor MacDonald complains about full buses.. Yet he also whines about high capacity light rail being two expensive. Hello, Mr. Intelligent Design: the low capably bus gets full because it’s low capacity. The same way the freeway gets jammed full of solo driver automobiles.
The fundamental mistake people like Adam make following wacky ducks like MacDonald (and lame ducks like Sims) into the pond: both try to sell congestion pricing as:
1) more effective at moving more vehicles down a given transportation corridor (ie, more vmt and more dead Polar Bears)
2) a method to stop people from driving so much. The second Doug MacDonald and rudderless Ron Sims decide what they actually stand for…that might be the magic moment they actually start making sense. Listening to the anti-transit goobers at the Discovery Institute and Kemper Development Corp, both Sims and MacDonald aren’t expected to return to reality anytime soon.
I wonder what happens when both men figure out their ‘all diesel buses all the time’ ideology actually ‘makes global warming worse’ (than just driving alone in a fuel efficient car). Maybe Adam P can tell us. Do they finally wake up to reality? Do they achieve their dreams and finally leave Seattle and go back east as each has wished for years?
MacDonald either isn’t very smart, OR has been deluded by his oppressive pie-in-sky tolling hallucinations As such, MacDonald fits right in with the gang of angry old white guy malcontents who have been fighting light rail here for decades.
10% percent of Metro’s buses are all electric (and they carry 30% of the ridership). They are called electric trolley buses. They run on the same power that Link will run on. There is no reason there couldn’t be more of them. Back in WWII when Seattle Transit carried 130 million riders (read more than Metro and Sound Transit combined carry today) most of the service was provided by Trolley Buses. There is no good reason, given the exigencies of climate change, we couldn’t ramp up trolley bus use. You could 50 miles of trolley wire up much faster than 50 miles of light rail. Just a thought.
What multimodal man said. Electrifying the rest of the non-freeway frequent service routes (http://transit.metrokc.gov/tops/bus/serv-freq.html ) would seem to be relatively high benefit for cost.
I was going to steer this around some, though I like some of the recent comments especially these about increasing electric service and such. I think we should be able to have light rail and a major increase in electric bus service too. Nice seeing the new Hybrids in the tunnel too!
My rub rests with the way the commute is being framed as the topper in the debate as to why people sprawl rather then just settle in Seattle. I’m pretty sure availability of affordable family homes is higher on the list then transit. But the topper for us is entirely different. First of all, there is no way I would send my kids to Seattle schools, that’s just a given. Therefore there is not any way I would have continued to live in Seattle. The end.
For a lot of people, this is a no-brainer, that they kind of do this old fashioned and maybe almost forgotten thing of well, I don’t know, putting their family first and making sure their home is in a decent family oriented place. Try taking a toddler around most neighborhoods in Seattle. Can we get a list of which parks do and which don’t have abandoned drug parephenalia? Which have unscopped dog droppings and which ones don’t. Maybe which have kept playground equipment and which have old rusty playground equipment. How about an area where you can walk with a kid that doesn’t eventually cross an eight lane throughfare filled with mad commuters for several hours each day.
As far as being a desirable place to raise a family, Seattle has grown beyond that place and, prove me wrong, but I don’t see any turning back. Having lived in this area my whole life, I would say Seattle started losing the qualities for this back in the eighties. I bring this part back up because it’s being discussed here why aren’t more people settling in Seattle rather than sprawling outward and quite frankly, many people like myself just want more for their families and for their future. IMO Seattle blew it on that one years ago with it’s greed to become a large “world class city” without stopping and really looking at what makes one that way. This is no Hamburg or London here, and neither is it heading that direction, there’s really no debating that.
I just wanted to re-direct a little because the first poster seems to be dismissing everything McDonald is saying outright in their comments, when some of what McDonald is pointing out about Seattle and sprawl is so dead on target you can’t get any closer to it, and our current “leaders” should get more of a clue, because I don’t think this area has the best leadership at the present, and I believe a change has to start somewhere. Of course for those eligible to vote, you do have the oppotunity to effect change, for better or for worse by voting your choices as well. Please set aside some time and learn about your candidates, I know it’s not easy, mostly just finding the time, but it can be interesting.
I also agree that GMA needs to be given more time, it’s really a big step in the right direction. Some counties elsewhere in the state have really used it to great effect and with good leadership the same could happen here in King.
I do this every single day. No offense, but sounds like you haven’t been following the news in Northeast Seattle. New playgrounds at Ravenna Park and Ravenna-Eckstein Community Center (among other places around the city). The PI reports “High enrollment cramps North End elementary schools”. Bryant Elementary has 532 students this year! Roosevelt High School is a top performing public school (and if you’d prefer private school, Seattle has those too).
You may also enjoy the comments over at
http://noisetank.com/hugeasscity/2008/09/03/do-families-matter/
including mine, pointing out that in Seattle and all over the world there are already urban families living in small apartments. My family is high on my priority list, and my wife and I feel that while Seattle certainly has a lot of room for improvement it’s a great place to have a young family.