Month: February 2009

I wrote a post arguing for increased density on Beacon Hill over at the Beacon Hill Blog. I’ve cross-posted the text here below the fold, and turned off the comments, so the discussion can happen over there and hopefully we can change some minds in that neighborhood. Continue reading “Density Good For Beacon Hill”

We’ve been talking a lot about transit oriented development over the past weeks, and the Seattle Times has picked up the story of a Bel-Red area upzoning around the future light rail stations there. In a 1.5 square mile stretch of land between Bel-Red road and SR 520, Bellevue will upzone to allow 12-15 story buildings in exchange for developers paying to day-light buried creeks and building parks, part of a practice of exchanging building rights for public amenities nicknamed “incentive zoning”. Bellevue thinks this plan could bring 4.5 million square feet of office space and 5,000 units of housing by 2030, plus some unspecified amount of parks space. If it works out, it’ll be a great example of applying recent lessons of New Urbanism in our area, and even the Seattle Times editorial board is oh so slightly impressed.

I think Seattle needs to do the same thing around the two stations in Sodo and the two U-District stations. The land around Sodo isn’t perfect for development since it’s in a soil liquefaction zone where the cost of building large structures is significantly more expensive. However, recently remarkable progress has been made in construction technologies for liquefaction zones, and the University of California system is building a massive research campus in a similar industrial soil liquefaction zone in San Francisco, next to their new T-Third Street light rail line. If it can happen there, it can happen here.

The University District has extremely unimpressive zoning currently. The neighborhood is capped at the normal NC-65 or NC-85 zoning for most of the area, which allow for 65 or 85 foot tall buildings, while there are already several high-rises, and many old brick buildings taller than that. A couple 12-15 story buildings there won’t hurt anyone, especially if they come with nice amenities like green space or affordable housing.

TOD seems to be an area where Bellevue is moving ahead of Seattle.

For those of you who missed the notice, our next meet-up is going to be Wednesday, February 25, in the International District.  Click here for the details and instructions on how to sign up.

There have been a couple of comments recently about HB 1490 that basically plead for us not to call people NIMBYs, arguing that people have legitimate concerns, etc, etc.

First of all, we reject the premise that density and walkability make a neighborhood worse.  At the same time, people have a different aesthetic sense of this and there’s no moral content in that judgment.  But even if you accept the argument that density is an unfortunate requirement of our environmental situation, that doesn’t free people of the NIMBY charge.

Typically, whatever project a NIMBY opposes actually will have negative impacts on the neighborhood.  No one’s property values ever went up because a jail or sewage plant was built close to their home.  So in a narrow sense they’re entirely justified in opposing the project.

The point of the NIMBY epithet is that from a regional perspective the projects are of critical importance, and have to go somewhere.  No one argues that we can get by without having any prisons or sewage plants.  The frustrating thing is that those protesting the project typically want the service —  we ought to detain dangerous criminals, or treat sewage before it goes into the water supply.  They just want someone else to pay the proximity costs of that service.

To bring this back to the TOD bill, in liberal Seattle, no one is going to come out and say that we shouldn’t have more dense neighborhoods somewhere.   People can be “pro-environment” and “pro-density,” but the “character” of their neighborhood just so happens to be incompatible with environmentally sustainable, dense development.  They perceive those lifestyles as having net costs and want someone else to bear them.  Meanwhile there are a very finite number of rail stations where really dense development makes sense, so they are de facto arguing for a reduction in the number of densely constructed units in the region.

I don’t think anyone believes the bill is perfect, and there are people working with Futurewise and TCC to fix the problems that do exist.  But there’s also a lot of solid opposition to the bill from people that think higher zoning is Stalinism, or that are “pro-density” but just don’t want it wherever they are.  It reminds me of the “pro-transit” people who could never seem to bring themselves to support any transit measure that actually ever went to the ballot.