Roger Valdez over at Seattle’s Land Use Code has a pretty amazing piece today about the analysis – or lack of it – that went into Sound Transit’s decision to waste the airspace above the Roosevelt station and build what amounts to a suburban commuter station.
This isn’t really new. In the US, transportation agencies aren’t incentivized properly to get involved in land use. Their incentive is to build the lowest risk option available to them, which is, unfortunately, generally a terrible choice for the neighborhood.
In this case, Sound Transit claims they did no economic analysis of potential development on their Roosevelt site before deciding it wasn’t worth it. With a six story mixed use building adjacent to them on one side, and a developer who’d like to build 12-15 stories on the other side of the street, I have no problem calling that decision embarrassingly dumb for the neighborhood.
Unfortunately for us people who care, it’s quite smart for the agency. They’re not a developer – they can’t spin up a limited liability corporation to build a building and then let that LLC declare bankruptcy if the building fails. They’re stuck with what they build, which means the risk to them is very high – both financially and politically – if they don’t have an absolutely sure thing. It makes sense that they wouldn’t do an economic analysis, because the chances are vanishingly small that it would show them anything other than “don’t build anything but the station.”
What really needs to happen here is that we need to fix Sound Transit’s incentives. There aren’t easy solutions here – it’s essentially impossible for them to partner with a developer when they have a ten year planning timeframe. But there are solutions, and we need to make them happen soon enough that the agency doesn’t become hated by the neighborhoods it builds in – because that’s a great way to sink ST3 and beyond.