Month: May 2012

Update: The current Yesler Terrace project is 22-acres. The redevelopment is expanding it to 30 acres. So I’ve updated the math. Point still holds.

The Seattle Times ran an article about concerns over the Yesler Terrace replacement project. What jumped out at me:

[Hired land use consultant Matthew] Gardner is skeptical that Yesler can capture 10 to 15 percent of new residential development citywide, which he says the plan calls for. But Heartland points out that Belltown grabbed 22 percent of the city’s new housing in the 1990s.

Yesler Terrace is 22-acres, or about 3.4% of a square mile[1]  30 acres or 4.7% of a square mile. With 5,000 units and assuming only one person living in each unit[2], that’s a residential density of 145,455 106,667 people per square mile, more than twice one and a half times the density of Manhattan. The project will also have a good deal of office space, some open space and a community center.

The city can plan on putting 10-15% of new residential development citywide[3] on 3.4 4.7% of a square mile and 0.04% of the city’s area, with mostly mid-rise buildings, through the magic of density. In Black Diamond, 6,500 units are being built on 1,500 acres. I know I’m preaching to the choir, but this is why dense construction near transit is so important. Though we are building rapid transit access to only a small portion of a the city, it clearly could be very easy to accommodate all new housing construction in just the planned Link station areas. Sadly, we are mostly getting new parking lots and vicious fights.

1. It is possible the development project is larger than this, though I cannot find evidence of that.
2. Obviously there will be more than one person per unit.
3. I am not sure what time frame that is supposed to be over.

Until Link goes more places, enthusiasts from other parts of the city will need excuses to come to the Rainier Valley. This week’s excuse is the Franklin (High School Arts Festival, Saturday, May 19th from 11am to 3pm. The school is clearly visible from Mt. Baker Station. From PTSA president Elizabeth Lowry:

The festival will feature student performances, including the steel drum band, kung fu team, jazz band, Quaker band and lion dancers, along with displays of visual art, ceramics and wood arts. Franklin High School is celebrating its 100th birthday this year.

Plants and art will be for sale as well. See past Link excuses here.

The headline in the Capitol Hill Seattle blog pretty much says it all:

Facing ‘unprecedented wave’ of development, letter gives design board license to kill (bad projects)

Well I’m afraid to deliver the bad news, but no it doesn’t. Design review was never intended to kill projects whether they were deemed “bad” by the public or even by the design review committee. The purpose of design review is to provide “a forum for citizens, developers and the City to review and guide the design of qualifying commercial and multifamily development projects (emphasis mine).”

It is simply appaling that two sitting Councilmembers would write a letter fanning community hostility toward development and that they would imply that design review is a forum to stop projects. In fact, every design review committee I’ve attended the chair of the committee has to go to great lengths to remind neighbors who oppose a project that design review isn’t a way to change underlying zoning, stop a project, or even repurpose or redirect a project.

The purpose of design review was supposed to be to allow new development minor departures in exchange for modifying design in accordance with generally accepted design guidelines. Some neighborhoods have developed their own guidelines with more refinements. But as many have pointed out before, design review is a feeble measure for neighborhoods who want to “kill” new development. I think that’s a good thing and that’s what the law says.

I’ve suggested other ideas about how design review could be modified along with introduction of zero based zoning, but the truth is the design review is not a way to kill projects and  shouldn’t become a vehicle for that, ever. At best, design reivew is a give and take process to help move beyond neighborhood objections and get projects built.

Tom Rassmussen and Sally Clark should be embarrassed and ought to make an effort to counter the impression the Capitol Hill blog has created. All their letter and the post does is promote a common misconception about design reivew and add more frustration and costs to people who are trying to follow the law and get their projects built. And furthermore, it stokes an already frantic obession among some that we’re facing some kind of swarm of bad development. We need more housing options in Seattle and Councilmembers who will encourage and support growth, not make it harder for our city to accomodate more people by vilifying developers.

Today Puget Sound Sage released a new report on Transit Oriented Development (TOD) in the Rainier Valley. It  outlines changes seen in the Valley over the last decade, makes an environmental and social equity arguments for a greater emphasis on affordable housing and living wage jobs in TOD, enumerating racial justice principles for TOD,  and calls for urgent and aggressive actions and creation of tools necessary to achieve these principles. Tonight at 5:30 at the Filipino Community Center (5740 M.L. King Jr. Way South, Seattle, WA 98118) Puget Sound Sage will hold a panel discussion on their findings.

I have only had time to skim the document, but my first impress is that the report does a good job setting the context, honing in on specific problems of concern not usually focused on, and then proposing strategies to address these problems. Many of these strategies however, not surprisingly, require public money to get them off the ground as well as legislative changes on the regional and state level. I’m also very happy to see that the report is not a rebuke of TOD and development in the Valley, but rather in my reading, a call for TOD that more aggressively aims to benefit existing residents.

Below is a list of recommendations included in the executive summary. Continue reading “Report, Event: TOD that is Healthy, Green & Just”

It’s hard to disagree with David Apert’s recent post titled “Affordable housing advocates should talk about land use… and land use advocates need to talk about affordability,” but I do. The problem isn’t that the two groups are talking past one another, but that they both make the same mistake, putting too much emphasis on housing price rather than pushing for fewer rules and less regulation of housing production. Obsession with price leads to price interventions that only make things worse. Consider the parable of the hot dog vendors.

Continue reading “Hot Dogs and Housing: Moving Beyond Affordability”

In my previous post, I proposed selling carrots on Metro buses, and allowing people to use their ORCA cards for this purchase. 

ORCA cards have the ability for what’s called an E-Purse.  This stores money on your ORCA card for travel that isn’t covered by a regular pass.  I use my E-Purse* to pay for the occasional ferry trip, which is outside the coverage area of my pass, and deposit money into it using a credit card and ORCA’s website. 

When writing the carrot piece I had no idea if ORCA cards could theoretically be used to purchase non-transit goods and services.  After all, if your employer is paying for part of your ORCA card and recieving a tax benefit for doing so, it wouldn’t make sense to allow people to buy carrots (or anything else) with that money.  So I sent an e-mail to the contact page on the ORCA website, and recieved this reply (emphesis mine):

The E-purse that is on the ORCA card can only be used for transportation services.  The reason for this is to prevent cardholders who receive transportation benefits from using them for non-transit purposes in keeping with FTA and IRS regulations.  However, there is memory capacity on the card to implement a second E-purse that could be used for non-transit purchases.  Although this isn’t on our short term horizon, it may be something that we explore in the future. 

So it’s possible.  Let’s think of the implications of carrying real money on your ORCA card.

• Just as it’s quick and easy to board a bus using ORCA, you could pay quickly at convenience stores. 
• Pay for parking with a swipe? 
• Vending machines.
• Bus carrots.

Of course, these benefits would be incentives for more people to carry an ORCA card.  And it turns out that there’s at least two systems that have already implemented this – Tokyo’s Pasmo and Suica Cards.

* Which I always coordinate with my E-Shoes – it’s a bold look for a man.

U-Link construction, as documented by the Traylor/Frontier-Kemper joint venture.

This is an open thread.

With U-Link coming online by the end of 2016, rail will serve some of our densest neighborhoods as well as one of the largest employment centers in the region.  To date, however, most of our attention has been absorbed by development opportunities and disputes further up around other North Link stations.  While the UW Station area is a less than ideal candidate for a dense interconnected grid of mixed-use development, it does provide a unique opportunity to reviving what has been a traditionally an auto-dominant area.

Because the station will be located just to the south of Husky Stadium and Montlake Triangle, a significant TOD barrier rests in the fact that the area’s immediate vicinity is all University-owned land, comprised of medical, athletic, and recreational facilities.  These are, by no means, small buildings, and the local geography and street network alone create irregularities in subdivision potential.  There are also major institutional hurdles to jump when even considering breaking up large tracts of University land for private development.

More below the jump.

Continue reading “UW Station, An Opportunity”

At a 2:30 press conference today at Tukwila Int’l Blvd Station, Sound Transit spokesman Bruce Gray and Chief of Police Ron Griffin announced the discovery that approximately 4.2 miles and 70,000 pounds of copper wire has been stolen from within LINK’s hollow elevated guideway.  With the exception of the stations themselves, all of the wire between Rainier Beach and SeaTac Airport has been stolen.   The copper wire sections – roughly an inch in diameter – function to isolate stray current that might otherwise be absorbed by the structure, slowly weakening it over a period of decades.  At current copper prices, the theft is valued well over $200,000.

Gray and Griffin were understandably unwilling to discuss the details of ingress points that allowed the thieves to access the guideway, but they did say that upon successful access there would have been no way to know that anyone was within the structure.  Gray stressed that there are no operational safety concerns related to the theft, and that the wire was strictly for the purposes of reducing stress on the concrete and rebar, thus extending the useful life of the structure. Sound Transit expects to replace the copper within 2-3 months.

Sound Transit is seeking the public’s help with any information that might lead to the discovery and arrest of the thieves. Anyone with information is encouraged to call the King County Sheriff’s office (206) 296-3311.

Anecdotally, I’ve been having a lot more success with OneBusAway the last few weeks. I asked OBA point man S. Morris Rose if it has been restored to the accuracy level of, say, a year ago:

At some level, OBA per se hasn’t changed at all, but there have been fixes inside the KCM network that have fixed a lot of the problems. In one instance, there were problems with the integration of the new and old types of AVL data. In another, there were problems with buffering of GTFS-based real-time data. Brian Ferris- yes, he yet walks this earth- fixed both of those particular problems, and I would agree that things are much better now than they were before.

Have we returned to the Golden Age of OBA for KCM users? I think that’s overstating recent advances. (Bear in mind that OBA serves Pierce, Community Transit, and Intercity users. None of this applies to any of them- their level of service has been solid.) Things are better than they were, but not as good as they were before that.

Mr. Rose believes it is “likely” that by the end of the year OBA will reach new highs for data quality, as GPS rolls out and the raw schedule data better reflects holiday (and UW off-day) reduced service levels.