Month: March 2014

Paul Constant, The Stranger:

On the other hand, Seattle sure does feel awful bubble-like lately, doesn’t it? There’s so much construction happening everywhere that I’m reminded of Seattle in 2000, or 2008. And worse, it’s all aimless, unfocused construction of the kind where everyone is building the exact same type of building over and over again—luxury condos, with retail on the ground floor—and some of them are certainly doomed to fail. How much retail-on-the-ground-floor does Seattle need? Shouldn’t we be smarter about growth, and consider holistically what this city needs? Even worse, all of the construction is aimed at the wealthy, and in today’s America, we all know that there are only a limited number of wealthy people to go around.

I call your attention to the post because Paul’s remarks do a good job of illustrating how most people think about housing supply and demand.

Paul is absolutely right to sense the outward manifestations of, if not a bubble, then at least a general frothiness in the Seattle real estate market. Cranes are everywhere. 10,000 units opened this year and nearly 15,000 will open in 2015. Housing prices are rising. Houses are getting multiple bids, often well above asking price. Coincidentally, housing prices are now almost exactly where they were when Seattle Bubble author Tim Ellis started his blog in 2005.

However, none of that proves we’re in a “bubble” per se. My best read of the market right now is that we have low supply and high demand driving prices up. In 2007, there were over 12,000 single-family homes on the market in King County. Today there are just 3,000, despite the increase in population.  Real estate bubbles are typically fueled by large numbers of people borrowing easy money to buy a home that everyone assumes will appreciate wildly. Today, relatively few people qualify for a mortgage and even fewer can find a house to buy (in Seattle, anyway). 

Also, to my eye there appear to be far fewer “luxury” developments than the last housing boom. What I see are mostly apartment buildings targeted at renters, not ornate condos like Escala in Belltown. I do agree that the style of multi-housing is fairly monotonous: 6-story “breadboxes” with retail on the ground floor. But that has more to do with the zoning codes than anything else. Will all that retail fill up? Hard to say. There are only so many tanning salons and Potbelly sandwich shops to go around (and many retail categories, from travel agents to bookstores, simply no longer exist). In the long run, though, I’m not sure how much it matters. On Capitol Hill, the auto repair shops of yesteryear have been converted to serve truffle fries and roasted brussel sprouts. Spaces can be adapted.

I also think it’s interesting to say that some of these developments are “doomed to fail.” Fail for whom? We overbuilt in 2000 and 2008, but the housing stock that was created during those periods was all filled up by 2003 and 2011, respectively. Some developers took it on the chin, no doubt, but that’s the game. Meanwhile, Seattle got more housing. In the long run, yesterday’s luxury housing becomes tomorrow’s middle-income housing.

Again, I don’t bring this up to pick on anyone. I think Paul’s expressing a common sentiment when it comes to real estate development. I just think it’s worth considering the costs and benefits of development from a few different angles.

Just a reminder that on April 2nd from 5:30-7:30pm Seattle Transit Blog is co-hosting a meetup at Hattie’s Hat in Ballard with Seattle Subway, in order to help raise money for Move King County Now.  City Councilmember and Sound Transit Board member Mike O’Brien will be speaking, STB writers will be present, and light snacks provided.

Details/RSVP here.

I made an after cuts version of my frequent transit map to show how many neighborhoods throughout the city will lose frequent service if Metro cuts service due to a funding shortfall.

Explore the picture itself here.

by DAVID SEATER

On Tuesday Sound Transit hosted an open house to present the 60% designs for the Bellevue Transit Center and Hospital stations on East Link, incorporating feedback from the 30% design presentation last May and the cost-savings changes approved in April 2013. These stations are expected to open in 2023 and will generate 7,000 of East Link’s projected 50,000 daily riders in 2030. The presentation and meeting materials are available on Sound Transit’s website. As elsewhere along East Link, ST is still in the process of selecting final names for these stations.

Highlights of the design changes include:

• Canopies at the Bellevue Transit Center now cover the majority of the platforms.
• A new eastern entrance to the Bellevue Transit Center station due to the revised station location along NE 6th St.
• Hospital Station will have stops for RapidRide curbside along 8th in the existing locations and a drop-off loop for Access paratransit immediately adjacent to the station.
• A Sound Transit owned and maintained pedestrian path will connect Hospital station directly to 116th Ave NE.
• The tunnel underneath 110th Ave NE will be dug using the Sequential Excavation Method instead of the previously proposed cut-and-cover method.

Representatives from the City of Bellevue and the Bellevue Light Rail Permitting Citizen’s Advisory Committee were also present to introduce the Downtown Livability initiative, station area planning, the redesign of the Bellevue City Hall plaza, and a new downtown neighborhood association.

Continue reading “Bellevue TC & Hospital Station 60% Design”

As workers continue to search for any survivors in the devastating Oso mudslide, Community Transit has just started a new alternate bus route, 231, serving Darrington and nearby communities that lost service on route 230 due to the blockage of State Route 530. The route takes the long way around, via State Route 20 through Skagit County.

The schedule is available here. Community Transit is also working with affected residents to form vanpools.

Our hearts go out to those who lost loved ones in this tragedy. Our gratitude goes out to the army of rescue workers who have done everything from providing food, shelter, clothing, and transportation, to digging through the muck to find anyone who might still be alive under there.

When passenger train service is on the ballot, there always seems to a group saying that bus rapid transit (BRT) is better than rail. The Eastside Transportation Association (ETA) was that group in 2008, when voters passed Sound Transit 2.

Here is an ETA campaign piece calling for “BRT” instead of Light Rail Transit, from that 2008 campaign. By BRT, the group really means an enlargement of the network of express bus service.

Here is another ETA campaign piece calling for “Bus Rapid Transit”, with a headline (pg. 5) of “We Need More Transit – NOW!“, also from the 2008 campaign.

Oddly, ETA is now campaigning to downsize the regional express bus network, such as it is, by working to defeat King County Proposition 1.

There isn’t anything in Proposition 1 about building rail for ETA to complain about. Proposition 1 is about saving the Metro bus service we currently have. Also, cities would get 40% of the funding stream from Proposition 1 to do needed maintenance of bridges, roads, and sidewalks.

Defeat of Proposition 1 would lead to King County Metro having to cut 17% of its bus service hours. Nearly every eastside bus route would be impacted. In particular, 12 of Metro’s 21 eastside commuter express routes would be cut entirely.

The Eastside Transportation Association did not respond to my request to clarify its position on Proposition 1, but the most recent statement it has on the topic makes it clear it is opposed, and believes too much money is already being spent on buses.

Although the City Council’s final compromise wasn’t quite everything car-free living advocates might have wanted, the legislation as a whole could be a positive event for Seattle. It’s positive if it’s the first, rather than the last, step in the evolution of how Seattle pays for car rides.

Anna Minard provided the most concise summary of what the bill does:

• Rideshare companies—that’s uberX, Lyft, and Sidecar, which are being referred to as “Transportation Network Companies”—must abide by a rule that no more than 150 drivers can be active on their system, ready to pick up passengers, at a time. Given that Uber last week revealed they currently have about 900 drivers and “regularly exceed” 300 drivers on system at a time, that could really change their service.

• Allows for-hire drivers to pick up street hails but not passengers from taxi stands. (Until now, they’ve been barred from picking up people hailing cabs on the street and limited to only picking up prearranged passengers.)

• Adds 200 new taxi licenses over the next two years.

• Adds new insurance and safety regulations to the app-based services, while also trying to block TNCs from working around the driver caps by creating multiple shadow companies. It also gives the city council authority to remove the cap on the number of drivers in the future, instead of leaving it to city regulators.

For users of everything other than the TNCs, this is an unmitigated good thing. On-demand car travel becomes much easier with for-hire drivers available for immediate use and more taxis.

The impact on TNC users is mixed. The old situation is an unregulated gray area with few rider protections. The bill creates those protections, while forcing a de facto decrease in the supply of drivers. The latter is bad for consumers, but I can appreciate the Council’s position. It makes no sense to destroy the taxi industry with onerous regulation while allowing a competitor to operate without limitations. A superior solution for consumers would be to lift taxi caps too, but the conservative thing to do is to ease the taxi caps and for-hire restrictions while hobbling the TNCs enough to give their competitors some breathing room.*

That’s all fine as an intermediate step. The ultimate policy objective should be to phase out arbitrary caps on all sorts of driver services. A city where it’s easy to get a ride when you need one is a city where not owning a car is a very attractive option, which will boost transit ridership and decrease the crippling weight of parking pressure on our land use. That’s what the three anti-cap Councilmembers (Burgess, Bagshaw, and Rasmussen) seemed to understand, and I applaud them for their vision.

*One can certainly quibble with the level of the cap, but then the TNCs were notoriously secretive about their driver numbers until the last moment.

• Sound Transit to buy 5 double-decker buses for routes operated by Community Transit.
• Washington State Ferries looking for a new leader, many challenges to come.
• Seattle Tunnel Partners will make changes to meet WSDOT contracting requirements for minority and women owned business.
• Advisory committee recommends new Tacoma Amtrak station at east end of Freighthouse Square.
• NYC building massive Hudson Yards “overtrack” development, Seattle’s DPD recently looked at overtrack development opportunities (p.44) south of King Street Station.
• Seattle’s comprehensive plan update, Seattle 2035, is getting rolling. Three directions proposed, but some feel they lack vision. To me they feel very PSRC. Background info here.
• SDOT issues a clarification about changes to Alaskan Way Viaduct traffic count locations which had originally prompted a sightline post.
• Lean urbanism: a fancy name for tactical, cheap interventions that make better people places… like parklets.
• City announces 10 new parklet locations for 2014 based on success of the first parklet outside Montana (my favorite bar btw).
• Get a sneak peak of the First Hill Streetcar maintenance facility on April 3rd thanks to Young Professionals in Transportation. (Members only, become a member here)

This is an open thread.

While Metro kept itself afloat through a combination of reserves, cutting nonessential services, and legislative authorization for a two-year, $20 vehicle license fee that expires this year, Community Transit went over the cliff in 2010 with a cumulative cut of 160,000 annual service hours, including all Sunday and Holiday service.

CT’s new draft Transit Development Plan (pdf) will use increasing tax revenue from the economic recovery to restore 73,000 annual service hours in increments through 2019, with the biggest chunk coming in 2015. CT will remain a shadow of its former self, even before considering the growth in Snohomish County in the intervening decade. 2014 is the first year that sales tax revenue will exceed 2007, in nominal dollars. Adjusted for the consumer price inflation — to say nothing of fuel and labor costs, the main drivers for a transit agency — CT is still 10% lower.

Although Metro is presumably experiencing similar trends, they only partially offset the various temporary measures that have preserved overall service levels and expire soon. Expect a full report on Metro’s financial state this week.

Details on CT’s proposed service additions are below the jump.

Continue reading “Community Transit Begins the Recovery”