Month: April 2014

Danny Westneat had a column last week on the rapid development of South Lake Union and Denny Triangle that elicited a fair amount of eye-rolling from the urbanist set in my Twitter feed. Here’s the nut graf:

I’m no Lesser Seattle type. Growth means jobs, and density means a vital city. But wasn’t it supposed to be managed growth, or smart growth? Plopping down the biggest development in city history on two blocks with little provision for infrastructure seems helter-skelter. Not smart.

I admit I rolled my eyes the first time through as well, especially when I got to the only quote in the piece, from reliable density foe John Fox.  But let’s take Westneat at his word that he’s in favor of smart growth, where we plan for transit, schools, and parks to go along with our deluxe apartments in the sky.

If you really want smart growth, it follows that you’d need more central planning — something Seattleites have traditionally resisted.  In fact, you’d want the exact opposite of the decentralized, neighborhood-driven process that Fox’s SDC advocates.

Instead of quoting the SDC, Westneat might have taken the opportunity to highlight Seattle 2035, the major planning initiative currently being undertaken by DPD.  Or, he might have looked to his paper’s own archives, where an accessible story comparing Seattle, Portland and Vancouver, written 11 years ago during the last building boom, is still quite relevant:

But when it comes to livability, we seem stuck in first gear and our neighbors are more than a little condescending. Seattle’s OK, they say, but a little crass. Yokels on planning. Bumpkins on design.

“Seattle has an ethic of passivity,” says Portland developer John Russell. “People throw up their hands and say there’s nothing we can do.”

“I can’t figure out why you guys don’t build better buildings,” says Homer Williams, the developer behind the burgeoning new Pearl District and the upcoming Macadam restoration along the Willamette River.

…
Continue reading “Smarter Growth Means More Planning”

If you haven’t been following the Proposition 1 discussion obsessively, you might not have a firm idea of what the (now inevitable) Metro cuts will look like. David Lawson’s analysis of the Seattle and Eastside cuts are useful references, amended by the recent slight uptick in projected revenue.

South King County’s cuts are equally deep, but are not accompanied by a major restructure and so did not merit the kind of analysis David brought to the other subareas.

Metro’s website about the cuts is here.

[UPDATE: Here’s a document about phasing, where the first 166,000 hours go away this September.]

Proposition 1 is failing in early (but substantial) returns. With 30% of an estimated 38% turnout counted, the measure is failing 55%-45%. Barring an unexpected late surge in ballots, King County voters will get the road and bus systems they evidently deserve.

Faced with the choice between slightly higher taxes and draconian cuts to service, the voters have chosen the cuts. The impact will be most severe on the transit-dependent, but commuters of all modes, businesses in dense areas, clean air and water, and public health are all losers.

At the campaign party, King County Executive Dow Constantine indicated he would submit the legislation to cut 550,000 service hours in the next few days. Some officials expressed interest in trying again, perhaps at the city level, but in any case cuts will begin soon.

It is always imperative that Metro spend its dollars wisely. The King County Executive and Council must exercise real political courage to overcome the forces that resist reform of our route structure. In an expanding service environment, it would be possible to rationalize the system and take care of the scattered losers from any restructure, but today Metro must focus on the serving the most people it can, and the casualties are regrettable but inevitable.

One effect of the cuts will to be consolidate desirable service into a few trunk lines. It is more important than ever that these lines function effectively to avoid the total collapse of the system. In these corridors, cities must ignore complaints from other stakeholders and remove parking or general-purpose lanes to ensure these buses are not stuck in traffic. Moreover, future city transportation levies must invest in priority treatments for buses. The returns from these projects are often astronomical, and if anything the case for them has improved.

In these struggles, we look forward to the support of the many Proposition 1 opponents who were concerned that Metro was not spending its dollars effectively.

Update — As Cody pointed out, it might be nice to link to the actual article. Also, the original version of this post misspelled Ms Cutler’s second name.

Last week, Techcrunch’s Kim-Mai Cutler published an excellent – and detailed – summary of the history of housing, affordability and the housing development environment in the Bay Area. You may not be aware, but in the Bay Area in general and San Francisco in particular there has been a growing movement of people who are unhappy with gentrification and rising rents that they believe has been caused by the tech industry. Protesters have been blocking and vandalising Google buses and have even been known to harass Google employees at homes (full disclosure, I work for Google in Seattle). I highly recommend the post, it’s truly excellent, and a few interesting titbits jumped out at me, and I thought I would share them.

The big advancement in thinking in the article is about how rent control and NIMBYism interplay and create a startlingly hostile environment that pushes affordability out of anyone’s best interest:

San Francisco has a roughly thirty-five percent homeownership rate. Then 172,000 units of the city’s 376,940 housing units are under rent control. (That’s about 75 percent of the city’s rental stock.)

Homeowners have a strong economic incentive to restrict supply because it supports price appreciation of their own homes. It’s understandable. Many of them have put the bulk of their net worth into their homes and they don’t want to lose that. So they engage in NIMBYism under the name of preservationism or environmentalism, even though denying in-fill development here creates pressures for sprawl elsewhere. They do this through hundreds of politically powerful neighborhood groups throughout San Francisco like the Telegraph Hill Dwellers.

Then the rent-controlled tenants care far more about eviction protections than increasing supply. That’s because their most vulnerable constituents are paying rents that are so far below market-rate, that only an ungodly amount of construction could possibly help them. Plus, that construction wouldn’t happen fast enough — especially for elderly tenants.

So we’re looking at as much as 80 percent of the city that isn’t naturally oriented to add to the housing stock.

More below the fold.

Continue reading “Rent Control, Protectionism and Affordability”

Happy Election Day!(and Happy Earth Day!) If you haven’t mailed in your ballot, dropped it at a King County Elections drop-box, or voted at a live voting location, and it is not 8 p.m. Tuesday, April 22, 2014, yet, it is not too late.

If you have your ballot with you, carefully follow the instructions on the ballot envelope, place the ballot in the security envelope, seal all envelopes, and sign the outer envelope. Then get it to a drop site by 8 p.m.

If you take your ballot to a post office, be very sure it will be postmarked today, and make sure you put a first-class stamp worth at least 49 cents on it. If it is already past 6 p.m., there are no post offices at which you can get it postmarked today. Indeed, most postal locations close by 5:30.

If you don’t have your ballot with you, have lost it, or just want to cast your ballot in the privacy of a voting booth, voting sites are located at Union Station (the big art deco building next to Link’s International District / Chinatown Station, and the Sounder/Amtrak King Street Station) at the southeast corner of Jackson St. and 4th Ave S; Bellevue City Hall; and the King County Elections Headquarters in Renton.

If you are not sure how you plan to vote on King County Transportation District Proposition 1, Seattle Transit Blog has endorsed a “Yes” vote and spilled a lot of ink regarding the issue. Just peruse the RECENT POSTS at the right.

Tomorrow’s election is going to be close and every vote is going to count. As a daily reader of STB, I’m not worried about you voting Yes on Prop 1. But now is the time to get your friends, family and co-workers to vote as well as all of the other people that value Metro as much as you. Here are three things we can all do to get out the vote:

1. Take a few minutes out of your day to talk, call, text, or email your close friends, family and co-workers to vote Yes on Prop 1. Tell them why you’re voting yes, often people just need a little encouragement, especially for special elections. Here is why we’re voting yes.
2. Take to your social media to get out the vote. Change your Facebook profile, invite your friends to vote yes and tweet why you voted #YesOnProp1 to #SaveMetro (we’ll be RTing).
3. Help the campaign make calls. Move King County Now is hosting phone banks all day, with Pizza provided.

Today:

• 10 AM – 5 PM at 901 Fifth Ave, Suite 2200 710 2nd Ave (RSVP: matt@movekingcountynow.org for any 2 hour slot during the day!)
• 5:00 PM – 8 PM at 1100 E Union #1e (Help us call voters to remind them to mail in their ballots and Vote Yes on Prop 1 to Save Metro!)
• 5:30 PM – 8 PM at 1402 3rd Ave (RSVP: matt@movekingcountynow.org)

Tuesday:

• 10 AM – 5 PM at 901 Fifth Ave, Suite 2200 710 2nd Ave (RSVP: matt@movekingcountynow.org for any 2 hour slot during the day!)

Tuesday night the Move King County Now campaign will be hosting an election night party at Kells Irish Restaurants & Pub  (1916 Post Alley starting at 7 PM).

Ballots in King County’s special election must be postmarked by tomorrow, so now is the time to stop procrastinating and Vote Yes.

I suspect there are many voters out there that simply want to have as few of their taxes as possible going to transit. They’d be perfectly happy to not have public buses at all, or a system that only those in the most dire need would set foot on. If that’s your ideology — you simply haven’t bought into the enormous societal benefits of higher transit use — we’re just going to have to agree to disagree. All the squabbling about labor costs and efficiency are secondary to what you really want, so go out and vote your principles.

For the rest of you, any angst you might feel about this vote comes down to the gap between Metro as it is and Metro as you would like it to be, or perhaps the gap between a vehicle license fee with a low-income rebate and a different tax. We’re aware of those gaps; Seattle Transit Blog has probably thought more than any other organization about how to improve Metro dollar-for-dollar. But a voter more interested in good transit service than “sending a message” needs a theory of change: how a no vote will lead to improvement in whatever Metro is not doing well.

Rejection of this tax will not rally the legislature to produce a more progressive taxing source. Deep cuts to transit service are not going to punish the forces that keep our taxes regressive, and in fact will give them a solid argument that even King County voters just don’t care about preserving transit service levels.

Minor efficiencies aren’t worth deep cuts. True, a crisis at Metro might wring some concessions out of the union, but not enough to make up for the cuts, the suffering of the transit dependent, and the numbers of people who will give up on Metro and decide it’s useless for them. It is no way to build a system. The really big restructures over the past half-decade are connected to qualitatively new service — Link and RapidRide — rather than the specter of cuts. A growing system is easier to restructure than a shrinking one.

If you think Metro is a pretty good agency, vote Yes. If you think Metro could improve greatly, stand with the experts on Metro improvement at STB and vote Yes.

It’s become fashionable in progressive coastal cities to start planning for the reality of climate change, particularly sea level rise. Locally, Sound Transit says “the Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (SEIS) for the Long-Range Plan update will consider the potential rise in sea level and localized flooding that may occur as a result of climate change based on GIS data currently available.” Although maps of the Seattle Archipelago are an interesting thought exercise, in the foreseeable future rising seas are likely to be much less dramatic. Nevertheless, plausible sea level predictions do have implications for Sound Transit’s long range plan.

Sound Transit 1 and 2 rail lines will suffer little in the next hundred years or so, although the elevated Boeing Access Road section may become a causeway over water or frequent flooding. Although Seattle is fortunate to find most of itself at elevation, Sound Transit 3 and beyond face serious constraints. Hopefully, Seattle will allow thriving, dense neighborhoods to grow around those stations; if those station areas are under immediate threat, the value of the entire alignment is doubtful.

A wildly optimistic estimate as to when light rail might open to Ballard and/or West Seattle is 2030. A map I found that projects what the coastline might look like 50 years after that is at right.

A few immediate observations from this map:

• An approach to West Seattle on or west of 1st Ave S is a little dicey.
• Interbay is a terrible place to create a new neighborhood, suggesting an eastern approach to Ballard is more responsible.
• The idea of a “Rainier Valley Bypass” via E. Marginal Way to speed up South Link trips seems bankrupt, in particular because it would likely come after Sound Transit 3.
• South Sounder looks to be in pretty good shape; coastal North Sounder, not so much.
• The Deep Bore Tunnel is not well-positioned, but its lack of futureproofing extends well beyond the sea level.

Continue reading “Link and the Rising Seas”

On Fridays some friends and I have a semi-regular tradition of grabbing sandwiches from Tat’s (go with either the Italian Grinder or the Tatstrami) and heading over to Waterfall Garden Park to relax and pontificate on what needs to be done to make this city perfect.  It’s one of my favorite parks in Seattle, a place I make sure to take visiting friends and family.  A great resting point after a long week of work or a day showing off downtown.  What makes it so great:

 

 

 

1. I can get to it. I don’t have long for lunch so need a place located where I am.  Same thing when showing off the city to people.  It needs to be where we are.

2. It’s worth going to.  An actual three story waterfall in the middle of the city, with maintained ‘green space’, a glass roof (it’s not always bright and sunny) and in winter, heating.  It’s not some barren wind/water swept empty plaza.

3. It’s enjoyable to just be there. The tables and chairs (plus above mentioned setting) make it a great place for people to be.  And it’s great to be around people.  And yes, maybe this makes me a bad progressive, but there are security and maintenance staff that help make it a pleasant experience.

Where is your urban oasis and what makes it great?