- There are openings for the design review board in Seattle. My thoughts on this from 2011 are still relevant.
- In Fauntleroy, 5 stories and 32 units constitute a “monster.”
- Design for buildings on top of CHS now final. Not enough height, way too much open space.
- Mike Lindblom thoroughly investigates where Lynnwood Link’s cost overrun came from ($). Some of it is escalating contractor rates; most of the rest is cities asking for goodies where ST isn’t really empowered to say no.
- Mike Lindblom is also on reddit to chat about Sound Transit 3, basically now.
- An open house on Redmond Link Nov. 16th.
- The Seattle Times tackles the relationship between segregation and zoning ($).
- Big plans for Northgate Station.
- The Kitsap Sun has a four-parter on the new foot ferries: 1, 2, 3, with 4 to come.
- C-Tran getting rid of external bus ads.
This is an open thread.
As for CHS, why aren’t those building at least 10 stories tall? And, why do they need to waste that valuable space on a plaza, when there’s a giant park right next door?! We have learned nothing, and I fear that if we can’t do real density here – at the epicenter of a ‘needs to be dense’ space – then forget about hoping for it elsewhere.
If I remember right, Sound Transit didn’t want anything built on top of the station box, hence the plaza. The Capitol Hill Farmer’s Market will be using that space every Sunday at least.
I completely agree that the buildings should have been taller.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/43315334@N07/35623341673/in/dateposted-public/
What do you think, David. Should Stockholm fill that open space in?
https://www.flickr.com/photos/43315334@N07/26528540429/in/dateposted-public/
Because then nobody would want to live there to ride this.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/43315334@N07/26529002289/in/dateposted-public/
And you know, I was getting really tired of looking it this with not giant glass buildings in front of it, and blocking that ugly blue sky.
But meantime, I’m negotiating with Langley for about two low level passes over Seattle CBD with this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_boom
Growlers (not the beer glass) would work just fine, wouldn’t they, Joe? Well, one consolation. King Steet Station and Zeitgeist Cafe have withstood earthquakes. Doubtless Dale Chihuly can melt down all that glass in the street and…some things too horrible to describe, but museums buy them anyhow.
And also, with glass removed from the steel structure, maybe the sight of beautiful buildings could be back with us ’til architects can create something that doesn’t need to be demolished again for the reputation of Seattle.
The Black Hole of Calcutta had density, guys. And doubt it would’ve been much nicer vertical and clad in glass. So I’m going to concentrate on taking transit regional. With crash of 20-whatever, there’ll be a wealth of foreclosed acres of crap to buy cheap and reorganize for transit between places humans can live with.
Mark Dublin
There’s not enough public support yet for midrise neighborhood centers, so it can’t overcome the clamor to “keep it short”. People have real and imagined fears about losing sunlight, being in a concrete jungle, and more traffic congestion and competition for parking. Hopefully the clamor for midrise and “a home for everyone” will reach critical mass at some point but it hasn’t happened yet. When it does you’ll see the politicians and agencies racing to catch up and give us more Chicago-like and Vancouver-like neighborhoods. Unfortunately we couldn’t wait to build Link and some housing now because the housing shortage and transportation gap is so critical now.
You can see the previous iteration of this controversy at the north end of Broadway, where QFC moved out but the lots remained stagnant because the 4-story zoning limit wasn’t profitable enough. There was a huge controversy to raise it to 7 stories (which was already doing well on Bellevue Avenue) and it was delayed and delayed then finally approved, and whoosh the QFC site and Safeway site and others were rebuilt. The building at the top of the Y where Broadway, 10th, and Roy Street meet, went up just before the zoning change so it was stunted at four stories, and every year we’re deprived of the housing and community members that could have lived above it. So Capitol Hill station housing is coming in at the current zoning limit. (Seattle Central has the right to build 13-story educational buildings on its parcels, but it’s not ready to expand that much yet.)
“why aren’t those building at least 10 stories tall?” – because that would exceed the zoning limits set by the city of Seattle.
“because that would exceed the zoning limits set by the city of Seattle.”
Yes, I assume what felsen means is, “Why is the zoning limit so short?”, so that’s what I attempted to address.
In fact in Seattle, developers are building to the zoning limit because otherwise they’d be leaving demand unfulfilled. They’d build more if the zoning allowed them to.
In fairness this was all decided many years ago. Pretty much the entire 2000s was spent on community plans for TOD here. Now its actually finalized and beginning to actually be implemented.
It is too bad this beautiful old historic apartment building was needlessly torn down for this multi-block staging site on the corner of 10th & John. Could have provided affordable housing for the last 8 years. It was near the hole for the station but not in the path of it…
https://sherrlock.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/xeileeen-court-20091.jpg
https://pauldorpat.com/2013/03/23/seattle-now-then-the-gables-apartments-on-capitol-hill/
Also makes we wonder why this prime unused asphalt site sitting atop the station wasnt used the last few years for a fair/carnival/market/popup retail/tactical urbanism/cirque du soleil.
I wonder if density would be that much higher at ten stories. You have FAR limits and setbacks and that sort of thing — https://www.theurbanist.org/2014/09/02/85-foot-and-125-foot-height-limits-are-a-missed-opportunity/
OK, for that particular spot, I guess it would be OK. The plaza would work as part of the FAR, meaning you could put a “pencil” building next to it. But in general, the lack of really high buildings isn’t the problem. Height does not equal density. Brownstone areas of Brooklyn have density that is ten times higher than the average Seattle neighborhood, and they aren’t that tall at all.
Given the restrictive zoning forcing all of the density into “urban villages,” you absolutely need the height. I don’t foresee all of NE Seattle, for example, turning into Brooklyn brownstones ever.
It doesn’t seem to matter how much housing gets built. Prices keep going up and pretty soon no one making less than six figures will be able to live in the city (and even some of them might have problems, depending on what other expenses they have.) Everything that gets built is “luxury”. Anything that’s not “luxury” and that’s older gets purchased by developers for more “luxury” housing, and people who can’t afford the rents get displaced. More and more people keep moving in, and there’s never enough.
I used to think if we keep densifying, housing prices would stabilize, but that’s not happening. Of course we need to keep densifying, but I can see why some people believe that the more housing gets built, the more people will get displaced and have to move out of the city or become homeless? Because that seems to be what’s happening.
And the new mayor and city commissioner aren’t going to help with any of this.
Why is it such a good thing for an entire city to be upscale, only affordable to those with high-paying jobs?
It is just supply and demand. Lots and lots of demand, and not quite as much supply. Still more than we used to have, but not nearly enough to keep up with demand. Zoning has a lot to do with it. A very small percentage of the city is zoned multi-family (roughly 10%). This means just about all of the growth occurs on a tiny sliver of land. Quite often, the land already has an apartment. Do you tear down a two story apartment building to build a six story one? Only if rent is extremely high. Quite often there is another, valuable use for the property, like a restaurant. Again, it doesn’t make sense to build there unless rent is really high.
On the other hand, there is plenty of land which is obviously underdeveloped. In my neighborhood in the north end, it is common to see small houses on huge lots (bigger than the standard size). Developers simply build the maximum allowed, which means subdividing, and then building houses. So they tear down the old house, and build three new ones, each on a 7200 foot lot. So instead of small apartment building, or a dozen row houses or even a half dozen “normal size” houses on small lots, you have three giant houses. This does little to meet the demand for middle class housing, but is simply the result of an antiquated set of rules.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb#Portland.2C_Oregon
https://www.citylab.com/environment/2017/01/san-francisco-streetcar-burial-ban-colma-california/514028/
Have really started thinking the return of “Streetcar Suburbs” is worth starting to examine now. This is the mode that created many of the suburban areas later taken over by car transportation when enough people became able to buy cars.
We have a very large population sprawled over much territory. Which is now trapped by the very number of cars, providing no freedom or efficiency at all, because the’re trapped in traffic.
As the charm has worn itself off transportation only by car, I think public transit might start pooling with the development community to connect with existing lines exactly the way local streetcars began to be feeders into cross country tracks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb#Portland.2C_Oregon
And more or less exactly the way developers simply switched from streetcar/interurban suburb to city, and well as between city travel. Karlsruhe, Germany has long had the exact kind of thing I’m thinking about.
LINK’S future ST’s might look for development land close to where a LINK line is built, and find trainsets that can handle both street and high speed right of way service.
From the way Portland Max winds through parts of Portland with some relatively sharp curves, we could be able to use standard LINK trains, or their successors, to do the same. Worth trying,
Next decades, a livable life in this region will require some serious change of living patterns. So to me, no harm in a few tests. At worst, we’d end up with a few more transit friendly comfortably dense towns around the region.
Nothing to lose.
Mark
We keep building housing, but we’re still adding jobs faster than we add housing. For every apartment or condo we build, 2 or 3 new cubicles get added in downtown office buildings. Which is still a better ratio than it was a few years back.
The run down, hundred-year-old triplex in the CD that I used to rent is now unaffordable to me. No big developer there, no new “luxury units,” just a small family landlord, and simple market pressures. Rents in that building soaring even though no developer will ever want it, because the land it’s on is downzoned compared to the building on the lot.
Watched one of my friends finally complete a year-long quest to move out of his “temporary” apartment (that he’d been living in for 4 years) and buy a condo in an ST3 station area. Almost every single unit he was able to put an offer in over the course of his search on was on land that had been downzoned since the building had been built, in a building that would be illegal to build today. And every unit had at least a dozen offers far over asking; not “luxury” units (whatever that means), just 1980’s style condos with baseboard heaters and cookie cutter granite-counter kitchen remodels.
It’s like recycling plastics or switching to electric cars to solve climate change. It’s not nearly enough, and that’s why there hasn’t been any stabilizing effect yet. That doesn’t mean that climate change is a hoax. It means we’re severely understating the problem. Rents have been going up 5-10 percent since 2000 except the slight reversal in 2008-2011. That should have been an alarm call to upzone urban village centers to at least 14 stories and single-family areas citywide to lowrise to get the price increase back down to 2% to match inflation. But we didn’t, so prices went up, rich people are paying more, and working-class/poor people are being pushed out of the city or are a paycheck or two away from homelessness. It reversed in the recession but then came back even stronger than before.
Unfortunately the current situation gives the illusion that higher density is creating the price pressure, and that makes people like John Fox advocate that we just need to freeze zoning and discourage teardowns. But that won’t stop the increases, it accelerates them instead, look at San Francisco. In the early 90s rent was somewhat higher than Seattle and you had to look up[ to a month for a place rather than a couple days. By 2000 it had become ridiculous with people paying $600 to sleep on a sofa, and now it’s gotten way out of control with $3000-4000 rents, and average house prices in San Jose over a million dollars. Which can only exist if there are enough people able to pay $3000-4000 for them (or if they pack three people per room and the landlord/city allow them to), and over $1 million for a house. But there are enough affluent renters/buyers to fill up the units. So we obviously need a lot more. And we need a much larger amount of public housing like Britain and Germany have, not just for what the US calls the poor (the very destitute), but for the lower middle class who shouldn’t have to spend more than a third of their income on housing, and are locked out of some places if they don’t make three times the rent.
Also, don’t forget retirees who are living on fixed incomes and the impact on them from ever increasing property taxes and other levies. My mother-in-law is now facing being taxed out of the modest Seattle home she and her husband built, raised their family in and have lived in for some 50 plus years.
No matter how many times this trope gets debunked, it persists.
“DID YOU KNOW? State law provides two tax benefit programs for senior citizens and the disabled: property tax exemptions and property tax deferrals.”
http://www.kingcounty.gov/depts/assessor/TaxpayerAssistance/TaxRelief.aspx
Real people have all kinds of situations that programs like this don’t address. It’s like the issue of medical insurance premiums: some people don’t qualify for the subsidies but still can’t afford insurance, and others can’t afford insurance even with the subsidies but their state refuses to expand Medicare. I myself had a situation one year where my apartment building burned down and I had thousands of dollars in medical bills on my anemic individual insurance and I thought I could use the income tax deduction for these, but it turned out that the amounts weren’t high enough to qualify for the deductions (the threshold is 10% of income). So yes these policies help a lot of people, but others fall through the cracks due to the exact details of their situation. I can fully believe that Tlsgwm’s relative and Reg are falling between the cracks. What I disagreed with Reg about was that we shouldn’t let 1% of seniors be a reason to reject needed property taxes (i.e., ST3). That doesn’t mean throwing the seniors under the bus but it means finding another way to relieve their cost burden, and not foregoing transit or other public goods that the city needs tor its present and future well-being.
@Jon Wright
Just remember that you will become a senior citizen one day and when it happens you will find out what it is like to be on a fixed income while at the same time your expenses, taxes, etc.. are all going up and find out that you are not eligible for these senior citizen programs.
And oh yea don’t come back and say I should have prepared better for my retirement because I did but no one could have predicted the rise in the cost of living in the Seattle area that has happened in the past several years.
If it were me I would try to find some way to make such a valuable property generate some income so that I wasn’t living on a fixed income. Unfortunately I doubt I will ever be wealthy enough to be able to get into a prized location that has the potential for this issue to happen.
Mo money, mo problems. Or maybe it is mo wealth, mo problems.
Just to be clear, this is not a good thing. You have folks who are simply trying to live out their golden years, but now they have to navigate the world of reverse mortgages and government programs, just to stay in their home. There are lots of people who wish they had that problem, but is still a problem.
And the problem is due in part to zoning. Obviously the lack of an income tax plays a larger part, but either way, the problem is due to way too few residents in the city. Even if we had an income tax, the people who are house rich, but cash poor would be in trouble. Like the guy earning minimum wage being asked to pay sales tax on that taco he buys once a weak, he doesn’t have enough company. If the city had more people, more people would pay chip in, and the individual burden would be a lot less. A city with this much employment should have a lot more people, but we don’t, and a big part of the reason is our antiquated zoning rules.
I’m pretty sure this is one reason why so many of the big old houses in Portland’s inner east side have been subdivided into plexes. When people got to the point where they needed the extra income and had lots of extra House space, they tacked a few extra mailboxes by the front door and added a couple of interior doors.
One big old Victorian looking place near SE Main and 20th or so has 9 mailboxes by the front door.
If someone wanted the extra income these days, the exclusive zoning makes it awfully difficult to do stuff like that.
I think Portland is way ahead of us in terms of zoning. They seem to be doing it right — encouraging preservation while increasing density. In most of Seattle’s neighborhoods, we are doing the opposite. An old house gets replaced by a bigger house, but density doesn’t increase.
You can always keep working. Or sell, use the money to buy a cheaper place in another city, and pocket the (huge) difference.
If you’re a senior citizen today, you probably bought your home back when homes in Seattle cost a fraction of what they do now. Which means you could probably make a fortune by selling it or renting it.
Easy to say keep working if you’re working, but if you’re old and laid off, many employers don’t want to hire you even if you have the skills—would rather hire younger and cheaper—even if you offer yourself for a cheaper wage.
But, really, if you’re at SS age, shouldn’t you be able to enjoy your SS after working like a dog for 40, 50 years? Working in some places and for some people along the way that were rather toxic. After paying into the system for decades, you should be able to enjoy the fruits of your labor instead of practically going from the workplace to the grave.
@Jeff Pittman – why the vitriol? @Jon Wright provided a link to the County’s site showing how a qualifying senior can get a property tax exemption if you meet the following requirements:
•Annual household income of $40,000 or less
•Own and occupy a house, mobile home, condo or co-op,
•61 years of age by December 31 of the previous year, or
•Retired because of disability or
•Veteran with a 100% service-connected disability
•You are a widow, or widower, or state registered domestic partner at least 57 years of age whose spouse or state registered domestic partner had an exemption at the time of death
These aren’t exceptionally hard qualifications to meet, particularly for those on a fixed income, and apparently over 26,000 eligible seniors in King County have not applied. Jon’s posting this would seem to be a public service, not something to complain about.
Getting a property tax deferral is also available if the household income is under $45,000 – and apparently only 1% of those eligible for deferrals have actually enrolled. It’s a two-page form so hardly onerous to do so.
Obviously these programs won’t help everybody, although I’d imagine that most seniors who are retired and make over $45,000 – that’s an income well over Social Security – either have a lot of equity in their home or have paid most or all of the mortgage off.
If his post helps just one senior who didn’t know about these programs with their property tax burden I’d say he did a public service here, and your berating him for not yet being of retirement age is unpleasant to say the least (and please don’t lecture me either; I spent the last three years of my elderly mother’s life caring for her both financially and health-wise in addition to working full-time, so I get what the difficulties can be).
“Obviously these programs won’t help everybody,…”
This is exactly the problem with @Jon Wright’s comments. Many seniors, my mother-in-law included, simply do not qualify for either assistance program but are far off from being financially secure. His claim that my prior assertion is a “trope that had been debunked” is what is not particularly helpful and, frankly, is nonsense.
Additionally, the deferral programs simply delay the inevitable (at an additional cost of 5% interest currently) by creating a lien on the property for the tax amounts paid by the state during the deferral period. Many seniors who own their homes outright don’t find this particularly desirable, especially considering the maximum threshold between the exemption and deferral programs is just $5k.
Finally, it doesn’t take all that much additional income for a retired couple living primarily on SS retirement benefits to cross over these thresholds:
“Here’s how much the average senior gets from Social Security each year.”
“According to the SSA’s December 2016 snapshot, more than 41.2 million retired workers were bringing home an average of $1,360.13 each month. Over the course of the year, this would work out to just $16,321.56. For comparison, the federal poverty level in 2017 is $11,880. This means if the average senior were wholly reliant on Social Security income (which some indeed are), he or she would be earning only 37% above the federal poverty rate for a single individual. This is precisely why the SSA suggests retirees have additional income sources beyond just Social Security.”
“Another concern with leaning so heavily on Social Security and its average annual payout of $16,321.56 is that annual cost-of-living adjustments (COLA) simply aren’t keeping up with the actual expenses for seniors. Over the previous 35 years, the medical care inflation rate has outpaced Social Security’s COLA (i.e., the raise that seniors get if the price of goods and services goes up as measured by the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers) in 33 of 35 years. In fact, Social Security had no COLA in three years since 2009, and this year’s COLA of 0.3% is the smallest increase on record.”
(link)
Oh, I meant to mention one more thing in my reply above. These assistance programs for seniors do nothing for those seniors who rent their residences and will see their property owner’s increased property taxes passed through to them ultimately.
Here’s a great piece on the whole subject matter from a few months ago.
http://realchangenews.org/2017/05/03/taxing-silver-age-property-taxes-burden-king-county-seniors-fixed-incomes
@Scott Stidell,
As Tisgwm put it not every senior qualifies for these programs and that includes me. Yes it is easy for you to make your comments but I will just repeat what I said earlier. You will be a senior citizen one day and then you will be walking in my shoes and find out what it is like.
And to the poster who suggested that senior citizens should just sell their homes and buy something else maybe in another city. We have lived here most of our lives. We have friends and family here. we have our social lives in the area and our doctors are here and you suggest that we just move away and leave that behind and all because I comment about the rising cost of living in Seattle.
Developers are building “luxury” studios/1BRSs because they generate more profit per square foot than more modest designs, smaller buildings, and larger 2+BRs. Also, before the 1980s the builders/owners were local and intended to keep the building productive for a century and hand it down to their children. Now the large breadboxes are financed by Wall Street which has stricter demands for high returns within the 19-year payback window and they don’t care after that because the building is depreciated and they’re on to a new investment. And “luxury” is such an overused term that it can simply mean having a W/D, microwave, and dishwasher. But it’s a magic word that creates dollars of demand.
As soon as everybody who has a 6-figure salary or Daddy’s million has a place they’re satisfied with, developers will no longer be able to chase the top 20% because either nobody will rent/buy their place, or they’ll vacate their previous one when they do, thus causing a vacancy problem for other owners. At that point the Wall Street developers will leave (good riddance!), and smaller local developers will have a chance to compete, and will build less-profitible-but-still-profitible buildings on smaller parcels. But that depends on whether the zoning allows them to. Right now zoning is divided between large breadboxes, too-short lowrise, and sacred single-family. The “missing middle” is illegal: all those 5-10 unit courtyard buildings, dingbats, duplexes, ADUs, etc. It’s either illegal (4-8 unit, SROs, microapartments, duplexes), regulated out of existence (ADUs), or can’t compete with the big-money developers in urban village centers (Broadway).
“As soon as everybody who has a 6-figure salary or Daddy’s million has a place they’re satisfied with, developers will no longer be able to chase the top 20% because either nobody will rent/buy their place, or they’ll vacate their previous one when they do, thus causing a vacancy problem for other owners. At that point the Wall Street developers will leave (good riddance!), and smaller local developers will have a chance to compete”
I really hope you are right about this, but I have doubts.
The owners aren’t going to keep them empty en masse because some rent is better than no rent. They were making a profit in 2000 when rents were less than half of what they are now, so they have an enormous cushion to go down before their profit gets down to the level of a stockholder or grocery store owner.
I hate crappy multi-family development as much as anyone else and I’m an architect whose career has been working on this junk, but developers look for opportunities to invest money with the highest return. If not Seattle, it will be somewhere else. Developers dont have to build in Seattle, and there is certainly a lot of risk in developing. You can pile all the requirements you want on development, if it doesnt pencil out for the developer or provide any benefit to them, they wont build it. Its as simple as that. They have no obligation to provide housing, or office space or retail or whatever. Building housing is not a charity unless its affordable housing in which case you spent lots of public money to benefit a very few lucky individuals. Thats all good to provide affordable housing but its NEVER going to meet the huge demand for housing in Seattle especially when it can literally cost $700,000+ per unit to build (like in SF).
National developers will go to greener pastures. But people who live here and just want to develop something locally won’t. You don’t need a national developer to build one duplex or small apartment building, you just need somebody who maybe has a house on the land and some money saved up, and possibly some local financing.
Agreed. Many say that it’s supply and demand, and that is true. But it seems like there’s endless demand. (Ok, probably not endless, but a lot). Hong Kong is expensive and it’s filled to the rafters with high rises, so density is not the same as affordable. I don’t believe supply and demand can realistically fix this problem. Seattle has gone from a mid-range city to an expensive city. Those living on mid-range salaries will no longer be able to afford it. The poor will qualify for subsidies and the rich can afford it. There’s your recipe, hot off the press from San Francisco my friends!
I used to think it was density until I realized that Houston and Chicago prove it’s supply relative to demand. Both cities allow enough housing to be built to match demand, so prices remain steady. Houston does it with unlimited sprawl, and Chicago does it with smart lowrise and midrise, but the result is the same. Japan also has limited land but you can get an apartment/house in Tokyo on a bullet train line with lots of walkable amenities around for the price of a Seattle apartment/house ten years ago. That’s partly because apartments are traditionally small, but mostly because Japan allows building houses on even the smallest irregular-shaped scrap lots, and every zoning level allows everything in the lower levels. And they don’t have parking minimums because everything you need is just a few steps away on foot or frequent transit — for everyone everywhere in the city, and for people in smaller cities and small towns.
Houston also doesn’t have much zoning, so if there is demand for a 50 floor building in the equivalent of Magnolia then that is what gets built.
Houston gives private covenants the force of law [1], so it has the same effect as restrictive zoning, but it’s a patchwork of random self-serving restrictions rather than a coherent citywide plan. Generally the covenant-writer was a subdivider and the restrictions were designed to keep working-class people and apartments out to keep the neighborhood exclusive, country-like, and high property values.
[1] According to “The End of Suburbia” if I remember right. In other cities a covenant violation is merely a breach of contract, but in Houston they put the police and city behind enforcing them.
Here’s an article that might interest you… Portland may just have actually moderated its own rising rents within the last year, using – yes – the good ol’ laws of supply and demand: http://cityobservatory.org/signs-of-the-times/
So why are things different in Seattle? The following are possibilities that have occurred to me:
1) WAY too much demand – Amazon etc. have drawn so many new people here that even the rapid pace of construction cannot even touch spiralling rent. Potential solution: Amazon heads off to HQ2, stops hiring at the current rate, frankly we all give a sigh of relief (or go into an economic bust – but that would solve housing at least!).
2) Foreign/ Wall Street investment – I did not find Cary Moon’s related statement racist on the face of it, as “The Giant Pool Of Money” is not a China-only phenomenon by any means, and I would honestly appreciate a task force gathering information on EVERY foreign investment + Wall Street too. In brief, the “Pool” skews property prices because it sees real estate as the safest place to put money and have it produce dividends. If you need pay for things like, oh, 401ks and pension plans by a reliable return on investments… Seattle housing might just be the perfect thing to buy up and sit on. I would expect that a responsible city government would be aware of this and take actions to protect their citizens (when they don’t, they become Vancouver BC).
Required listening if you haven’t already: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/355/the-giant-pool-of-money
3) In roughly 1962 zoning across most of Seattle was changed to preserve SFH areas in amber, and forbid the building of apartments. Now, I get it, because those dingbats (actual term) are shockingly ugly even today – but this one bureaucratic decision almost certainly created the entire Seattle crisis all by itself.
Take a stroll through Wallingford or Fremont and you can easily see duplexes, triplexes, and backyard cottages that let property owners leverage their declining investments in the harder times – but this was all from the 50s and grandfathered in. If property owners had been allowed to change over their properties in line with market forces, we would have a heck of a lot more dingbats, but… enormously increased density and very likely no housing crisis. Activists are trying to make it happen, but it just isn’t politically possible to create 50 years of catch-up in a short amount of time. I have sympathy for the homeowners who are horrified at that potential rate of change – they should have been absorbing it at a reasonable level over the last 50 instead, it’s easier on the psyche.
I honestly believe that our current building spree IS fixing the housing crisis… it’ll just take, oh, 25-50 years. Right now, prices are just going to keep rising until the demand craters – but the moment it does, prepare for SLU to be an extremely affordable neighborhood! Shitty construction methods will just hurry the day along.
Anyway, it’s not simple, but the answers are out there somewhere.
Amazon is not leaving; it said it plans to keep HQ1 at around 45K and build HQ2 to 50K, so its size here will level off but it won’t shrink. We were doing all right before Amazon’s growth spurt so we’ll be OK if it shrinks. If Amazon ends up shrinking here because of moves or layoffs, a lot of people will probably leave the area because they don’t have other ties here, as happened in the 2000 and 2008 recessions. In that case the tight housing market would get significantly looser. Not just in SLU, but all over the city. But SLU won’t become a ghost town because other companies would take the space Amazon vacates.
An interesting fact about Seattle’s population is it peaked at around 550K in the early 60s and then dropped to 410K before starting to rise again, so housing was cheap in the 80s and 90s because it was still refilling the housing built for a larger population. However, I as a young adult then thought it was just normal and would always be like that.
Foreign trophy houses are a big deal in London, New York, and Vancouver, but I’m not convinced they’re a big deal in Seattle. What you’re seeing here is more of a foreign working investment such as in an apartment building, or a residential investment so the family can live here and the kids can attend Eastside public schools and university. That may or may not be a problem but it’s not the same as buying up houses and leaving them empty.
The change is so acute because it’s squeezed into an inadequately small area. It’s one thing to protect the shoreline mansions that are too few to worry about, but when 75% of the land is frozen single-family and already built, there’s not much left. If we had high/midrise zoning in urban villages and lowrise zoning everywhere else. you’d see a scattering of smaller buildings and less of these huge breadboxes, as a wider variety of homeowners and developers built a wider variety of things over a larger area. And therefore the impact on any particular neighborhood would be less, and perhaps not even very noticeable.
The transit void in Belltown is kinda annoying.
From Olympic Sculpture Park, if you are trying to get to King Street Station the closest stop is for the 99, which has a gap in service from 9 am to 2:30 pm. This isn’t too helpful if you are trying to get to King Street Station for a 2:00 pm departure to Portland.
The bus service on 1st has a northbound stop, but no southbound stop.
Denny has a westbound stop at Queen Anne Ave, but there’s no corresponding eastbound stop until 3rd.
Google maps suggested taking the ped bridge at Thomas and going to the stop at Western & John.
I wound up taking the 5 minute detour over the sculpture garden bridge (BNSF had the Broad Street crossing blocked) and going up to Denny and 3rd.
I don’t even think the stop on First is there any more though.
It might not be, but it does still show up on Google maps.
A D line RapidRide bus went past me while I was in that area, so they are at least “serving” the area by running buses through it, but not actually stopping anywhere.
I would think that with the huge construction mess on the north end of 3rd it would be good to have some service moved elsewhere (2nd? 1st?) but apparently not.
You’re right, there is still one stop on 1st and Lenora. Is that the one you’re referring to?
Here’s a link to the notice about changes to the 99 route (you have to click on the wording, and it’ll take you to a PDF):
http://kingcounty.gov/depts/transportation/metro/alerts-updates.aspx?route=099
You’d think they would move some of the buses off the north end of 3rd. Maybe in the future.
Well, before they got gradually erased from the Waterfront Project’s renderings, the Waterfront Streetcar was supposed to have a nice station at directly across the eventual bridge to the park.
And the 10th floor archive room at the Downtown library still has some Kaiser Engineering plans to swing the cars across the BN tracks and up to Seattle Center. Plain civil engineering. What was there once can be put back.
A fair amount of right of way and track, and several stations, have been falling apart and rusting outside since 2005. First Avenue used to have some trolleybus overhead it might be a good idea to put back- sharing positive wire with Connector if need be.
New trolleybuses could easily drop poles to cross the BN tracks, and run wire on the Waterfront itself- don’t think batteries will yet run the whole length. Generally forgotten how much bus service along first and second north of the Market before Metro took it out.
Complete move to Third sort of an austerity measure. These last five years’ ballooning amount of both passengers and money could easily pay to put this service back.
Whether or not streetcars are there, buses could at least run the present rail right of way between Broad Street and the Pike Place Market. Sounds like good transit engineering firm: Will & Way Inc.
Mark
At some point, I would like to see a new “West Side” RapidRide route. This would overlap with a lot of other RapidRide routes, but I think it would work fairly well. https://drive.google.com/open?id=10JOcA53iz-sxtjZ8Ng7v6zonzxZ9-PNh&usp=sharing. This would do several things:
1) Much faster trip downtown for those on 24th Avenue NW. Right now you have to take the 40 as it goes all the way around, or transfer to the D.
2) One seat ride from 24th Avenue NW to 15th and Market, as well as Interbay. These are all areas that have grown a lot and are still growing. Connecting with one seat rides would be really nice.
3) Bypasses Queen Anne, which means a faster trip from Ballard to downtown than the D.
4) Add service along 15th and Elliot. You would try and time the D and the new bus, to get headways along this corridor down to about five minutes (ten minutes on each). This could then lead to a restructure for Magnolia buses — similar to what they will do eventually when Link gets there. More direct routing, but to Interbay instead of downtown.
5) Connect Belltown to existing bus service. You could easily transfer to buses like the (2, 13, 8, D) which means that folks could get to Queen Anne and South Lake Union easily, Some people would rather walk up the hill, but a lot of people would welcome the easy transfer.
6) Provide service from Belltown to places north and south. Belltown is just as densely populated as South Lake Union, and the city estimates over 25,000 people a day will take the streetcar from South Lake Union to downtown (along 1st). I think the estimate is inflated, but there is no question that frequent transit along first would be quite popular.
All of this would make sense after other improvements are made. The 40 and 44 will be turned into a RapidRide+ route, and the streetcar will be given right of way on 1st, which means that pretty much the entire route will eventually have major mobility improvements. When that is done, adding this route would be extremely popular, in my estimation.
And another thing that no one on this blog will care about because I think you’re all pretty much young or at least have no trouble walking up hills.
This city has become harder and harder for anyone with any kind of mobility issues to get around on public transportation, and it’s harder if they can’t drive for whatever reason, and don’t qualify for Access and can’t afford to take Uber or Lyft every day.
I work near First Ave. in Pioneer Square. There are no longer any buses that go down First and up to Third, since they moved the 62 to Third. I realize they are building the Center City Connector. But that’s three years away. I don’t know what I’m going to do for three years, I really don’t. I don’t understand why they can’t have a bus going up one of the side streets. They’ve always had something either going down First or up a side street. Always, from the first time they had streetcar service in the 1880s. Over 130 years, and suddenly nothing.
Norah, I am relatively young but the walk up Marion from 1st to 3rd or 4th is steep enough to slow me down. I sympathize; it is certainly a tough area to get around for people with mobility limitations. Metro is aware of this problem and it seems to me that they kept Route 62 on 1st as long as they could. You may already know this, but Route 62 was moved to 3rd Ave because construction on the Center City Connector is getting started this fall (possibly even this week). Metro can’t really run bus service on 1st during the construction period; if it were possible at all it would require constant construction reroutes (not a great passenger experience).
Route 12 does provide service up Marion/down Madison. I know it’s still tough to get to the stops from 1st since they are on the steep part of the hill. As an alternative, Metro maintains a map of accessible routes through Downtown Seattle that includes escalator and elevator access:
http://metro.kingcounty.gov/maps/pdf/seattle-accessible-map.pdf
Thanks, 372Rider! Yes, I realize about the construction for the CCC, but I still maintain that they could run a bus up the side streets Even if they had to stop in the middle of a block, 1/2 block uphill isn’t as bad as two blocks.
Does anyone happen to know if it’s possible to use the escalator in the Wells Fargo Building after 5 pm? I remember using it one time and it seemed to lead to the actual bank, and I got there one minute before closing. This was one day when I was running a work errand so I got out early, but I usually get out at 5 and there’s no negotiation about that time.
I seem to remember that the escalator through the Wells Fargo Building quit at 6pm, rather than 5. Its been a year or so since I’ve tried after 5 though.
Likewise Western Ave in Belltown is another area that is relatively out of reach to transit despite its intensely urban location.
Next time you’re where the walkway from Colman Dock hits First Avenue, notice that there’s trolley overhead going south on First.
If you can follow it south a block, it turns uphill on Cherry, south to James- and then curving uphill until maybe twenty feet up, its last piece of hardware is a switch that’s been hanging there since 1990.
Route was planned to connect the Ferry terminal to Pioneer Square and the King County Courthouse. And possibly follow the 3 and 4 route to Harborview, making Colman Dock the terminal for a single seat ride on several uphill east bound trolley routes.
Also, finally, a ride from the Waterfront to Pioneer Square LINK Station.
Wish the Feds- or some agency- could make Metro either give back the money for aerial wire and Waterfront tracks, or complete the work and start service. 27 years can hardly be called an unrealistic schedule.
Probably within a week’s work to restore. Wonder if the Law has a legal order called a writ of “Solummodo hoc faciam!” Though in Seattle, a Just Do It order to will go all the way to the Supreme Court, who’ll probably rule that the precedent could cause Seattle to go into shock.
So good thing the line could have everybody relevant at Harborview Emergency before they know they’re….well, let’s just say moving even slower than usual.
Mark
Yes, I’ve never been able to figure out why they don’t run a bus down Western.
That’s a useful map, 372 Rider.
I am also young, but even since a knee injury, have preferred to avoid walking down hills. This drop in connectivity affects everyone.
Yes, exactly. It’s not just older people that would have a problem with it.
Great piece from Mike Lindblom (as usual) on the Lynnwood Link severe cost escalation.
“Several ideas first appeared this spring in a transit-agency list of 243 cost-saving guesstimates, theoretically worth $380 million, that officials drafted amid early inklings of the shortfall.”
Interesting. This spring you say. Hmmm. I for one would really like to know exactly when the agency became aware of the magnitude of the problem.
“…most of the rest is cities asking for goodies where ST isn’t really empowered to say no.”
This commentary from the blog compiler just isn’t supported by the facts.
Finally, in regard to the “unstable federal funding” reference in the Seattle Times piece, I had commented about that on an STB entry just last week:
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As far as the federal contributions are concerned, at least for the remainder of FY2018 (which we are already a month into) the funding for transit assistance programs seems to be there. The THUD appropriations bill has moved out of committee and is on the Senate calendar. On the House side, the corresponding transportation bill was wrapped up into an omnibus spending bill and has passed in that chamber without any drastic cuts to these programs. Most likely the Senate bill will move forward and the differences will be worked out in conference.
This piece did a nice job of summarizing the two spending bills. Again, it’s these appropriations bills that ultimately matter, not the OMB’s or the Congressional GOP’s adopted budgets.
https://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/senate-appropriations-committee-approves-transportation-spending-bill/
To follow the Senate bill, here are the links:
https://www.appropriations.senate.gov/news/majority/committee-advances-fy2018-transportation-hud-appropriations-bill
https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/senate-bill/1655
To follow the House bill, here are the links:
https://appropriations.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=395016
https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/3354
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Remember, Sound Transit isn’t an independent agency that answers only to itself, like say the Port of Seattle or the WSCC. It’s an extension of the constituent cities and counties that make up Sound Transit. So, yeah, if cities want to spend money on nice things, that’s their prerogative. ST staff can provide their profession opinion, but ultimately it’s a political decision not make by ST but made by the ST Board.
ST is the ST board. What you mean is that the ST board does not have the personnel or political power to stand up to the cities and counties (and to the majority of voters who want these suburban freeway lines, large ST-funded P&Rs, and limited zoning).
The ST board *ARE* the cities and counties. Why would they stand up to themselves?
You made it sound like ST wants something but he board contradicts it. The board is ST; the staff’s opinions are just the staff’s opinions. I said the board’s “personnel” because those are the city and county leaders you’re talking about.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/43315334@N07/31121820054/in/dateposted-public/
Here’s the internal side of one of the infernal ads that I doubt a jury would convict me for correcting with a paint scraper. I’ve got no problem whatever with anything possible decoration or message on and part of the bus I don’t have to look through.
But I fee deeply disrespected to have a window I paid a lot of taxes for become a hideously ugly blockage of a view tourists spend thousands of dollars to come see.
If I had a business without the ad budget to compete, I’d also have a class-actionable objection to making the advertising in front of my business impossible to see. I’d be paying ST-3 taxes too. Traditional feature of urban transit is good window-shopping.
Easy to replace money from ads on buses, Wrap every office building in the transit system from ground to roofline, being careful to get every square inch of glass. And extra sure to make office occupants have exactly the view I’ve posted here.
But. If the system’s finances will force ST to be sold for rolling private prisons (which is what bus wraps look like from the inside) ‘nother suggestion. Since with all eyes on smart screens 24-7-365, could replace windows with steel panels and who’d care?
Especially if cameras now replacing mirrors are connected with screens that’ll give passengers sensation interstellar dog-fights with the Gringon Fighter Command -after fighting on their side to clear the skies around King Street Station of Seattle’s last vertical glass.
Or that the bus has become a futuristic battle tank, with passengers able to use their smart-phones to help get violators out of transit lanes with the main turret gun and a lot of fender-piercing rockets. Or demolish other buses covered with competing ad-wraps.
Also, same equipment on LINK, especially between Tukwila Interational and Rainier Beach, could put an end to LSD use from whole ST service area. While steel panels outside get fortunes in legal cannabis revenue just across the Nisqually.
“One pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small…..”
Mark
Any word on additional Amtrak Cascades service to Portland this Thanksgiving season? It was common in the past
No. There will not be extra Thanksgiving trains, unless Amtrak has decided to step up and I’m pretty sure they aren’t.
There is plenty of land which is obviously underdeveloped