Application decision of the week - Wallingford townhomes!

Some people follow sports teams, others follow their stocks, but when it comes to excitement in the Seattle area I don’t think anything holds a candle to zoning interpretations. So, in an effort to force me to understand the rules behind our city’s zoning decisions (and so I can be a more accurate, yet still obnoxious blogger), I’m going to try and break down one ‘hard-to-understand’ decision of the week. (And if anything I say is completely off base, just leave me a comment).

Located in Wallingford, these two decisions give the okay to divide two neighboring lots into two different five-unit townhome lots (basically permitting 10 different townhomes to be built). So here’s the question, is this kosher? 

If this was taking place outside of an urban village I would have been fully in my right to jump up and down typing  ‘micropermitting‘ all over the place since these decisions would essentially have allowed 10 different townhomes to skirt around the Design Review Board process.  (In non-urban villages, it takes 8 different townhomes for the Design Review Board process to kick in).

However, since these townhomes are planned for an urban village, developers are allowed to build up to 20 townhome units before the Design Review Board process kicks in. So, even though these 10 townhomes might have raised eyebrows elsewhere, they come in well below the urban village thresholds and so no eyebrows need disturbing!  See how much sense that makes! Now if I could just figure out why urban villages have significantly higher thresholds…