The Cosmo condominum’s poor response to even worse downtown zoning changes featured on KIRO TV.

This story is really disturbing. First, the city rezones the Denny Triangle to reduce spacing between an existing condo building and a proposed office building in the Denny Triangle from 60 to 18 feet, next, it upzones the planned office building from 13 to 34 stories, and finally - after the Cosmopolitan condominium is notified of this change by the city it communicates none of this to its future residents who will be moving into the condo.

The Cosmo Seattle web site is doing a great job of digging into this situation, detailing how this happened and making sure this issue doesn’t just go away. In fact, they’re still waiting for the mayor to respond to this letter signed by over 70 people .

This story was featured on KIRO news on Monday and the station put together a nice piece about the situation. However, one part that made me roll my eyes was when KIRO interviewed one city employee who explained the situation by using a ‘density is good for the environment’ argument to sugar coat over what really was a ‘we made a bad decision that flies right in the face of our goals for creating a livable downtown’.

Anyway, the moral of the story is don’t expect condo developers downtown to share important information like this with you, the city isn’t doing a good job protecting downtown condo owners from hasty zoning changes, and in order to protect their interests downtown condo owners need to get organized and have their voices heard.