Now I know why some townhomes have sidewalks and others don’t.
Last week, Gordon, a local townhouse developer from RPA Seattle was kind enough to invite me on a tour of some of his townhomes in the Lake City area. I really appreciated the time, and it gave me the opportunity to learn more about things from the development point of view. I’ll follow-up with some more posts, but here was the first thing I learned.
Do you know why the townhomes on the left have a built out front with sidewalks while the townhomes on the right don’t?
Well…the answer is that the threshold level for requiring sidewalks used to be 6 units. So…if you built 6 or more housing units on your plot you were required to build sidewalks. However, if you built out 5 or fewer you weren’t required to (and you guessed it, only 5 townhomes were built on the lot to the right).
Starting this year the threshold was moved down to three units, so if the units on the right were built today they would be required to also build out sidewalks.
Anyway, this photo below is a great example of the pedestrian and landscaping improvements you gain with sidewalks.
5 comments
Is this perhaps also an example of micropermitting? The designs of those two buildings look pretty close. Instead of permitting 11 and doing sidewalks in front of both they can do 6+5 and do only sidewalks in front of the one with six.
It’s actually two different owners. But yes, the two look very similiar. One other note is that the developer on the left also treated his fence so that it looks better.
Actually that fence is untreated, but we do treat our fences (the 12050 33rd property, behind where you took that picture, is our project). Micropermitting was an issue for those two sites in the picture, so David is right. That six unit project and the five unit on the right were both the same guy. (Greg, you were thinking of the 12314 33rd site up the block next to our other project). But with the reduction in the frontage requirement to three units, this won’t happen in the future anyway.
I’ll withdraw both my comments then.
You’re excused. I’ve had the benefit of living with those projects and that block for the past two years.
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