Case study: Why are houses on Queen Anne so desirable?
Guest article from Matt the Engineer.
(expanding on some comments from this post)
I have a very typical house on Queen Anne. It was built in 1904, and there’s nothing terribly special about it. It’s cute, but it has its problems as any 100-year-old structure might. If it were located on a 7200sf lot in, say, Wedgewood it might be worth $100k less than it is. Yet it was only on the market for one day before recieving 2 offers. Why?
I agrue the main reason is not the houses or the hill, but the density.
My house is on a typical 3000 sf lot. This gives me room for a nice front yard with a lawn and garden, a large rear yart big enough for my two dogs, space for a garage (if I ever get around to re-building one), a garden space, and over 2000sf of living area. I’ve had 6 people living in it comfortably for a summer, and have had my 10-person family up for two holidays. I have 4 bedrooms, a comfortably sized kitchen, dining room, large living room, laundry room, and a family room. Why anyone could ever use a house bigger than this is beyond me, unless they had 10 children and a horse.
Of course, it’s close to the city and on a hill. There’s no view, but people like hills. I’ll call the hill the only non-density benefit. You could also argue that being close to the city is also a non-density benefit, though if all houses were less dense then there wouldn’t really be a city.
It’s walkable*. I don’t have to get in the car any time I want to go places. The walk to any services is tree-lined, and I have nice house fronts to admire as I walk and people to interact with. This is directly a result of density.
It’s affordable. Stop laughing. The likely reason that land was cut up into 3000 sf pieces back before the days of zoning laws is that it’s a reasonable size for a single family, and developers could sell the same amount of land to more people. Bringing a streetcar into the mix made this size house a good idea - you need density to support public transportation.
But it also made it affordable - working-class families could afford a house this close to the city, on a hill, as long as they don’t take up much space. The same is true today. If you think a typical house is expensive, compare it to one of the large houses on the hill.
This article could have easily been written about Fremont, Ballard, much of the U-District, Green Lake, or some of Capital Hill. Whether or not suburbanites admit it, density can be very desirable. I’m not sure what inspired our current zoning laws, but I think they’re flawed. Where we build single family houses, let’s go back to 3000sf (or less) lots with neighborhoods, not 7200sf car-centric sprawl.
* I’ll list what I can walk to in order of distance:
1 block
small grocery store
2 small restaurants
coffee shop
major bus line
5 blocks
library
sports fields
swimming pool
community center
dense retail area
10 blocks
2 large grocery stores
1 mile
7 large grocery stores
opera
ballet
symphony
sports arena
Seattle Center
waterfront
Lake Union
float planes
3 dense retail areas
2 miles
downtown
11 comments
Of course only after I submitted this did I look at the “about” section here and realize this blog started with a Wedgwood focus. I don’t mean to pick on Wedgwood - it’s a beautiful area, I just think it could be improved by densifying a bit at least near neighborhood retail areas. This goes for all of the 7200sf and 5000sf zoned areas within 5 miles of downtown (light yellow here - 2.5Mb PDF).
No offense taken, and what you say is true - some nice development would be welcome in the Big W.
West Seattle neighborhoods don’t cut it? I’m biased…forgive me.
On walkability, check out walkscore.com. It identifies all the businesses and amenities within walking distance of an address. The “walkscore” is built upon the LUTAQH (Land Use, Transportation, Air Quality and Health) study in King County. With rising gas prices, walkable neighborhoods will become even more desirable. I was up in West Seattle a little while ago for the Sustainable West Seattle Fair. What a great walkable business district up where the Farmer’s Market is located.
Walkability.com’s pretty interesting. I get a 62 out of 100 in Wedgwood. It did miss a couple things - the QFC, laundromat and the Cafe Van Gogh just a few blocks away- but otherwise pretty good.
Walkscore gave me a 91, and did miss a few places.
[Rhonda] Sorry, I’m not familiar enough with WSeattle to be much help. The friend of mine that lives there does live in a townhouse, but it’s surrounded by single family homes on lots of land. I do like the area near the farmer’s market, but haven’t gone outside the retail area to look at the houses.
Does the density of an area attract quality retail (as in non-chain restaurants) or does quality retail cause more density, higher property values? The density on Lake City Way seems to have attracted gun shops and pawn shops.
“Un-dense” Wedgwood has a commercial strip with tons of vacancies. Yet the few good places we do have “Top Pot, Grateful Bread, Javasti etc.” are always jammed with people.
Is Lake City Way really dense? It seems like a car-centric suburb strip to me. Density of houses (or even condos) is what brings in the type of business you walk to. If there are 1000 houses within walking distance of a donut shop, they’ll only get say 20 walk-in customer a day - so they’ll need a parking lot and neon sign or they’ll go out of business. If there are 10,000 walking-distance residents, that number goes to 200 - and the space that would have been parking can now be 3 other businesses.
My idea of a perfect density balance - be it on Queen Anne or Wedgwood or Bothell - is a strip of dense, walkable retail stacked with condos, surrounded by 3000sf housing, connected to other towns and cities by a good easy and frequent transit system.
Oh, and to specifically answer your chicken-and-egg question: for QA, it was definately density. The area was layed out over 100 years ago, and most of the stores are chain-free and high quality.
I’d say Lake City Way is definitely pretty densely-built - but only one part (downtown Lake City Way) has the corresponding services and infrastructure to be considered a walkable neighborhood. In the ‘downtown’ LCW area there are quite a few large multi-family housing complexes, lots of little businesses, you can walk to grocery and drug stores, a city library and there’s a Farmer’s market during the week.
However, that said, outside of the core neighborhood strip, there’s a lot of investment from the city that is needed to make getting to downtown LCW fairly easy - there’s a lack of sidewalks in the area, drainage is pretty bad, and traffic down residential streets is even worse.
Matt, no problem! I do really enjoy reading this blog and WS does have many of the issues that you’re addressing…probably why I care about keeping what character it has. I couldn’t tell you about Wedgewood or Lakecity.
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