Smarter Neighbors

About 150-200 people attended Councilmember Sally Clark’s townhome forum ‘Townhomes – Can the Patient be Saved?’ Saturday morning at the Capitol Hill Arts Center. (Oh yeah, this forum will also be available on the Seattle Channel’s web site later next week).

Sally seemed very pleased at the turn-out and even joked that she received some suggestions before the meeting that people wished it had been called ‘Townhomes - Can the Patient be Killed?’

I have to say, Sally’s starting to grow on me a bit. I think she’s been doing a good job of keeping the public discussion about Seattle land use moving along this year (of course, Sally’s final grade will be based on what that looks like) and every once in awhile you can see some signs that she’s starting to come into her own as a leader.

Tom Eanes of the Seattle Planning Commission started off the presentations with a 20 minute Powerpoint presentation showing lots of examples of townhomes (ranging from those described as the ‘Fungus eating up our city’ to some nicer examples). For those that fell within the fungus camp, Tom pointed out how the design of these townhomes suffer greatly from the lack of any kind of design or SEPA reviews. Another concern he mentioned is that without any kind of townhome owner association to support the long term maintenance of these townhomes as a group, there is grave concern about the long term sustainability of these units.

The negative impact of six foot fences surrounding the front of many Seattle townhomes was also a top point in Tom’s presentation. He showed photos of all kinds of creatively bad enclosures (from simple wood fences to more elaborate shrubbery screens) that each had the impact of reducing the friendliness of the neighborhood and making the place less secure for those walking on the sidewalks and those living behind the fences (security drops when neighbors can’t see you).

He gave a very nice presentation about ‘cookie-cutter’ 4-pack townhomes and how they technically manage to fit within current zoning code.

The following aren’t Tom’s words, but my observation. While watching his presentation I couldn’t help but think of 4-pack townhomes as the genetically-modified chickens of the multi-family development world. Instead of being injected with growth hormones and unable to stand up, developers inject 4-pack townhomes with too many amenities - enclosed garages, private fenced yards, three bedrooms, living rooms, laundry rooms, and ‘common’ open areas. It’s so much in such a limited area of space that the townhomes become bloated and parts of them become unusable (try to park your car in one of these garages).

Tom next moved on to give a historical analogy about the state of Seattle’s townhomes vs. the state of New York tenement design in the 1800s. He showed the gradual progression of zoning code improvements to these NY buildings which eventually created better tenements, making them desirable places to live a century later.

Tom wrapped up by giving some good suggestions for better townhome design - entries visible from the street, private open space on the sides, minimum lot widths of 100ft and wider parking courts. All in all, a very nice presentation that the crowd really liked.

Next began the panel portion of the event where each of the following panelists presented for about 10-15 minutes.

(Panelists left to right) Mike Podowski, Land Use Planner, Seattle Department of Planning and Development;Greg Hill, Wallingford Community Council; Dan Duffus, Soliel LLC; Brittani Ard, Ard Consulting, Master Builders; Brandon Nicholson, Nicholson KovalChick Architects, Congress of Residential Architects)

First up was Mike Podowski from the DPD. I was hopeful about this presentation when Mike first admitted the zoning code for townhomes was not having the desired effect on townhome design that was hoped, but then was brought back down to reality when the DPD autopilot part of the presentation started.

Mike pulled out the DPD’s favorite public relations stat of all-time - that over 60% of Seattle’s land is zoned for single-family. I really think this is the all-purpose flour of arguments for the DPD (see page 10)-I’ve heard the DPD use it to justify, ‘Why are you knocking down a grove of trees in Maple Leaf?’ to ‘Why don’t you increase setbacks between multi-family and single family properties so that there’s a little more privacy?’

This time the stat was brought up in the context of why we need to encourage as dense as possible townhome development in what little amount of multi-family zoned land Seattle has. I personally think its an important question, but I didn’t see how it related to today’s topic of bad townhouse designs. Is single family zoned land really to blame for encouraging bad townhome designs - if that’s true what kind of blame should we assign to other non-multi-family zoned land such as parks or cemeteries?

Mike then went on to talk about what updates to the multi family zoning code might make townhome design better - these included raising the height limit of townhomes by 5′ to encourage better and different types of roofs, pooling open space, reducing townhome fencing heights, encouraging curb cuts, wider driveways, and larger parking spaces. It definitely looks like these will make some improvements, but the next speaker, Greg Hill of Wallingford, suggested the DPD isn’t going far enough.

Greg started off by poking a hole in the multi-family update’s plan to add an extra 5′ of height by suggesting that an enterprising architect will be able to find a way to add a fourth floor. He then took a little bit of a side trip and gave an interesting example of how a homeowner sitting at grade facing a pedestrian at grade is naturally inclined to build a wall between the two. (I’ll give an example of that in another post).

Greg presented a pretty interesting critique of townhome design, starting off by showing an example of how missing trees in front of a new townhome development was an example of how DPD on-site inspectors basically give developers ‘pocket variances’. He then touched on how cars don’t fit into townhome driveways, how profitable the business of ‘cookie-cutter’ townhome production is, how little actual architectural design goes into the cookie-cutter townhomes, and how the multi-family update’s ’shorter fences for taller buildings’ tradeoff is a bad idea.

Next up were developer Dan Duffus and zoning-consultant Brittani Ard (I group them together because they touched on the same points and didn’t have Powerpoint presentations). Dan talked about how he supported the multi-family zoning updates because they will ensure future townhome development is profitable and fix some of the major townhome design problems (ie fences). Dan talked about how setbacks eat up buildable lot space and suggested that with the market slowing this was a perfect time for the city fix zoning before the next round of development kicks in.

The main point I left with was how Dan mentioned how incredibly costly from a time and architectural cost time going through the Design Review process is (this was challenged later by two architects/developers who spoke up during Q&A). Dan said that adding regulations will help make townhome development less affordable.

I feel that if neighbors are going to successfully push for better townhome zoning regulations in this city, they’ve got to be able to respond to this particular argument. Will better townhome design make townhomes less affordable? If neighbors don’t have a good argument to counter this, then developers are going to keep pressuring the city to keep permitting bloated townhome development.

And finally, Brandon Nicholson gave what I thought was the most informative and balanced presentation of the day. He’s an architect who will now only take clients whose projects go through Design Review, and he showed both the ‘pessimistic’ and ‘optimistic’ views of what could happen after the multi-family zoning update is approved.

The ‘pessimistic’ side is that the ‘4-pack’ townhomes will still be built in Seattle - and this time they’ll be able to go higher - (Brandon showed a slide where instead of a ‘4-pack’ townhomes with pitched roofs, they have Mansard(?) roofs).

On the ‘optimistic’ side, Brandon showed a whole bunch of really interesting townhome designs that would really do great things for the city. There were some nice examples of development that you can see in places like Portland and Victoria, BC. (I would really like to grab a copy of his presentation to show some of the photos.)

Leaving this meeting, I feel that the city still has some work to go on tightening up all the new updates in the multi-family zoning code. The ‘4-pack’ townhome will still continue to be built (although with lower fences) and nobody on the panel even addressed the ongoing problems with townhome micropermitting. I hope more creative thought will go into refining the final multi-family update that is presented to the council, because after listening to the presentations in today’s forum I would recommend that the council rejects the update as it currently stands.