Are townhomes really “like a fungus network eating up our city?”
At this Saturday’s ‘Townhomes-Can the Patient Be Saved’ forum, Tom Eanes of the Seattle Planning Commission quoted an anonymous planner who said that Seattle townhomes were ‘like a fungus network eating up our city’. He then showed a photo of the neighborhood around Aurora and N 85th St.
So I was curious, is the area that bad?
The area between townhomes on different sides of the block wasn’t so bad.
Still sucks to be a single family home in a land of townhomes, though.
With few townhome associations to take care of the landscaping (note: some developers feature as a benefit the fact that there are no association dues to pay), you gotta wonder how the owners are going to deal with maintenance issues in the future.
And like many other townhomes throughout the city - many of these suffer from useless garages and driveways - and the streets are pretty packed with parked cars.
The strange thing about this neighborhood is that even though you can easily find every townhome design problem that is caused by lax zoning and zoning enforcement (street facing fencing, unusable garages, hidden entrances), the neighborhood itself isn’t bad and certainly not worthy of being called a fungus.
4 comments
well, unless you live there, perhaps you can’t say.
I am living in one of the five single family homes left on our block, so from that perspective “fungus” seems like a mild word.
I didn’t forget the single family homes -
‘Still sucks to be a single family home in a land of townhomes, though.’
I really take issue with the fact there is no Owners Association. Exterior maintenance will really fall behind and in a few years look pretty shabby. Also, if there was an OA, the covenants could require that people use their garages as their primary parking place - removing the litter of vehicles off surface streets and leave room for guest parking. And yes, maybe the garages would be better designed…or owners would purchase smaller cars….Lots of problems with no OA - separate from the overall lack of design inspiration or creativity.
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