Category — Green

Below are images of Northgate’s Thornton Place (being constructed by Lorig)- it’s scheduled to be completed this year and is located just south of Northgate Mall.

On this space used to be acres of parking which never seemed to ever fill up with cars - but instead would play host to various RV sales, car electronics blow outs, and traveling carnivals.

But soon it will be a southern extension to Northgate Mall and home to many new homes including; 143 retirement residences, 109 condos, and 278 apartments.

It’s being touted as Seattle’s greenest address? And even though I think Squirrelman’s old house may have given that claim a run for it’s money, it’s way greener than anything being built by the mall’s UVillage competitor.

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

The West Seattle Blog reported about this on Thursday.

Plans were filed with the DPD to redevelop a fairly large amount of land in West Seattle (just west of the where the western end of the West Seattle Bridge turns south).

As reported by the West Seattle Blog,

“Land Use Application to allow 21 single family residences in an environmentally critical area (clustered housing). Parking for 30 vehicles will be located within the structures and 8 surface parking spaces will be provided on the site.”

Using Live Maps, here’s the Bird’s Eye View (looking west) of the property up for development. Comments on the West Seattle Blog are also expressing surprise that homes could be built on such a steep location.

Here is the view looking north

And here’s a link to the DPD’s map. (linked from the West Seattle blog)

The ‘green’ world of Mayor Nickels continues to amuse me. He likes to issue edicts condemning small environmental transgressions, while at the same time ironically overlooking his own.

Here’s the latest ‘green’ admonishment from the Mayor, the Seattle Times today reports about his latest efforts to inspire Seattlites to curb their use of bottled water.

When Mayor Greg Nickels drives in his car, he carries a plastic container filled with tap water.

He says it’s his small effort to save the environment.

Thanks for the leadership here, Mayor Nickels. You’ve inspired me to curb my anti-environmental ways in a way similar to yours - I have now stopped clubbing baby seals with disposable pre-filled water bottles and instead club them with reusable plastic containers filled with 100% Seattle tap - ‘the finest-tasting, purest-source water in the world’.

Anyway, how about building some more drinking fountains then. I know these kids would appreciate it.

Thanks Mayor Nickels for your leadership!

Saw this on 35th Avenue NE right across from the shops south of the Wedgwood Broiler. It looks like four trees were damaged. Anyway, the city is right on top of it, and expressed their displeasure with it.

Last week’s vote by the city council to lower the threshold of which projects in Seattle’s urban villages would require SEPA review generated some comments - and this statement from the Seattle Community Council Federation.

EARTH WEEK IRONY: CITY COUNCIL WEAKENS SEATTLE’S PREMIER ENVIRONMENTAL LAW

It is a sad Earth Day to have to announce that yesterday, the City Council unanimously weakened Seattle’s premier environmental law, the ordinance implementing the State Environmental Policy Act. As passed yesterday, Council Bill 116010 exempted from the ordinance all building projects of up to 12,000 square feet, and of up to 30 units (80 units downtown), in urban centers and station overlay districts–the very areas receiving the most growth, and thus most needing the protections of SEPA.

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The Phinney Ridge Ecovillage is making some noise up in North Seattle, and will hold an open ‘State of the Neighborhood’ forum tomorrow.

(The Phinney Ridge of the future?)

Here’s the announcement:

Come join your neighbors for a “State of the Neighborhood” forum on the direction of Phinney and Greenwood. There’s a lot to love about our neighborhood — that’s why we live here! The PNA, the Farmer’s Market, Santoro’s Books, the new library, backyard chickens and our “green” sense of eco-responsibility and sensitivity to the planet.

But the very things we cherish about Phinney/Greenwood are being challenged by relentless development and commercialization. Livability, affordability and sustainability may be our values, but how can we protect them moving forward? Traffic is getting more congested and faster, property taxes are rising, small business rents are being raised to unrenewable levels, and familiar structures are being replaced by condos and megahomes.

At the same time, the Phinney Ecovillage, the Phinney Ridge Community Council and new movements like Livable Seattle, a coalition of neighborhood activists, are working to defend neighborhood values. Come on out for the Neighborhood Forum and help us chart the future!

From 2:30 to 4 p.m., Saturday, April 26, at the Phinney Neighborhood Center’s Community Hall (the brick building). Enjoy the rest of the day with Green My Ride at the Phinney Neighborhood Center, 6532 Phinney Ave. N. Please click here for more info.

Can multi-family development be done in a greener, more sustainable manner if the middle man (the developer) is taken out of the equation, and will it pencil out for less if no developer, real estate agent, or marketing firm is necessary? Possibly.

Keith over at Green House Collaborative has an inside-track into a 6,000 sq. ft L2-zoned property in Fremont. His maternal grandmother’s house currently sits there and he has an idea to build a beautiful (and I’m assuming green) 4-5 unit building here. And he’s looking for 3-4 other interested potential future unit owners who might be interested in working with him to get this idea off the ground. And, oh yeah, he’s also trying to learn more about co-op’s too as both a possible way to finance this development and to drive a better sense of community among the residents.

Got any ideas, I’m sure he’d like to hear them.

(photo from Green House Collaborative)

Wow, I knew about Sustainable Ballard and the Phinney Ridge Ecovillage, but not all of the sustainable communities that are sprouting up all over the place.

Right now it seems like move of these groups are there to provide advice, suggestions, and ideas for how to make their neighborhoods more sustainable. This includes things like cutting emissions, growing and sourcing food locally, and of course - building design/planning.

As these groups grow in popularity it should be interesting to see what kind of political influence they will be able to bring to the land use table. It doesn’t appear that anyone is specifically driving this movement, so if you don’t see your neighborhood on the list - hey, feel free to start your own.

You can see a listing of all the sustainable neighborhoods on SCALLOPS.

Here’s a great new blog, the Green Housing Collaborative

And can anyone help the publisher of this blog with his call for an affordable, green-built multi-family townhouse that fits into a sustainable neighborhood?

Photo from Green Housing Collaborative.

Here’s an article from Andres Duany I was forwarded. Just posting it as something to think about…so please do feel free to post your thoughts about the article.

DUMB GROWTH & ENVIRONMENTALISM

A couple of years ago, at a Smart Growth conference in Atlanta, Ted Turner said that, on the whole, it
all sounded to him like ‘dumb growth.’ I publicly objected then, but I am now beginning to agree with his assessment. Smart Growth is devolving into an anti-greenfield-development campaign with the most important thing is to keep urbanism from spreading onto open land. As the thrust of a long term agenda this is simplistic. Anyone who thinks that development on greenfields can be stopped ‘does not know how sausage is made.’ Even Portland couldn’t do it (which is something that should be made clear). This dumbing-down is now taking hold within the CNU (Congress of the New Urbanism). We are becoming an organization of romantic amateurs.These are the realities:
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Wow, I found this story “It’s Ugly, Stupid” linked from urbnlivn.com and couldn’t believe it was actually written by The Stranger. Usually when The Stranger reports about neighborhoods taking exception with proposed building projects, their first response is to cry ‘handwringing NIMBYs’, but today they actually looked at some of the deeper issues - like recognizing that the neighborhood’s issues are with buildings that are boring and ugly! Of course they do get in one of their ‘The Stranger’ digs against the secret armies of Seattle’s blog and flyer-armed NIMBYs,

While Seattle does have more stringent requirements for construction than other cities, Seattle’s lack of quality control only gives NIMBYs more ammo against development.

I actually really appreciated this article because my neighbors and I have been working to reduce the scope and improve the appearance of a large retail/condo building in our neighborhood. And our concern isn’t with redevelopment (’cuz it will replace a crappy building to begin with) but it’s with all of the power that the developer holds in deciding whatever they want.

Since it appears that Tom Rasmussen wants to improve the quality of these projects via the land use process, here are some of my ideas:

* The Design Review Board (DRB) is a non-paid group of volunteers whose influence is too limited, but whose judgments are relied on too heavily. (A very bad combination, like Red Bull & Vodka & Venus Velasquez!) The DRB really only has the power to chip away at the edges of a bad project by recommending that a developer add cornices, change design colors, and other small cosmetic changes. Give the DRB the ability to bump significant incompatibility issues up to an independent city group of arbitrators. This will help force developers and neighbors to the table before things get out of control.

* Land use decisions used to be appealable to the city council, but the council dropped that ability to appeal. The city council should reclaim this power because at the very least it puts developers on notice that the public has some last-chance political options.

* It’s time to go through and update city zoning. It’s not good neighborhood planning for anyone to have high density zoning slammed against single family zoning. Build transitional medium density between the two.

* Strengthen the land use code to demand more energy efficient, pedestrian friendly, green built, and neighborhood friendly building elements. It’s time to require more quality built into these projects. I know they’ll make the projects more expensive, but they will make the projects better.

These are just some of my ideas, if you’ve got some, please let me know!

You see this alot these days, we build green! Our buildings are enviro-friendly! Oh, but are they now.

The problem is that there are lots of different levels of certification from different certifying bodies. The elements that go into each certification are also a bit difficult to understand. Now, don’t get me wrong and think I’m bagging on Green Certification, it’s just important to understand that their idea of green might be different from yours.

The two most frequent types of certification you will find in this area are LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) and Master Builders Associations Built Green certification. LEED uses the following designations, Certified, Silver, Gold and Platinum. While Built Green uses 1-star, 2-star, 3-star, 4-star, and 5-star as their designation levels.

From what I understand Built Green is a builder self-certified checklist (at least for the lowest three of its five star ratings) while all builders who want LEED certification have to submit their projects for third-party review.

Now with LEED, even though these projects are all third-party reviewed, there still are some questions about what this certification really means. I recommend checking out this really good article in FastCompany about LEED green certification levels, it takes a very good critical look at LEED’s pros and cons.

So, I guess at the end of the day it seems like the best thing to do is to not rely too much on the certification levels but instead ask the builder for their checklist of what they’ve done to make their building green, and decide for yourself whether this is good enough for you.

To read through the specifics that go into each Built Green star rating, check out their certification checklists. For more info about LEED, check out this page.

Image: 4-star certified Conover Commons from The Cottage Company.