Category — Neighborhood Plans

Yesterday night I had the opportunity to attend a North District Council meeting with 40 other folks at the Lake City Library. The guest speakers were Diane Sugimura of the Department of Planning and Development and Mike McGinn of Seattle Great City Initiative.

Mike’s talk was interesting. He showed photos of what the Seattle area might look like in 100 years (very scary) and presented ideas for building smart sustainable urban development. All were great ideas, but I feel like Seattle Great City is more of a theoretical, ‘wouldn’t it be nice’ kind of organization, instead of the in-your-face dog-fight politicking group needed in this city to actually change our zoning and land use laws.

Then Diane Sugimura spoke. And after presenting the DPD’s roles within the city, opened it up to the floor for questions. And boy, she was grilled (especially by a North Seattle audience who wasn’t too happy to begin with since most of them had just been flooded out). And to her credit, Diane handled all the questions with grace and patience. The audience peppered her about ‘crackerbox’ style development, houses built on wetlands and unstable slopes, and developers that level all the trees on the property to build even bigger single family houses. However, while listening to bad development story after bad development story I had a profound thought - the DPD is just a bureaucratic entity and nobody is leading any kind of land use planning within Seattle’s neighborhoods.

In fact, the DPD’s role in city planning is actually pretty small - they’re here to make sure that the pipeline of permits, complaints, and various questions are efficiently processed. Although they may actually think they have some influence, don’t look to Diane or the DPD to propose the kind of updates to the zoning code that these neighbors and others are demanding. Instead, look to the mayor who is choosing not to invest in fixes to our broken zoning codes and to conduct important neighborhood planning.

Sadly, unless you fall within one of the following areas I’ve listed below - you’re pretty much on your own. And if you don’t have the backing of a strong community council, you’re going to have to build up your coalition to fight any bad projects in your neighborhood.

The areas where the city of Seattle is actually devoting its urban planning attention.

• The city is demanding more from it’s own buildings in terms of environmental and community sustainability.
• The city is actively planning growth in South Lake Union and the Downtown area. (note: the Denny Triangle area is strangely outside this area)
• The city is will retain the 65%+ portion of the city that is zoned single family (note: and this is old school thinking too, there are plenty of single family areas that would be ripe for improvement if they could be zoned multi-family. What is important here is to manage the transition between single and multi-family zones)

Anyway, I now believe more than ever that to get the kind of land use planning attention throughout Seattle that the city deserves, that we’re going to have to either change our mayor’s attitudes, or get a new mayor.

I was down at the South Lake Union Discovery Center today checking out all the displays about the upcoming South Lake Union redevelopment and had a thought, “what if the city spent as much time thinking about neighborhood development in other neighborhoods throughout Seattle as it is doing in South Lake Union?”

I have a feeling that if the city did spend time carefully looking at developing neighborhoods as a whole instead of piecemeal, I don’t think you’d see bad development like we’re seeing in:

• The Denny Triangle neighborhood, where the city is permitting a high-rise to be built just 16 feet away from a neighboring residential high-rise?!? This kind of close-in high-rise development has not been successful in any major city and is terrible urban planning. 
• The Pinehurst neighborhood (North Seattle) where Kohary Construction has pretty much ticked off the neighborhood by using a loophole to avoid the DPD’s Design Review Process and using this lack of review to build dull, characterless townhomes that push most of their development’s traffic issues into the surrounding neighborhood.
• Wedgwood (again in North Seattle) where Murray Franklyn wants to build a huge mixed commercial/residential property that is only 8 feet away from single family homes and is going to really screw up traffic on 35th Ave NE.
• Summit and Belmont on Capitol Hill where Murray Franklyn is planning to put in a less than dynamic mixed use building leased out to even duller tenants.
• Dearborn Street just south of downtown where there are plans to build a major shopping complex, which the neighborhood feels will have a devestating Walmart effect on their neighborhood businesses.

Anyway, this is just a list of problem developments I’ve learned about while working on this blog, and I’m sure there are many more out there. Perhaps what we need is the DPD to put together a ‘South Lake Union Discovery Center’ that covers the entire city and lets us think about development holistically. Or perhaps what we need is a mayor or city council to realize that this is the major issue facing Seattle neighborhoods.

The Seattle Times reported today that the Odd Fellows Hall on Capitol Hill has been sold and is going to be updated and restored (not torn down!). They report that many tenants are justifiably worried that in the updated building rents will be so high that many of the current artist tentants will be displaced.

But rather than speculate on what will happen, these are three major factors that will go into what is eventually built.

* The Owner - The owner has tremendous leverage determing the final development. They can set binding requirements in the agreement for what is built next and they can determine the final scale of the building by raising/lowering their asking price. Properties are usually sold to developers outright or on contingency (this means that the property sale occurs when some other action happens - usually when a Master Use Permit is issued). You have more sway over an owner if the property is being sold on contingency since an active neighborhood has lots more time to actually lobby them. (In the case of Oddfellows it looks like the sale has already happened).

* The zoning envelope - For each project, there is a corresponding maximum amount of ‘build’ that can take place. This maximum amount is capped by whatever type of zoning is in place and this really dictates the kind of building which will go there. So, think of this as what sets the price, because it determines what the potential build could look like. (This is also where the design review process kicks in, where issues unique to the site can reduce the amount of buildable space the city will permit).

* Developers - These are the folks who actually decide what is going to be built, how it will look, and how it will be priced. They have to push their proposal through the city and depending on the integrity of each individual developer - they choose whether to work in partnership with a community or not. However, they can be lobbied too, and their goal is to get a Master Use Permit with the least amount of headache possible. (Since Oddfellow’s new owner is the group that refurbed Trace Lofts, I don’t think quality will be an issue. However, they will need to be lobbied hard to preserve affordable space for artists!)

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!

Just received this notice:

Please note that the monthly meeting of the CNC Neighborhood Planning Committee is next Tuesday, Oct 16^th at 6:30 pm in the community room of the West Precinct (8^th and Virginia Streets in downtown)

Agenda

• Approve CNC letter regarding SEPA threshold changes
• Discuss recommendations to CNC on follow up to letter regarding neighborhood planning update process
• Discuss recommendations for CNC regarding Multi-Family code changes

If time…

• Review changes to Comprehensive Plan process recently passed by Council

This Monday the city council will hear proposals for updating and ’standardizing’ the city’s neighborhood plans. Within the proposal there are a number of goals the Mayor wants to achieve, including;

* Growth in some neighborhoods out of sync with growth targets
(higher or lower)
* Major new investments (light rail, large private investments)
* Some current plans not effective in guiding growth
* Importance of Sustainability and Climate Change Today
* Many new city-wide plans and policies adopted since original neighborhood
plans adopted

However, a couple of the many issues not mentioned here that are also driving this need to update these plans include;
* The plans themselves were built with close neighborhood involvement and so within these plans are specific things neighborhoods wanted that the city does not now want to support. This includes specific zoning, open-space, and traffic requirements set out by different neighborhoods.
* The city wants a streamlined neighborhood planning process performed by city employees to avoid what one internal Department of Planning and Development (DPD) memo (thanx to Dennis Saxman for finding this) stated as:

The August 15 DPD memo also
complains that “There was emphasis on creating neighborhood planning
committees with balanced stakeholder representation, rather than
attracting creative thinkers and problem solvers who may have had
useful knowledge or skills they could contribute.” Another DPD memo
ridicules the effort to be inclusive: “At the extreme, some planning
committees set rigid criteria of selecting, forexample,
two residential property owners, two business owners, two Antarctic
penguin lovers, etc.”

So, why do I think this could be the end of the beginning of the Department of Neighborhood’s (DON) role in putting together these neighborhood plans? Well, the first is money, within this proposed plan, the DPD will receive $457,365 worth of new resources and $314,312 worth of reallocated resources. On the other hand the Department of Neighborhoods would only receive $89,950 worth of new funding. In addition to this, it is also looking like there are big differences in philosophies about the process of building neighborhood plans between the two departments, and the Mayor strongly favors that of the DPD.

Personally, it is looking like the DON is being moved into more of a neighborhood services role (working with community councils, providing passport services, etc…) and will be responsible for smaller, less strategic planning roles. While on the other hand the DPD will be in position to not only approve and adjust individual projects within the city, but now will own the policy under which all projects are planned. For those who support neighborhood involvement as an important part of Seattle’s land use planning, this is not a good change.

And one interesting thing to watch on Monday is whether Councilmember Sally Clark (Chair of Economic Development and Neighborhoods) argues vigorously against this change because it would basically neuter the power of her committee.

You can check out the presentation the city council will receive on:
http://www.seattle.gov/council/attachments/2007bneighborhoodplan.pdf

The Seattle PI had a really great editorial about the city’s need to focus more of its efforts on neighborhoods. They timed this with a 170-page report published by the City Auditor titled ‘Time to Revisit Neighborhood Plan Implementation.’