Jun

10

The Code of Hammurabi

Filed Under Design, Development | Leave a Comment

He’s no Bob Loblaw, but Foster Pepper Attorney Colm Nelson dives into case history and comes up with some salient points for designers and developers:

Eye for an eye, really? Irresponsible developers pay heed to the Code of Hammurabi!

Since the dawn of civilization, irresponsible builders did not survive in the marketplace. They did not survive, period. Under the ancient Code of Hammurabi of Babylon circa 1800 BC any builder who negligently built a home that later collapsed and killed the home owner “shall be put death.” Recently, citing to the Code, the Supreme Court of Washington recently, sternly reminded owners, engineers and contractors of their responsibility for worker safety.

In 2004, a digester dome at Spokane’s sewage treatment plant collapsed, killing one City of Spokane employee and injuring two others. The massive digester had a capacity of 2.25 million gallons. Its purpose was to take raw solids, circulate them for several weeks at a high temperature in an anaerobic process, and turn the solids into fertilizer. The injured parties, who were standing on and adjacent to the digester when it collapsed, sued CH2M Hill Inc., the project engineer that had contracted with the City as a consultant for the 10-year capital improvement project to upgrade the plant.

The Plaintiffs alleged, in part, that CH2M had failed to properly advise them and the City, in writing, of the downstream effects of altering the direction of sewage flow at a valve-like transfer station leading to the digester. Prior to the accident, the workers noticed pressure rising in the digester and, in an attempt to relieve that pressure, began conducting a transfer to move sludge from that digester to another. However, CH2M had recently suggested a design change for that valve and related system, which had been implemented, and the effect of that change was significant. Instead of transferring sewage out of the digester, the new system simply transferred the sludge to a “deadhead”, causing no relief in pressure whatsoever. Unfortunately, the City workers did not know this and believed the transfer would relieve pressure. Ultimately, the digester’s dome collapsed, causing one of the workers who was working on top of the dome to fall into the digester and die, while the other two were blown clear by a wave of sludge and suffered serious injury.

via Eye for an eye, really? Irresponsible developers pay heed to the Code of Hammurabi! : Better Building: The Responsible Developer’s Blog.

Apr

5

Can Transfer of Development Rights (TDR) Programs Work in Washington State? : Northwest Land Matters : Seattle Lawyers & Attorneys for Land Use, Real Estate, Environmental & Water Law : GordonDerr LLP

Filed Under Development, Zoning | Leave a Comment

From the law blog of GordonDerr:

The City of Issaquah recently announced a complex agreement involving a transfer of development rights (TDR) transaction that will preserve more than 140 acres of forested land in and around the City, including the entire Park Pointe area at the base of Tiger Mountain. Several years ago, a developer had proposed to build hundreds of homes at Park Pointe. The TDR agreement shifts new development away from Park Pointe and into the area around the Issaquah Highlands master-planned community.

This project, like many other TDR success stories in Washington State, was the result of fairly unique and fortuitous circumstances. Land conservation efforts always require vision and dedication, and in this case, local officials, planners, and other partners worked for years to preserve Park Pointe. However, as reported in the Issaquah Press, a key factor in the ultimate success of the project was the recession: between early 2009 and late 2010, the property’s value dropped from $18.9 million to around $6 million.

TDR is an intriguing concept that has been studied and debated at length. It has been used in a variety of one-off, opportunistic projects in Washington (ranging from historic preservation and affordable housing to conservation of working forests and farms). But it remains to be seen whether TDR can be used on a broader scale for more strategic and proactive conservation.

…more: via Can Transfer of Development Rights (TDR) Programs Work in Washington State? : Northwest Land Matters : Seattle Lawyers & Attorneys for Land Use, Real Estate, Environmental & Water Law : GordonDerr LLP.

Dec

10

How do you define ‘Smart Growth?’

Filed Under Development, Land Use, planning, Policy | Leave a Comment

Kaid Benfield (director, Sustainable Communities and Smart Growth for the National Resources Defense Council; co-founder, LEED for Neighborhood Development rating system; co-founder, Smart Growth America coalition and author of Once There Were Greenfields and other books) has called for a reexamination of how we talk about Smart Growth, which begs the question: What does Smart Growth mean to you? There are official principles, of course, established when the term was coined, but do you have your own definition?

Via Verde affordable green housing, Bronx, NY (courtesy of Jonathan Rose Cos.)

It’s time to update the definition of “smart growth”

It has been a dozen years or so, fifteen at the most, since a broad but committed group of advocates and organizations coalesced around a shared set of beliefs that, borrowing from then-Maryland-governor Parris Glendening’s landmark legislation, we called “smart growth.”  The phrase suited the movement because it emphasized that we were not opposed to population and economic growth, but we felt it was important to accommodate it in a smarter way:  one that reduces the environmental, economic and social costs of unchecked suburban sprawl and brings investment and opportunity back to communities that had been left behind in the building boom on the fringe of our cities and metro areas.

I’m still for that and, if you’re reading this, chances are that you are, too.  But what about the particulars?  Have we learned anything in the last decade and a half, and are we sufficiently applying what we have learned?  I would say yes, and no, respectively.  I’ll get to that in a minute but, first, let’s look at where we’ve been.

Capitol Hill, Seattle (by and courtesy of Eric Fredericks, neighborhoods.org)

rural Frederick County, MD (by and courtesy of Kai Hagen)

Of all the attempts to define what the content of smart growth should be, the one that has had the most publicity and staying power has been the set of ten principles crafted in the late 1990s for the Smart Growth Network (NRDC is a co-founder).  They are expressed as imperatives, the things we should strive for in pursuit of a smart growth agenda:

  • Create a range of housing opportunities and choices
  • Create walkable neighborhoods
  • Encourage community and stakeholder collaboration
  • Foster distinctive, attractive communities with a strong sense of place
  • Make development decisions predictable, fair and cost effective
  • Mix land uses
  • Preserve open space, farmland, natural beauty and critical environmental areas
  • Provide a variety of transportation choices
  • Strengthen and direct development towards existing communities
  • Take advantage of compact building design

…More

via New Urban Network

Dec

10

The next real estate boom

Filed Under Cities, Development | Leave a Comment

Image from DryIcons.com

Many have said that the recovery will be the beginning of a new economy, different from the one that created the bubble. The Brookings Institution speculates on the opportunity before us to shape that economic development for the betterment of all:

What if there were a new economic engine for the United States that would put our people back to work without putting the government deeper in debt? What if that economic engine also improved our international competitiveness, reduced greenhouse gases, and made the American people healthier?

At a minimum, it would sound a lot better than any of the current offers on the table: stimulus from the liberals, austerity from the conservatives, and the president’s less-than-convincing plan for a little stimulus, a little austerity, and a little bit of a clean-energy economy.

The potential for just such an economic renaissance is a lot more plausible than many would imagine. At the heart of this opportunity are the underappreciated implications of a massive demographic convergence. In short, the two largest demographic groups in the country, the baby boomers and their children—together comprising half the population—want homes and commercial space in neighborhoods that do not exist in anywhere near sufficient quantity. Fixing this market failure, unleashing this latent demand, and using it to put America back to work could be accomplished without resorting to debt-building stimulus or layoff-inducing austerity. At least for the moment, Washington has an opportunity to speed up private investment for public good and launch what could be a period of long-lasting prosperity. It is a market-driven way to make the economic recovery sustainable while addressing many of the most serious problems of our time: the health care crisis, climate change, over-reliance on oil from countries with terrorist ties, and an overextended military. …More

Oct

18

Green Infrastructure: Hero of Budget and Earth

Filed Under Cities, Conservation, Design, Development, Environment, SDOT, Seattle, South Lake Union, Streets For People, Sustainability, Transportation, Utilities | Leave a Comment

Even though we won’t win a free trip to Portland for saying this, you should really be reading Sightline Daily. We like the regional round up of sustainability topics they find from all over the region, like this from the Tyee:

Road and stormwater infrastructure often destroys the ecological function of the land that supports it and burdens home buyers and taxpayers through its cost to install, maintain and replace. Since the end of the Second World War, the per dwelling unit cost for providing, maintaining and replacing infrastructure (defined here as the physical means for moving people, goods, energy and liquids through the city) has increased by nearly 400 per cent according to some estimates.

Most of this per capita increase has been the consequence of ever more demanding engineering standards for residential roads, coupled with the gradual increase in per capita land demand over the decades (or at least until the year 2000), a consequence of universally applied sprawl patterns throughout the United States and Canada.

The first costs of these ever more odious engineering standards and ever more exclusive zoning regulations were often invisible to the taxpayer, buried as they were within the costs of the original home purchase. More…

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