Aug

9

Where is the TOD?

Filed Under Brownbag, Housing, Land Use, Transit, Zoning | Leave a Comment

Great City’s Leadership for Great Neighborhoods meets tomorrow at GGLO’s Space at the Steps to discuss the future of station area planning efforts. Our friend Roger Valdez opines on the state of local Transit Oriented Development, or the lack thereof, on the Seattle Transit Blog:

Amend Seattle’s land use code to get real Transit Oriented Development

by Roger Valdez

Roosevelt Night Life (Photo by author)

This summer has been good for land use and transit in Seattle largely because of the discussion—some would say argument—over appropriate density around the Roosevelt station area. Wednesday this week is a big day for Roosevelt, the Seattle City Council’s Committee on the Built Environment (COBE) is having a hearing on the subject and later that day Leadership for Great Neighborhoods is having a brown bag lunch discussion. The discussion in both places ought to include something about amending Seattle’s toothless station area overlay designation in its land use code.

Seattle hasn’t encouraged or even allowed true Transit Oriented Development. Any visitor to Beacon Hill will attest to the bizarre sight of a light rail station sticking out of the ground like the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Other station areas have yet to deliver on the promise of dense, walkable, housing and retail built around light rail stops. Why does Seattle lag so far behind places like British Columbia and Vancouver where there is lots of new housing around light rail?

Part of the problem is our single-family focused culture and economy. It’s easy to forget that one big private property interest in Seattle is single-family homeowners who benefit from attenuating the supply of housing. That’s not a slur, but a simple economic point. If housing is in short supply, then those who already own it benefit by keeping that supply limited. Diminished supply and increasing demand means existing homeowners can watch their property values increase …More

Mar

8

EPA: energy efficiency is about location, location, location

Filed Under Cities, Housing, Land Use, Sustainability | Leave a Comment

One way for emissions to be noticed as a part of a home's environmental footprint. Via HikersItch.com

We’ve said it before: green don’t mean a thing if it aint got that urban swing…

Where we live has an enormous impact on energy use, according to new research commissioned by the EPA. The report, “Location Efficiency and Housing Type — Boiling It Down to BTUs” finds that Americans use far less energy if they live in an apartment building in a transit-oriented neighborhood than if they live in a detached suburban house, even if that house has green building features and sports fuel-efficient cars in the driveway.

When it comes to this report, a picture’s worth a thousand words. As the graph above shows, the biggest energy efficiency gains come from living in transit-oriented neighborhoods.

A household living in a single family detached house located in a typical sprawl development uses an average of 240 million BTU British Thermal Units, a unit of energy output of energy a year, while the same household would only use 147 million BTU if the exact same house were located in a compact neighborhood. Make that single family house an apartment and energy use is down to 93 million BTU. …More: via Streetsblog Capitol Hill » EPA: Energy Efficiency Is About Location, Location, Location.

Oct

7

Great City’s Position on Council’s Backyard Cottage Legislation

Filed Under Great City, Housing, Neighborhoods, Zoning | Leave a Comment

Cottage Housing in South Seattle

The Seattle City Council’s Planning, Land Use and Neighborhoods Committee is meeting at 2:00 pm in Council Chambers at City hall this Thursday to discuss their proposed backyard cottage legislation. Members of the public are invited to attend and submit comments.

Great City has taken a position on the issue. We generally support the effort but would like to see a few improvements to the proposed legislation. Our letter summarizing our position on the proposed legislation to Council member Sally Clark who chairs the Planning, Land Use and Neighborhoods Committee after the jump.

Read more

Sep

29

Decoding the Proposed Mulitifamily Land Use Code

Filed Under Design, Housing, Land Use | Leave a Comment

Editior’s Note: This post was written by Great City super volunteer Jeff Reibman and David Neiman of the Congress of Residential Architects (CORA) who participated in the CORA team described below.

Photo courtesyof the CORA Team

The Seattle City Council’s Planning Land Use and Neighborhoods Committee (PLUNC) is considering an update to the Multifamily Zoning Code. To aid in their process they asked three groups to test run the new Low-rise sections of the proposed code to see what sort of outcomes we might produce on several different sites. Teams were asked to produce both “White Hat” schemes that showed to positive potential of the proposed code and “Black Hat” schemes that attempted to game the code to maximize development potential while producing results counter to it’s intent. The goal of the exercise was to help council members visualize the real world impact of the proposed changes and to see how it could be modified to better accomplish the city’s goals.

The three teams were picked to represent a spectrum of relevant ideas Team 1 was The Master Builders Association. Team 2 was The Congress of Residential Architects (CORA) with some involvement from Great City. Team 3 represented longtime neighborhood advocates.

CORA’s team was represented by a number of seasoned multi-family architects who drew on their experience to test a wide range of ideas. Our black hat schemes were intended to illustrate extreme of significant loopholes and unintended consequences while our white hat schemes highlighted the type of development we hope to see more of and advocated for changes that would incentivize it.

On 9/24/09 all three teams presented to PLUNC in council chambers. CORA displayed and explained the 20 boards posted here to council members and the public. Here is a link to the Executive Summary (Small PDF) and here is a link to the Full Report (Big PDF – 13 MB). Of eleven recommendations that would close the major loopholes exploited by the bad schemes & provide additional flexibility where it would allow the good schemes to be improved. Our major recommendations include:

  1. Reduce allowable FAR for ground-based housing. Above 1.1 FAR, the wheels start to come off the cart for most ground based housing schemes. At 1.4 FAR most ground based housing schemes are a disaster. We need to revisit allowable FAR & use it as a tool to reward desirable features & outcomes. For small-lot ground-based housing, FAR needs to be kept relatively low. For structured parking solutions, large lots, and projects that undergo full design review, higher FAR is appropriate.
  2. The residential amenities requirement is far too permissive – it reduces open space to an afterthought. It’s not hard to correct. The requirements just need to be dialed up to be more significant. See executive summary for proposal.
  3. Lift the density limits in all L-zones to allow diverse unit types, sizes, affordability levels.
  4. Return to a 30′ base height limit for all L-zones w/ a 4′ height bonus in L3 for structured parking.
  5. Encourage basements by exempting them from FAR – you get a privacy grade break & create opportunities for inexpensive rental flats.
  6. Reduce required Green factor. If it were working, it would incentivize open space, privacy screening, tree planting & permeability. It does none of those things; it simply covers your land in shrubs & your walls in vines.