Ugly Townhouses and Apartment Buildings, begone!

That's got to be the ugliest color–pea-soup green– I've ever seen on a house.

The problem is that the more design that goes into something the more expensive it is. In my neighborhood we have some hideous townhouses, with ugly garages, no good landscaping, and no real design. They are about 300-400k. We also have some really nice, completely green ones that are unique and nice looking and cost 500-600k for the same square footage and amenities. Now I would much prefer the nicer ones, but I also want people to have access to affordable housing.

Every restriction or requirement put on a developer increases the cost of housing. Doesn't mean we don't do it, but I think that often that side of the equation gets left out or dismissed with nonsense about greedy developers blah blah blah.

Unfortunately, aesthetics are a matter of personal preference. Exactly the sort of thing that shouldn't be subject to the whims of democratic process. For instance, while Sarah68 thinks the pictured house is an ugly color, it is one of my favorite in the 'Seattle palatte'. Legislating the appearance of other people's homes has the potential to go seriously awry. If we force people to build according to a code that is broadly agreed upon, our built environment will regress to the mean. Please don't do this Seattle!!!

Affordable to whom? And who on earth would buy a townhouse for $600K, no matter how “green” they are? There are some really nice houses with Lake Washington views for $600K now. You're right about the nonsense about greedy developers, however; right now they're not greedy, just very desperate. When the recovery happens, they'll be greedy again.

Amusingly enough they sold, and pretty quickly. Right now though there are some for sale that have the virtue of being both ugly and expensive. They are also located on a busy street in a not to desirable part of the neighborhood. Even still a couple of them have sold.

And even if developers are greedy they are also pretty savvy. Their profits are not that different from most businesses. Its not like they are making so much on each unit that they can comply with costly regulations without raising prices. People always go on about how developers are to blame for the lack of affordable housing but yet you don't see them building and selling housing for less. Orgs like the SHA do, but only with grants and funding options not available to developers.

Reducing the parking requirement while having transit “service” as it is, and getting worse, will plant cars on the street, builders will pocket that cash anyway, and we gain REET, so it MUST be done.

The reason SHA and Seattle/King County's other non-profit and public housing developers create affordable housing isn't because of the funding mechanisms available – it's because they are mission-driven to house people who can't find safe, decent housing that is truly affordable in the open market.

The funding universe for affordable housing is in constant flux and currently it may take 14 or more sources to create a single multi-family building – hardly an advantage and really more of an inhibitor.

When market-rate developers want to create affordable housing they can – Low Income Housing Tax Credits – a critical resource that often provides 60 percent of current affordable housing funding – are available to for-profits as well as non-profits; what's missing too often is the will for market developers to create affordable housing, not the means, otherwise a few years ago during the boom times they would have been cranking out affordable units along with market-rate units instead of pushing to the upper limits of profitability.

The good news; market-rate developers can turn this around when the economy recovers and join the public housing authorities and non-profit developers in creating the affordable housing thousands of our neighbors so desperately need.

I wonder if it would be legal to require that all designs be approved in some fashion. I believe that codes that certain neighborhoods meet certain design elements were found legal in other communities. Or would this be a lawsuit quagmire with developers to fight such a law?

Most of the time it's not the “greeness” that makes the $600k townhouses cost more than the $300k ones. Energy saving appliances, water saving toilets etc add $10k or so in actual costs.

It's the styling.Tear the craftsman gingerbread off the $300k and add “Dwell” modernist siding. Replace honey/white cabinets and laminate floors with dark “wood” colors. Pink granite with black granite. You've got a $600k townhouse.

Uh-huh. Then why don't you go and do it. Or why isn't it being done? If developers could make a profit building low income housing then why aren't they? I mean if they are so greedy they should be jumping at the opportunity? Or are they just not smart enough? Maybe they just hate poor people?

If this were truly the case there would be more for-profit developers building low income housing just like their are for-profit stores catering to low-income people.

SHA is certainly “mission driven” and they do great work, but like you said funding low income housing is complex.

I am all for encouraging developers to build low-income housing, and the tax credits already available are great start, but we need more lots more. We could dramatically increase height limits for example. Give developers an extra floor for every one or two they make low income or affordable. We could remove parking requirements, allow for smaller lot sizes, slash permitting costs and impact fees, provide low interest loans, and many more thing.

One of the things about the economy is that if there is a way to make money at it someone will probably do it. The fact that almost all low income housing is built by non-profits or government agencies tells me that it is likely something that is pretty hard to make money at. We should change that.

I should add that those cosmetic choices don't add much to the cost of the townhouse either. It's $200k+ surcharge for looking like 2008 instead of 2003.

I agree with JW (I too really like that building): Bold, and well-thought out designs are always going to be the ones that create the most controversy because they tend to split people into lovers and haters. You think Paris' Eiffel Tower and Sacre Coeur didn't have their detractors when they were built? And closer to home even the Smith Tower wasn't loved by everyone (nor the Needle for that matter.)

The real problem is enforcing an aesthetic that doesn't piss anyone off. In other words, asking for developers to create buildings that are as mundane as possible, with no flair.

And don't assume developers dislike this. In fact, it makes their job easier because instead of having to actually choose some kind of architectural expression they can just choose any old architect to design a building to spec.

Another thing that is annoying, our current design guidelines say that new architecture has to respect the architectural context of the neighborhood. Pray tell, what neighborhood in Seattle has any form of architectural coherence other than Pioneer Square? It is such a worthless requirement and results in some weird attempts to mimic both 1900 single family homes, 1930's spanish-style apartment buildings, and 1970's front-parking convenient stores all in one building.

Here's my solution: due away with design guidelines and design review altogether. In it's place, set up a neighborhood development board. When a developer buys a piece of property and puts in an application for construction, even before any design work is done, they begin a dialogue with the community about what they want and need and what the community wants and needs. These meetings continue throughout the design process but the community is allowed to respond to not just the architectural elements, but all aspects of the building. When a happy solution is found, the developer can then build.

The benefit here is that a developer then must bring in a building and basically try and sell it to the community. Unlike today where a developer comes in with crap, the community tells them it looks like crap, the developer says they just built it to the design code, then the review board agrees and signs off.

other cities ave many rowhouse neighborhoods that look nicer and aremore affordable, why not just copy what they do?

1. they often have a fee simple rowhouse with 3 units: owner in the middle, and someone they rent to on the top floor and on the bottom, basement floor. With no parking. This is illegal in many of our low rise neighborhoods because of size restrictions and the parking requirement. So everyone of those ugly townhouses that we build which is one expensive unit could have been three more affordable units.
2. We allow buildings with no door to the street, very ugly, and hostile.
3. We allow non street to alley lots the 3 pack and 8 packs have buildings with no direct entrance to the street. Ugly, hostile, and the common driveway eats up the space preventing little front and back yards. Again, with each unit required to have an attached garage, we force developers to build crap.
4. We have small lots but require lots of space, making the builder forego the little tiny front yard which makes a great transition space hosting a nice broad stairway up to front door, possibly a porch for eyes on the street,
5. People need access to alleys where we have alleys. When you allow the 4 pack or 8 pack you cut off the access to the alley enjoyed by the buildings that are on the street. This alley access is a great way for them to park cars.
6. We often ban garages from being built, but they allow folks who inhabit row houses and apts. without parking to have a place to put cars. Many use transit M-F and use the car only on weekends.
Most people will always be multimodal.
We should foster it and not demand single modal.
6. the requirement of parking often means smaller lots can't support a nice 4, 6 or 18 unit apt. building due to the need for a costly and street-uglifying underground concrete garage. rowhouses required to have attached parking means their whole structure is upset, too, removing the broad steps in front and the basement unit and the porch and in effect requiring a ugly garage and the first level too high off the street and not connected to it. These four packs look like mini office towers, they do not interact to make a nice streetscape.
many of our so called town houses don't even have a door to the street! and all that space on the 5 pack or 8 pack lots is used for a common driveway meaning there's no little yard in front or in back…..forcing the townhouses on the street right up to the lot line, making the street very ugly and hostile. There's no place to hang out on the steps!
we need to just look what works elsewhere and copy it. But most likely we will have 400 charettes on our criteria, spend two years talking, implement a dramatic pilot program limited to 3 projects a year, while all over the world people ahve already figured this out and we're too self absorbed and fiercely independent to just learn what works and copy it. Our mental processing time for this stuff is so glacial, we seem to need to cogitate about 50 years before going for mass transit, for example. Then we only do so a little bit. The same thing is happening in urban design. It's fairly clear what to do and what works but we are simply reluctant to (a) copy what others do and (b) change.

Radiant flooring, on-demand hot water, increased insulation, triple pane inert gas windows, bamboo floors, special concrete, etc etc etc all cost much more than 10k.

Plus you add in the cost a real architect as opposed to cookie cutter units with decent design inside and out and you run up the cost even more.

If developers were just taking on 200k to their units you would pretty quickly see others only taking on 150k, then 100k, and so on. Profit margins on real estate development are more like 10% So on that 600k townhouse about 60k of that is profit. Sometimes more, sometimes less, a lot less.

I completely agree with you that those Row Houses are (post-gentrification) very wonderful and cute neighborhoods. But it also important to note that generally the context in which they were built was cheap, terrible housing for poor factory workers. In fact, much of the later code requirements throughout cities was in response to this type of poor housing.

Not to belittle your comments, I think there is a lot to learn from this type of housing and again, in many cases today it is really wonderful. More to illustrate that there is no science to what is (or what will be) considered beautiful architecture.

SHA's mission in doing HopeVI housing is not to create affordable market-rate housing; it's to help finance their low-income housing. Unfortunately, when they tear down older low-income housing, as they've done in several projects around Seattle, to build mixed-income projects, they don't replace the low-income units 1-to-1. The outcome is less low-income housing. They deny it, but all you have to do is be able to count. Don't mix SHA in with low-income housing developers. An entirely different situation.

Have you ever worked with a group that operates on consensus? I can not-so-fondly remember those six-hour meetings with people yelling and people crying and nothing decided. Then you have the additional pleasure of people selling their houses and new people moving in, so you never have the same group trying to come up with design decisions. The two immediate consequences: whoever has the loudest voice and the most stamina wins, and no one would have time to work for a living.

Have you shopped any these? most of the so-call modern greens do not have those features you mention -Radiant flooring, on-demand hot water, increased insulation, triple pane inert gas windows, bamboo floors, special concrete- and are not architect designed. Sure the ones designed by Pb Architecture that are featured in Dwell, Sunset, and the Seattle Times magazine do. Most of those are asking a lot more than $600k. The rest are the same old shitty boxes.

joshamar, in fact, the form of row house I am talking about includes neighborhoods that are rich, and poor.
Look at the movie Dressed to Kill. The shrink has a beautiful rowhouse with a basement unit he used for his therapy office. That could also be a unit for a public school teacher making $45K. Look at the Cosby Show. Beautiful rowhouse. Look at no. 10 downing street, fairly upscale. Not exactly Dickensian.

Look at the movie Moonstruck or Crooklyn. THESE are the kind sof things I am talking about. Those are middle class and working class rowhouses with nice front entries, stairs and stoops and porches, and a unit on the two middle floors for the owner's family (really Cher had a pretty nice extended family, lots of big pasta dinners) (same with teh black family in Crooklyn) and a renter above and below (nice for the owners to get that rent. Affordable all around).
I am suggesting we simply get pictures of any of the 1,000,000 urban blocks around the world that have successful rowhouses both rich and poor and simply copy those apps instead trying to write our own urban design “software” (land use, bulding design and review codes) from scratch and taking fifty years of process to do it.

If you really want a zero carbon footprint, that's what we'd do.

It is being done by for-profits. If you look on craigslist for a while you'll see income restricted units advertised in buildings not on http://aptfinder.org/ . In particular I remember ones at The Cairns and Alley24 that were roughly what we were looking for at an amazing price–then we saw the fine print. We make too much money, though to be fair we absolutely should be paying our own way.

The ones at Alley24 at least were funded via a city Tax Abatement Program and are controversial because they replaced the old wood-frame Lillian Apartments. Nick Licata's writeup here:
http://www.seattle.gov/council/licata/up/up_192…

And of course Section 8 is available for most anywhere.

Never said that developers could make a profit in affordable housing, only that they could produce it if they were so-motivated.

The motivation or lack thereof is the crux of the matter, not the capacity to create; market developers make money on some projects, break even on others and lose money on occasion, all part of the development universe. No one expects them to do this but they might find their image improved greatly if they would.

“Many use transit M-F and use the car only on weekends.”

We use zipcar for this… why should I need pay for parking an owned car?

on neighborhood development boards — I am fairly sure that none of the 1,000,000 urban blocks around the world that have beautiful rowhouses both rich and poor got that way with neighborhood development boards. Let's jump right over all the process and start with the end product. Here are pictures of ten city neighborhoods we like. Here are their rules. Adopt those rules, you'll pretty much get the results you see in the pictures. Done. Change. On the way to zero carbon footprint by 2040.

Or do what we did with rapid transit, talk for fifty years then build it; meanwhile the nations that had subways fifty years ago now are building high speed train networks that displace many shorter flights totally…there's basically no more flights from Madrid to Barcelona, you'd be crazy to waste time on an airplane, take the high speed train….by the time we take fifty years to finally get a consensus that our beautiful rowhouses have to have the same rules that got everyone else in the world beautiful rowhouses, too, Spain will be building maglev trains connecting Santander to Bilbao and Burgos and Madrid.
And there will be a high speed train from Shanghai to Tokyo.
we need to recognize we are way behind, and our insularity is the problem.

I go by these particular houses several times a month. What I find jarring each time are the roof lines, particularly the two pitched roofs on the building on the right that drain towards each other. It always looks awkward to me to see a gully in the middle of the roof line. The other asymmetrical roof lines are also not very attractive.

There is a four or five year old house in Lakewood/Seward Park that has a massive faux stone chimney on the outside going up two floors only to end under the eave. Evidently the fireplaces are gas and are vented through the wall so there is no mechanical reason for a real chimney, but every time I look at it I'm struck by how strange the chimney looks not extending above the roof line. These roof lines strike somewhat the same way.

I toured the ones I mentioned and they had all of those.

I doubt they are vain enough to care that much about their image. Hell if they really wanted people to love them they could just give away houses.

Developers, like any business, want to make a profit, and like any person, need to make a living. We can talk about some fantasy world where they do things for free, or we can figure out how to get more affordable housing in the world in which we actually live.

I actually like the townhouses in the picture. What gives people the right to enforce their exact vision of good taste. Set some basic rules based on principals of urban design and then let go of control. Half the problems of the 4-pack were the results of zoning rules trying to specify to much (e.g. rows of fences because somebody thought that all townhouses needed separate private outside space).
And affordable housing, if you let the market build enough housing then it will decrease the value of older units. Some gov. subsidized housing is always going to be necessary, but all poor people should not be dependent on gov. housing subsidies for a place to live.

Architecturally, this new angle roof design, plus, uneven side surfaces, isn't bad Post Modern. The green color is off. Could be darker. The Blue goes with the brickwork. Landscaping strip seems narrow. I've seen ugly and this ain't that bad.

Ugliest house I ever saw was a quaint box cottage w/ small porch, a little gingerbread and bright paint. It's foundation was actually a large boulder that sloped away and down from all sides, even in the front where a little bridge-like affair was set up. Yeah, I'd wanna live there like, never.

Design review boards follow rules, but you can argue codes are ignored often. Artist renditions that show only the new building (most renditions) fail to demonstrate important views in relation to adjacent structures. This suggests codes were made lenient, the bar set too low, “Just approve it already, wouldja?” Seattle developers have long had plenty of leeway to build according to free market rules. How's that working out for ya?

There is very little “government subsidized housing.” There is a shrinking number of government housing–actual government units–and there are non-profits who build low-income housing for people who may or may not have government funding. They have a lot of trouble building those units because their funding sources have been drying up. It would be nice if poor people wouldn't have to be dependent on low-income housing for a place to live. However, the “market” doesn't build low-income housing, because they make more money from building market-rate housing. That's what the market is, in housing or anything else: profit-driven. Did you notice what happened over the last 1.5 years?

My take from back in June 2008:
http://hugeasscity.com/2008/06/11/if-you-want-t…

Affordable housing is government subsidized, that is what I mean. Gov. provides some funding so rent can be cheaper and you have to qualify by income to live there. New construction doesn't always create cheaper units, but older units then become cheaper as supply is created. If builders could throw up cheap buildings with small units, then rents would be cheaper too. It isn't the market that is stopping affordable housing, it is the regulation of the market that is, which we then try to fix by giving subsidies.

There's no regulation on how small units can be; I had a friend who had a new condo in Belltown that was 300 sq ft. There is regulation on whether the units are safe and up to code. That's what's expensive in smaller units. I don't think you'd want low-income people living in unsafe units, would you? That's what often happens with the older buildings; there've been horrific stories of that kind of thing in the newspapers over the years. And sorry, but there is no way the market could or would build units that were affordable to really low-income people — say people on GAU (should it survive the Legislature) where they pay 1/3 of their income, or people on SSI, who make little more than that. That's where non-profits come in, not the Paul Allens of the construction world. You want what isn't going to happen. The “market” creates market-rate housing, period. Your particular ideology does not make reality any different.

Let's do remember that aesthetics are subjective.

I’m not opposed to exploration of design standards, but they’re not going to be of much use if they originate from asking people who revere the single-family dwelling what they like or don’t like. So if the structure in this photo is somehow violating the color palette code (which to my eye, it is not), then I trust the AIA will begin work by systematically cataloguing all single-family homes in Seattle, as—gasp!—there are some which are similarly painted. Much worse, actually.

But here’s the thing: that purple monstrosity in Capitol Hill offends my eye, but so what? The owner apparently likes that color, and the fact that I find it loathsome links to my values about being a Seattle resident, which is letting him/her paint a house whatever color he/she likes without objection from me.

It’s just tiresome when the resistance to density gets camouflaged as having to do with aesthetics. NIMBY has been reborn as NASM (Not Across the Street from Me). If you don’t like multifamily housing, just call it “unattractive,” so you can tie up the permitting process and also task DPD, an agency struggling with revenue shortfalls and layoffs, with months of esoteric code revisions.

There’s the long-standing fiction that residents of single-family homes have a superior design sense; however, a short walk through most Seattle neighborhoods will demonstrate otherwise. So how about we set aside this smokescreen about aesthetics and stay on the real issues of density, green building, affordable housing…you know, things that actually matter?

Is that photo an example of an ugly house or an well designed house? One person's idea of forward thinking design is another person's ugly. That example could go either way….
Also, you are conflating what it looks like on the outside with crappy construction and design on the inside. They are not automaticall the same thing.