By Erica C. Barnett
This week’s Seattle Nice takes on one of the wonkiest, yet most contentious, issues facing Seattle: Design review!
Specifically: Should the city exempt housing, hotels, and life sciences buildings in the downtown core from design review, a protracted process in which panels of architects and activists (yes, activists) get to raise objections, and force changes, to new buildings. Historically, design review has been weaponized to delay the development of new housing.
In neighborhoods across the city, design review has forced housing developers to change details as picayune as the color of exterior brick and the orientation of exterior landscaping. It has also been used to reduce the number of housing units available to renters (requiring additional setbacks from the street, for instance, or forcing “wedding cake”-style tiered buildings) as well as dictate what kind of amenities a building must have.
In one example I covered several years ago, the Northwest Design Review Board delayed a 57-unit, four-story apartment building on Greenwood Ave., an arterial street, because neighbors insisted that each of the 57 studio apartments should have its own washer and dryer and central air conditioning; they were also furious that the building would have a common space on the roof, because you know how THOSE kind of people get with their wild parties. (Seriously: They wanted to kill the outdoor space because people would, quote, “party.”)
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Design review can add hundreds of thousands of dollars and months, sometimes years, of delay to a project—costs that get passed on directly to the renters who will ultimately live in the building. Still, advocates (including our own devil’s advocate on the podcast, David) argue that if we didn’t have it, Seattle would be chock full of ugly buildings.
Um… Have they looked around Seattle lately? I would argue that design review, which focuses intensely on “neighborhood character,” has contributed greatly to the homogenization of the city, shaving off any and all unique design elements in pursuit of the sameness we see in new developments all around us. After agonizing for months over whether a building’s brick cladding should be dark brown or brown, or whether some apartment should be removed to achieve a curvilinear exterior wall that gestures toward the riparian history of blah blah blah, design review still spits out ugly buildings—at significant cost to the people who will ultimately have to foot the bill.
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Design Review discussions are prohibited from delving into floor plans. Or unit type. Or unit counts. Period. None of those issues are relevant to Seattle’s Design Review process as it has been run for at least the past 6 years. (Note that the Greenwood project sort is from 2016)
There are several issues you raise. If having washers in unit are a requirement, then it should be on a defined check list. Redesigning apartment layout takes time and money. If there is such a requirement then it should be published before filing a building permit. That said, if the architect is holding up the building over brick color then I suspect they are just running up their bill. Is that really the hill the developer wants to die on? (or at least get delayed over?) Some complaints sound real and some sound like convenient excuses to tell the bank rather than fess up to the real delays that are in the builders control. Some like the roof space may be worth thrashing out in public as it could affect the public. These thing can be done quick and anybody who has ever designed anything from a rocket to a bird house knows that getting many eyes on a design early prevents a lot of pain after you think you are finished.
Design Review doesn’t “spit out” buildings and is not responsible for the formulaic designs you’re bothered by. Those are produced by the developers’ design teams. Commentary for Design Review is based on the Design GUIDELINES, which are intended to GUIDE the design toward a solution that meets not just the property owner’s needs but those of the community. The horror stories, cherry-picked from over 30 years of design review history in this town, continually re-referenced again and again, are the exception and not the rule in how things play out. I was on the Central Area DRB for several years and never once did we fuss over ridiculous nuance like subtle tonal differences in brick selections. Since the time of the Greenwood project, the maximum a project could go through is two EDG meeting and one Design Recommendation meeting. In my time only a small fraction of the projects ever had to do the maximum. Those that did came through demonstrably better. And as for your contention that design review can “add hundreds of thousands of dollars and months, sometimes years, of delay to a project” is based on these nightmarish outliers, and old information on how the process works. By repeating this nonsense you are doing the dirty work for the developers. It’s preposterous to suggest that the actual consultant fees involved add in any noticeable way to the rent a tenant will someday pay (those consultant fees for Design Review would commonly not exceed 5-figures, a drop in the bucket compared to the construction costs well into 10s of millions). Instead of fear mongering you could instead focus on what could be improved, maybe even delve into some slightly more creative thinking like, eliminating the “Design Recommendation” phase. Or you could focus on the real impediments to timely implementation of the permitting process like MUP and building permit, which take far longer than Design Review. You could also look into the history of the program to educate your readers on why the program got its start in the first place.