1. Last week, the Seattle Department of Transportation released an update to the city’s Bicycle Master Plan Implementation Plan that—as I reported on Wednesday—attempts to address complaints from bike advocates by committing to “study” several routes in South Seattle (along Beacon Ave. S., Martin Luther King Jr. Way S., and between downtown Seattle and Georgetown) that were omitted in a draft version of the plan released earlier this year. Those projects, according to the update, may be built at some point in the future, if unspecified “additional funding” becomes available, perhaps in the form of also-unspecified “new grants and partnership opportunities.” (Bike advocates, as you might imagine, aren’t holding their breath.)
In addition to identifying those “study areas,” the updated plan still gets rid of miles of long-planned protected bike lanes, pushes other bike projects back several years or indefinitely, and eliminates about a dozen projects that were in the most recent update, back in 2017. And it replaces an already delayed two-way protected bike lane on the east side of Fourth Avenue in downtown Seattle with a one-way northbound lane on the west side of the street—another setback for a project that was supposed to open last year but which was delayed until 2021 on the grounds that a two-way bike lane might slow down transit on Fourth Ave. during the “period of maximum constraint.” (The report now cites “parking impacts” as a reason for the latest change).
Some other changes since the last version of the plan include:
• A 1.27-mile “safe routes to school” neighborhood greenway to the Orca K-8 school in Southeast Seattle that was identified as “low risk” and scheduled for completion in 2021 is now listed as “TBD”;
• The two-mile North Admiral Connection in West Seattle, which had been removed in the earlier version of the plan, is now back and in the “planning phase,” with a “TBD” completion date.
• Two center-city projects—a quarter mile of protected bike lane on 9th Ave. and a quarter-mile “south end connection” to the Center City bike network in Pioneer Square—will be completed this year, a year ahead of the schedule in the earlier plan.
• Two projects on Capitol Hill—a 0.8-mile stretch of neighborhood greenway (plus 0.1 miles of protected bike lane) along Melrose Ave. and a 0.8-mile stretch of protected bike lane along Union —are now scheduled to open in 2021, a year after the draft version of the plan said they would be finished.
• A half-mile “interim” protected bike lane on 8th Ave. downtown, which was scheduled to open this year, is now listed as a “permanent” PBL that will open in 2023.
• A 0.6-mile safe routes to school connection to Stevens Elementary School on Capitol Hill that was scheduled to open in 2020 is now listed as “TBD,” with 10 percent of the design completed.
• The 1.4-mile Missing Link of the Burke-Gilman Trail, which has been delayed forever by lawsuits from industrial businesses in Ballard, has been divided into three segments, the last of which is now scheduled for completion in 2021, rather than 2020.
The 20-year lease reportedly does not include a redevelopment clause, which would allow the building’s owner to end the lease early for redevelopment, potentially preserving the historic bar for another two decades—if boycotts like the ones that led Meinert to sell his stake in three Capitol Hill bars don’t drive it out of business. The odds of that happening seem fairly low—Meinert also owns the 5 Point Café in Belltown, which does not appear to have suffered from its connection with the former Capitol Hill fixture. The Five Point and the Mecca are among the oldest continuously operating bars in Seattle, opened by the same family in 1929 and 1930, respectively.
It isn’t clear whether there’s a direct nexus between people buying up derelict RVs at a bargain and putting them back out on the street—which clearly happens—and the “predatory rental” practice Durkan says her policy would address
3. Last week, Mayor Jenny Durkan announced that her office was cracking down on junk RVs and “predatory” RV landlords—people who buy up derelict or dangerous RVs and rent them by the month to vulnerable homeless people—by making it easier for the city to destroy junk RVs and fining people who buy them and rent them out . Erin Goodman, head of the SoDo Business Improvement Association, referred to this practice as “car-ranching” in an interview with KOMO TV last year, and the phrase appears to have stuck. (As recently as 2015, the same phrase was used, also on KOMO, to describe people who own multiple cars and abandon them on the street).
Because the mayor’s press release doesn’t contain any information about “car ranching” other than an assertion that it happens, it’s hard to say whether it’s a problem widespread enough to justify changing city law. (The mayor has not delivered any legislation to the city council, who were reportedly blindsided by the announcement).
Nor is it clear whether there’s a direct nexus between people buying up derelict RVs at a bargain and putting them back out on the street—which clearly happens—and the “predatory rental” practice Durkan says her policy would address. I asked the mayor’s communications director, Kamaria Hightower for some answers. I’ve condensed my questions and Hightower’s answers below.
ECB: What makes an RV rental “predatory,” specifically? Do you have any examples, and do you know how often this actually happens?
KH: Predatory rental of vehicles is the act of renting vehicles that are unfit for human habitation based on public health and safety standards, to vulnerable populations. In most cases, these rentals are targeted towards individuals with lack of financial and material resources. When RVs that are occupied are towed, the occupants will be offered services, including shelter, to help them re-establish a rental in a safe and appropriate location.
ECB: How does the city identify predatory RV owners and has the city considered other penalties that impact these owners directly?
KH: Predatory vehicle rental is an issue affecting vulnerable populations and adjacent neighborhoods. It has been identified by both the RV Remediation Pilot and SPD Parking Enforcement as a means for individuals to take advantage of already vulnerable groups by allowing people to live in dangerous and unfit conditions. Renting of RVs is not illegal; and this proposal focuses specifically on vehicles that pose a safety and health risk.
ECB: What criteria will be used to determine which vehicles get destroyed instead of sold at auction?
KH: The city will use existing Junk Vehicle criteria from the State and in addition the vehicle must also meet one of the following public health criteria developed by King County Public Health to identify vehicles that are unsafe to reenter the market:
- Inadequate sanitation to the extent that occupants or the general public are directly exposed to the risk of illness or injury;
- Creates an environmental hazard;
- Creates a health, fire or safety hazard; and
- Inadequate protection to the extent that occupants are exposed to the weather.
ECB: Has the city determined that there is a direct nexus between the 60 vehicles that were resold over the last year after being towed and predatory RV rentals? If not, what is the other evidence that this policy will result in a reduction in predatory rentals of RVs to vulnerable homeless people?
KH: In 2018, 53% (60) of the RVs/vehicles towed through the RV Remediation Pilot reentered the market despite being removed from high-ranking cleanup sites with significant health and safety risks. We are stopping the resale and auction of hazardous vehicles, which should ensure unsafe and unhabitable vehicles are not returned to the market.
“For those who are chronically homeless, providing treatment and services to those people is not giving them everything. It’s actually treating some of the issues that they have, and we need to do more of that i we’re really going to talk about transitioning folks into housing that they can stabilize in. And we do that by expanding the LEAD program, which is proven to be effective at helping people get into housing permanently. The navigation teams that we have are a waste of money. It’s unconstitutional, it’s not effective, and it wastes taxpayer dollars.”
“About 27 percent of Seattle streets do not have sidewalks. And the reason that we can only afford to put in about 10 blocks of sidewalks a year is that they cost so much. They cost about $300,000 per block face. That means close to half a million or sometimes $1 million per block. I think that there’s a role for home zones— streets without sidewalks where we can slow streets down, where cars are guests. I see sidewalks is having a lot of embedded carbon and a lot of stormwater impact. I don’t think we need sidewalks everywhere. We need them some places. Certainly with safe routes to school, safe routes for seniors. But there are a lot of places where sidewalks are not the answer.”
