Category: Maybe Metropolis

Density, Development, land use, Maybe Metropolis, zoning

The Invasion of the Corner Stores

Activating residential neighborhoods one poppyseed bagel at a time.

By Josh Feit

The line stretched 25 people deep along the sidewalk on a recent Friday on Capitol Hill. I wasn’t waiting to get into a club. Nor was I anywhere near the thumping Pike-Pine corridor. I was a mile away in an NR3 zone, a city zoning designation that not only forbids apartment buildings (while requiring all the surrounding single-family homes to be built on roomy 5,000-square-foot lots), but also prohibits retail businesses.

Mt. Bagel, where I was eagerly queueing up to get a bag of six fresh poppyseed bagels, is on the corner of 26th Ave. E. and E. Valley St., tucked up against the Arboretum, far afield from any commercial action.

“How did you folks pull this off?” I asked the woman working the cash register.

“It used to be a neighborhood grocery store,” she said. “I guess they never changed the zoning, and we got grandfathered in.” Then, perhaps worrying that I didn’t approve of such mischief, she added, “The neighbors love it!” King County records show that the two-story, three-bedroom, 2,000 square foot building was built in 1910 and sold for $91,000 in 1985 to its current owners; Seattle’s Department of Construction & Inspections notes that “it was built originally as a mixed-use building” meaning apartments on the top floor and commercial on the bottom.

“Of course the neighbors love it,” I said. “And there should be more of it.” Far from creating an unwelcome disturbance on an otherwise serene street, lines around the block constitute a political win for any city.

If we’ve learned anything from the pandemic, it’s that the traditional notion of concentric-circle cities where commercial action is relegated to downtown cores—and eased out of existence the further you move from the center—is an outdated and awkward contemporary city planning conceit. Twenty-first century approaches to zoning need to be altered to prioritize commerce in neighborhoods across the city. Similarly, as I’ve argued in this column many times: density should be shared across the city as well.

The fact that Mt. Bagel was a corner grocery in bygone days hints at an era before cities were reconfigured for the automobile; a time when outer-tier neighborhoods prioritized community needs as opposed to isolation.

Seattle needs to shift away from its carbon-heavy, suburbanized model and create networks of neighborhoods with dense housing that have immediate access to mass transit, parks, schools, and commercial spaces.

Seattle should take advantage of the public’s appetite for post-pandemic urban experimentation by redistributing density and commerce throughout the city’s neighborhoods, including in our neighborhood residential zones. Re-activating spaces in residential zones that are already zoned for business is a logical and easy first step.  Seattle’s Department of Construction & Inspections doesn’t have a catalog of spaces—like Mt. Bagel—that would fit the bill. But it would be a promising pursuit for the city to locate these spaces and start a program to promote reactivation. For example, Spokane has identified 95 such spaces.

In fact, Spokane’s planning department has an official initiative to allow property owners to convert any former commercial space, including spaces located in residential-only zones, back into commercial use.  The city, which is about a third the size of Seattle, established its “Activate Existing Neighborhood Commercial Structures” policy well before the pandemic, back in 2017.

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“In the past, Spokane enjoyed numerous small retail and commercial stores peppered throughout the neighborhoods, selling the small sundries and supplies needed by nearby residents,” said Kevin Freibott, a senior city planner for the city of Spokane. Freibott noted that “the presence of corner shops and small neighborhood retail in traditionally residential-only areas, can help activate a neighborhood, provide for greater use of pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure, and create a sense of place and community that can be missing in more homogenous neighborhoods.”

Of course, not all of Spokane’s 95 properties were ripe for redevelopment, Freibott said. Meanwhile, and unfortunately, the city has not reached out directly to any of the eligible property owners to see if they’re interested in converting their property to non-residential use. So far, the program has very few examples—just three—of commercial reactivation. However, cool examples of conversions on quiet residential intersections include one vacant residence that was converted into a coffee and fresh baked pastry shop called The Meeting House (it was a corner grocery in 1925), and a vacant house that was converted to a bakery and brewery called the Grain Shed (it was originally a small shop.)

As our affordable housing crisis (a cry for more housing) combines with the climate crisis (a cry for sustainable land use policies), Seattle needs to shift away from its carbon-heavy, suburbanized zoning model which severely segregates housing types and cordons off commercial use. Instead, we need to create intertwined networks of neighborhoods with dense housing that have immediate access to mass transit, parks, schools, and commercial spaces. Re-introducing commercial occupants into the swaths of Seattle’s developable land that’s currently off limits to neighborhood shops could be a popular first step toward meeting this urgent goal.

As the line of people stretching down 26th Ave. E. upset the placid morning with a giddy jolt of human activity, it became clear that Seattle is ready to embrace this change. Let the full-scale invasion of corner stores begin.

Josh@PubliCola.com

Affordability, City Council, Density, Development, housing, Maybe Metropolis

Maybe Metropolis: The Impact of Housing Scarcity, Not Housing Development, is the Problem

By Josh Feit

As urban environmentalists—that is, pro-housing groups and transit advocates—have been correctly pointing out lately: there’s a serious shortcoming with environmental impact statements these days. The environmental review process has been commandeered by slow-growthers and anti-housing groups as a way to thwart green transit projects and even modest density such as backyard cottages on the grounds that these types of projects will disrupt the community.

Can we please look at the bigger picture? Adding density not only translates into a better return on infrastructure investments, such as new transit, by improving efficiency and adding riders, but it also reins in sprawl and its accompanying high-carbon commutes. Framing new housing along these lines makes one wonder why we don’t do environmental benefits statements for new development.

Unfortunately, as Erica reported on Monday, the scared-of-growth city council is preparing to weaponize the notion of impacts yet again, amending the city’s comprehensive plan to queue up new impact fees on development. Proponents of impact fees say they would fund the new transportation infrastructure needed to accommodate new housing. The populist idea, which unites the council’s right flank (sponsor Alex Pedersen) and left flank (socialist Kshama Sawant) over their shared reactionary utopianism, is a see-through ploy to slow development—also known as housing. Developers—who you might think were manufacturing opioids, not new housing stock, given the blanket animosity they inspire—already pay sales taxes, real estate excise taxes, and Mandatory Affordable Housing fees. In fact, Pedersen’s proposal could cost developers up to four times as much as the annual property taxes on new development, according to a potential fee schedule introduced at a recent council hearing on the comprehensive plan amendment.

Instead of prescribing impact fees on new housing, the council should tax the impact of non-development by authorizing a fee on property owners who live in the vast tracts of our city, 75 percent of Seattle’s developable land, where prohibitive zoning forbids apartments. The city’s current development ban has put inflationary pressure on housing, fueling the affordable housing crisis and creating a disproportionate impact on renters and potential first-time buyers. Meanwhile, homeowner wealth grows. Between 2012 and 2022, the median cost of a house in Seattle rose from $420,000 to $1 million. During the same period, according to data from Zillow, median rents in Seattle rose from around $1,250 in 2012 to $2,350 in 2022.

Critics of new development like to point out that brand-new housing is never affordable to low- and middle-income people. But they seem to miss the fact that the developments they’re criticizing are being built now, under Seattle’s current zoning regulations—not in the up-zoned dystopia that exists in their minds. In other words: It’s the current rules against more density that are raising the price of housing, not some pro-development free-for-all.

Making new housing even more expensive by charging an impact fee for transportation (when we’re already investing in transit through several other streams) is a regressive canard, not a fair policy. Pedersen argued that impact fees could allow the city to lower the next transportation levy, reducing property taxes, but as Erica correctly pointed out, it would simultaneously harm renters by making the cost of new housing more expensive; a majority of the city, around 55 percent, rents.

The pro-housing advocacy group Sightline sent a letter to Mayor Bruce Harrell and the council last week that warned about the regressive effects of existing impact fees in Oregon, where they’re called System Development Charges. Noting that scarce housing markets are likely to make impact fees “fall on renters and new homebuyers,” Sightline cited research that concluded: “Homebuyers and renters in tight housing markets likely bear a greater share of SDC costs than landowners.”

An impact fee on non-development—as opposed to a tax on development—makes sense because you can see the harsh impact of Seattle’s restrictive, status quo zoning laws every day: Gentrification, rising rents, and development that’s clustered along busy, polluted arterial streets.

The Oregon data also concluded that fees kill development (rather than raising any money from it). Sightline’s cautionary letter to Mayor Harrell and the council goes on to argue that impact fees put a disproportionate burden on affordable housing. In Oregon, they wrote, “smaller entry-level homes, lower-cost middle housing and apartments, and communities with weaker markets are disproportionately affected by SDCs. High-end single-family detached housing is generally impacted least.”

Conversely, an impact fee on non-development—as opposed to a tax on development—makes sense because you can see the harsh impact of Seattle’s restrictive, status quo zoning every day: Rising rents; gentrification; development clustered along busy, polluted arterials (about the only place where developers can build dense housing). The regressive status quo forces renters to bear the carcinogenic brunt of the car culture that our suburban-style homeowner zoning promotes; and, because bus routes don’t pencil out in the vast majority of our low-slung city, we’re stuck with an inefficient transit system. Indeed, the best thing we could do for transit isn’t levying a tax on development, but adding more development that would support robust transit.

The council is holding its public hearing on their impact fee proposal on November 7.  I agree they should pass an impact fee, but not one that exacerbates our affordable housing crisis.  The council should take up the impacts of our current zoning system—the one that’s responsible for forcing people to flee the city’s overpriced housing market—and they should propose an impact fee on the deleterious impact of Seattle’s longstanding, NIMBY prohibition on building homes.

Josh@PubliCola.com

Density, Development, Environment, Maybe Metropolis, zoning

A Pyrrhic Victory for Tree Canopy in Wedgwood
Source: Museum of History & Industry, Seattle (MOHAI), via Historylink

by Josh Feit

In a headline-making standoff this summer, residents of the Wedgwood neighborhood were able to thwart a developer who planned to replace a single family home with two three-unit buildings. Under heat from the community, the developer relented and turned one of the planned three-townhouse buildings into a single unit instead, shrinking the number of housing units by a third.

The effort, waged by Wedgwood tree canopy advocates who objected to the developers’ plans to cut down a cedar tree, got an assist from the Snoqualmie Tribe, which weighed in with a letter to the city arguing that the tree was a historic culturally modified tree.

I’m glad the Snoqualmie Tribe got involved in great tree debate. Not because their plea to spare the tree—which Wedgwood activists named Luma—may have helped save the massive cedar, but because it opens the discussion to looking back at what Wedgwood was like a century or more ago. And this is where my disagreement with canopy ideologues starts.

According to HistoryLink, Wedgwood used to be a sylvan paradise of “dense forest” crisscrossed with trails. After the forest was clear-cut, white newcomers transformed the area into farmland and then, in 1941, into a new whites-only neighborhood called Wedgwood. Today, Wedgwood is made up mostly of single-family houses with lawns and zoned “neighborhood residential”—part of the 75 percent of Seattle’s developable land where apartments are banned.

Now that all those trees have been replaced with single-family housing, anti-development voices, such as city council member Alex Pedersen—who tried and failed to drastically expand a new tree protection ordinance by using tree protection as an unsubtle proxy for anti-development rules— present themselves as righteous tree advocates.

I know it’s a gotcha to point out that single-family development is the original anathema of tree cover, but it’s a meaningful gotcha. It reveals the hypocrisy at the core of the NIMBYism (Not In My Backyard) that still governs our city today: Now that I’ve got mine, I’m not going to let anyone else have theirs.

 

 

Seattle Daily Times, July 6, 1941

The added irony, and frustration, is that dense development—that is, more units on individual lots, as opposed to one single-family house per lot—ultimately supports more trees in more spaces. For example, if everyone living in Capitol Hill, one of the densest zones in the city (with more than twice as much density—20,000 people per square mile—than Wedgwood) stretched out into single-family living, there would be little room for green spaces like Volunteer Park and the Arboretum that serve the neighborhood. Indeed, Council District 3—with Capitol Hill at is core—has the second highest canopy cover in the city, at 32 percent; the city’s goal is 30 percent citywide.

I live on Capitol Hill. Specifically, I live in a Neighborhood Commercial-55 zone (one of the city’s denser designations, where five-story mixed-use buildings are allowed) and my immediate neighborhood is an emerald wonderland.

Sure, as the 2021 City of Seattle Tree Canopy Assessment Final Report found, “neighborhood residential” (formerly “single-family”) zones had more tree cover (34 percent on average) than multifamily areas (23 percent). But this highlights yet another hypocritical cornerstone of the NIMBY reality. Their roomy neighborhoods leave space for more greenery and tree growth because they rely on multifamily zones to provide an offset. Multifamily zones are packed tight as part of a cohesive zoning plan to work in tandem with the adjacent commercial hubs and transit-friendly arterials. Adding more of these dynamic, walkable housing and commercial hubs to our city’s zoning map would preserve more trees in the long run because it accommodates sustainable growth as opposed to sprawling growth.

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In other words, the only reason less dense areas have more canopy is because they’ve confined the kind of development that makes the city workable to a paltry portion of the city as a whole. If our city wasn’t growing and housing wasn’t scarce, this status quo might be sustainable. But as Seattle rapidly approaches a population of 800,000, we need to make more room for more housing adjacent to stores, transit, restaurants, arts, and services. Given that building densely ends up preserving more space for trees, this city needs more multi-family zones, not fewer, if it wants to meet its 30 percent canopy goal.

Using tree canopy as a cover story to prohibit additional density actually threatens existing canopy because growing outward obliterates more trees than it saves. In this context, by saving one tree, but stalling more housing, the tree activists scored little more than a Pyrrhic victory in Wedgwood.

Certainly, two wrongs—knocking down more trees in Wedgwood on top of what we clear-cut a century ago—don’t make a right. But enacting a hardline tree protection ordinance, which now seems to be the conventional takeaway from the Wedgwood tree saga, is also a wrong, and a graver one. Instituting an inflexible prohibition against much-needed housing development is simply a way for people in single-family neighborhoods to reject new residents.

This example—downsizing from six planned units to four—might not seem like a major loss of housing, but if neighborhoods across the city are able to decrease housing developments by a third every time a developer tries to build in-fill multifamily housing, the losses will add up fast.  Conversely, allowing greater housing flexibility in the areas where more new housing is needed—the core idea of YIMBYism (Yes In My Backyard)—would serve the greater good. It would also, ultimately, save more trees.

Josh@publicola.com

Density, Development, Environment, Maybe Metropolis, Transportation

It’s Time for an Urban “Discover Pass”

By Josh Feit

Urban Seattle is an offset for the rest of King County.

People who choose suburban lifestyles may frown at Seattle’s density, but their roomy yards, loping streets, and low density, which creates a disproportionate, negative impact on our region’s  infrastructure, is only possible thanks to the density they scorn. Dense neighborhoods like downtown Seattle, Capitol Hill, Chinatown, and the Fremont, Ballard, and University District cores are keeping our region sustainable.

When urban dwellers make transit-oriented, low-impact housing choices, the adjacent suburban areas such as sprawling Bellevue, isolated Bainbridge Island—and yes, Seattle neighborhoods like Laurelhurst—reap the environmental benefits. These suburbs and low-density neighborhoods would be irresponsibly unsustainable without the jumbles of urban Seattle that give our shared ecosystem a slight breather.

Apparently, our lawn-locked neighbors aren’t just passively benefitting from our green choices. They’re also dropping by a lot to take advantage of density’s perks. Judging by Seattle Department of Transportation parking data, the city’s densest neighborhoods are also the region’s most popular. Appropriately, due to this high demand, SDOT charges for parking in these neighborhoods.

Spots like Capitol Hill (where hourly parking costs $4.50 in the evenings) and the University District ($4.50 in the afternoons) are popular destinations because—thanks to the underlying zoning for mixed-use and dense housing—they have a concentration of businesses, services, restaurants, and exciting entertainment options. You can identify the same consistently popular destinations, by the way, from light rail data: Capitol Hill and the U District are among the system’s top four stations.

A better program, call it Sustainability Pricing, would remake congestion pricing by supporting affordable housing. 

Paying $4.50 an hour to park in the city hardly covers the full value suburban visitors get from visiting Seattle’s urban landscape. Just as the state puts a price on our beautiful parks with the Discover Pass (“more than just a parking pass, it’s your ticket to unlimited access to millions of state managed lands across Washington state”), Seattle should be compensated for maintaining and managing density.

To do that, Seattle could take inspiration from last month’s exciting news out of New York City, where the feds approved the nation’s first-ever congestion pricing program, allowing the city to charge drivers for entering midtown and lower Manhattan. A similar congestion pricing system has been on the books in London for two decades—fulfilling its goals  of decreasing greenhouse gases, increasing transit use, and reducing congestion. The Durkan administration briefly considered congestion pricing in Seattle, but predictably, they ended up doing nothing.

Three cheers to Manhattan for leading the way by bringing a necessary dose of environmental logic to the U.S.

Not only should Seattle follow suit by charging people to drive into our busiest neighborhoods—with exemptions for low-income drivers, including downtown service workers—we should go bolder than the Manhattan model. A better program—let’s call it Sustainability Pricing—would revamp congestion pricing in a few key ways.

First, as I just noted, Sustainability Pricing Zones would apply not just downtown, but in every dense Seattle urban hub.

Second, unlike in London and Manhattan, where the proceeds  go to transit, the money would instead fund affordable housing.

And finally: Those housing dollars should flow right back to the communities whose drivers are “bridge and tunneling” in.

Not only should the revenues go predominantly to fund  affordable housing, but they should go back to the drivers themselves in the form of subsidies for new, affordable housing in the neighborhoods where they live.

Here’s why: Many people are priced out of urban hubs. It’s the result of an intransigent resistance to zoning changes (more density) from both the suburbs and from single-family homeowners in cities themselves. Perversely, this anti-density pathology turns dense, transit-friendly zones into exclusive, expensive real estate. Sharing the density region-wide (and citywide) is a smart way to address a lot of problems caused by cordoning density into a tiny slice of Seattle, including sky-high city rents and suburban car dependency.

So, let’s send the Sustainability Pricing dollars back to the drivers themselves. Or more precisely, let’s channel the money back in the form of subsidies for new, affordable apartment buildings in their neighborhoods. In the long term, this would help create region-wide density, easing the environmental burden on today’s disproportionately dense urban hubs. If certain communities don’t want to upzone to allow multifamily housing—hello, Upper Queen Anne—the dollars could revert back to Seattle transit funding.

I realize downtown Seattle is struggling right now, and it seems counterintuitive to charge people to visit (at least by car). But an urban version of the Discover Pass isn’t only about downtown. As I’ve pointed out many times: The pandemic changed Seattle by igniting urban hubs throughout the city.  The now-popular, citywide outdoor seating program is one example of how our city is sharing urbanism. By making all our dense neighborhoods a source for supporting even more density, we will be both acknowledging that the old downtown model has changed, and that Seattle can help its neighbors do the right thing by embracing that change.

Josh@PubliCola.com

Development, Economy, Maybe Metropolis, neighborhoods

The CBGB Theory: Weirdos Not Bros Will Revive Downtown

By Josh Feit

After insisting for months that getting big employers to summon their workforces back to the office was the key to a revitalized downtown, Mayor Bruce Harrell rolled out his updated “Downtown Activation Plan” this week without mentioning that increasingly remote strategy. When Amazon announced earlier this year that, starting in May, employees must come in three days a week, the company’s own employees immediately rebelled.

Today, employees are spending about a quarter of their time working from home, according to a recent Stanford University/Census Bureau study. And just last week, noting that “offices are still at half their pre-pandemic capacity,” the New York Times ran with this enervating headline (for those holding out hope for a corporate office rebound): “Return to Office Enters the Desperation Phase.”

In Seattle, telecommuting was already rising sharply prior to COVID, tripling to more than 16,000 downtown workers between 2010 and 2019, according to Commute Seattle. And let’s be honest, a 3-days-in-2-days-out model already represents the startling acknowledgment that the future of downtowns looks different than the traditional model. More important, a mandate that grates against a major social shift hardly seems like the makings of a long-term or sustainable solution.

And so, credit where credit is due to Harrell’s office for finally chilling out on the Amazon panacea and rolling out some longstanding urbanist wish-list items, including a few legislative proposals. Erica posted an in-depth report on Wednesday, and along with Harrell’s (and soon-to-be deputy mayor Tim Burgess’) predictable, go-to policing solutions, the plan does mine some of the real Janette Sadik-Khan stuff that Seattle urbanists have been talking about for more than a decade.

The grab bag  includes supporting a broader range of building and street uses—waiving fees to bring more food trucks downtown, for example, and allowing both ground-floor housing and retail on the upper floors of buildings downtown. Likewise, it includes recommendation for a pedestrian-only pilot by prohibiting cars on Pike between 1st and 2nd—a tiny bit of car-free real estate, but I’ll take it. And Harrell’s plan even gives a nod to lidding I-5, a near-decade-old, $2.3-to-$2.5 billion planning nerd agenda item. Most prominently, there’s also legislation in the mix that supports increasing downtown housing stock through targeted up-zones on Union and Pike Streets (with incentives for affordable housing) and also code changes that help turn office space into residential space.

As a neighborhood’s stock drops, it becomes more open to free-rein experimentation, not to mention more open to a diverse economic base of commercial renters.

It’s a nice roundup of ideas, but it misses the mark by emphasizing new, downtown residential housing stock; downtown is already dense and tall. We need to get serious about putting density elsewhere in Seattle, rather focusing on downtown . The first step to reviving downtown isn’t new housing, it starts with embracing the grim commercial real estate market, where vacancies recently increased from 22 percent to 24 percent.

How does embracing vacancies help revitalize downtown? Like this: As commercial vacancies rise—new demand for Seattle office space fell 30% from January 2022 —rents drop. And as rents drop, the weirdos, rather than the big employers, move in. And by weirdos, I mean: creative-class, art-centric, small-scale retail. In short: The rebirth of downtown will be sparked not by Amazon, but by high vacancy rates, leading to low rents, leading to an influx of vibrant, small businesses, leading to new housing demand.

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Call it the CBGB theory of city planning. During the sluggish mid-to-late 1970s, New York City’s famously abandoned and spent Lower East Side neighborhood, where CBGB set up shop on Bowery, attracted waves of bohemians who turned the neighborhood into the epicenter of an urban shock wave that would change cities into magnetic destinations for brains, youth, talent, and commerce.

Making analogies to New York City—in the 1970s, for that matter!—certainly seems like a stretch for Seattle. Seattle’s hot tech economy and hot real estate market don’t conjure the “Ford to City: Drop Dead” days of NYC bankruptcy. Nor does Seattle, population 779,000, parallel the creative serendipity that flows through a city of more than 8 million people like New York. But this basic truism makes sense at any level: As a neighborhood’s stock drops, it becomes more open to free-rein experimentation (and yes, graffiti!), not to mention more open to a diverse economic base of commercial renters.

I’m going to put my hope in the new, small businesses that have recently and eagerly started popping up downtown. 

The limited data available from real estate analysts such as CoStar suggests that demand for leases on smaller spaces (0-5,000 square feet) has decreased more than 50 percent year over year—suggesting lower rents could come, drawing small businesses  downtown.

Consider the arc of this anecdotal observation about the downtown retail renters’ market from the folks at Seattle Restored, a City of Seattle program that pairs downtown landlords with small pop-up style businesses for three-to-six month rental stints, providing grants to help with rent.

A lot of property management companies began reaching back out, perhaps realizing renters weren’t willing to pay the high prices, they were now looking for smaller renters.

When I first contacted them in April for any insights about downtown’s small space retail market, they believed landlords were willing to hold out for high rental prices. They didn’t have any hard data, but said they noticed larger real estate/property management companies were rescinding  initial offers to work with the program, likely holding out hope to rent at full market value.

However, recently they noticed a change. This week they gave me an update, saying it looked more like a renters’ market these days: About a month after we first spoke, they told me, a lot of property management companies began reaching back out. Perhaps realizing commercial tenants weren’t willing to pay the high prices, they were now looking for smaller renters. The program’s success so far backs up this theory: With 30 spaces now filled, the program is well on its way to hit its goal of 45 small businesses set up by the end of the year.

With that in mind, I’m going to put my hope in the new, small businesses that have recently and eagerly started popping up in PubliCola’s neighborhood (Pioneer Square), such as The Monkey Bridge II,  OHSUN Banchan Deli & Café, and Café Lune—none of these are  a subsidized Seattle Restored business, by the way. In short, I’d rather bank on them than on Harrell’s plan for new high-rises on 3rd (conveniently ousting McDonald’s, I imagine)—or phantom Amazon employees, for that matter.

The city should focus less on policies of willful denial—landowners imagining high rents and Amazon execs mandating against reality—and focus more on attracting eager small businesses. The city can do this by passing zoning regulations that favor or even mandate smaller square footage spaces. Let the weirdos, not the bros, take the lead in reviving downtown.

Josh@Publicola.com

Density, Maybe Metropolis, Mayor Harrell, Urbanism, zoning

Maybe Metropolis: The Vibe of the City is the ’90s
Aerial photo of Wallingford in 1969
Image via Seattle Municipal Archives; Creative Commons 2.0 license

by Josh Feit

Mayor Bruce Harrell’s State of the City speech should have urbanists worried. Listening to his address last week made it clear the mayor wants to counter the recent emergence of a new generation of urbanists. This new pro-housing movement, defined by an unprecedented alliance between social justice activists, developers, environmentalists, labor advocates, and transit nerds, has chalked up a series of policy wins in recent years. And judging by Harrell’s speech, he’s trying to stall their momentum.

That might seem like a strange thing to say after Harrell, previewing his “Downtown Activation Plan,” used the speech to paint this colorful urbanist picture: “It may mean a linear arts-entertainment-culture district that connects downtown with multiple neighborhoods or identifying a 24/7 street, a stretch of several blocks where you can find a restaurant, bar, grocery, or your favorite clothing boutique at any hour of the day.”

I’ll be the first to argue that shops close too early in Seattle (especially its pizza places) and that a thrumming nightlife is at the top of any credible urbanist agenda. But Harrell’s limited, “stretch-of-several-blocks” urbanism represents the reverse of what the new movement has been pressing for. Today’s urbanists want to move away from using the downtown core (and a few scattered urban hubs) as an offset for our city’s otherwise suburban and unsustainable land use patterns. Unfortunately, by looking backward to the old downtown-centric model of city building, Harrell is giving cover to single family preservationists who benefit financially when the city limits opportunities for increased density, amenities, and housing citywide.

Erica hilariously titled her report on Harrell’s state of the city speech “The State of the City is Vibes.”   Credit where credit is due, ECB—it’s a headline for the ages. But I’d like to amend it. It seems to me that under Harrell’s vision, the state of the city is: The ‘90s. Specifically, 1995.

Here’s what I mean: The idea that a city’s cultural electricity (and its housing, but more on that in a second) should be focused in the center city is a remnant of Seattle’s 1995 comprehensive plan. That shortsighted plan stuck us with the land use model we have today—one that relegates mixed-use, urban spaces to downtown and tiny slivers of the city along busy, wide arterial streets.

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That 1995 model is the root cause of our current gentrification spiral and affordable housing crisis. It puts a crunch on supply by prohibiting apartments, condos, and storefronts almost everywhere. With the neighborhood planning process coming up again next year, Harrell’s retro impulse to focus on downtown put urbanists on notice that efforts to add affordable housing beyond the downtown core or a few scattered urban hubs is anathema to his vision. His speech led with a big pitch about the significance of downtown while failing to acknowledge any other Seattle neighborhood—nor the controversial, classist residential zoning rules that prevail across most of the city.

Unfortunately, by looking backward to the old downtown-centric model of city building, Harrell is giving cover to single family preservationists who benefit financially when the city limits opportunities for increased density, amenities, and housing citywide.

A newly ascendant YIMBY (Yes in My Backyard) movement set on reforming this neighborhood inequity has been gaining political momentum in recent years; they won a slight upzone in Seattle’s supposedly inviolable single-family zones in 2019 and, later that same year, removed steep barriers to building accessory dwelling units in residential zones. They’ve also sparked a once unheard-of social justice/development alliance in Olympia that’s currently pushing for statewide upzones. Most notably, they’ve been turning out at city hall and neighborhood meetings in organized numbers that rival the once-dominant NIMBYs.

In what seemed like an effort to curb this urbanist momentum and hijack YIMBY talking points, Harrell talked about downtown the way pro-housing urbanists have been talking about the city as a whole. Seizing on office vacancies as an opportunity to address the housing shortage, Harrell promoted “bold action” downtown which “may mean changing our zoning codes to convert excess unused office space into housing. We need more housing options,” he said. “Let’s make downtown affordable for everyone who wants to live there.”

I’m all for converting excess, unused office space into housing, but a plurality of Seattle’s affordable housing, 35 percent, is already located downtown. Putting more housing there hardly constitutes “bold action.” It would actually be bold to challenge the status quo and change the zoning that needs to change: the exclusive rules in Seattle’s leafy, outlying neighborhoods where multifamily apartments, including low-density fourplexes and sixplexes, are prohibited. As for allowing greater flexibility, that too is needed in the outlying neighborhoods; we need to allow more commercial uses in our residential-only zones.  If the pandemic has taught us anything about urban life, it’s that amenities traditionally reserved for “urban” zones actually fit right into “neighborhood character” elsewhere in the city.

In his state of the city speech Harrell tied his urban hopes solely, and precariously, to downtown.

The mayor’s emphasis on downtown undermines the renaissance afoot in Seattle’s neighborhoods, where urban energy like expanded outdoor seating at local cafes and more pedestrian-oriented streets are becoming the norm. That energy is on the verge of moving Seattle away from its 30-year-old planning model that has stifled economic diversity in our neighborhoods. While density was once the third rail of politics, it was notable in 2021’s election cycle not only that moderators at every candidate forum included a question about citywide upzones, but that nearly every candidate signaled support. Harrell said there is already enough “zoning capacity” in the city to house everyone who needs housing—another vintage ’90s argument that ignores the exclusionary reality on the ground.

In his speech last week, Harrell tied his urban hopes solely, and precariously, to downtown: “I am very pleased that employers like Amazon recognize coming back to work downtown is a great thing,” he said. The very next day the Washington Post hit with the reality check that employees themselves weren’t interested. And that same day, the Puget Sound Business Journal reported a 30 percent drop in demand for Seattle office space since January 2022, running a story about downtown occupancy that featured this alarming quote from a recent report on downtown commercial real estate: “There will be no great return. Seattle’s lights will not just turn back on again. We thought this in 2020 and we were wrong. Too much time has passed.”

Downtown is an important part of the city, but two emergent trends—the recent activation of Seattle’s other neighborhoods and the need to reimagine our downtown for a future with fewer office workers—suggest we need a more  imaginative, beyond-downtown vision as opposed to the 1995 model that tries to sequester density and city life. As the affordable housing crisis persists, it’s disappointing that Mayor Harrell’s only reference to zoning changes in his speech was about creating more housing downtown (where zoning already allows residential housing, by the way). Simultaneously and sadly, he remained silent on the 75 percent of the city where multiplex housing remains illegal.

Josh@PubliCola.com