Tag: development

Affordability, Density, Development

Linkage Fee Could Include Single-Family Houses, Cost Up to $28/sf

A new proposal from the Department of Planning and Development, quietly released via DPD’s Land Use Bulletin today, would allow linkage fees (square-footage taxes on development to fund affordable housing) of up to $28 a square foot for all new residential development–the equivalent of about a 10 percent tax on new housing, or about. That includes (importantly, and for the first time during the long linkage fee discussion) not just multi-family but single-family housing, which could be subject to the same linkage fees as the “yuppie condos” some linkage fee proponents have said deserve to be targeted by the tax. A 4,000-square-foot house, for example, would require a payment of $112,000 if the council adopted both the maximum fee and applied it to single-family development.

In addition, a new review of the proposal under the State Environmental Policy Act (SEPA) affirms an earlier finding by DPD called a Determination of Non-Significance (DNS), meaning that the proposal has no major environmental impacts and will not have to go through a full environmental impact statement. (See the full SEPA checklist for the proposal here). Two months ago, under pressure from pro-density linkage fee opponents, DPD withdrew its initial DNS for further review.

The proposal is only a framework for future discussions about the linkage fee, intended to allow the city council and Mayor Ed Murray’s Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda committee the broadest possible range of options, including the maximum linkage fee. (Council member Kshama Sawant, who’s running in the Third District, which includes rapidly gentrifying areas like the Central District and Capitol Hill, has said repeatedly that she supports the maximum possible linkage fee). The options now also include taxing new single-family housing instead of exempting standalone houses from the tax, which could help mollify linkage fee opponents, who protested the seeming unfairness of taxing one class of development (condos and apartments) while exempting another (houses).

The logic behind the linkage fee goes like this: New development has a negative impact on affordability, because it drives up housing prices (rents are higher in new buildings) and displaces existing residents whose current housing is more affordable. The opposing argument is that a tax on new development will inevitably reduce the number of developers building in Seattle, which will reduce overall housing supply, which will drive up rents in a landlocked, mostly single-family-zoned city that’s expecting 120,000 new residents in the next 20 years.

DPD says they don’t intend the proposal to be a recommendation, and expect that HALA and the council will come up with a joint proposal (likely somewhere below $28 a square foot, and potentially taking single-family houses out of the mix) when HALA makes its recommendations. Those recommendations have been delayed one month past their original deadline, until the end of July, to give the committee more time to discuss affordable-housing options.

 

 

Density, Development, land use

New Rules Would Further Limit Density

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Contrary to the recommendations of Mayor Ed Murray’s Housing Afforability and Livability Agenda committee, city council member Mike O’Brien has proposed additional design review requirements for buildings with eight or more units in low-rise 2 areas of the city–neighborhoods where small, two-to-three-story low-rise multifamily buildings (essentially, a range of uses from townhouse to apartment building, depending on the designation) are allowed.

Mayor Ed Murray wrote a letter to O’Brien opposing the proposed new requirements, which O’Brien said are worth considering because of concerns about excessive density in those areas (remember, we’re talking about eight-unit apartment buildings here) from neighborhood residents.

In the letter, Murray notes that HALA never even discussed imposing the often costly, time-consuming design review process on small buildings, and noted that such a requirement “could run counter to some of the emerging recommendations for ways to reduce the cost of new housing.

“I could be more supportive of this revised legislation if this unexpected addition of a new design review threshold in the LR2 zone were removed, and considered instead as a part of more comprehensive design review improvements.”

Low-rise areas make up just 10 percent of the city’s land area, and are located either in urban centers or urban villages, or along major arterials, according to a 2014 analysis by the Department of Planning and Development.

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The council will also consider several new rules that would reduce allowed density in low-rise zones–up to 25 percent less density in low-rise 1 zones, and up to 20 percent less in low-rise 3, according to DPD’s analysis. Among the proposed changes, many of which do echo HALA’s recommendations:

• An amendment that would count unenclosed external areas, like outside staircases, toward a development’s total density. This would reduce the number of units that could be built in a new building. The recommendation, council staffer Sara Belz told the committee, came after the city started “observing larger, bulkier buildings in low-rise zones than were anticipated in 2010,” when the council adopted a package of amendments to multifamily zoning regulations.

• A proposal that would limit the size of clerestories (my new favorite word), which are small (around four-foot) additions on top of apartment buildings that allow developers to include skylight or loft space above the building’s maximum allowable height. The logic there, O’Brien explained, is that many developers are using clerestories as, essentially, a “height bonus” across the entire roofs of buildings, which, he said, “doesn’t serve the purpose of a clerestory.”

• Continuing to allow a four-foot height bonus for partially buried buildings (to allow daylight basement apartments on the downhill side of slopes), while simultaneously requiring wedding-cake-style stepbacks at the tops of low-rise buildings where they face the street, so that a four-story building, for example, would only look from the street like a three-story building. This one didn’t raise many questions, except from Tom Rasmussen, who wondered why the elevation drawing featured a sharp-looking ’50s Ford Fairlane. (A mini Don Draper also shows up in the left bottom corner).

Vanishing rowhouses.
Vanishing rowhouses.

• New limits on the number of townhomes on a single lot. The proposed rules would increase the threshold for “rounding up” the minimum ratio of building to land in multifamily areas. Instead of four townhomes on a 5,000-square-foot lot, for example, the new rules would only allow three. The rules would also limit density in low-rise 1, already the least dense low-rise zone, to prohibit four-packs of rowhouses. “We get a lot of complaints about lot subdivisions” into rowhouses, committee member Tim Burgess said.

• Requiring a certain amount of space between rowhouse developments and adjoining lots, a proposal that came out of “concerns about adjacency impacts associated with not requiring a side setback for some rowhouse projects.” The proposal would lead to 3-and-a-half-foot gap between rowhouses on adjacent lots. Although Licata said a photo in the council presentation of a rowhouse butting up next to a single-family house next door “is why people are angry about these type of structures in their neighborhoods,” Rasmussen noted that leaving unusable gaps between rowhouses leads to the accumulation of litter and creates spaces that are “not easy to landscape” and “dark.”

• The committee also talked about the Seattle 2035 plan, a complete overhaul of the comprehensive plan that guides all city development. During the brief discussion, Rasmussen suggested that he was opposed to 2035 Plan Alternative 4, which would encourage transit-oriented development around both light rail stations and frequent bus transit hubs like RapidRide stops, because “Metro [which funds buses] doesn’t have a stable funding source.” Metro relies heavily on sales tax; Sound Transit, which builds light rail, has a dedicated levy for that purpose.

Rasmussen also told his colleagues that although there were good arguments for building a light-rail station at N 130th St.(something the neighborhood wants, and which O’Brien has supported), transit-oriented development in the Lake City neighborhood could displace the people who live in “modest” homes along that street, pushing those residents into the suburbs.

Two things about that: One, the houses Rasmussen was referring to are mostly owner-occupied, and so owners would benefit if house values went up dramatically because they were suddenly on desirable, developable land. And two, it’s more than a little ironic to hear Rasmussen worrying about low-income residents while simultaneously pushing a proposal for neighborhood conservation districts that would make it harder to build new apartments and so increase the cost of housing.

City Hall, Development, Transportation

Parking Accessibility vs. People Accessibility

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KING 5 TV’s news staff long ago established themselves as the whiniest whiners who ever whined about having to pay a few bucks to park their cars on publicly owned streets. But it’s hard not to notice the fever pitch that coverage has reached in the past few months, even as KING management confirmed rumors that it will move the station’s headquarters to SoDo—where on-street parking is more expensive than at KING’s current digs on Dexter, and much harder to come by during baseball season.

But it’s not just personal for the station whose employees will soon have to endure the indignity of driving around for parking, paying market rate at one of the many private lots near their new location, or taking the bus. (Just kidding about that last one.) Based on KING’s relentless coverage, you might reasonably conclude that the network sees parking almost as a moral issue—a human right that exists beyond the free market. If you believe the city has a duty to donate street space for you to store your car, it’s a short leap to  trashing those who want to use the streets for bike lanes, parks, or faster transit as greedy, out-of-touch, bike-hugging ivory tower types who don’t understand how Real Seattleites live.

See, for example, a few representative recent stories, all from this February and March: “Seattle Making More Money on Parking.” “For Seattle, Parking Revenue Adds Up“; “Seattle’s Building Boom Often Comes Without Parking.” “Growing Pains: Parking in Seattle Getting Harder, More Expensive.” And finally, “Seattle’s Disappearing Parking“; Seattle’s Disappearing Parking“; and, of course, “Seattle’s Disappearing Parking.”

The most recent example of KING’s breathless coverage of Seattle’s supposed “War on Parking” (stage left, ominous voice: “Some have called it… a war on parking”)  is a piece titled “Housing Boom Prompts Parking Shortage” about the “seismic shift” in Seattle’s parking burden. Reporter Chris Daniels’ target? City policies that give some developers the option—and it is only an option—to cater to car-free or car-lite residents by devoting less of their building budget to parking storage.

To hear Daniels tell it, on-street parking has “evaporate[d]” as new residents move in, zooming up and down the street like maniacs when they aren’t stealing the parking that rightly belongs to the people who got there first. No statistics are cited on how many new units have been built with reduced or no parking, nor are of those speed-demon new neighbors given a say in the piece (three white homeowners serve as a barometer of West Seattle sentiment). No information is provided that might demonstrate any “parking shortage” in West Seattle or elsewhere, nor any evidence that only “select developers” are given special dispensation to build without parking. And even the image KING uses of this supposed scourge of brand-new housing appears to be a somewhat older three-story building—with a parking garage.

There’s a whole debate over how to define the “frequent transit service” that allows developers to build housing with less or no parking (they don’t have to build without parking; the new standards merely allow developers to respond to market demand for parking spaces), but you won’t hear about it by watching KING 5.

Instead, you’ll hear reporters like Daniels handing the mic freely, and without any pretense of evenhandedness, to longtime homeowners who bemoan their lack of “parking accessibility.”

How chained are we to our cars that “parking accessibility”—subsidized car storage in our publicly owned rights-of-way—has become more valuable than accessibility for human beings?

Development

Which Would You Rather?

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Behold, a stately, beloved single-family home awaits its cruel demise at the hands of “progress”—the same progress that created the hideous eyesore next door, which mars the idyllic landscape with its post-1960 scale and design.  Soon five families will live on a site that was ordained by God and the neighborhood planners of the 1980s to be home to only one. Farewell, sweet neighborhood character.

Uncategorized

Is Tom Rasmussen Going All-In NIMBY?

An invitation City Council member Tom Rasmussen sent out this morning was headlined, provocatively, “Councilmember Rasmussen to Host Neighborhood Character Preservation Meetings, Hear Community Feedback.” It went on to announce several upcoming community meetings to discuss new preservation districts and development restrictions in

“Neighborhood character,” of course, is a common Seattle dog whistle for “keeping apartments, poor people, and other icky stuff out of our single-family neighborhoods.” (Alternate version: “Leave everything the same as it was in 1962.”)

Rasmussen, who charted this territory when he championed a conservation overlay district for the Pike-Pine area back in 2013, has often sided with neighborhood residents against developers. See, for example his support of 2008’s incentive zoning legislation, followed by his enthusiastic endorsement of so-called “impact fees” on all new development in Seattle; his proposed moratorium on aPodments; and his support for new restrictions on small-lot development, to name just a few.

These days, though, Rasmussen—a lame-duck council member who will retire in January—is sounding more like a neighborhood activist than a legislator.

His recent announcement, for example, promises to give neighbors “a voice in the design of proposed developments”—as if they didn’t already have an extremely loud, vocal, and influential voice, in the form of neighborhood councils, organized neighborhood lobbying campaigns, and near-endless public comment opportunities in front of the design review board, the Planning Commission, the City Council, and community and campaign forums.

The promise of Rasmussen’s proposed Neighborhood Conservation District Board, which is explicitly to require that every new development be “consistent with the distinctive physical character of a neighborhood,” would make citizens’ personal tastes and preferences (Craftsman 4evah!) the ultimate arbiter of whether new apartment buildings are allowed in neighborhoods. If neighbors are really given the right to decide, irrespective of zoning, what type of building is and isn’t allowed in their neighborhood, it’s not hard to see why developers might look elsewhere to find land that doesn’t need “preserving.”