Seattle prides itself on its forward green thinking. However, it lags terribly behind on forward green doing. Why is that? There may be other factors endemic to the banking system in the US and the financing of projects, but here are two Seattle-specific issues:

1. The City’s most valuable incentive to developers of deep green buildings, the additional height bonus, is at odds with the wishes of many immediate neighbors of these buildings. Thus, each new deep green building is greeted with opposition, instead of excitement and encouragement.
2. Because of this opposition, the City sets up barriers to the granting of these incentives instead of providing technical or financial assistance to design teams and developers to help them achieve their deep green goals and grant them the incentives.

Those barriers add time and cost to projects that are pushing the envelope, making it less likely that design teams and owners will pursue the construction of innovative buildings.

City of Seattle rightly grants an incentive for something we desperately want and need, deep green buildings. However, in classic Seattle passive-aggressive style, while the incentive is saying “Yes, please go ahead and do this! We want you to do this!” the path to achieving that incentive is filled with pain and trouble. Why would the City choose to offer a height bonus instead of a financial award? Because height bonuses are free. It doesn’t cost the City anything to allow a developer to increase the height of their building. Once the building is built though, the increased property taxes from the larger building will help to pay for other needed city services.

Councilmember Nick Licata’s Resolution 31400 to establish a Sustainable Building Advisory Board illustrates my second point. On his blog, Licata writes:

In response to concerns raised over the Skanska project [Stone 34] by the surrounding community, the Bullitt Foundation, and Living Building Challenge representatives, I have introduced Resolution 31400. It calls on the City to provide updates and enhancements to its Living Building Challenge and Seattle Deep Green pilot programs. Resolution 31400 also requests the Department of Planning and Development (DPD) to form a standing Green Building Advisory Board to advise the City on sustainable building practices; to screen proposals for eligibility; and to assist in developing new or updated sustainable building programs.

In other words, according to Councilmember Licata’s expressed intentions, the Sustainable Building Advisory Board will be a watchdog group of green building professionals and community representatives charged with making sure no unworthy buildings are granted the height bonus, arousing the ire of neighbors. The Sustainable Building Advisory Board will be punitive in function rather than helpful and educational.

At the meeting of the Planning, Land Use and Sustainability Committee for Resolution 31400 on May 8th, Diane Sugimura, head of Seattle’s Department of Planning and Design (DPD) said that “a handful” of projects are “in the pipeline” that would be affected by the Resolution over the next two years–that is, three or four. Three or four buildings out of how many that will be built in the City of Seattle over the same period?

This is a program that is not working.

This is in stark contrast to Brussells, Belgium, where their extraordinarily successful Exemplary Buildings program has, since 2007, facilitated the construction of 117 ultra-low-energy green buildings–totalling nearly 3 million square feet. Over twenty-three buildings per year! Nearly half of those buildings are Passivhaus. There, winners of the three competitions held since the inception of the program have been given cash awards of $12 per square foot, technical assistance in achieving their goals, and their projects have been massively publicized. (Including a nice book.) Ninety per cent of the financial award goes to the owner of the building, and ten per cent goes to the design team. (See my previous blog post on the head of the Exemplary Buildings program Joke Dockx’s visit to Seattle for more.) For the Bullitt Center, the award would have been about $600,000.

As a result of the success of this program, the government of the Brussells region has mandated that as of January 1, 2015, Passivhaus will be required for all office, institutional and residential buildings, both single- and multi-family built in the 62-square-mile region.  (Resolution 31400, like Seattle’s Climate Action Plan, makes no mention of Passivhaus.)

As of this writing in Seattle we have two Living Building Challenge Buildings (out a total of four in the entire United States) and one Seattle Deep Green building under construction. Seattle does have a fair number of LEED-certified buildings, but at 85% of current code, the energy-conserving bar is set very low for City-required-for City-projects-over-5,000-SF LEED Silver, and four out of five of those LEED Silver buildings will have to be renovated by 2050 if we are going to achieve carbon neutrality. (Yes, virtually all. Stockholm Environment Institute’s Carbon Neutral Plan for Seattle postulated that 80% of Seattle’s building stock would have to be renovated to something like Passivhaus standard– that is, to 10% of current code–by 2050.)

How can we encourage projects that meet that carbon neutral goal NOW; that do not have to be expensively renovated within the next 37 years? I suggest a new program similar to Brussells’ Exemplary Buildings program, combined with Passivhaus.

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Rob Harrison, AIA, is a Seattle architect and Certified Passive House™ Consultant. This article originally appeared in the Harrison Architects blog.

Image credit:  Brussels, Sustainable City

The idea that increasing housing supply—building more housing units of all kinds—has a beneficial impact on housing price is still very controversial in Seattle. Intuitively, people know that when there is more of something for sale, the price of it naturally begins to fall. Even so, there is a stubborn view here that making more housing doesn’t have the same effect on housing price. But the fact is, when developers make decisions about when, what, and where to build, the studies they use are based on an analysis of housing supply and demand, and how those factors affect price.

I’ve written elsewhere about academic studies that found reducing or holding supply constant in the face of increased demand definitely results in higher prices.

Still, there is no way to do a side-by-side controlled study of supply and demand on two comparable cities. One can’t take a city and impose limits on supply and hold demand constant while in an adjacent city turn up supply with the same level of demand over five years, then analyze the data. The world can’t always be a laboratory, nor does it want to be.

However, each and every day real estate decisions worth thousands and even millions of dollars are made based on forecasts about housing supply and demand. Where do developers turn when they try to figure out what to build? With lots of money at stake they aren’t likely to just wing it, and even if they wanted to gamble, risk-averse banks and investors wouldn’t let them.

Developers and real estate people use data in studies done by agencies that analyze supply and demand. One local firm, Kidder Matthews, just released a top-line analysis of the apartment market in Seattle. What does their forecast say about housing supply and demand?

Vacancy rates generally have an inverse relationship with changes in rent; as vacancy rates increase the rate of rent growth generally decreases. Over the past twelve months the average regional rent on a per square foot basis increased from $1.21 to $1.28/s.f./month (5.8% increase) in tandem with vacancy falling by 90 basis points.

The basic assumption advisers and decision makers in real estate share is that when it comes to housing (apartments in this case), excess supply—empty units—means lower price. It’s also what real, local, actual, retrospective data show.

What’s the future look like for Seattle and the region for apartments?

Rental rates have returned to historic highs and use of concessions is minimal in most markets. In response, new development has ramped up with an estimated 8,277 new units expected during 2013. Currently, there are more than 13,301 units under construction and a total of 21,989 targeting 2013 and 2014 delivery. Although vacancy has remained at very low levels for the past two years, accelerating future apartment deliveries should begin to put upward pressure on the market vacancy.

When price goes up the financial incentives to develop housing go up too. More people want the product, the price is higher, and new producers want to get a piece of that business. Vacancy rates drop, prices go up, more suppliers enter the market, competition ensues, prices fall, suppliers hold back, prices go up, repeat. That’s how the cycle works, at least for people who put real money into housing.

Market studies are used by developers, lenders, and investors as a map to decide what to build and where and when to build it. How housing supply and demand affects price is not an academic exercise for them—it’s their financial future. Real estate studies based on supply and demand are not dactylomancy; these studies are the most conservative time-tested measure used by the real estate industry to invest and build.

As the economy in Seattle improves more jobs will be created, and with those jobs comes increased demand for housing. Development of more housing—of all kinds—we will positively impact price. It will. Whether we should relax regulation, incentivize new development, and encourage a variety of housing types isn’t debatable anymore—it is a mandate, especially if Seattle intends to sustainably welcome growth and economic recovery.

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Roger Valdez is the director of Smart Growth Seattle, where this post originally appeared.

No, this isn’t a minimum security prison, it’s the courtyard at Washington Middle School in Seattle’s Central Area. I asked my daughter if anyone ever goes out there and she said, “I don’t think we’re allowed to.”  Sigh.

Dismal, neglected  spaces like this send a message to our young people that we don’t care about the time they spend in school. And that’s just one particular instance of an overall lack of quality in the public schools that sends a message to parents that they should look to the burbs for something better.

The people who run diverse urban schools like Washington have a Herculean task just to keep things up and running, so this is no diss on them. But seriously folks, can’t we as a community do better than this?

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Photo by the author.  This post is part of a series.

The choice is clear: people or cars?  What’s it going to be, Seattle?

As shown in the video above shot at 23rd and Marion, much of 23rd Ave has four travel lanes squeezed into a 60-foot right-of-way that only leaves room for narrow sidewalks and no buffer between pedestrians and cars. It’s a scary, dangerous, and wretched place to walk. To parents of small children, a road like this is a constant source of anxiety, and for good reason.

I live half a block off 23rd Ave and for 15 years have experienced first hand how it severely degrades quality of life and compromises the City’s goals to create walkable neighborhoods. As I wrote in 2008:

Because walking along 23rd is a such a totally miserable experience, very few people do it, street life is dead, and 23rd is like a black hole cutting across the neighborhood. Pedestrian-oriented businesses fail. And street environments that repel pedestrians have a tendency to become havens for street crime — it is no coincidence that 23rd and Union, as well as 23rd and Cherry and other areas further south on 23rd Ave have had troubled histories.

23rd Ave is one of the City’s most important north-south arterials. But if the City decides that all four travel lanes must be preserved to maintain vehicular capacity, there is pretty much nothing significant that can be done to make 23rd Ave a more people-friendly street—there simply isn’t space.

All cities draw on their historic, cultural and political patterns to find their own unique form and organization, which evolve over time, but for millennia urban planners, politicians and developers have drawn lessons from other places to inform and ultimately improve their own cities. As Seattle continues its evolution as a city, here are a few lessons I think we could learn from Taipei.

1. Density requires open space. An inevitable consequence of Seattle’s continued economic and population growth is increasing population density – more people living in multi-family residential (condo, townhouse or apartment) buildings in close walkable proximity to transit and amenities. A key feature of dense but highly livable urban living is open space, where city dwellers can get out and play. Taipei does this very well, with one prominent and relevant example being the vast assemblage of park, bike and walking paths and wetlands that stretches for miles along the Danshuei and Sindian rivers in central Taipei. On a weekend day, the paths are packed with cyclists, walkers, bird watchers, Tai Chi practitioners, families at playgrounds and many sports teams. In many ways it feels much less like a tourist attraction than like the city’s back yard, where citizens come to recreate, relax and enjoy a respite from the crowded city. With the redevelopment of Seattle’s waterfront, we have a generational opportunity to create a similar amenity for our city – not just a place primarily for tourists like our current waterfront, but a place for Seattleites to recreate and consider their own.

2. Don’t be afraid of signage. A city’s primary function, indeed what makes the city humankind’s greatest invention, is to bring people together to exchange ideas, goods and services. Commerce is at the very heart of urbanity. Building signage is nothing more than the city’s various merchants visually announcing what they have on offer. It adds vibrancy, color and life to the streets and in some cases is like a table of contents for buildings – telling you what is inside and inviting you in to explore. Some of Seattle’s best-loved icons are bright signs – the Pink Elephant and the P.I. Globe come to mind – so we have a tradition of embracing signage. Why not let our buildings better express their contents and embrace the fact that our city is a thriving commercial hub with businesses we are proud of?

3. Embrace street food. Far from detracting from the success of sit-down restaurants, Taipei’s street food provides a tantalizingly interesting and appealing feature to the sidewalk (adding new and appealing sensory dimensions of smell and taste) and creates an almost block party like feel as people evaluate, discuss and stand in line for various snacks. These street food carts serve to invite people to be a part of the interesting street life, where they are naturally inclined to shop and eat at other establishments. Further, this sort of homegrown micro-enterprise entails far less cost and risk than opening a bricks and mortar restaurant, meaning street food carts can also allow small entrepreneurs to get a start. Take, for instance, the food cart pod on First and Pike, which has transformed a surface parking lot into an active and interesting sidewalk. Why not encourage more of this?

4. Unconventional retail configurations can not only survive, but succeed in unexpected and appealing ways. One of Taipei’s most striking features is the unexpected variety of retail shops – both their content and configuration. Unlike Seattle, where retail is traditionally found on the ground floor in spaces of at least a few hundred square feet (and often much larger) located on arterial streets, Taipei has many small and narrow retail shops (in some cases just six or eight feet wide and ten to twelve feet deep), narrow shopping alleys with no car traffic, and restaurants and retail on the second and third floors (and in some cases much higher than that). To a large extent, this diverse and finely detailed retail pattern is a reflection of population density. Clearly, Seattle’s current population cannot support the same quantity or diversity of retail as a city like Taipei. But, in many ways, by not fitting into a formulaic retail pattern, these spaces are more interesting, intriguing and inviting. An example here in Seattle is Post Alley or the warren of shops in the Market. Most retail consultants would describe locations with these characteristics are sure failures, yet they work because the adjacent activity, scale and interest draw people in. And, as with street food, small retail footprints and one-off locations allow small businesses to set up shop, with lower gross rent, increasing employment and the retail mix in the city.

One of the most delightful things about travel is that it opens one’s eyes to new realities and possibilities. Though Taipei and Seattle have a great deal that differentiates them and many features of the culture and built environment simply do not translate, there is much we in Seattle could learn and apply to our own city.

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Gabriel Grant is Vice President at HAL Real Estate Investments and is currently an Affiliate Fellow of the UW’s Runstad Center for Real Estate.  All photos by the author (click on some of them to enlarge).

Having grown up in the suburbs, and as my husband and I consider starting a family of our own, my interest in this topic continues to grow. It seems to peak when I travel to other cities and countries where there is a stronger presence of children downtown than the average American city. For example, seeing Italian mothers toting their children to daycare through the heart of Milan on bicycles made me reflect on my childhood mode of transportation to school. My school bus ride or trip in the family car courtesy of my parents certainly didn’t include a bike ride past a cathedral. Additionally, seeing young Japanese elementary school children, crisply dressed in their school uniforms, independently navigating the Tokyo subway system on their way to school made me think of the first time I independently rode public transportation . . . in college. And seeing high school students run their track workouts through Grant Park in downtown Chicago made me consider the land use ramifications of the typical one-story suburban school and surrounding playfields and single-family homes.

Today, however, certain North American cities are seeing a growing number of parents choose to stay downtown after they have children rather than immediately flee to the suburbs. Thanks to the Seattle Chapter of the American Institute of Architects and their Emerging Professionals Travel Scholarship, I was able to dive head first into my passion and travel to a handful of these cities to see what, if anything, was the secret to creating a family-friendly downtown. I dug into issues of neighborhood design, urban housing, recreation, and transportation. I also looked carefully at the incredibly important link between education and housing for parents, as Jon Scholes recently described on this blog.

After my bags were put away and I had time to synthesize the neighborhoods I visited and interviews I conducted, I noticed a series of trends that are happening nationwide. One such trend is that these new urban parents are organizing to change cities, hoping that they can stay in the downtown neighborhood they love while still supporting the needs of their growing family. They are using their collective power to fundraise for playgrounds and to make their voices heard at school board meetings and city council meetings. I also came away from my travels with a number of suggested policy and design solutions to help make cities, including Seattle, more family-friendly. Those research findings are compiled in a Family-Friendly Urbanism exhibit, currently on display at AIA Seattle’s gallery space through the end of April. (1911 First Avenue, open Tuesday through Friday from 9 am to 5 pm).

Additionally, and most importantly for the future of Seattle’s family-friendliness, AIA Seattle, the Seattle Department of Planning and Development, the Seattle Planning Commission and the Downtown Seattle Association are co-hosting a day-long forum about the topic. Ingredients for Designing a Family-Friendly Downtown will take place at City Hall on April 11th. International, national, and local speakers will be in attendance to discuss housing, education, recreation, transportation, and the market realities of retaining families with children in urban neighborhoods.

Will you join us on April 11th to further the conversation?

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Sarah Snider Komppa is an architectural and urban designer and former Seattle Planning Commissioner. She recently finished a year-long research project about family-friendly cities thanks to AIA Seattle’s Travel Scholarship and the support of her employer, LMN Architects.

All photos by the author (click to enlarge).

]]> http://citytank.org/2013/04/03/what-are-the-ingredients-for-designing-a-family-friendly-downtown/feed/ 0 http://citytank.org/2013/03/29/tankshots-7/ http://citytank.org/2013/03/29/tankshots-7/#comments Fri, 29 Mar 2013 14:48:18 +0000 dan bertolet http://citytank.org/?p=1418

There’s sharing in our future:

The very thing that makes cities so powerful – their ability to agglomerate – will only be enhanced by the sharing economy. Academics tell us that great things grow out of dense human interaction. Picture what’s possible when those same people are further connected to each other through networks modeled in the digital age and built on the real-world sharing of cars, spare bedrooms and whisks.

I’m already hooked on Car2Go. It has probably nudged up my carbon footprint, but I have no doubt that new carsharing systems like Car2Go will lead to an overall reduction of humanity’s overall environmental impact. Parking guru Donald Shoup is fond of pointing out that the average car is only operating (i.e. not parked) about five percent of the time. Double that to just 10 percent through carsharing, and we might only need half the number of cars.

The building in the photo above houses flex space, including a new shared art workshop called ALTSpace. Coworking spaces are popping up all over the city. Okay, so the bike in the photo isn’t shared, but it soon could be.

And have you heard about Yerdle? Founded by a former Walmart executive and a former Sierra Club president, the goal of Yerdle is to enable peer-to-peer sharing of stuff that could reduce the consumption of new stuff by an estimated $200 billion per year.

More sharing means more bang for the buck, and less stuff means less greenhouse gas emissions—two things that are going to matter more and more in our resource-constrained future.

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Photo by the author.  This post is part of a series.

NOTE: The following post contributed by Great City is part of a series from advocacy groups supporting the proposed rezone in Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood.

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Two decades ago Seattle set off on a path to preserve neighborhood mojo, attract jobs, and ensure neighborhoods had a robust supply of urban housing. Neighborhood planning efforts in the 1990’s were predicated on the assumption that to preserve Seattle’s single family neighborhoods, we were going to have to maximize development in our Urban Village neighborhoods and Urban Center neighborhoods to accommodate future population and job growth. After decades of striving towards perfection in transportation planning, we also added that funding transit infrastructure needed to be a core element of neighborhoods designed to absorb the most density.

Creating dense urban housing that attracts families—in the same way a Wallingford Craftsman attracts families—will require a rich mix of affordability, design, and amenities. And I am certainly not the first to point out the logic that more housing inventory makes cities more affordable by offering supply to meet demand. A broader city-wide conversation about the types of housing we want to incentivize to meet our city’s needs over the next 30 years is overdue. But that conversation shouldn’t be shoe-horned in at the eleventh hour, as some Councilmembers are now attempting to do with the South Lake Union rezone. Rather, it should happen with thoughtfulness, technical specialists, and a clearly articulated vision for what we seek to achieve. Housing is a critical component of a carbon efficient, affordable, and livable Seattle, and addressing the challenge is going to take our best thinking, innovation, and leadership.

As our Seattle City Council considers the long awaited South Lake Union rezone, I encourage neighborhood planning advocates to get involved. Density in South Lake Union and other urban centers means preservation of a single family home lifestyle in other parts of our City. It means less sprawl, less regional traffic, and more equity for our infrastructure investments. Now is the time to move the South Lake Union rezone forward and finally enable the kind of development that will bring all these benefits. Lackluster, underdeveloped “bread loaf” projects will fill the void in the short term if we once again make perfection the enemy of good.

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Great City Board Member Jessie Israel recently participated in Eric Becker’s film short on Placemaking & Seattle.  Watch, read and get involved in the conversation:  http://vimeo.com/53098694

Photo of South Lake Union from Eastlake Ave by Dan Bertolet – click to enlarge.

Once upon a time, there was a state that faced an obesity epidemic. In particular, many economically disadvantaged people who lived there were struggling with their weight and as a result they suffered disproportionately from Type 2 diabetes and heart disease. At the same time, the population of the state was growing, and prices for healthy foods – such as fruits and vegetables – were increasing, making them less affordable to poor people.

The State decided to start a subsidized healthy lunch program in schools to make sure that economically disadvantaged children were developing healthy eating habits. At the same time, they granted more land to fruit and vegetable farmers to help them grow more food and meet demand.

When the legislators met to decide this, one of them asked: “But won’t the farmers make more profit if we grant them more land?”

“Yes, potentially,” replied another. “We had better tax the fruit and vegetable production from that new land to make sure that the farmers don’t make too much money.”

“I know,” chimed in a third, “let’s use the money we get from taxing fruit and vegetable production to pay for the healthy lunch program!”

As you might imagine, the farmers were somewhat surprised by this policy decision but for a while they went along with it.

Some years later, the healthy school lunch program was struggling to meet growing demand from a steadily increasing population. The legislators went back to the farmers to announce that they were tripling the level of the tax on additional farmland grants. “But wait,” said the farmers, “if you keep raising the taxes on this additional land, you are working directly against fruits and vegetables being affordable. In the limit, you may make it unprofitable for us to farm this land, and that is not good for our state’s fruit and vegetable supplies.”

So the legislators hired a consultant (who was on the board of the school lunch program) to ask them how much money the program needed, and how much the farmers should provide in extra taxes. The consultant had the very difficult assignment of telling the legislators how much profit farmers should be allowed to make.

One farmer came to see the legislators and said: “Don’t you see, taxing us is not making healthy foods any more affordable to the population as a whole. Growing affordable fruits and vegetables needs to be part of your health policy. You can’t do it all by just giving more money to the school lunch program!”

Another farmer suggested that health is really a systemic challenge. It depends on widespread access to affordable healthy food, a great school lunch program, access to preventive care, and land use planning that makes walkable neighborhoods and healthy lifestyles possible. “We need all these things,” she said. “You need to look at these things all together, and not get less of one, and more of another.”

One of the legislators was not convinced: “Let’s set up a task force of people from the lunch program, and ask them what they need, and how they see the problem.”

“No,” replied the farmers. “The point is, you need to set up a task force that looks at all of these things together, and challenge your task force to come up with a plan and policy that optimizes around health outcomes, not around only the metric of how many students are served by the lunch program.”

Here are some other thoughts the farmers had:

• The task force should have lots of different kinds of people on it: macro-economists, health policy experts, preventive care specialists, grocers, land use planners, farmers, and people from the school lunch program.
• One of the questions the task force should consider is asking farmers what it would take for them to grow more food on the land they have: are there any regulatory barriers that prevent them from maximizing their yield?
• To the extent that revenue streams are needed to fund the recommendations of the task force, it should look at multiple sources of revenue in addition to taxes on fruit and vegetable production. These might include taxes on soda-pop as well as other sugary and fatty foods, or taxes on people who keep their land fallow and unproductive for many years thereby restricting land supply for growing food.

The legislators thought this over. Now this systemic kind of change was not very sexy stuff. It was definitely harder to model and quantify. It was going to take a long time. It was going to be really hard to get front page coverage in the Seattle Times.

But it also made sense. So they did it. And their State was able to grow, and deal with the complexities of that growth without making myopic mistakes. And the State thrived, and its people ate healthier, and they were healthier.

And they all lived happily ever after.

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Above image of Politics, Law, and Farming in Missouri by Thomas Hart Benson taken from  the cover of Wendell Berry’s What Are People For?

In spite of its name, incentive zoning is a tax and taxes are the opposite of an incentive. We tax cigarettes partially for the revenue, but as a public health intervention it is very successful. The higher the taxes on cigarettes, the lower the smoking rate. By taxing new development we’re sending a message: building more housing is a bad thing and we’ll make it more costly if you do it.

The premise of incentive zoning is like something out of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. According to the Seattle Municipal Code, building more housing creates negative impacts, especially “an increased need for low-income housing to house the families of downtown workers having lower-paid jobs.”

More housing is a bad thing that has to be offset by taxing that new housing to create housing at a lower price. That’s right, the Seattle Municipal Code, the DNA of the city’s development, is built on the premise that more housing actually makes things worse in the city, so bad in fact that we have to tax it to create, well, more housing.

For some of us it’s clear that this premise is utterly false. What we really need is a true incentive that would coax developers to build more units even though they and their bank might not be sure there is demand for those units. In the real world, developers try to build just enough units to ensure low vacancies and steady rent revenue, no more and no less. True incentive zoning would reduce the risk of building too many units, encouraging an outcome that has broad benefits for the City and region.

But we have it completely backwards. Developers want to build more housing, and we’re discouraging them. If they built more housing, rents would be more competitive and people who earn “workforce” wages might choose to rent in South Lake Union, give up one of their cars, and skip home ownership for a while, setting aside their savings for a home purchase later.

Seattle City Council should back away from the proposals they are now considering to increase the taxes on new development in South Lake Union and possibly throughout downtown as well. Implementing such measures now, when housing demand is rising, will end up turning more newcomers to the region away from Seattle: exactly what we don’t want.

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Roger Valdez is a blogger and Seattle resident.