I hate to break it to you but the "strip-mall-style new bank or chains" will still occupy about 70% of the ground floors on new buildings. Density or not.

I mean, jesus, how many more banks and chain frozen yogurt places have gone up on the Hill along with our "density."

Rents are far too high and the spaces available far too big for small indie-businesses to hold their ground, let along expand.

I suppose it's some improvement. Kind of. But it will do very little to maintain (or improve) the character of our neighborhoods without some kind of control on the rents.

@1 Rent control slows development, which is the only thing that can reduce prices without reducing desirability in a city. I'm not sure I buy that the hill has too high of storefront rents (they were developed at a time when the market values walking more than it does now), but there are several neighborhoods that could use a second commercial street to calm rents. For instance, I'm an advocate for upzoning Galer on top of QA, to add supply of storefronts. We're approaching critical mass of banks, plastic surgeons, tanning salons, and overpriced boutiques.

And that's something this legislation helps with. Those parking-based drugstores are replacing storefronts with parking, instead of storefronts with more storefronts.

Sweet! What does this do to the waste of space ugly building CVS wants to do at 45th and Meridian?

Will this help save Moon Temple in Wallingford?

@2 Wrong. The addition of inventory has never reduced rent anywhere. Ever.
Only severe economic contraction has done that.

Rent controls in New York (and in Europe - though the zoning model is very different) was the single best tactic to create an upwardly mobile class of owner-renters in US history. And contrary to the myth spinners like Donald Trump it did not hinder development.

If it was true that increases in rental inventory stabilized or reduced rents, then rents would be trending DOWN here. And obviously they are not.

@5 You're ignoring the desirability factor. Rents have gone up because our employment has shot up. Mostly from that little company in SLU, but really our entire economy's doing great compared to the rest of the country. More jobs = more people = higher rents, unless you build more.

It's a really a causation/correlation issue. You see new housing, and you see your rent go up, and you think "new homes = higher rents!". But the causation is in the other direction: higher rents --> new homes, as developers can justify building to banks using rental prices.

Rent control, combined with zoning regulations, killed affordability in NYC.

@5,

#2 believes that there's no such thing as slums in the absence of rent control. So, you're kind of wasting your breath.

How is Ed Murray ("Divisive!") going to be against this? Since he has no plan other than "Not McGinn", he and Sandeep will spin up something, I'm sure.

"Divisive!"

Give me a few more years and a 40 story minimum downtown will be considered "too short".

grin

@8 for the You Are My Density win.

@3 & 4: As long as they move along the process in a timely fashion, developers are held only to the code that was in place when they first submitted their design, even if the rules change while they're still in design review. So the Wallingford and Queen Anne CVS projects will likely be unaffected by this legislation, and maybe even the West Seattle one. Conlin has said he hopes the bill will cause the developer to reconsider and "negotiate" if it's clear that the city is unhappy with these plans. It's also possible that if neighborhood activists make it deeply unpleasant for CVS to ignore them, they could decide to change their plans, like Walgreens on Broadway did back in the day. But in short, this bill doesn't affect the Moon Temple development. Boo.

Does this mean they'll build on top of the Cap Hill Safeway?

Or raze the University Village shopping mall and put in apartment towers?

Anna...

In some of your posts I think you're ignoring one of the main grievances against the Wallingford CVS development: Neighbors here aren't necessarily screaming for more density, they're screaming to save the nearly 100-year-old buildings at the center of the neighborhood. Absent saving those, yes, we'd rather have a multi-story, multi-use building than a suburban CVS.

As you know, I was the person who brought up the Broadway and Pine Walgreen's at the design review meeting as an example of fighting back against a big corporation's crappy design, but the difference with that site is that it was previously a Chevron station. Hardly iconic. The Wallingford site is very different.

We're seeing interesting buildings in urban villages being torn down all over Seattle and replaced with 4 to 6 story structures. I don't think density, density, density should be our only goal--we need to strike a balance between density and preservation.

Thanks for covering this issue!

#5

And during that time Manhattan's population dropped from 3 million to 1.5 million.

#12

I can just imagine every kid in Seattle thinking....Why can't we live in a NORMAL place like Bellevue!!.

closetag tester

It's so nice that the Council waited long enough for two banks in Uptown to remodel their new digs and keep their strip mall style designs without all of that pesky oversight. I'll bet that Chase and Bank of America on Mercer are feeling so lucky right now, unfettered by those onerous regulations. Oh right, the get what they want anyway, and in the Case of Chase, they took over the best record store in town. Neat!

@14,

John,

I see that you copy and paste your posts from STB. It's more efficient that way for the Supreme Ruler of the Universe.

I can see that you probably have a LOT of things to keep straight -- that comet that keeps slipping out of its orbit; the temperature of IRRitatingly variable Proxima Centauri; twiddling with Hubble's constant so that stuff keeps flying apart.

It's a big job, and we respect you for it.

Well done Seattle!

This is a huge mistake that doesn't do anything to solve the original Wallingford CVS problem that kicked this whole thing off. The only thing this ordinance means is that CVS will have to build a second floor.

The ordinance is based entirely on floor-area ratio, instead of the number of units. A developer could take over an entire block in a historic neighborhood and build a multi-story Target on it, and call it high-density under this law even though it's a one-unit building.