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800 Maynard Ave S, Suite 200, Seattle, WA 98134
800 Maynard Ave S, Suite 200, Seattle, WA 98134
Do we try to get a ballot initiative going? Wait for a sympathetic politician to take up the cause?
If you want a dedicated parking spot move to Issaquah.
The most desirable neighborhoods are those with huge single-family mansions, or waterfronts (Malibu, anyone)? The most expensive zip codes in America are Alpine, NJ and Fisher Island, FL.
There are miles and miles of crumbling row houses worth almost nothing in America. No one in their right mind wants to live in these ones. And some people CAN'T live in row houses -- the disabled, families with strollers.
This is a lot more complicated than pretending those boxes they hid all the bodies in in The Wire are our future utopia.
Minimum parking requirements, in of themselves, are a bad thing though. Why not make them easier to get rid of by building rapid transit?
Fnarf, there are millions of row houses worth a mint all over NY DC London etc.
There are others that suck because they are in crime infested neighborhoods.
Here's what we need to do.
1. eliminate the parking requirement. You want a car, get a clue, park it in a garage nearby like urban people do. Walk/use transit during the week, drive to the slopes on the weekend.
2. The restrictions on window area suck, it means you can't have nice windows, that's why what we see being built is so boxy. They aren't allowed to have too much window space. This was because of energy concerns but now we have better windows. Result: having lots of nice casement windows and bay windows like good rowhouses do, is illegal, and we get the boxy shed motif.
3. allow the row house to have several apartments. We do not allow this. (In part because of the attached parking requirement).
Often in NYC you have an owner's unit of say 2 stories with an apt. above and a semi basement apt. below, allowing diversity of incomes.
See "Crooklyn." This also allows 6 story townhomes in our 6 story zoning whereas fee simple townhome and the parking requirement mean you only get a 4 satory townhome w garage and nobody on top or below -- failing to maximize density.
4. SET BACK from the street so there's a yard or a patio and a porch or stoop, don't allow building up to front lot line or hostile blank fences. (Yes you can in Baltimore see the Wire, but it's not so nice. In Georgetown in DC they do build up to lot line but face it that's a millionaire's neighborhood, everything looks nice.)
5. Allow or require builder to build up to lot line on the side. Yes, omg the walls touch each other!
6. require lot from street to the back -- not an inset unit or house in back without frontage on the street, this creates minibackyards.
There's more but you get the idea.
In general Seattle needs to really get out of the "we are unique we will have the most innovative everything" mindset and just go look at what works elsewhere and let it be copied.
Meanwhile, the parents of the kids at Roosevelt High School are sending out emails trying to get more parking spots for the lazy kids who drive to school and keep height limits to 4 stories.
But they'll lobby - as you can see here - and you won't.
"As you know, we have several areas around RHS that are blighted. One such area is now up for public comment on a proposed development. That area
is: 6501 15th Avenue NE (properties bounded by 12th Avenue NE, 16th Avenue NE, NE 64th St. and Ne 68th Street), directly to the south of the front of RHS as well as to the east and west.
Currently, that area is zoned NC2-30 (about 4 stories) and the developer wants to be able to go as high at NC3-160 (16 stories).
The Roosevelt neighborhood will have a light rail station around where the QFC stands now by about 2016. This will bring density to our neighborhood. This development is likely to be condos and/or apartments.
What is of importance to RHS is the affect on the assignment plan for who goes to RHS. These new apartments and condos will likely make the
district assignment boundaries of who goes to RHS smaller. Meaning, if you live very far beyond Roosevelt/Ravenna/Green Lake, it may be harder
for you to get into RHS in the future. The taller the buildings, the more people in them.
Also, RHS will see considerable shadowing by any building higher than 4-6 stories. The higher the development, the more it will fill the footprint of the area and dwarf our building.
What can you do? The City Department of Planning and Development is now taking public written comments on this project. The PTSA asks you to please consider writing to the City. Here are some concerns about impacts to the environment you can mention:
Height/shadowing
Parking/traffic (if the City does not set-aside on-street parking for Roosevelt, there could be major traffic issues for our school)
Aesthetics (Bulk/scale in proportion to buildings around it )
The written comment period is May 18th to June 9th, 2009. You can write to:
Department of Planning and Development
Attn: Shelley Bolser, Senior Land Use Planner
700 5th Avenue, Suite 2000
POBox 34019
Seattle, WA 98124-4019
Re: project 3010100
Or e-mail:
shelley.bolser@seattle.gov (reference: Project 3010100)"
As an environmentalist, this drives me fucking NUTS because, in their quest to look charming and granola, Eugene has basically maximized its urban sprawl. Or, rather, suburban sprawl. They build out instead of building up. And it's not even aesthetically nicer, either; I think there's something to be said for a nice, dense downtown with tall buildings. And people need to stop designing cities around car-travel, anyway; encourage some walking and bus-riding.
People were packed in on each other like sardines. Summer recreation was sitting on the front stoop drinking beer and listening to the neighbors argue. Every once in a while a husband and wife would duke it out on the street, or start throwing dishes or furniture, and really give the neighbors something to gossip about.
The biggest, most consistent turf wars in these neighborhoods were over on-street parking. If a stranger parked in front of somebody's house, the car would be trashed or worse. People would put sawhorses or cones on the street in front of their houses. and the cops didn't do jack shit about it.
Philadelphia always has had buses (streetcars when I was a kid) on every arterial, and subways, so a lot of people didn't have to use cars. But most people wanted to have them, and would resort to violence to have them, because guess what? If you had a car you could GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM YOUR SHITTY FUCKING URBAN DENSITY NEIGHBORHOOD.
Eliminating parking space requirements in the city isn't going to do a damn thing to make people's lives better, and it won't do jack shit to reduce sprawl, except in the minds of stupid fucking credulous hacks like Dan Savage, who have drunk this dumb-ass pie-in-the-sky "new urbanist" Kool-Aid straight, no chaser.
I'd live in a sod hut on the Nebraska prairie before I'd ever live in one of those row houses again, Dan. You're whoring for an ethos that most sane people piss on.
Slog readers are neither a representative, nor an influential, sample of the society at large, and if they consider themselves any kind of "cutting edge," I shouldn't have to buy insurance for my throat.
The country is a long, long, long way away from anything even remotely close to that though.
So drive it is for now.
In passive aggressive Seattle, we'd just go inside and leave angry comments on blogs instead.
Build up to the street!
The "yeah but Philly/Baltimore is a shithole" argument doesn't hold up. Architecture didn't cause the strife in those cities any more than high crime neighborhoods in Detroit, Los Angeles, East Palo Alto, Houston, etc.-all of which are detached, single-family home utopias so championed by the opposition-where created by grassy front lawns and two car garages.
Building transit through places where every building has been required to have parking for every unit will result in very expensive rails carrying cars that are empty but for some bums lying in pools of their own urine.
We have to re-legalize construction for the non-driving lifestyle before it makes any sense to spend money on transit.
I stumbled into the non-driving lifestyle by accident, and after moving back to Seattle from Chicago, found that my idea of a walkable distance grew massively. The hills in Seattle make walking fun in ways that no other city can compete with.
I believe that there's a tipping point not too far away. If more non-drivers than the current 3 (me, Dan Savage, and that other commenter) convince others to try walking in this city, the trend will grow and what was considered a walkable distance now will get multiplied by something big.