Like the plague of 6 & 8-pack towhnhomes, the developer (and his architect) found a hole in the land use code. NIMBY's aside, Apodments are ugly and cheap. Seattle has enough ugly and cheap.

They may be cheap now, but they won't stay that way. And who the hell wants to share a kitchen? How would you possibly keep it clean? Sounds like fight city.

I live in a SFH across an alley from an apodment. There's a lot of traffic, and I wish they would do a better job of not letting their trash escape their cans, but other than that, I have no problem with it.

What I do wonder is whether Dominic favors or opposes district elections for city council, as this seems to put the issue of whether such elections would be dominated by NIMBYs front and center.

The biggest NIMBY screamers on Capitol Hill are people living in the architecturally identical 6 pack townhomes across the street. They can't park their oversized SUVs in their owned parking space, so they're freaking out that apodment dwellers are going to take all the spaces with Car2Gos.

Council land use committee chair Richard Conlin, who sponsored the substandard-lot moratorium, said he does not support a moratorium on aPodments. "The difference between this and the small-lot issue is that with small lots, people were taking advantage of something that was never intended to be a buildable lot. ... In the case of aPodments, they are putting in place something that we want, which is density in places that are zoned for density."

But Dreyfuss, you are the Great Foe! Be a dick!

Having a shared kitchen that's not quite as clean as it might be when you're living alone is preferable to having your own kitchen at the end of a 30 mile commute from the suburbs, or no kitchen at all in the city.

Rich people think poor people are gross.

@5) I like it when he's this sort of Dick.

My first apartment; above the Melrose building circa 1986, bathroom down the hall, hot plate, bed, table, chair, $120/month, noisy, crowded, totally fucking awesome for a country boy form Mason county. I was too poor to own a car, pine street was full of auto parts stores and glory holes, I got a job at Central Co-op, took a class at SCCC every quarter, drank my first legal beer at the Canterbury, dropped acid on the roof of the mortuary across the street, lost my virginity, howled at the moon.
No, #1 , you don't know ugly and cheap like I remember it. Seattle's central core used to have a lot of it, and poor people used to live there, if you take away that who's gonna buss your table, clean your floors, build your pretty and expensive?

This isn't a rich/poor thing. Poor people should have better amenities than this for "starting at" $600/mth. $600/mth is expensive for a shared bedroom and kitchen. It's not really great for poor families either.

I'm not expecting $600 to buy gigantic suites or anything. But it should buy you more than a closet.

These aPODments are driving up the cost of regular apartments, and other normal housing. They increase the number of "low cost" places to live without giving thought to the quality of places to live. And, they're certainly not friendly for families.

But, sure. Rail on for how you think poor people should live in substandard housing and its a good excuse for increasing the number of low income people by giving them little more than a closet for a good share of their rent.

What's more inhuman, sharing a kitchen or spending tens of thousands of dollars a year to commute more than an hour from the far suburbs so you can live in a more tasteful amount of space? This kind of arrangement is ideal for couples, among others, who want to share living quarters but keep separate bedrooms.

@8, me too. Now let's see if the mayor can fall off his fence in the right direction.

Seattle does have enough ugly but it doesn't have enough cheap. Rasmussen disllikes these for the wrong reasons; the right reason to dislike them is that they are basically a very expensive rented room.

@10, nobody disagrees about the need for up-to-snuff housing or that apodments have been a bit hit or miss so far, but the question is about a moratorium. The council can enact code without a moratorium in place.

Some call them aFRAUDments for their blatant circumvention of land use intent and negation of ability for the public to comment, for their cheap construction, zero tie in to infrastructure realities, and ability to cram 40 people onto a tiny tiny space without so much as a real kitchen per unit.

This isn't about quality lowcost housing. It's about developer profits and it stinks.

@6, @14 Yup.

I've been looking at pictures of these on the web and they don't look so bad. They look like the sorts of living spaces that would be great for people who are single and just (re)starting out on life. That shared-kitchen thing is not so bad when you're alone. It's the bathroom, people. And they're not ugly on the outside.

At $600 bucks, I guess they're alright. If they were $500 or in $400's, I'd say, "Hell, yeah! Build me more!" But $600 is still quite affordable if you're living close to Downtown.

I voted for Rasmussen, I liked the guy, but, more than once, he's seemed to be going out of the way to do the establishment's bidding. I don't know what's wrong with him. He's no Nick Licata or Mike O'Brien. He reminds me more of Jan Drago. It's made me reconsider. There's nothing that's an emergency about these "apodments".

@16 Big phrases, but what do they mean? Built cheaply? Everything's built cheaply! Developer profits? Developers are going to make a profit no matter what. I'd rather they make a profit building affordable housing than $500,000 condos. No real kitchen? Maybe not real to you, but real enough if you're poor. Forty people in a small space? I don't know where you're getting your figure, but let's say you're right - did somebody ever tell you that this is a city? You know, where people are supposed to live close together?

And "zero tie in to infrastructure"? Do you mean that they don't build parking for those forty people? 'Cause you can't be talking about the sewer. Did you know that cities have public transportation, specially near the Downtown core? And don't worry about your parking space. Someone who's paying $600 bucks for a small room with "no real kitchen" is unlikely to have a real car.

Floater, yes 40 people. And yes cars. But don't believe the comments section. Let the city go do a survey on the existing AFRAUDments. The residents bring cars. Lots of cars. Not cheap materials? Go visit one of these construction sites. The materials are cheap and noncompliance with workplace safety has brought city inspectors out multiple times.

And a landuse code that lets a developer pretend that he's building 8 units when in fact he's building 40 - because that's the reality of this loophole - is crap.

Sometimes it isn't about the theories of urbanism. Sometimes it really is about crap development in the name of profit and little else.

@19 I've looked at the photographs on the web, from various sources (not just the developers), and they don't look like early-20th Century slums to me. Please provide the link where I can see the images of these horrible, dingy slums that you're talking about.

Most of the aPODments will be torn down in a decade. They are built like shit and are basically a honey trap for slumlords. It's another developer scam. What the city needs is god damn rent control. Not hastily built over-priced Ikea Slums.

I've never heard apodments describe as having a "centralized living area and kitchen" (no different from a large house). All the pictures I've seen show everything crammed into a 220 sq. ft. cell.

But if such things exist, where you can rent a small sleeping space but with a large common area (and yard, and other amenities) then it could actually decrease density.

And while we're at it, if we had cheap high speed rail we wouldn't all have to cram in the same 5 sq blocks anyway.

@21 Yet.

Give them a couple years...

@14 A moratorium on aPODments is necessary considering the rate they're being built. Otherwise they'll be grandfathered in. But, it's nice to see you and Dominic shilling for the sleazy developers. True colors and all that.

@25, I'm shilling for the cash-strapped city dwellers, but thanks for playing Slog so vigorously.

Completely disagree with you, Dominic. This absolutely needs to happen. I'm all for density, but this is not the way. A moratorium needs to be placed and loopholes closed for these buildings. These apodments are urban planning nightmares. If they are allowed to continue at the current rate, the real effect will be felt within a few years. Some people against these are NIMBY's but many aren't. We want to preserve the livability of our neighborhoods.

And I live in one of the most dense areas of capitol hill, pike/pine west of broadway.

And if you're on Richard Conlin's side, you need to do some SERIOUS soul-searching.

Not only is "cheap" construction not illegal, it's industry standard. Those cute Craftsman homes on Queen Anne? Bought from a Sears catalog.

The point of design review is to allow code departures by meeting community desires. Want an extra floor? Well, if you use brick and give us more room at the sidewalk, we'll allow it. But if you're building everything to code (as aPodments are), design review does nothing. You won't get better materials, or extra parking spaces, etc. What it will do is kill anything but high-profit projects, as it greatly increases the cost to build anything.

All you rich people are just upset that poor and lower middle class people want to live in Seattle.

Get over yourselves.

@25 adapt or die.

As to the effects of these on urban planning: They mean fewer parking spaces used for cars.

If you actually just use bikes, bus, walking, and the occasional car rental or Car2Go or whatever, this is MORE efficient.

Always interesting that the people most opposed to these tend be right-wingers who supposed to really, really, really be into freedom.

That said, these things look overpriced for what they are. $600 for something that small and no kitchen?

@32 et.al. Remember this is market rate housing. They're selling out at $600/mo, so who are we to say it's too much? What else is being built for anything close to this downtown? Even old, tiny, rundown apartments are hard to find at this price near downtown with your own bathroom and access to a kitchen.

These units really are built via land use loophole and need more thought before more are built.

Suggestion: Devlopers can still build but deny permitting for microapartments and aPODments to have RPZ passes for those buildings. Neighborhoods take the people density, but not the cars. Less urban density theory, more practicality. (And if developers howl, too bad. They are minting gold for themselves with ROI on these buildings.)

(hey slog robots, et.al. = et alii (masculine) or et aliae (feminine) = and others, it's not a website)

Also, I'd like to see microapartments (with tiny in-room kitchens and living spaces) separated from the aPODment model (no kitchen, no living space in unit) in land use code.

Something you don't like but is legal = "loophole".

There's nothing loopholeish about aPodments. We allow 8 bedrooms to a unit. If you're a family you can have even more than this. If you're not a family you can rent out all of your 8 bedrooms. Our laws allow this, and that's a good thing.

@ Matt: Yes, but you can't get parking passes for all 8 people. There is also more city oversight for families renting out rooms than there is for APODments.

And yes, that's exactly what loopholes are: uses that meet the legal but not the spirit of a law. That's why people want to close loopholes.

Slog; using Publicola to get the news since 2009.

Here's a thing: I lived in Seattle for 10 years, lived outside the dorms for at least 6 of them, and I never paid $600/mo (except the last 6 months when I paid slightly more than that for a studio in the Denny Triangle).

I almost always shared a bathroom. I almost always shared a kitchen. And yeah, it was sometimes tough living with other people, that's just how it works. But I also had my own bedroom. I lived in standard apartments and share houses found in dense neighborhoods all around the city with more space and comfort than those aPodments could offer (and yes, I've been inside them).

I'm all for quality, affordable housing. Gods know we need it. But, in my view, this fails on both fronts. $600/mo may be cheap "for downtown" but a poor person's budget gives less than a shit about geography. And it's not terrible quality, but the individual leases would make it feel like living in a hostel, which directly affects quality of life. If you ask me, a program that helped poor people find roommates and find housing they could afford would be more worthwhile.

That said Rasmussen's reasons for wanting to stop these projects lack... what's the word... compassion. And there's no reason for a moratorium - that's knee-jerk bullshit. They aren't the greatest developments in the world, but they don't really seem to cause very many actual problems. Get off the soap box and get to work changing the code, asshole.

Many of Rasmussen's moves have been bugging me a lot lately. I have voted for him in the past but will happily vote for someone reliable who might run against him. I live on Cap Hill and have had no negative reaction to this type of dwelling. I support building codes that enforce health and safety but reject the idea of legislating aesthetics.

@38 Don't worry - you can't get parking passes for all 8 people in an aPodment unit either - it counts as one unit with 8 rooms rented.

How is this not exactly the spirit of the law? How are these room rentals any different than renting out all of the rooms of a house?

@ Matt: Yet it isn't one unit with 8 rooms rented. It's one unit w/ 38-ish rooms rented. That's the loophole that needs re-examining via code. Analysis of neighborhood impact important.

@44 No, it's 5 units each with 8 rooms rented. Again, nothing against the spirit of the law.

There's no negative "neighborhood impact" to density except parking, and as these are only allowed in multifamily zoning we're well past the parking debate. Name a multifamily zone with ample available on-street parking and maybe we can have a debate, but it will be one that ends with the phrase "parking permit". That's not a land use debate, it's a street use debate and is easily solved.

Hey Matt the Engineer, as you show with your explanation of et al., the "et" isn't abbreviated and needs no period after it. That should help you use it without creating inadvertent links.

Yeah, I got that after I posted. Full grammar shame accepted.

@19 -- Dominic's not a media whore. He's a media sex worker.

I speak as a single family home owner in a neighborhood with absolutely terrible transit options at the moment. Arbor Heights, I believe, has the worst transit options for a neighborhood with 5,000+ people living in it according to the last census. We're a forgotten, isolated hub now forced to be car dependent. We're also, contrary to stereotypes, VERY blue collar. Yes, there are ludicrously wealthy folks down on the water, in the Arroyo area. Most of us up on top of the hill are very working class.

Our traffic on our arterial routes (Roxbury, SR99, 35th SW) is already shitty and I'm *ALL FOR* more density around here.

There is a strip on the King County side of Roxbury and a big plaza on 35th & Roxbury on the city side that in my wildest dreams will be ripped apart to create 1,000 units of decent housing at going market rates. Why? Because then it gives massive political ammunition for increased Metro transit spending in my neighborhood--to my benefit. It gives massive political ammunition to increased Seattle police, fire department, department of transportation, parks, and public schools spending in my neighborhood--all to my benefit.

All of those, in turn, drive up MY property values. This will push up my property taxes--all these services aren't free. I am alright with that trade off at this time. Why? Because whinging about the impact is whinging about impacts that aren't really THAT big. Yeah, I'll trade +10 minutes to my commute and eating out a few times less per month in a goddamn heartbeat for all that. More frequent busses? Better schools for my boy, and the future little boys and girls in the neighborhood? More police and fire coverage? Uh, duh.

This is not about the pristine areas of West Seattle like Alki, the Junction, or the Admiral; or the endlessly fawned over neighborhoods like Capitol Hill, Queen Anne, South Lake Union, Green Lake, and Ballard. Those neighborhoods are the true minorities of this city. This is about Arbor Heights. Westwood. Northgate. Rainier Valley. Lawton Park. Lake City. The International District. South Beacon Hill. This is about supporting not always what is best for me, but for my son, and his sons and daughters. What will make Seattle better for them, in the long run, and affordable for them, in the long run?

This legislation is pure "I got mine, fuck off" by Tom Rassmussen and his class peers in our wealthy and trendy enclaves. This legislation is total horseshit and a fuck you to every neighborhood that isn't already at the higher levels of influence in this city. This is why I support district elections, to break the power these "pretty princess" neighborhoods have on our purse strings and city council.

This legislation is not to 'keep poor people out' of the Nice Neighborhoods. It's a petty and transparently shameless attempt to keep their Nice Neighborhoods from getting a few more cars competing for parking, and to keep the class sizes in their Nice Neighborhood schools from having to go up a few percentage points over time. Boo hoo. The world of Seattle does not revolve around your neighborhoods, and in a few years, will have their influence curbed. You all are acting like the petty conservatives in Congress, desperately trying to stave off the inevitability of time and evolution.

Get out of the way or die a political death when district elections arrive. The rest of Seattle is trying to evolve.

@53 And you're going to require them to pay for all of that space? Outlawing small housing doesn't force poor people into larger housing. It forces them onto the street.

As a retail manager, I can say that some of my employees were very happy to be able to move into a new apodment in Eastlake, and out of an unaffordable shared house in the Rainier Valley.

OH NOES SHARING A KITCHEN:
Spoiler alert - apodment residents have been sharing a kitchen for their entire adult life. It's just usually a kitchen in a shitty overcrowded rental house.

Not only is "cheap" construction not illegal, it's industry standard. Those cute Craftsman homes on Queen Anne? Bought from a Sears catalog.

And yet those Craftsman houses are still here a hundred years later. Those aPodments will be lucky to last 20.

I would be less skeptical of aPodments if Seattle's tenant protections weren't a cruel joke.

If, or really *when*, those aPodments become overrun by a bunch of 20-something jackasses, anyone who actually has a job who rents one of those rooms is going to be shit out of luck. Landlords have no obligation to enforce even their own noise regulations, let alone enforce the city's. And I guarantee there's no noise mitigation built into those cheap-ass buildings.

Also, speaking of cheap-ass buildings, once everything starts to break in a few years, the landlords will have no incentive to repair anything, since low-wage tenants have no other options than to suck it up. Without enforceable tenant protections, aPodments are slums waiting to happen.

@56 most of our housing stock was built during WW I and WW II, here in Seattle.

They said it wouldn't last either.

Guess what? It did.

@56 Based on what? Name a housing style other than EIFS siding (which was always a bad idea in a wet climate) that's been torn down en masse? Our fire safety codes are good enough that buidings very rarely burn these days. Roofing is good enough that even cheap comp roofing lasts 20-30 years and is cheap to replace when it wears out. Siding is good enough that it will last almost forever with mildly competent maintenance - even ugly vinyl siding will last practically forever.

@Gloomy Gus

Suuuuuure you are. Weren't you the one saying that rent was going down in the city last year, so why should we have rent control?

@57 I am 100% behind you if you're proposing better sound control requirements in construction. But do you think design review will even mention sound control?

"landlords will have no incentive to repair anything, since low-wage tenants have no other options than to suck it up"

How is this different than any other building type? Is your solution to not build low-wage housing?

If/when housing degrades, tenants that can afford better move away and the rent goes down to attract people willing to live there. Or landlords fix up the place to attract higher rent. That's the market, love it or hate it.

@61,

My solution is not to cram 40 low-wage tenants into a small building run by a slumlord. Not without actual tenant protections that allow the tenants to sue the shit out of the landlord and/or complain to a government agency about their living conditions.

But you're ok with cramming those same low-wage tenants into other buildings run by slumlords? You know banning affordable housing doesn't give people better housing, right?

And I'll await your evidence that any of these buildings are run by slumlords. Or that "slumlord" is a real thing in a non-rent-controled city.

@60, show me where I wrote that, willya? I think you've got the wrong guy.

@63,

http://www.seattleweekly.com/related/to/…

@65 The motivation there is short-term intentional degradation because the buildings were to be torn down. Is that really your fear for aPodments?

True long-term slumlords require rent control, or there's a direct financial incentive to provide maintenance on your investment.

@66,

Those articles date back 15 years. Short term? Fuck you.

Slumlords operate anywhere that tenants have no choices and there's no governmental accountability. Is it your assertion that slumlords never existed before rent control? Fuck you.

For God's sake, people. If we need to reform our tenant laws, let's reform them. If we need rent control, let's institute it. If we need better and larger affordable housing, let's build it. But until that day comes (and it may never come, the way things go around here), don't "protect" low income folks from housing that's less than that ideal by not giving them housing in the first place. Tom Rasmussen's real "emergency" should be to fix the current tenant laws that are leaving them at the mercy of landlords - ask the long-time tenants on Capitol Hill who have been curtly shoved out to make room for condos - *not* preventing the creation of affordable housing in the first place. The problem is not that poor people don't have their own kitchens. The problem is that they'd be lucky to find a home at all.

Gotta love the shilling for developers and Car2Go, a joint venture of Europe's largest car manufacturer and Europe's largest car rental company, charging $84 a day for a car that holds two people and three bags of groceries.

@64 Apologies. That was baconcat, not you. And, apologies for delay.

But, you're still shilling for creators of poorly made shorty housing with really expensive rent that are going to price out the lower 40%. $600 is A LOT for 200 sq ft.

Let's hold up the OTHER Washington as an example of what happens when you squash potential solutions like this. Here, you can rent a house, condo/apartment, or accessory dwelling unit (like an english basement, carriage house, or in-law suite, but only in certain areas). You can also run a boarding house, but only if you provide some meals to the tenants. Therefore, everyone must have roommates, be able to afford an individual place, or the landlord must also be a cook, which means that it's a full-time job and there aren't many of these situations around. You can't rent a house with individual leases for the bedrooms, that would be a boarding house, and you'd need to provide meals.

Rents are insane, so we try to gin up some affordable housing, using a combination of developer incentives (which the developer can always get around by just building anything that would be permitted by-right) and tax dollars. Guess who's moving into much of that affordable housing? Middle-class young professionals. Because incomes and rents are so high, single people making around $50K per year qualify for many of the new affordable rental properties, and around $60K qualifies for owner-occupied affordable units. That's not completely insane. Someone making $50K, to spend 30% of their income on rent, could only afford only $1250/month in rent; at $60K, it goes up to $1500. Good luck finding much in that price range. In my not-very-desirable neighborhood, a nice 2-bed will cost each tenant over $1200. Since the prices are low enough and rents high enough to support rental activity over purchases, many market-priced units in the less-desirable neighborhoods are purchased by investors. Of the 5 home sales we've had in our neighborhood over the last year, 3 were investors/landlords. Of the 10 condos, every last one was purchased by an investor. This pushes out people who could afford to buy these units and live in them, since the investors are coming with lots of cash and few stipulations, which makes them preferable to most owners who intend to occupy.

So, rather than providing an option (which, to me, looking at the websites for some of these places, doesn't seem too terrible...not my cup of tea NOW, but with a private bath, kitchenette, and a larger kitchen/laundry/common area, I would have seriously considered when I was younger) for younger people to rent at MARKET rates WITHOUT taxpayer subsidies, we end up spending public money getting young professionals into small units in the city, where we could be spending that money focusing on more affordable FAMILY housing for those who need it. Once again, the perfect is the enemy of the good, and, while I like having young professionals in the city, they can be accommodated with innovative market-based solutions like these and microunits and we can get to focusing on the people who REALLY need subsidized affordable housing or they'll be living in outer suburbia and commuting 2 hours to their minimum-wage job every day.

If you want these places to be better, then make building codes stricter, get some new rules about street parking, and create regulations geared towards mitigating their potential problems. A moratorium on smaller, more-affordable units will land you squarely where we are, with glorified studios (~500 square feet and without a real door on the bedroom...technically "junior one-bedrooms") renting for $2500/month and selling for nearly $400K, if they're near public transit and in nicer neighborhoods (my friends just sold theirs for $450K in 8 days with multiple offers).

DEMAND RENT CONTROL NOW! Dominic seems to underscore a huge problem with where we get our information these days: underpaid, young novices with a profound lack of history, society, anthropology and political and business strategy.

Dominic, Rasmussen may be driven by the wrong reasons but anyone familiar with disaster capitalism, feudalism and big money land grabs will recognize that aPODments are no friend to any poor, save for the homeless themselves. This is a glorified forcing of lower to middle income folks into glorified closets as though that's the only way to affordable density. Dominic, that's total bullshit. Why don't you write about RENT CONTROL (or, the lack thereof)? Why don't you highlight the lack of tenant rights in our "progressive" city? Gimme a break. Whether you wish to or not, you bid for developers and white city councillors who already got their piece and then some.

And, btw, in my 'hood there's a building at 1720 E Denny Way that's being "re-done" by Hamilton Urban Real Estate INVESTORS. They cut down ALL of the big trees, brought in an army of masons and repair folks who've made a grand mess (all while the building is full of tenants). And, guess what, rents for 1 bedrooms were in the $800-$900 range. The units were far, far from perfect but it was a building with character that's been housing creative shaker movers for years and years. And, this is so typical.

RENTS ARE INCREASING $1200 - $1600 /mo there. Where are the Boomers at City Hall on this? Nowhere. They all suck on this issue. Big time. Dominic, why don't you go and ask them WHY?

RENT CONTROL and rent increase limits legislation are what's needed. Not glorified closets.

For me the jury is still out on aPodments. In Manhattan, maybe a good thing, but Seattle may not be dense enough to drive middle class demand for boarding houses (and that is what an aPodment is). btw, Design reviews don't work. By the time the project is complete, the design has completely changed from its original. Developers hire architects to design the building to pass review, then do what they want as they build. What's the city gonna do, say 'tear it down'? Design reviews are toothless.

Does an apodment come with a meal ticket, just like college?

the aPodments are certainly--mostly--ugly, but my complaint right now is the stapling, tacking, whatever of umpty seven trashy notices all over the doors, gates, railings. ugly made even uglier.
also, i thought that the new building height limits for Capitol Hill were six stories. apparently that means six stories on the uphill side of the structure and seven or eight stories on the downhill side?? humbug