On December 2, a design review board for the city’s Department of Planning and Development will make its recommendation on a six-story building planned at Broadway and East Jefferson street. Here’s the corner recently:
And here’s a rendering by Ankrom Moisan Architects of the proposed building:
What’s great about it: The First Hill streetcar will run right past this building (or within a couple blocks of it), linking the residents of the 99 apartments to two light rail stations, the International District, and Capitol Hill. The number three and four buses run past frequently. It’s a 10 minute walk from downtown. The developer is asking the city council to increase the height limit from 65 feet to 85 feet, which makes sense for a central location so well served by transit. This is where we should be increasing heights and density. Also, the hospitals on First Hill are impersonal and hostile to pedestrians; this mix of residential and retail uses will liven up the street at the south end of Broadway.
What’s not great: The developers are proposing 117 parking spaces in two below-grade levels. So, despite the fact that this location is so well served by transit, the developers are trying to build auto-oriented housing. The council shouldn’t let them. If the developers want more height, the council should give it to them—on the condition that the builder cuts the parking capacity in half by eliminating one of the levels of parking. (The council should do this in all central locations where a developer asks to exceed existing height limits). Digging holes for parking garages is one of the biggest expenses in construction; the deeper the hole, the more it costs and the higher the rents. Building a city for more cars—not that it needs repeating—also contributes to congestion and pollution. Instead, these apartments should be built for less money, the units should rent for less money, and the entire thing should be tailored for the central, walkable, transit-served neighborhood that it’s in.
@ all of you who gush over Paris & London & NYC & Berlin: it ain’t going to happen.
Seattle will never be the political or financial capital of anywhere; the powers-that-be will never have the capital (or capitol) to tax the residents of Yakima, Colville, or Osoyoos to pay for gleaming shiny examples of public transit.
It’s not the parking, though, that’s the issue here. What’s the mix of apartments, and will there be enough three bedroom apartments–or (more likely) will there be any at all? What are the local schools like?
Stranger readers often dismiss the vast blandness of the suburbs (and don’t realize that Seattle’s only about 1/3rd the population of King County), and they also don’t realize that Seattle doesn’t provide many options for a family with more than a single child (or perhaps an elderly in-law). It’s just too difficult to find good housing and schools within city limits–Seattle, despite its boastful self-image, is just not a good city for everyone.
Yes, folks who live in units such as these will take transit to work and back, in high proportions. Problem is, however, that after getting home in the evening, they may want/need to travel somewhere in their car. Or do so on the weekends.
Yes, it’s still transit-oriented development and people take transit to work, but it’s a leap from that to saying those residents won’t have any car at all.
Yes, make provisions for electric car charging, for car-share parking, for bike racks and so forth, but even so I expect most projects like this will generate something in the order of 0.8 cars per dwelling unit. Those cars will either be accommodated in on-site parking or on the street. Take your choice.
So long as I can pay for the privilege of underground parking within a few minute walk from my apartment, I wouldn’t oppose Dominic’s Nanny State prescription. However, because I have to drive for work (I’m an auditor), if you ban parking spaces in town, I’ll live out of town, drive in, and inconveniently park in front of your place EVERY DAY. Your choice.
Oh, @46 —
San Francisco is transit-oriented like Susan Hitchison is non-partisan. Seriously, I’ve lived & worked there.
I remember the BART, which offers service along one single narrow corridor, being so under-provisioned that they were proposing to increase rush-hour fares to actually discourage riding during peak hours. (This was around September ’08)
I remember the Muni rail was a joke. The trolleys, lovely relics that they are, are useless. SF’s main mode of public transit is a shitty network of inconsistently-served bus routes, which creep across the city even slower than cars.
SF is absolutely not a poster child for transit. SF is what every growing city in the world should avoid becoming if at all possible.
And, yeah, they love their parking caps, ’cause it sure as shit ain’t the utility of their transit system that sells tickets.
Well, there are 99 apartments and presumably there is one space per apartment with parking leftover for building maintenance and staff. Instead of including the parking place with the purchase/rent of the condo/apartment, the building owners could lease the spots to those who want them. Not everyone has a car and therefore not everyone will want/need a parking spot. If transit is as good as it’s supposed to be, eventually residents will view their car as an unnecessary expense and give up the car and parking spot. The building owners could then lease the whole thing out to a local business.
@5 – the carrot ought to be the gawddamn fact it’s on transit & near commerce and therefore will be quicker to rent/sell and less empty time between turnovers, than say, some shithole in Leschi east of MLK. They aren’t paying anything of the multi-million dollar cost of those gold-card level improvements. The height, or rather generally, more height than before, is already mandated by law & comprehensive plans/anti-sprawl laws, is it not?
Developers ought to be in bidding wars for such sweet sites. The stick ought to be: We the people could always lobby to make sure that streetcar never goes near their sweet chunk of property otherwise… (and zone the neighbors for light industrial or a new jail while we’re at it).
@38: would those be the same buildings built in neighborhoods that pre-date Ford’s Model T? (Actually, I think the number of old parkingless apts about matches the number of folks that revel in being carless in this city -so keep ’em)
Don’t even GO there on NYC: I’m a former NY’er and New York City has plenty of parking – Park Slope alone has 885 garage/lot spots and about 11,600 spots total. Let me rephrase that: a neighborhood older than the revolutionary war , about 20 by 5 blocks, has ample parkng for more cars than broadway has residents DESPITE having 12 subway lines and 11 subway stations nearby. Need proof? See page 8:
http://www.transalt.org/files/newsroom/r… Jackson heights, where the median income is on par with Seattle, has just as many: so don’t pretend NYC = cars must be a luxury item. Not true.
Dom: You fail at this almost as Bad as JoshM at CHS did with the development going in where the farmer’s market rents: he at least had some cited ‘research’ to share.
Here’s my list of good sites to dive into:
ite.org – Institute of Transportation Engineers – the report “parking generation” and “trip generation” that Shoup and others cite from comes from these folks
zoning ideas considered in SF-
also an acknowledgement that families need parking
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cg…
excellent review of car share benefits: http://www.toronto.ca/zoning/pdf/car_sha…
http://www.parkingtoday.com/
http://www.vtpi.org/shoup.htm 1999 critique by Shoup /
http://www.vtpi.org/tdm/tdm72.htm Victoria Transport Policy Institute
http://www.bts.gov/site_map.html
http://www.planning.org/pas/infopackets/…
want instant momentum towards more transit, bike and carshare use? Tax GAS, not residential/retail development. Plugging your ears, humming and pretending that people don’t need cars in this city isn’t facing reality: the way to be like Paris, NYC, London etc, is to have a superb network of options.
@9 you are spot on.
@12: hospitals are high-car traffic in & out (ambulances, visitors, sick folk, docs called into ER) at great speed and often a dangerous hurry. Peds in crosswalks around hospitals get hit alot. “Luckily they’re close to the ER” doesn’t cut it when you’re dead, of course. Likewise, drive-thru starbucks and gas stations are considered hostile to peds. And the intersection of 14th/Madison.
@16 excellent point: those who have to drive will now have to drive from further away, creating a larger carbon footprint & adding more to traffic misery than if the damn apt was built with parking. besides, dedicated parking is proven to reduce the significant congestion caused by “circling” (See: Dr.Shoup on youtube).
@17 watch out: the pro-curbside parking boneheads will argue though that ‘parked cars provide separation between dangerous cars and peds’. Ugh, as if curbs don’t exist. Me? I like replacing the rows of car-scape with TREES and WIDER SIDEWALKS. Imagine a sidewalk wide enough (and uncluttered enough) to include a bike lane! Alongside trees!
@19 : underground parking spots averaging 300 sq ft tend to cost around 22K-25K per spot, for what that data is worth. Still doesn’t mean construction cost = causation of market rates for parking, nor does it change that fact that if the spot is rented or leased, the owner can make that cost back in 10-15 years and then profit on it virtualy cost-free for decades after.
@25 the question remains, if 100 car users move into that building, and only 50 spots are there, – even if 10% give up their cars and switch to zipcar, in taking on your zoning proposal, aren’t you putting 40 more cars parked on the street / circling for parking / adding pollution?? One yet-to-be-built streetcar and some buses to rainier valley & broadway does not a ‘transit hub’ make.
@32 windowless, fire-escapeless poor housing? Dat’s COLD. Wow, Scrooge and his jails/poorhouses has got nothin on you.
@57 – we can’t do that in this state – all gas taxes go to highway construction.
That said, gas should be like MJ – available to licensed adults and taxed heavily.
Dominic, love the article. For all those people who say Off-street parking is not so bad, take a look at my article on CHS:
http://www.capitolhillseattle.com/2009/1…
While parking maximums and unbundling are important, market rate on-street parking is the best because it will drive down overall demand and thus, off-street parking will not be nearly as lucrative for developers.
The problem is that on-street parking is so difficult right now that developers can charge premium rents simply by saying “secure parking available”. They need to overbuild instead of underbuild because they need parking available even on the last units they rent so they can keep prices high. And even for progressive developers, they have to deal with banks who don’t like to loan for projects with parking less than 1:1. From a trusted developer source:
“There analysis is often not “scientific” but will look at what other buildings in the area provide and if they think that the “competition” has more parking and that could affect the occupancy and thereby the value of this asset, then they will not make a loan on the project.”
Note that they don’t look at the utilization of parking in other buildings, but simple the capacity. Ridiculous.
Rev. Smith: Thanks for calling me out again 😉 You cite Shoup twice and you are fundamentally misrepresenting his ideas. Please stop.
Rev. Smith: According to the study you cite (which I think I cited first) Park Slope has a total of 11,620 parking spaces for 53,078 residents. This means barely over 20% of neighborhood residents can own a personal vehicle. The Capitol Hill Urban Village has about 20,000 residents. I’m not sure what the total number of parking spaces is but just around Broadway its almost 6,000 spaces. I think its safe to say that there are at least 60 – 70% the number of parking spaces as residents on Capitol Hill. That’s absurd for the most densely populated neighborhood in the Pacific Northwest.
Josh @59, @60,
When Capitol Hill has as many MTA stations as Park Slope, we can start making comparisons.
@47, @51,
Okay, let’s stop comparing Seattle to NYC and Paris. How about Zurich? Frankfurt? Mannheim? Munich? Geneva? Basel? Vienna? Milan? I’ve commuted to job sites in each and every one of those cities on public transit, and they all have us beat.
Dominic, when did you become a Republican?