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.
A 1.0 parking ratio, WTF?
Hell, even Kent has something like .7 around Sounder Stations, and that isn’t even frequent all-day service.
Yeah!…
Because everyone knows that the cost of its construction, and not the present market value of the housing (and its amenities), dictates what people pay to rent housing!
You can’t possibly that stupid are you?…
If they want to pay to park their cars, let them. The point is now they have other options and will most likely be walking and using transit more than they would had they not had the housing (and garage) not been built. We don’t need to be forcing people to do things here. Housing should be more carrots and less sticks.
@ 2) Someone’s in a good mood.
Obviously, market value is a big factor, and extra parking spaces are amenities that add to the market value. But higher building costs also require a developer to charge more to make the project pencil out.
@3) The carrot is the additional height.
@2 Your avatar is giving me a boner.
require provisions to plug in electric vehicles
that one parking space is an asset for the renter, having a place for out of town guests to park for free should not be a social crime
The ghost of ECB haunts this entry.
If you get to dictate how people function, what prevents other people from telling people who they can and cannot marry?
You’ll be wanting to ban all cars next.
You know what’s good about having a permanent parking spot? It allows you to take public transit instead of having to move it every 1-3 days…and you can still go camping on the weekend.
The reasonable goal here is to encourage people who have cars to drive less. That means giving them secure places to park their cars and easy access to other forms of transportation. A car parked off the street does not contribute to congestion or pollution. Neither does providing housing options with better access to public transportation to people who do not have cars (and therefore already do not drive) lessen congestion and pollution. If your concerned about congestion and pollution the effort should be to target people who drive a lot with opportunities to drive less. But, people who drive a lot, are probably going to be uninterested in housing without parking at any price (or will find paid parking elsewhere, or park on the street and drive their car every 24 hours if just to move it to avoid a parking violation). Which is better, to use easy access to public transportation to reduce the miles driven by a car owner or to make a non car owner’s already committed use of public transportation more convenient. Seems to me they should be increasing the parking to encourage two car families to drive less. Then you potentially take two cars off the road for each apartment.
That’s so gross. Here’s hoping Mike O’Brien and maybe Sally Bagshaw can convince the conservatives on the council
like Richard Conlin and Nick Licata to pass parking space construction caps around transit corridors. Parking spaces for 1/3 the residents sounds about right, although a tailored solution to individual blocks would work if the council can put enough work into it in the next year.
(If Conlin and Licata aren’t staunch conservatives, I’d like them to prove it for once — building an underground highway and failing to pass a bag tax don’t count.)
@6
🙂
I don’t get it: how are the hospitals are “hostile to pedestrians.” There are sidewalks everywhere around them, all buildings are connected by sky bridges, bus access to all of them is excellent. (I know – I’m a frequent visitor.)
There’s even an outdoor escalator between Madison and Marion – provided by the hospitals – to ease going up the hill there.
Do you mean the existence of the hospitals makes it so you can’t walk right through them? I don’t get it, Dominic.
Dumb dumb dumb.
Dominic, plenty of people who live downtown own cars but don’t drive them everywhere. As someone who occasionally likes to get OUT of town, owning a car is absolutely mandatory. Putting said car in an underground parking spot is vastly preferable to, say, parking it on the street, don’t you think?
All people, car owners and otherwise, will use other forms of transit if it is convenient to do so. You don’t need to punish them to make them do it.
@12: the hospitals are boring to walk by–often there’s little to nothing of interest on the street. Sidewalks are great, and hospitals are very important, but I’d rather walk on a street that has window displays than one with a brick wall two feet from my face.
Also, I think the lack of parking makes people think twice about keeping a car. I think the city council would be better suited to make it so that renting a housing unit and parking space are separate. That way, renting an apartment could come with the option of renting a parking space as well, where developers feel it is necessary to build it.
I guess this would make sense if lack of a parking space would make someone sell their car. Maybe it would for one or two residents, but everyone else will just park on the street, eliminating 50-or-so parking spots in an already parking-impossible neighborhood. This hurts business, of course, because why not go to Ballard or Belltown, where parking is far more ample, to drink instead?
Plus – I wonder how how much gas is burned from people driving in circles, looking for parking. That 5-10 minutes of extra driving per day per car adds up, and the less parking there is, the longer that search takes.
I already chimed in on this conversation when we had it about Thornton Place, but yeah. I live on Ballard Ave., in an old apartment without any parking. There’s no permit system for downtown Ballard. I can’t get a car because I have nowhere to leave it all day, and I want to keep taking Metro to work.
This doesn’t mean I’ll live here forever without a car; instead, it makes it more likely that I’ll move somewhere farther off the transit grid and end up driving a lot more. I would prefer to make the most eco-friendly car-owning choice, but a lack of offstreet parking makes that nearly impossible in my current location.
If the city really wanted to provide a solution they would gather data from non-riders (us hated car owners) and act on it by providing viable mass transit options, rather than the Dominic Holden draconian answer.
One way is to get a can of car data (where are the cars sleeping), a can of bus stop location data (regardless of assigned routes), send out postcards to the owners of the cars and ask a few very basic questions: do you commute to work using your car? If you could go to this bus stop (or one pretty close to it) would your take the bus? Where do you need to commute to? How often?
Get data, solve quantifiable problems.
Not everybody that owns a car wants to own their car.
Offering actual alternatives, rather than assuming everybody that owns a car is choosing between their car and mass transit.
Providing a real alterative based on facts would be a good start.
As for the singular example in the subject of the story, allow the developer to rent the spaces independant of the apartment, giving preference to apartment renters. Lease the rest to people that would be happy to get their car off the street, even if they do not live in that particular building.
The more cars you can pull off of the street, the easier it is to get rid of the on-street parking altogether and convert the street into bike or bus lanes.
Under ground parking should be encouraged, on street parking discouraged, allowing the paved lanes to be used to move people rather than store cars.
@13- If you only occasionally get out of town, renting a car is much cheaper than owning one.
1) This thread ends @ 8 . You make sense!
2) Is that really the building that they are proposing? Ugly.
3) I don’t think excavation is the spendiest part of construction. Besides, I don’t think they would build an apartment building on a slab.
4) I don’t Dominic has ever worked a day in his life.
@15, Lack of a bus made me buy a car, does that count?
I purchased my home because it was within walking distance of a bus, then metro reallocated the bus.
Replaced with 4 busses (if I want to be to work on time, or 2 busses if I want to be 1 hour and 22 minutes late, thanks metro!).
Not everybody within the city limits is going downtown. Judging by the number of homes with 2 cars around me, I can only guess that I am not the only one without a viable mass transit solution.
If you live in the north end, north of 130th (the other Seattle), and you do not work downtown then my guess is that you might be one of the many, many, homes with two cars.
As someone who realized he didn’t need a car as a result of a parking shortage in his building, I’m with Dominic. And I’d rather see more lower-rent options with less parking around the city.
@14 – Oh, I see. Providing highly accessible, yet visually boring, amenities for pedestrians is hostile. Man, you can’t win!
To me pedestrian-hostile means tiny or no sidewalks, few marked crosswalks, too many concessions made for cars. Northgate is pedestrian hostile. Eastgate, Tukwila, – sure. But First Hill? That neighborhood is completely accommodating.
I have a car that I drive two or three times a week. I have two small children, and I used to take them to classes at the Garfield community center, getting home around to my First Hill apartment around 7:30 PM. I quit taking them to classes because it’s gotten so hard to find on-street parking that late in the evening, and there’s no way I’m going to hang out at the bus stop on 23rd & Cherry with my kids.
If you want to increase density, you have to make it possible for families to live in apartments in the city.
@19, and 8, this ended yesterday with ECB morning fizz yesterday at Publicola.
Same shit.
It is amazing that there is a market for more than one of these, maybe there isn’t.
Erica @ 23) No one is talking about eliminating parking for families or making it impossible for families to live in cities. This is about reducing parking capacity in the parts of the city best served by transit–the part of town that needs fewer cars. But folks who need their cars could still park them.
@12 Frequent visitor? That would explain the “free lunch”.
Because of the work I do and what I do when I’m not working, a car is mandatory. No other way around it short of dropping all my out of work activities and changing careers.
So when we were looking for a new place a few years back and my SO wanted to move to Cap Hill, I said yes so long as we found a place with parking included. Does that make me evil? Maybe, but it worked out fine at the time and we took full advantage of being in a walkable neighborhood when I wasn’t driving for work.
I don’t see the point to restricting parking spaces in new construction. We’re not mandating this much parking, and maybe the developer is putting in this much parking because of site anomolies or perhaps for profit in hourly parking. Either way, it’s not going to encourage more driving as much as it’s going to encourage more people with cars to live in a neighborhood where leaving the car parked is a good option.
Please do an on site inspection. This was a superfund site and the hole is far deeper than a two story parking basement– so the incremental cost is going to be small. I believe in discouraging cars, but the logic fails on ths site. What I think should be mandated is sufficient facilities for electric car recharges.
I Agree in principle, but there needs to be some parking spots so people can pay to park. Better that it is paid for by the users and not in rents for everyone.
@25 please read 9.
I think Stalin told all the builders, so you own the land, you are investing the money, NO, YOU CAN’T build parking.
Why not? Because I am Stalin.
Couldn’t they build the underground parking spaces, and then if they go unused because residents are so well-served by transit, just turn every other space into housing for the poor? Win-win.
Dominic,
Everybody should be forced to build housing that serves your world view and lifestyle. And yes, developers should be forced to provide zit cream for the Stranger’s workforce.
Sorry, Dominic, you’re off the mark on this one –
First, the way to get people out of their cars is to build dense, and make transit awesome, not simply punish drivers by increasing the scarcity of parking. Nobody’s gonna drive to a downtown job from here, but they might drive to Bellevue, and who’d blame them?
Second, the point is not to increase transit ridership for it’s own sake. The point is to make Seattle a desirable places to live in the long term, and in a spot with such excellent transit service, extra parking for residents isn’t going to cause anyone to take a car without a good reason.
Wow. Everything about this article is the reason this city sucks. Let people live their damn lives. Stop imposing your view of how things should be. I thought the “high density” people would love underground lots. I assume that is better than a parking lot?
Having a parking spot lets people drive less…..oh what is the point,you (Dominic) will not be happy until cities outlaw cars(i am exaggerating of course put your sort of I know better, let me show you how it’s done liberal/communist way of pushing your ideas on people is pretty aggregating and leads to this sort of outrage.
Oh, and Dominic, here’s a question worth asking yourself:
Is it possible that in areas well-served by transit, adding residential parking actually reduces car trips by attracting people who would otherwise live where transit is less available?
Did anybody else notice that in the sleek, modern future world, there is no overhead rat’s nest of wires?
Where did they all go? Are they going to bury phone and electrical service for the entire block? What happened to overhead electrification?
@ 34) So all those old apartment buildings across First Hill and Capitol Hill with little or no parking made Seattle so undesirable that nobody wanted to move here? And it would be a tragedy if this particular parking garage were only half the size–58 spaces? Personally, I don’t think it would suck if Seattle turned out like those other transit oriented cities like New York, Chicago, London, Paris… where parking is extremely limited and driving is a luxury.
1. Build and improve transit regardless of the design of any one building, duh.
2. Um, why not start by not requiring parking anywhere, instead of picking places to prohibit it. The ban thing is controversial.
3. What we really need: new buildings that don’t look like they wre extruded from a big old tube called “Architects’ Unversal Generic Building for Seattle: Apply goo so that building rises stright up next to lot line.” With that warning label on the goo tube: “Warning. Building Will Appear to be Three Bland Buildings, as Indicated By Subtle Use of Bricks or Other to Hide Bulk and Mass.”
What we get is athat canyon feeling and lots of buildigns like this one with no real identiy, not looks like a building feel, no entrance, no pediment, no drama, no character. It’s like Building by Ikea.
Look at that alleged cafe. Reality: there’s no room on the sidewalk for that. You need a bigger setback!
And when all four corners are built straight up like this model shows, the whole intersection will be a cold shadowy canyon like Third downtown.
Those other cities are chock full of squares and broader avenues creating more public spaces that look nice. Buildings that aren’t afraid to say “yes, I am here. You can see me. I am a building. I ahve a dramatic entrance. I have a foyer. I have a top and a sides and a back.”
The visual depiction here does not even take a point of view that will exist in reality. The wide angle point of view shown here is a point of view about half way inside the lot across the intersection! It’s a p.o.v. inside a building for gosh sakes. What you would really see from this point of view is probably the inside of a Quiznos bathroom!
if you took the point of view your’e really going to experience — say, one caddy corner across the intersection but right in front of the inevitable 6 story building that will rise there, too — you’d feel “wow, this is another really crowded intersection in seattle. Why does our development such, and NEVER look like NY or Paris?”
it’s this kind of bland urbanness, crowding th e sidealks, and rising straight up, which people here intuitively sense is bad, but can’t quite figure out. It’s nothign like NY Paris etc. which ahve broad avenues, tons of fountains an d little parks, tons of streets that look like outside living rooms. Ours, not so much.
Parking is just the start of it.
That new thing looks like it will take up twice the lot as the old building does. Maybe that’s what architects like to portray.
No one noticed the line in the article that said “Instead, these apartments should be built for less money, the units should rent for less money…”.
Show me one apartment building in Seattle that has been built for less money–whatever that means–and consequently has rented for less money. While we’re arguing about cars and where they should go or shouldn’t go, can’t we devote a little time to where people who are not upper-middle-class are going to live? Not in this building, for sure.
@38 all four of the transit-oriented cities you mentioned, without exception, have non-traffic based transit (subways and elevated trains). Unlike Seattle, in all of those cities, it rarely takes over an hour to go 8 to 10 miles.
A single rail does not a system make. All four you mentioned have a System.
Also, New York, London and Paris have trains to other cities that is relatively inexpensive. When it costs $10 more to drive ALONE to Portland than to take the train, it’s easy to make the decision.
Let’s also not forget that NYC’s sub goes 24/7. When there is no bus connecting Seattle Center to Cap Hill after 9pm on Sundays and Holidays, your system is FUCKED.
High density habitrails. Hopefully those guys will go out of business before they can wreak further destruction.
The latest thinking is that the Salish Sea can only support 1 million people. That means 1 million need to move.
LIFO? (or FIFO?)
Where’s the jet pack rental shack for the penthouse level?
oops, forgot, @7 ftw. And don’t forget giving the plug-in car stalls the best locations next to the bike racks.
Dominic @38,
NYC, Paris, Berlin, DC, you name it – I agree, they have us beat. But they didn’t become transit-oriented by capping parking spaces. They did it by building transit.
@9 wrote “a car parked off the street does not contribute to congestion…” @9 was wrong. New density that is auto-oriented puts (in a place like Belltown, where all the high-rises are auto-oriented, thousands) of new cars on streets with no additional capacity. Congestion follows. Riders of on-street bus transit, now fighting those hundreds of new cars just to pull out of the damn bus stop, suffer the worst.
@45 is also wrong. San Francisco & Boston — both transit cities but not exclusively transit cities — have actively employed parking caps to steer new construction toward pedestrian-friendliness. It has been an invaluable tool in both places.
So Dominic’s proposal is essentially right.
Unfortunately, @17 is also essentially right. The present and future transit options at that location — the 3, 4 and First Hill Streetcar — are useless piles of shit. First Hill got screwed in the light rail plan, and not for the reason Sound Transit claimed. It had nothing to do with construction difficulty, and everything to do with the fear of losing federal funding under a punitive-to-the-poor Bush administration edict against new transit investment serving those who already use transit. First Hill, and these new apartments, will now be stuck with a hardly-comes-and-moves-slower-than-walking toy train AND a modal switch just to go a mile into downtown.
Thank god I already got by single family home, garden, two parking spots and 10 minute drive downtown BEFORE these green facists took hold. Now if the rest of you who think Seattle is gonna stop global warming want to take a bum filled bus, I encourage you. Only makes my drive easier.
But I admire your shutzpah for comparing Podunk Seattle to real cities like Paris and NYC. That always cracks me up.
Even people who ride the bus or train every day still have cars, yo. How else are they going to go see their family in butt-fuck eastern washington? Let people have their cars, it’s stupid to not plan for cars. If there’s no parking then those residents will just pack more cars into the already ridiculously car-crowded area.
The city should require more off street parking for new buildings to help make more street parking available for those in older buildings.
Right or wrong, cars are not optional for most of us.
I would never move into one of these dense, transit-oriented developments unless I could have a secure parking space, and I’d gladly pay for it. I drive on average one day a week, but I still want a secure place to store my vehicle. Many of us, as Carollani @48 points out, have family and other business that regularly requires us to venture to areas either not served or poorly served by public transportation.
Build the transit first, then we can start talking about capping parking requirements.