Cedar Park is a quiet neighborhood of small, modest houses and
dead-end streets tucked into the northeast corner of Seattle a few
blocks off busy Lake City Way. Abutting Lake Washington to the east,
the neighborhood is pocked with thickets of big, old trees, and,
despite its affordability, boasts expansive mountain and water views.
In many places, the houses here perch atop steep slopes that are
designated “environmentally critical” under Seattle’s Critical Areas
Ordinance (CAO), which protects the city’s most
vulnerable
lands.
It’s ironic then that a provision of the CAO is what allowed
developer Berkshire Homes to erect a quartet of 4,000- and
5,000-square-foot McMansions just above a critical area at Northeast
135th Street and 39th Avenue Northeast. Residents worry it won’t stop
there; the loophole is open to other developers, too, and similar plans
are already in the works nearby. Upcoming legislation by CAO author
Richard Conlin to limit developers’ ability to build massive,
lot-line-to-lot-line houses would prevent the most egregious
“megahouse” developments, but the underlying loophole would still need
to be addressed.
The provision that allowed Berkshire to build its megahome complex
was actually intended, Department of Planning and Development (DPD)
spokesman Alan Justad explains, “to keep environmentally critical areas
as untouched as possible and preserve green areas.” The provision
encourages developers building near critical areas to cluster housing,
rather than spreading it out around a property, on the theory that
clustering will preserve larger expanses of
open space.
But the legislation had an unintended consequence: It allowed
developers like Berkshire to cluster several houses adjacent to an
environmentally critical area on lots much smaller than would
ordinarily be allowed, extending the property line along a narrow
corridor down the hillside into another parcel of undevelopable land at
the bottom. The resulting dumbbell-shaped lot Berkshire got was big
enough overall to meet minimum lot-size requirements, and allowed the
company to concentrate development at the top of the hill, where runoff
from the massive impervious surface will roll down into the
environmentally sensitive area below.
The houses themselves—all still on the market, despite price
reductions to between $998,000 and $1.5 million—are almost
comically grand. (The developer, John Urban, describes them as “regular
Craftsman-type houses.” He denied the existence of any regulatory
controversy.) They give the impression of perhaps 16 connected
townhomes, rather than the four single-family residences they are.
Instead of a front yard, they have a 20-yard-wide strip of asphalt;
instead of a backyard, they have a few bare feet of mulch. Instead of
trees, they have carefully manicured shrubs and boxwood hedges. “You
walk out the back door, you don’t get a yard,” says neighbor Jeffrey
Ochsner, an architecture professor at the University of Washington.
“You get a fence that’s six
feet high.”
Residents, including neighbor Rolfe Kellor, unsuccessfully appealed
the approval of the project. Kellor lives a few blocks down 39th
Avenue, near another lot where a similar multihouse development is in
the works. He says the megahouses are “totally out of character with
the neighborhood, in terms of the size of the lot, the size of the
houses, and the fact that they have no front yards or backyards.”
Nonetheless, he says, “DPD maintained that as long as the project was
consistent with the zoning, it was consistent with neighborhood
character.”
Justad confirms that “there’s nothing legally wrong” with such
megadevelopments; but, he adds, “We’re not satisfied that this is the
best that can be done, and we’re looking at how we can apply [CAO]
regulations in the future.” CAO author and City Council President
Richard Conlin called the provision that allowed the megahomes “an
interesting loophole,” and said it’s “something we’ll need to address”
in the future. 