Per usual, public comment will be at the top of the agenda. That will be followed by the Roosevelt Neighborhood Rezone discussion and vote, and then finishing with discussion and vote on revised General Lot Standards in Single Family Zones (more exciting than it sounds).

If you had planned to come to Council Chambers at 9 a.m. and the new start time causes any inconvenience, I apologize. If you were planning to speak in public comment and can’t attend, you can also do so in writing to councilmembers. Our contact information is located here.

The planned North Lot Tower near Qwest Field will undergo a review by the Pioneer Square Preservation Board. (Source: Daniels Development.)

Thanks to people stepping forward to serve, we have new appointees to the Seattle Design Commission, Seattle Chinatown International District Preservation and Development Authority, the Ballard Avenue Landmark District Board, the Historic Seattle Preservation and Development Authority, the Pioneer Square Preservation Board, a couple of neighborhood Design Review Boards, and the Ethics and Elections Commission.

My colleagues and I rely on input from more than 50 boards and commissions. The City Council and Mayor appoint members of boards and commissions after putting out a call for applicants.

We post notices and do some targeted outreach to professional groups that may be good trolling grounds for people with professional experience. You can check out openings any time on the Boards and Commissions Web site.

About serving on a board or commission

Service on the boards is voluntary (no conscription) with terms that last two or three years and include the opportunity to be reappointed. Commissioners meet usually twice a month. They contribute crucial informed opinions to project staff and policy makers.

How younger people can get engaged

Not surprisingly, board and commission membership can skew toward people who are established in their careers and have a bit more flexibility to give their time. Younger adults sometimes feel like they don’t have the knowledge or time to give.  Wrong! For a number of years now the city has had the Get Engaged program for adults under 30 who are interested in serving. The YMCA recruits the participants and provides training and support, while the City offers special one-year positions on the Boards and Commissions and partially funds the YMCA work.

Interested in serving?

To find out more about board and commissions, what they do, and whether or not you might be interested in serving, visit the City of Seattle’s Boards and Commissions Web site.

I’ve watched and supported the neighborhood’s update on the Roosevelt neighborhood plan since joining City Council almost six years ago. Councilmember Jean Godden and I went to bat for Roosevelt almost four years ago when it looked like the effort might sputter and die for lack of attention from Department of Planning & Development staff. We convinced the City Council to earmark money to pay for the detailed zoning analysis, and DPD staff went to work with the neighborhood’s sharp citizen planners. They’d already moved heaven and earth by getting Sound Transit to shift the location of the light rail station further into the center of the ‘hood. How hard could a zoning scheme be?

Throw in a concurrent effort by private developers to rezone the hotly debated “Sisley high school blocks” along with an eleventh-hour change-up by a new mayor, and, OK, an agreed-upon zoning scheme becomes hard, really hard.  The Roosevelt Neighborhood Alliance (RNA) had an initial proposal. Then DPD presented that proposal with a tweak or two. Then my colleague, Councilmember Tim Burgess, publicly urged going bigger. Then Mayor McGinn made a proposal. Then RNA presented the Sustainable Livable Roosevelt Plan (SLRP). Then a few hundred people showed up at the Roosevelt High School Auditorium for a public hearing to cheer for the SLRP (and boo the urbanistas). In the wings, the Roosevelt Development Group continues their alliance with long-time community antagonist Hugh Sisley.  To the east, defenders of the Ravenna neighborhood pushed back against allowing higher on the high school blocks for fear that six story buildings will spread like a contagion east.

There’s a blockbuster movie in all this, or at least a really great urban development policy case study.

While the Roosevelt rezone package contains much more than the changes on the high school blocks, most of the heated debate revolves around these three blocks in the eastern half of the circle around the station. In public testimony, via email and in conversation, advocates have mentioned all or some of the following desires for the high school blocks (thanks to Councilmember Burgess for compiling this list):

1. Maintaining the central impact of the Roosevelt High School building by protecting views to and from the building.
2. Creating a streetscape that is active and pedestrian-friendly, including “green street” designation for N.E. 66^th St.
3. Creating effective transitions from the core of Roosevelt out to the single-family zoning.
4. Making new open and green space possible.
5. Keeping a clean, safe environment for everyone, including Roosevelt High School students.
6. Increasing the number of housing units in the area.
7. Ensuring that a portion of new housing units rent or sell at affordable levels.
8. Honoring the planning process and involvement by neighbors.

After reviewing the various plans and basic sketches of what different development scenarios might look like, I believe carefully constrained 65-foot zoning (versus the more bulky 40 feet currently allowed) on the high school blocks yields our best chance at achieving the goals above in this sub-area of the neighborhood. These blocks are between one and three blocks from the slated light rail station entrances. They are bordered by busy N.E. 65^th St.  In making a decision that’s right for now and 40 years from now, 65 feet provides more setbacks “buying” more sidewalk space, more housing, more affordable housing and wider view corridors to and from the high school.

Proponents of 40 feet argue you can gain the same wider view corridors to and from the high school if you require developers to set the building back from the property line. While this is true, it’s also true that this would mean a decrease in development capacity from what you could build on a majority of the blocks now. In other words, a downzone. To my mind, a downzone would not lead to winning enough of the goals cited above (or any if the downzone precluded any new development at all) and is hard to justify in a light rail station area.

The cry of many 40-foot proponents is “Protect the high school!” Roosevelt and the greater North End of the city have the gift of an iconic building constructed before school architecture was stripped down due to changing tastes and diminished budgets. The building is a landmark, but, contrary to some assumptions, the viewsheds to and from the school are not protected in city code. Neither are the south or east sides of the building buffered from the world by wide publicly-owned expanses of green space setting off the building from the surrounding neighborhood. It’s a high school in an urban village across the street from a future light rail station. It is an urban place. I think we do current and future students a favor by building more (and more affordable) housing on the high school blocks. The development standards will require that housing face the high school (except at the corner with 15^th) as way to guard against off-campus attractions setting up shop across N.E. 66^th St.  Additionally, we will define 66^th as a “green street” requiring extra landscaping and trees, making it more than the linear parking lot it is now.

The Roosevelt neighborhood plan update and these rezones have always been about more than just the high school blocks. Despite the anger some feel about the difference of 25 feet in three blocks of the entire station area, I still believe Roosevelt has set the standard for communities undertaking a plan update and carrying out a technically and philosophically challenging conversation about current conditions and how communities we love may change over time. The results will be better buildings, better streets, better public spaces – better building blocks with which people build lives.

I’m proud that we succeeded in giving new flexibility to sidewalk cafes and loosening restrictions on mobile food vending. In planner-ese this is part of what’s called “placemaking,” but you could also say it’s just smart neighborhood and small business development. Walking down sidewalks this summer it was great to see people hanging out in new outdoor seating or see the tell-tale spray marks on sidewalks delineating planned outdoor seating.  One evening in upper Belltown I even got sit outside myself and talk with friends watching the world go by. A great luxury.

Helping food carts and trucks land in more places and be more successful strikes me as also smart neighborhood and small business development. Like everyone else I’m still waiting to see how mobile food vendors make use of the new street and sidewalk flexibility we approved this summer. I met a friend for dinner recently at Mr. Gyro in Greenwood and learned he’s underway with a truck and application. He’s now my test case.

If you know of anyone looking to get into the business, you can direct them to check out the Seattle Street-Food web portal - a one-stop-shop for interested mobile food operators to better understand the mobile food permitting process.  The portal includes a link to the Seattle Street-Food Checklist, which operators can print out to use while obtaining the necessary permits. 

Sidewalk seating and mobile food vending are part of my vision of land use (and street use) in service of economic rebound. Opening a food truck has a relatively low barrier to entry in terms of capital—what lenders call “low income, low asset startups.”  Make no mistake though. It’s still an expensive endeavor (as evidence, check out the niche market of food truck van retofitters), just not as expensive as some other ways to start a restaurant. The new flexibility and support are great ways the city can help hard-working entrepreneurs who want to innovate and be their own bosses.

This is my last blog entry looking back at the last term. Now that we’ve approved the 2012 Budget, everything is rolling again, and it’s time to start looking forward toward the future of our city.

I have a colleague and friend here in City Government who just returned from a Policy Link meeting in Detroit. If you read much about urban affairs you know Detroit is the crucible for everyone’s anger about the economy, the tanked automotive industry, bank foreclosures, overwhelmed public services, you name it. She said she thought Detroit was worse than New Orleans at this point in terms of crumbling public infrastructure and decimated neighborhoods.

Detroit is also the city where innovators are trying new things, taking over swaths of former single family neighborhoods and rowhouses as urban farms. Artists are re-colonizing and, if you can find a good paying job, you can find a house (most likely bank-owned) for less than $20,000. But can you live with the schools and transit….

Affordability is, to me, one of the toughest elements to produce in a city. No city aspires to follow Detroit’s path, but housing within reach for average people? I’d love to have more of that.

Affordability has multiple definitions depending on your economic standing. The most direct way we affect housing affordability is through direct subsidy — a voucher to pay the rent; a loan to share the cost of new construction; a tax break to buy down the rent. Because we’ll never have enough money to subsidize affordability for everyone (nor should we), it’s been important to me to squeeze, cajole and (bonus word alert) incentivize some level of affordability using the land use code. This has been a priority for me for my whole four years chairing the land use committee.

In general, “affordable housing” means housing that someone earning a region’s median income – or less — can afford.  We still use the long-standing benchmark of spending no more than 30 percent of your income on rent or mortgage, though, many of us would argue that adding in transportation costs would be a better measure of the true cost of housing. Like many American cities, Seattle struggles to keep affordable housing near where people work – a 2009 study showed that workers in core sectors — such as child care providers, office staff, maintenance personnel, and municipal workers — can’t afford to live in the city.

Even a high school teacher doesn’t earn enough to rent a two-bedroom apartment in Seattle; that apartment requires an hourly wage of $30.17, which is 16 percent more than a teacher’s salary. These days rent and homeownership frequently require multiple incomes per household.

While working to increase housing support for people earning way, way less than median income through the Seattle housing levy, I’ve tried to incorporate affordability into the basics of how we build new housing. Here are some of the ways I’ve worked in the Committee on the Built Environment (COBE) to make more housing affordable, and also to preserve the unique quality of Seattle’s neighborhoods while we’re at it.

Backyard cottages

Allowing backyard cottages is a smart and modest step to create more affordable housing options, help someone pay their mortgage, age with dignity in their own home, or to make a room for a son or daughter moving back home. Backyard cottages (officially known as detached accessory dwelling units) are separate from the main house and typically found in either the backyard or above a garage.

Thanks to legislation we passed through COBE, property owners city-wide now have the option to build a backyard cottage provided they meet certain criteria:

• Cottages are limited to 800 square feet, including garage and storage space.
• Your lot must be at least 4,000 square feet and not be in a Shoreline District.
• The maximum height of the cottage depends on how wide the property is, and total lot coverage requirements remain the same as for all single-family-zoned lots — no more than 35 percent of a lot can be covered with a structure, including the cottage.
• The property owner must live in either the house or the backyard cottage a minimum of six months every year.

Incentives for workforce housing

Incentive zoning is proven way to involve the private market in producing units that workers in core sectors can afford to live in. During my term we expanded incentive zoning from downtown to include urban centers, urban villages, and major transportation corridors.

Incentive zoning particularly targets those earning just less than area median income. These are not low-income rents, but they are affordable to mid-level workers in the sectors expanding in the city. Under these new rules the City Council can change the zoning in an area to set a base development level and also set a higher “incentive” height or density. To reach that higher development level a builder needs to provide a public benefit in exchange. The majority of that public benefit comes in the form of housing that must rent for no more than 80 percent of the area median income. The developer can choose not to include the affordable housing in their building, but then they must pay into an affordable housing fund, or, in some cases, provide a public benefit through open space, childcare, historic preservation, or use of development rights from another “saved” building or green area outside the city.

Updating multifamily code for green density

I worked to update the multifamily code in an effort to clear out obsolete restrictions that stood in the way of creating affordable housing while encouraging green development and density in urban

BEFORE

villages. We passed a collection changes – some radical — that add up to a positive vision with incentives that yield better places to live. Before, we saw cookie-cutter townhouses pop up everywhere. In the next building cycle I hope instead we’ll see different housing types providing more options and more housing where it makes sense (near transit and services). The overall cost of living for people should decrease as they have more opportunities to live near effective transit. OK, that assumes we can keep Metro solvent and expand service. All of our land use dreams are dependent on that little issue.

The changes we approved to the multifamily code went into effect in April 2011, and do the following:

• Encourage a diversity of housing types among townhomes, rowhouses, cottages, apartments, and auto-court townhomes;
• Promote keeping trees or planting new ones;
• Waive density limits for certain housing types when good design features are achieved;
• Require new design features to improve quality overall. For example: At least 20 percent of street facing façades must be windows and doors, and building materials must be varied;
• Provide incentives for “green building” and hiding parking underground or at the back of the lot;
• Allow for shared open space, for larger usable common areas;
• Change the lowrise height limits to match the height limit for single-family zones in most cases;
• Waive parking requirements for projects in growth areas and within .25 mile of frequent transit service (15 minute headways), allowing the market to dictate the level of parking to provide;
• Use a new flexible standard of measuring floor space, “Floor Area Ratio,” rather than previously restrictive setback and lot coverage requirements;
• Require Streamlined Design Review for townhouses with three or more units, but not for rowhouses, cottages or apartments in multifamily zones, and
• Reduce the number of zones from five to three (LR1, LR2, LR3) for code simplicity.

Curbing the spread of “megahouses”

While working to create new options for affordable housing, I also focused on retaining the charm and individuality of Seattle’s neighborhoods. One problem that came to my attention early on was the spread of McMansions, or MegaHouses, in Seattle’s neighborhoods: Out-of-scale, out-of-character houses seemingly plunked into neighborhoods, overshadowing houses around them.

Working with Council President Richard Conlin, COBE adopted legislation to help curb the impact these massive structures create on neighborhood character.

The new rules did the following:

• Adjusted the formula for how much of a lot may be covered by the structure,
• Better protected neighboring homeowners from being overshadowed by removing the provision that allowed a new house’s height to be based on neighboring property heights, a weird spiral upwards in some cases,
• Limited the location and visibility of garage doors that face a street,
• Restricted allowable height for houses on sloped sites; and
• Waived parking requirements on lots of less than 3,000 square feet, reducing the prominence of a garage as part of a structure.

Next week I’ll look back briefly at some great work we did by reaching into the street use rules.

During my four-year tenure as chair, I’ve met and spoken with city planners, low-income housing residents, architects, environmental activists, developers, community group planners, advocates for the homeless, regional planners, homeowners, renters, property managers, historians, futurists, attorneys, representatives of religious institutions, archeologists, people with an interest in transit-based development and people who would prefer to see Seattle stay the way it was in 1970 (or 1980, or 1990, or 2000).

There isn’t anyone in the city whose life isn’t touched by land use decisions in one way or another. That’s what I’ve loved about the thorny, no-clear-right-answer decisions we’ve faced. Each one has presented compelling, competing arguments for how we grow and change as a city on the micro and macro level. It’s been fascinating committee work and not always comfortable. The policies and planning required to keep Seattle sustainable, livable, and still recognizably Seattle requires concentration, flexibility, foresight, an appetite for risk, and a thick skin for everyone involved. I think I might have just medium-thick skin, by the way.

When I re-upped for the land use committee chair position at the start of 2010, I made it my goal to focus on land use as a service, as a means to an end. Zoning alone doesn’t make a great community. People make the community. Zoning – and great ideas about what to do with it – shapes the spaces we use in our life. Here are some of the ways I wanted land use to serve the greater good of our city:

• Support great neighborhoods with healthy business districts, affordable housing, and great gathering places
• Support historic preservation and cultural assets
• Support better living spaces with greater friendliness and visual appeal
• Support more efficient buildings and greater sustainability
• Support neighborhood safety
• Support economic success and the creation of jobs

As we proceed through the end of the year, I’ll use this space from time to time to evaluate how we did in COBE at meeting these goals. I look forward to hearing how you think we did.

This summer Seattle’s Department of Planning and Development started a major review of the Seattle Comprehensive plan. They are asking for your help and input on how to shape the city’s future.

As residents, we can all help plan how to secure and sustain Seattle’s quality of life. We’re challenged now by recession and the predicted changes to our city arising from climate change. But we also have opportunities to manage our urban design, including open spaces, transportation, opening our downtown to the waterfront and expanding our urban villages.  We can align our infrastructure investments with where the city is growing.

We also need to think about climate change. How can we help residents of our cities 50 years from now, when rising sea levels might affect our drainage and water systems? How can we continue to attract the best of the best to our vibrant, innovative, dynamic city?

Take the Comprehensive Plan Survey. Share your vision and hopes for the Emerald City.

I didn’t know that the brains of city-dwellers are different. We have more active amygdalas, portions of the brain that are associated with memory and emotional intelligence. No one is sure why, yet, but it might be because we have to interact with and remember more people.

A new line of research made possible by massive amounts of quantitative data coming online from urban areas shows that cities concentrate, accelerate, and diversify social and economic activity. As a city grows, it gets more efficient. We do more with less. That’s a good thing, especially if, as the U.N. predicts, by 2050 70 percent of the world’s population lives in cities. The challenges of income disparity and natural resource depletion persist, though. I haven’t finished all the articles. Maybe more answers are on the next page.

The mini food pods ring like mini echoes of Portland’s bigger food pod scene on private lots. Many of us have wondered why food pods haven’t grown in Seattle. Maybe Seattle’s real estate pressures are more intense.  Maybe we just haven’t opened the door before now.  Unlike Portland’s pod model, trucks at these two new sites will migrate to other locations or back to their commissaries at the end of each day.

Pods are popping while the Council digs into a steaming stack of proposed changes for sidewalk and parking regulations intended to foster a greater number and diversity of cart- and truck-based food vendors.  Feedback has been generally positive from people who want to see more and more variety of food out and about from trucks and carts.  There are a few strong concerns being raised from small business owners who see use of public right-of-way as an unfair competitive edge, especially if we let trucks use parking slots in already parked-up neighborhoods. Bricks-and-mortar restaurant owners have testified that trucks and carts gain an advantage by not paying competitive rent or utilities.  Additionally, they don’t want a competitor parked outside their door for a chunk of the day. I can see their point.

We’ve had two meetings in committee to get the gist of the proposal and begin to slice and dice the potential permit regulations and enforcement. I think we’ll have at least two more committee sessions to work through issues about whether to allow using parking spaces for trucks, setbacks for carts and trucks from existing businesses, hours of operation, permit fee levels and how to build in incentives for healthy food options.

Overall, while I hear the concerns from bricks-and-mortar restaurants, I think more street food is a good idea. I agree we need to review the proposed regulations carefully to make sure we get positive sidewalk additions rather than what one person described as “just a million falafel stands.” Don’t get me wrong – I love falafel.  The goal, though, is a variety of food options and great neighborhood street life at the same time.

I had the opportunity to see the future of the Mount Baker Light Rail Station Area as envisioned by five teams of college architecture, planning and real estate students last Friday courtesy of a national competition sponsored by the Urban Land Institute. ULI’s 2011 Gerald Hines Urban Design Competition netted 100 entries for review by a jury of development industry professionals. In the end four teams made the finals and came to Seattle to show off their development schemes. Teams from the universities of Oklahoma, Michigan (two teams) and Maryland took the mic and walked through their presentations in the Bertha Knight Landes Room Friday at mid-day. We were lucky to have a handful of Mount Baker residents in the audience (thanks for taking the time) to see the various visions for the future.  Each team had a slightly different take, but you’ll see the teams have a few things in common, too. Oh, and the teams caught a lucky break in the competition rules – they could assume all the property in the area was in single ownership.

§  Everyone tried to “tame” Rainier Ave. S.  One team (“Rainier Boulevard” from University of Oklahoma) widened the right of way in order to build a European-style street-within-a-street. Extra planting strips would separate a “local” street for cars and bikes from four lanes of pass-through traffic. Other teams also expanded the right-of-way in order to widen sidewalks, add parking, add bike lanes and have wider planting strips.

§  Most teams moved the Metro layover site to the west side of Rainier so the connection with the light rail station can be seamless (or Rainier-less).

§  Teams broke up the long, long Rainier blocks by creating pedestrian pass-through areas with great landscaping (imagine a wide sidewalk and trees slicing the Lowe’s parking lot in two).

§  A couple of teams re-engineered the intersection of MLK with Rainier in order to create better corners (and more controlled traffic and surface ped crossing movements).

§  Each team built up apartment buildings and condos in the station area, but there were differences of approach when it came to height.

§  Every team committed to neighborhood-serving, small-scale retail while also retaining the “big box” stores like Lowe’s by repackaging Lowe’s into a more urban space model.

The winning team came from the University of Michigan ($5,000 to the school, $45,000 split among the five team members) and they titled their presentation “Health Oriented Urbanism in Southeast Seattle” and measured their project’s success via criteria organized under the headings Community Health, Economical Health, Environmental Health and Individual Health. I thought this was pretty appealing from what I know of the community’s desires for a “town center” that is more than arterial space and parking lots.

The next day I participated on a panel discussion at Great City’s Equitable Growth Dialogues (held at Franklin High School). The panel was asked to reflect on the student visions which gave us a chance to tease out further some of the dicey conversations that come up around new development and who benefits when a new element like light rail changes people’s perceptions (and developer interest) about a neighborhood.  Not surprisingly, we talked about how to ensure low-income residents and small businesses are part of the station area future. We want people to live near light rail so people can have the choice to travel, live differently. In order to get housing near the station, existing buildings (mostly businesses right around the station itself) and their occupants have to move. At the same time, we want light rail to benefit, not shove aside, the people who live, own businesses and otherwise work in Rainier Valley now.

The pioneer, the early adopter, the tip of the spear at Mount Baker Station is ArtSpace which earned the nod from Sound Transit to purchase the old Firestone site between the light rail station and Rainier Ave. S.  ArtSpace will do 51 units of artist live/work space with some retail at street level and zero parking. This brings us back to knotty neighborhood problems. We need to tame Rainier in order for ArtSpace and later projects to succeed in helping us create the human spaces we say we want. We should take the ideas from the ULI competition and define new standards for how we want Rainier to look and operate.