I'd allow a hell of a lot more than 100, a pitiful token amount.

This metro is growing and we have to accommodate that somehow. It would be nice to use some of the growth to strengthen existing neighborhoods, and do so almost invisibly.

Here's an idea for the future-file: (okay, it's not thought through yet, but what the hey).
I think cottages are a good alternative for Seattle, and I'd like to see more of them. With the housing slowdown, I hear many local architects are in need of projects. Maybe there's a way to utilize their talents in designing such cottages? (I have no clue at the moment how this effort would be structured or paid for, but stay with me on this.) Kind of like the Great Depression, where artists and photographers (and others) were put to work doing all kinds of good things. Tap into architects' and designers' expertise and maybe we'll have even more stylish, "green", and structurally solid cottage structures in this town.

What a delight to have Knute speak up for the many advantages backyard cottages could offer this city. I share the same point of view. While I doubt they will inspire more Dale Chihuly's or inspire more craftspeople to greater works, the cottage can provide housing for people who don’t need large homes. I live near 41 somewhat similar housing types and It’s not the concept of cottages that is flawed in the City proposal its their size.

Knute mentions “Seattle loves cottages, bungalows, studios, and cozy hideaways”even the Sears and Roebuck house that could be ordered from their catalogue for $725 and assembled on your lot. Seattle has thousands of bungalows and what is a surprise to many is that they about the same size as the proposed cottages. That suggests to me that two on the same 4000 square foot lot is overkill and yes, “two” of this size looks a lot like duplex housing.

The word cottage carries the connotation that Knute uses, cozy hideaways or maybe the vine covered cottages in the English landscape portrayed in old movies. The City’s proposal could be that charming alternative, but it isn’t. It’s a full scale house.

Those who follow the ideas of the new urbanists know the name of the Godfather of the movement Andres Duany. He also likes the idea of cottages as do I, but he advises that they should actually be real “cottages” limited to one story and 400 square ft..

The City’s current proposal of 800 sq. ft. two story buildings works on Seattle’s big 9000 sq. ft. lots big lots as it does on the half acre lots in some of our adjacent cities and many of those that have been built in the SE part of Seattle. But it’s too big for smaller lots. Small lots need smaller buildings.

If one were to actually visit the sites of the cottages in S.E. Seattle or DADU’s as they were called before, you would quickly learn that the photos on the City web site or the photos on this story don’t reflect the reality of what is being built. They picked the best. The City’s proposal offers multiple exemptions to the rules which will regulate their use. Unless something happens with a new Mayor in town the City building department (DPD) passes out exemptions like candy at parades. We need much better assurance that the City will or can actually administer the cottage housing proposal.

I would join Knute with a beer in celebration of his desire that cottage housing could be, “a collective repository of artful individualism,” but few grandma’s will be sitting on the front porch of cottages. It’s the income from renting the space that is the carrot. I like the concept like Knute, but let’s do it well.

4000 Square Feet is not a big lot, most typical in the denser
Single family neighborhoods is 5k - adding an 800 SF footprint onto such a lot along with setbacks and an existing house makes for a very full lot.

Here in Tacoma proposals were in the range of 1,500 to 2000 Square feet for the accessory dwelling unit.

There are two crucial questions in both Cities - is the design good, and does a specific neighborhood want them?

Giving neighborhoods control of a design review process, if they can handle the work professionally goes a long way towards the second point. That said, there are some neighborhoods that aren't mature enough to accomplish this task, others that are primarily renters, such as on Capitol Hill and the Greater University District were they should be permited outright.

Giving the land use lawyers just another tool to take control over historic single family neighborhoods is not merited at this time - just look at what they did with WAMU - and, for that matter, the Seattle City government.

It's weird that some people act like infill development is the greatest new threat to our neighborhoods. I don't think it's a threat, and it's certainly not new.

Here's a 1957 example that I found by comparing Seattle Municipal Archive's Flickr photostream to today:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tigerzombie/3939272416/

The unfortunate thing there is the loss of the attractive original home. Backyard cottages are better than tearing down perfectly good houses to get denser use with townhomes.

Backyard cottages will make housing more affordable? Really? Let me tell you what will happen. Every house with a lot of sufficient size will be marketed as a house + a building lot, with a corresponding increase in price. You can write the real estate flyers now: "Add a backyard cottage for rental income!" On my block, a perfectly fine pre-war house on a double lot was purchased, demolished, and replaced with two tall homes, each of which cost more than the home that was replaced. How does this sort of activity make housing more affordable?

Not to mention the perennial issue of parking. The urban planner fantasy is that the occupants of these "cottages" will be the elderly and students, happily taking buses everywhere. The reality is that many or most will be occupied by one or two adults with one or two cars. Add that to the occupants of the main house with another two or more cars, plus the spillover from apartments and commercial districts, and we get fully-parked streets. In our narrow North Seattle streets, there's not enough width for two cars to pass with two rows of full parking. Homeowners, all of a sudden, have to schlep their groceries a block in the pouring rain because there's no parking near their house. This kind of density, on top of all the other density promotion of the last few years (upzones, decreased or eliminated parking requirements, etc.) can really change the character of a neighborhood, and the type of people who live in it.

Let's ask this question. Does Seattle need more or fewer middle class families? (Don't we already have fewer children than anyplace except San Francisco?) Does this proposal make Seattle more or less compatible with middle class family life?

BTW, "Waldo Woods" (not really a "woods" at all but a stand of dark and droopy evergreens with no underbrush of note) was slated for as much housing creation as a year's worth of cottages; in a location that is extremely well served by transit, parks, and major transportation routes. And it was already zoned for townhouse development. The NIMBY's delayed that project until the market turned, thus scoring their "victory." If housing can't be developed on such a great infill site, then where?

Vince; "...then where?" well probably, where the voters aren't looking. Increasing allowable density on single family lots (i. e. duplex zoning) would bring out angry crowds and that is not what our civic leaders want. "Backyard cottages" sounds cute and, let's acknowledge right off, that they can be cute but the principal appeal to our political leaders is that it evades the NIMBY (or, more accurately YOUR backyard) radar. Simply allowing bigger houses with rental units would be more energy efficient, preserve more open space and forthrightly address a need. But, you know, duplex zoning sounds so crass. It's subject to extreme disapproval.

There is some parallel with our national energy policy. Neither Congress or the President will call for a gas tax. They'd rather mandate better mileage and jawbone the carbon footprint (carefully avoiding a tax on carbon emissions). Likewise our locals pay obeisance to the sanctity of our single family homes but try to quietly nudge the numbers higher with something as innocuous as a cottage. Who could object?

Vince, your logic on prices doesn't make sense. Prices rise when something is scarce. Seattle's prices are relatively high because we don't have as many units as people want (absent near depressions), and because we have very few properties that can be built upon more densely than they already are. Relieve the scarcity a bit, and you remove upward pressure on prices. On a different tack, if your assumptions come true about liveability, that would keep prices down too.

mhays, your assumptions about pricing behavior come from Econ 101. Didn't you read the footnotes to that supply and demand chapter? Many buyers and sellers, perfect information, (and particularly) undifferentiated fungible commodity goods, among others. These conditions do not obtain in the real estate market, which operates differently from commodity markets. Real estate markets are far more complex, with market segmentation, filtering, gentrification, and shifting government controls and subsidies, all in the context of location/transportation trade-offs.

Upzoning increases the price of urban land. The average North Seattle $450,000 house will quickly rise to $525,000, because its highest and best use will be as a house + building pad. This will not necessarily elicit a flood of new housing. Homeowners are not profit maximizers and will not all build out their cottages. But the ability to do so will raise the value of their asset. Upzoning always accrues to the benefit of existing owners, and doesn't necessarily enhance affordability. (If you owned a site zoned for 10 units and the market value was $100,000 per allowable building unit, you could sell it for $1 million. If it's upzoned to allow 20 units, you could sell it for $2 million. To the developer, the costs, returns, and required rents are exactly the same.) The basic imbalance between a job-dense central city surrounded by low-density housing guarantees that cottages will not change the supply-demand balance that makes in-city housing so expensive. As a modest example, I refer again to the house on the double lot that was demolished for two new homes, each hundreds of thousands of dollars more expensive than the home they replaced. Supply went up, but housing affordability went down. As a macro example, why didn't the thousands of new housing units in the Nickels era provide affordable housing? - a significant addition to supply, yet home and condo values continued to rise until the crash, which had nothing to do with local supply/demand balance.

As for liveability, my point is that high density increases the stresses of daily living and creates a shift in the type of people who live in a neighborhood, without necessarily causing prices to fall. The young family says, We need two cars to get our kids to their activities, to get us to our jobs, and do the other things we want to do; maybe we'd be happier on the Kent plateau with a two-car garage and a much cheaper house. They are replaced by a DINK couple. How is that good for Seattle? I, for one, think city government should at least think about serving the people already here rather than trying to re-populate the city with hipper people.

San Francisco is very dense, and very fun to visit. It also has fewer children than anyplace else, and an income distribution that favors rich and poor without much middle. Is that the only model and destiny for Seattle?

VinceInSeattle, I don't have any answers on most of the big questions, but I can tell you what my young family decided in this situation: we rent in Seattle. We sold the car and get around quite well with a stroller and baby carrier, or the bus when needed. We use Zipcar when we do need to go somewhere out of the city, and it's all friendlier on the budget than housing in Kent. (Unfortunately there is a shortage of family-designed housing in Urban Centers, but cottages won't address that.)

And the rain has an upside: there was no line for eggs at the U-District Farmer's Market on Saturday.

I agree they are a good idea in principle, but 800 square foot structures on 4000 square foot lots is way too big, and will guarantee the disappearance of much of what is left of Seattle's "urban forest." 800 square feet is a house, not a "cottage." The size of new structures should be defined as a percentage of lot area, and ten percent is plenty. Less would be better. Cottages, not houses.

Vince, you're way off on prices for developable land. In Seattle people have the illusion that increasing developable potential (redefining highest and best use) has a straight-line additive effect on prices. But anywhere there's excess room to develop, land values don't rise in similar fashion.

To use an extreme, you could triple the zoning on a residential or commercial lot in Detroit, and the value probably wouldn't triple, or double, or anything close to it. That's because the land probably won't be developed anytime soon either way.

In Seattle, we don't upzone much, and relatively little is zoned higher than what's already there, so anything we do upzone has a price that's affected by scarcity. However, the same would be highly unlikely if half of our 120,000(?) houses suddenly found themselves able to add cottages/mils. Even if just 1% per year chose to add second units, the market would be fairly flush with supply.

There is such an excess of demand for close-in housing, due to the concentration of jobs in the center city and the difficult transportation linkages to get there (geographic and man-made), that up-zoning the city to duplex zoning would undoubtedly cause the increase in land value that I suggested.

"In Seattle, we don't upzone much." We've eliminated parking requirements in urban centers and decreased them elsewhere, increased building heights in the Regrade, supported residential development with the multifamily tax exemption, done all the planning to rezone the International District to high-rise residential, and are now planning to rezone the entire city to duplex zoning.

"Relatively little is zoned higher than what's already there." So wrong. Our neighborhood business districts are full of one-story buildings on 40' to 65' zoned property. There is lots of capacity for new housing; not that it would reduce housing prices, BECAUSE HOUSING IS ALWAYS DEVELOPED AT THE UPPER MIDDLE TO THE TOP OF THE MARKET. See, that's the problem. New supplies of wheat have the same cost structure as existing supplies of wheat. But affordable or work-force housing can't really be developed without subsidy, or subsidy by regulation. In North Seattle, there are numerous $400,000 homes that were replaced by a 4-pack of $450,000 townhouses. How does this improve affordability?

mhays, can you cite any dense cities that are cheaper to live in than less-dense cities? Any cities that have built their way toward affordability? San Francisco, Boston, NYC? I hear Miami and San Diego have lots of cheap condos, but developer bankruptcies and bank failures are hardly the recipe for sustainable affordability.

I reiterate my comments - the benefits of upzoning are, always and everywhere, captured by existing landowners, and raise prices without necessarily creating new supply. To the extent that supply and density are increased, they will change the demographics of the neighborhood. No city that I'm aware of has built its way to affordability (at least in the absence of bubble and subsequent crash).

And if you want to ask what my solution is, it's a multiple-centers approach that expands employment in small cities and business districts around the region. Russell moving from Tacoma to Seattle is exactly the opposite of what we should be encouraging. We should be using the business districts of Tacoma, Everett, Kent, etc. to absorb employment growth, not promoting it endlessly in downtown Seattle.

SF, Boston, NYC?! The three poster children for high demand but not adding supply? Chicago, in contrast, is an example of a supply being allowed to catch up, and prices being dramatically lower than the others.

The four pack of $450,000 townhouses helps affordability because it helps us avoid San Francisco style scarcity, which makes their housing vastly more expensive than ours. Without more units in the city, that $400,000 house (is there such a thing, except during the current sideline-sitting?), will rise more in price.

You can't build "cheap housing" without subsidy, but you can certainly keep your city affordable. Reducing parking requirements has cut tens of thousands from each affected unit. Aside from that, you need to have enough units to meet demand. Market-rate units will go for market-rate prices at first, then gradually move down over the decades. Today's non-subsidized "affordable" housing is generally older market-rate units from the 20s, 60s, 80s, etc. That only works if supply stays ahead. In San Francisco, where very little gets built compared to demand, an apartment from the 1920s that might be "affordable housing" in Seattle will instead go for $2,000.

Regarding zoning, I'm comparing Seattle with other cities, not just its own status quo. Compared to others, Seattle is extremely low in "vacant" land (far lower than NYC for example), and fairly unusual in our lack of land zoned high-rise, and different from larger cities in our areas of single-family zoning. Even the urban village process around 1990 didn't upzone anything if I recall.

Here are some facts on center-city densities and median home price, from Wikipedia and American Fact Finder (2005-2007 data):

Seattle: 7,191/sq mi, $439,500
SF: 17,323/sq mi, $789,400
Chicago: 12,649/sq mi, $270,700
LA: 8,205/sq mi, $594,900
Boston: 12,561/sq mi, $426,100

I don't see, from these data points, any strong argument that density enhances affordability. Of course, home prices and rental rates ultimately depend on lots of factors: in-migration, center-city jobs and trends, condition and age of the housing stock, governmental policies, amount of new construction, etc. It would be interesting put all these factors on a table for the top 25 cities and see what comes out. I don't necessarily accept your impression that San Francisco and Seattle are underproducing housing units while Chicago is adequately producing them, and that this is why housing in Chicago is less expensive, w/o the data to back it up. My impression is that Chicago can produce endlessly at the urban edge, supported by commuter rail in multiple directions and great freeways, w/o affecting the inner-city supply/demand balance.

To tell the truth, I wouldn't even really mind having more people living on my street. Height, size, lot coverage, and setbacks are all issues, but all negotiable. But what is really objectionable would be to have more cars on my street. If the city could charge, say, $5000 per year for the privilege of parking on a neighborhood street, I think that would solve my problem. The house next to mine is a 3-flat. At one point, that house supported 6 adults with 7 cars! And all but one parked on the street.

And finally, I'm under no illusion that DADU's or cottages or backyard tar-paper shacks will make housing more affordable. I have no doubt whatsoever that providing additional zoned capacity on an SF lot will make that SF lot more valuable. The DADU's, to the extent they go into the rental pool, will increase supply marginally, but since they are new and small housing built to modern codes, will be expensive to build and rent. For only 50 or 100 per year, it will take a long, long time to have any impact in a city the size of Seattle. I think it's a huge wasted effort.

Meanwhile, the City Council just changed the B & O tax to facilitate Russell's move of 900 jobs to downtown, from an area that's actually affordable, to one that isn't. The city's efforts at in-city job attraction, as well as wacky transportation policies, have far more negative effect on affordability than anything the city is doing to increase the housing stock.

A couple of things stand out really clearly here.

First, the only chance of preserving indigenous housing stock from townhouse development lies in allowing the owners of indigenous housing stock to add cottages.

Second, the houseboat community is overwhelmingly small houses, most with no 'yard' whatsoever. Still, this is some very pricey real estate.

The cottage idea seems like a good way to deal with some problems and benefit from some opportunities. Not a 'one size fits all' solution, but haven't we tried enough of those already?

Buildable residential capacity over three times the projected need for the long range planning period suggests something other than Econ 101. http://your.kingcounty.gov/budget/buildland/BLR_Ch5.pdf

Wading in on the details makes crosscut commenters a cut above other opportunities to share, knock on wood.