I had to make sure I was in the right place--an informative, well-written, thoughtful piece of investigative journalism? In the Seattle Onion? Will wonders never cease?

If there were a lot more of this kind of stuff, I'd even consider subscribing...

Councilmember Clark via her latest newsletter has firmly joined the politicians firmly neutral on Roosevelt as well as the "tweak" of picking the lock on single family zones (implementing regulations of comprehensive plan "urban village strategy," specifically LU59).

Clark: "...I think the neighborhood's proposal is sound, accepts new growth, and arranges the zoning map well. I also believe we can add a bit more, whether that's clearing the way to convert some of the remaining single family zoning near the station to multi-family or by stepping up to 65 feet or 85 feet in a couple of areas...."

[LU59 states:“Permit upzones of land designated single-family and meeting single-family rezone criteria, only when all of the following conditions are met: The land is within an urban center or urban village boundary; The rezone is provided for in an adopted neighborhood plan; The rezone is to a low-scale single-family, multifamily or mixed-usezone, compatible with single-family areas; The rezone procedures are followed.”]

True, developers profit when zoning laws allow higher buildings. But, it also creates more incentive for developers to build. And the end result is more housing, something we desperately need in the city.

Thanks Kent. Surprise upzones are like printing money for the current owners of the property; it's a one time windfall that has tremendous motivating power and, in all likelihood, does no one else any good. The high density developments near transit stations make sense on a planner's scale but we have to remember that most (if not all) the new residents will also have cars (new, expensive building/yuppies/cars, they do tend to go together, right?). Does Roosevelt enjoy lightly travelled, spacious streets? well, kind of, but a few thousand condos can make a big difference. Hello Capital Hill.

It's situations like this where I wish Seattle had at least some geographical district-based seats on the City Council instead of all at-large seats. In our current system, every member of the Council has to be firmly neutral on things like this. But if we had at least some geographic districts, then at least one member would be able politically to go to bat for everyday people.

The way things work now, whenever a middle-class neighborhood like Roosevelt has some big issue there is no one who can take up their cause. Rich neighborhoods have the deep pockets to pursue the lawsuits and what-not that get the attention of public officials, and low-income neighborhoods have myriad nonprofit and advocacy organizations who get such attention.

Consider the brouhaha that the wealthier Sandpoint/Laurelhurst neighborhood was able to make about Children's Hospital expansion (and the myriad concessions they got) and compare that to the brouhaha that Wedgwood and Maple Leaf wanted but where unable to make about the improperly permitted strip club that has now just opened smack dab in the middle of those middle class neighborhoods, because no politician dared speak for the neighborhood, and no one had the deep pockets or organization to file a lawsuit.

In this case, Roosevelt is seeing the same thing: without the ability to file lawsuits and truly compete with developers on the same economic and legal playing field, they will always lose.

One way of correcting this problem would be having at least some geographical district seats on the City Council.

Pass me a tissue. Yes, let's never build anything in Seattle ever again. Clearly, Seattle of 1980 was the paragon of human evolution, urban design and aesthetics: we must cast it in iron, never let it change.

Anyway, who will want to live next to a subway station with a fast connection to the UW, Capitol Hill, Downtown and SeaTac? Thugs and criminals, that's who. Density destroys neighborhoods. Don't you see how South Lake Union has gone downhill lately? Frightening, just frightening. Everything will be skyscrapers. Have you seen Capitol Hill? Oh, the parking. You know it's so bad with all those awful yuppies and all their cars. In fact they're knocking down apartment buildings to make surface parking lots in Belltown, it's so bad.

It'll be a disaster I tell you. All these educated young people moving to our city will want to start families in neighborhoods with good transit access in a few years, and once they're here they'll use their children as anchor babies so we can never kick 'em out. Build a fence, I say. Kick 'em to the curb. We must rally here at Crosscut: standing athwart the ship canal crying "stop!"

Great article. The access and administrative favors lavished on the few at the expense of the many by the council is like watching a political version of Groundhog Day. It’s also a good reason to consider electing the council by districts. It’s a start for imposing at least some accountability and would make the withholding of information and the wholesale maneuvering of the entire council as it relates to these projects a more difficult task.

The Seattle City Council is the second highest paid in the United States. At $110K each they are second only to Los Angeles where the Council is elected by districts. If they continue to operate as one rubber stamp with 9 handles then we should be able to get by with 2 or 3.

Great article and some much needed historical perspective. Again, it needs to be pointed out that this is not an issue of anti-density on the part of Roosevelt residents. Quite the opposite. The Roosevelt neighborhood recognized the need for added density and exceeded the targets given to them. After the Mayor and Councilmember Burgess criticized DPD's proposal as lacking in sufficient density, the neighborhood was still willing to work on adding more density to satisfy the City electeds, but now Roosevelt finds themselves and their plan rejected. All the neighborhood wants is to be able to help determine where that density should be located. That a private developer can employ consultants with political connections to draw attention to their contract rezone proposal is expected, but to have the Mayor citing those same consultants' argument as justification for hijacking the legislative rezone process is abuse of power and should not be tolerated.

We've had this problem on Bainbridge Island, where our former mayor drank the Koolaid of "urban villages" and tried to turn our rural island's main street into something akin to the top of Queen Anne Hill, complete with five-story buildings.

Call it the "golden goose phenomena": the developers want to cash in on the sense of place with projects that ruin rather than add to that sense of place. It takes accountability to keep this from happening. The financial inducements are just too great. There are no rewards built into the system for planners to keep things nice. No one gets paid for "sense of place", but they do go up and out into private practice if they learn how to slide things through.

We've had this problem on Bainbridge Island, where our former mayor drank the Koolaid of "urban villages" and tried to turn our rural island's main street into something akin to the top of Queen Anne Hill, complete with five-story buildings.

Call it the "golden goose phenomena": the developers want to cash in on the sense of place with projects that ruin rather than add to that sense of place. It takes accountability to keep this from happening. The financial inducements are just too great. There are no rewards built into the system for planners to keep things nice. No one gets paid for "sense of place", but they do go up and out into private practice if they learn how to slide things through.

I'm not sure what people were expecting the mayor and former lobbyist for Great City (tm) to do. You got what you voted for, Seattle, an upzone shill.

There are plenty of places in the city to build plenty of cubes. Developers will always want more for every project, it is never enough, city lavishing them with bridging the gap and parks levee money, upzone the upzone.

Let the people's voices be heard... Survey every address in the immediate area. If the answer is no, then it's no.

I agree, the at large council races do not help.

Does anyone else see the irony here? On one hand, you have Mayor Mike McGinn, founder of Seattle Great City Initiative, Sierra Club activist, and someone who many claim is a socialist and guilty of social engineering. On the other hand, one finds Roosevelt's own ultra-right wing, pro-property rights, uber-slumlord in Hugh Sisely who is known for collecting properties along NE 65th in the onetime hope making his riches when the cross Lake Washington bridge was built from Sandpoint/Magnuson.

And in the middle is the Roosevelt Neighborhood Association who are not driven by ideology but solely want some control of how their neighborhood develops.

Here is how the SeattlePi and the Seattle Times describes the situation at the corner of 15th Ave NE and NE 65th and the business association between RDG and Sisely.

First, here is how the Times describes Sisely as a land owner:
"A controversial figure in the Roosevelt neighborhood for his dilapidated properties that spill across three blocks, Sisley is the poster child for a proposal unveiled Thursday by Mayor Greg Nickels to ratchet up fines against landlords with properties in disrepair.

A Seattle Municipal Court judge recently ordered Sisley to pay about $75,000 in penalties for code violations at a vacant lot and an adjacent parcel on 66th Street he owns.

At a news conference, Nickels, without naming Sisley, referred to him as "the most egregious example" of those at whom his proposal is directed.

Blown-up color photos of heaped garbage bags by a house and a vacant lot littered with junk — Sisley owns both parcels — were mounted on easels next to Nickels."
Reference: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2003642671_nuisance30m.html

And here is how the PI describes Sisely and RDG's relationship:
"Jon Breiner and Ed Hewson, partners in Roosevelt Development Group, said they started negotiating with Sisley in the fall of 2005 and reached a lease deal a year and a half later.

"It was a long and arduous process to each any sort of an agreement due to the unorthodox nature of the landlord," Hewson said.

The P-I reported in July 2007 that the Roosevelt Development Group had signed a 99-year lease on the block bounded by 14th and 15th avenues and 65th and 66th streets. Breiner and Hewson said Monday that they also have lease options on the other Sisley holdings in the area and have bought four other properties from other owners, for a total development area of 250,000 square feet.
...
Sisley and his demands are why new buildings on the sites would need to be bigger than what zoning currently allows, Hewson said. "He's going to want to make sure that we develop the property to its highest and best potential."

Reference: http://www.seattlepi.com/local/article/Blighted-Roosevelt-blocks-to-get-16-story-1304008.php#ixzz1TNHSccpp

If one reviews the proposals from Sisely and RDG, it is apparent that the goal is to build the most and biggest on the property without any allowance for livability. No public space. No set-backs. Just sidewalk-to-sidewalk-to-sidewalk-to-sidewalk. A Borg-like box which covers the entire property and threatens to assimilate the adjacent Roosevelt High School.

It is too bad that Sisley--blinded by his right-wing ideology--doesn't know how to play the game in hiring architects and developers that can bring forward to the city designs that reflect the goals and objectives that the "social-engineer" McGinn would like to see in urban design. He would be much more successful in his efforts to re-zone if he was willing to compromise. Instead he has faced a 10-year fight in the past and by all looks appears to have the same 10-year fight in to future. At 80-years old, he risks losing the opportunity to leave a legacy at the expense of his pride in being right.

It's too bad there is little or no requirement to build quality buildings. When I see what is being built in Vancouver BC and compare it to the soon-to-be-if-not-already slums that have gone up in my "urban village" of Lake City, I cringe.

@ Kieth

"Hello Capital Hill."

We should only live so long.

Thanks, Kent
Appreciate the well-written article.

The idea that we need more dwelling space over and above the 600+ new units that would exist if the Roosevelt plan were enacted is invalid. We've just gone through a terrible recession. After the last big one in 1970-71 Seattle population took 40 years to recover, just now having passed that of 1960. Boeing is moving more jobs out of state (see today's Times) and Microsoft is in a permanent slumber. South lake Union is a center of action but the streetcar doesn't reach Roosevelt. We need to destroy the jewel of Seattle, its single family neighborhoods, for dubious growth?

Seattle is unique in many ways, not the least of which is a forward-thinking plan adopted in the 1980s and subsequently copied all over the world. This plan concentrates in-city growth in urban villages to leave single-family homes intact.

What Kent doesn't mention is RDG team members were behind the "public letter" calling on the Mayor and Council to ignore the Roosevelt plan and provide upzones. By cloaking themselves in faux-environmental rhetoric, the developers and architects who would precisely profit most from upzoning contrary to the Roosevelt Neighborhood Association's neighborhood plan painted the Roosevelt neighborhood as backward NIMBYs when nothing could be further from the truth.

The architectural firm hired to advise the RDG project was the same firm behind the "public letter" that urged trashing the Roosevelt plan for 120-foot density. This is the same architecture group behind the idea that we should upzone 10% of Seattle's single family zoning to multi-family uses -- which sounds like a reasonable number until you realize that puts 4-6 pack townhomes and low-rise buildings on EVERY block face on both sides of EVERY street in most Seattle neighborhoods. If you live in a single-family neighborhood, walk around your block tonight. Pick which of the 8 lots you see where you'd rather have a pack of townhomes or a 2-4 story building.

Seattle is also unique in the fact the local chapters of national and statewide environmental organizations are firmly in the developer camp. When I told the head of a Sierra Club chapter in another major US city that our local chapter Sierra Club President (former President now that Mike O'Brien was elected to Council) wouldn't support stronger urban tree protections because they interfered with developers she about fell over.

Through hard work by neighborhood volunteers we've preserved a quality of life in Seattle that routinely ranks us at or near the top of livability measures. We've created a zoning scheme in Seattle that is more than sufficient 3x the zoning needed to accomodate people and 2.5x the zoning need to accomodate jobs expected to be in our city by 2020.

Upzones, therefore, are not an environmental imperative for Seattle to do its part to reduce sprawl. This is despite what the architectural firms hired by developers like the RDG claim. This greenwashing of their profit motive is something policymakers, voters, and mainstream media should do a better job of recognizing.

I don't oppose upzones and as a lifelong businessman I certainly don't oppose profit. Upzones in our urban core areas (Northgate is a good example) to achieve a public good like truly affordable housing is not only a good idea, but a requirement to preserve our single family areas. While the affordable housing requirements are broken, largely due to lobbying by the same architectural firms who want to upzone our single family areas, at least Council is now requiring something in exchange for the upzones. You can thank neighborhoods for that, too, as neighborhood volunteers making Council aware of the excess zoning capacity we have in the city strengthened Council's resolve to extract some of the additional economic value represented by upzones.

Next time you see some group throwing around the "NIMBY" term or trashing neighborhoods for being obstructionist towards growth that will save the environment, look closer. You'll almost certainly find the group is populated by or financially supported by architects and developers who profit most from large upzones.

It would have been nice for this article to at least try for some objectivity.

(Just for the record, I have no connection to any developers, and live about a 10 min walk from the station.

This region is expected to take in another million+ people over the next 20 years (and this project should be planning for the next 100). Those people will either live around light rail stations, or in suburban developments, and the current Roosevelt plan calls for significant single family housing inside the walkeshed, no development on top of the light rail station, and only a few hundred extra housing units. If you want a plan built on that level of NIMBYism, you have to answer the following questions?

1. How much will property values climb in Roosevelt, as middle and working class people are unable to get housing near it as demand is way higher than supply.
2. Which forest do you want to flaten to put the extra population that wont be living in Roosevelt in?
3. Which highway do you want to widen so all those suburban dwellers can commute to downtown? And much money will that cost?
4. How much higher will operating costs for link light rail be, seeing the lower readership?

To all the NIMBYs out there, answer these questions, and then we can see if your point is valid at all.

The notion that building new high density housing near a Roosevelt light rail station will somehow prevent sprawl is pure nonsense - the two housing markets are totally different, and the suburbs will grow at the pace they currently are whether or not another couple of hundred units are rammed down Roosevelt's throat by a bunch of New Urbanist busybodies.

Natehc's other 3 false dichotomies masquerading as questions fall under the same category.

"And the end result is more housing, something we desperately need in the city."

Where? Because there are many new apartment buildings on Capitol Hill that are not filled. Ditto at Green Lake.

Also, how come, if density is so important, the Roosevelt station is drawn as a one-story building for an entire city block? No other public transit station in the world today would do such a thing.

I am a Ravenna/Roosevelt neighbor and I am proud of the hard work our neighborhood has done on its plan, working with the City. We are not NIMBYs; we all knew this was coming and planned accordingly. But we are not going to be bullied by the Sisleys and their minions.

Kent is right - do this to a neighborhood that has worked diligently within the rules and then the City Council and the Mayor ignore that hard work, well, then the rest of the neighborhoods should just call it a day. If they won't listen to our neighborhood, who's neighborhood is next?

Why are we spending so many public dollars to built light rail transit if we are not willing to walk the walk, talk the talk, and build the density that is the ONLY way these rail systems can become reasonably affordable?

Roosevelt nor any other neighborhood has to change with the times, and with the planned destiny of transit centers.

I see nothing wrong with tall buildings at 15th and 65th. Nothing.

Re: Capitol Hill/"affordable housing"/change
http://www.capitolhillseattle.com/2011/07/01/census-data-shows-where-capitol-hill-has-grown-the-most-changed-the-most

"...The biggest changes occurred along Madison in areas where Capitol Hill historically meets the Central District. While these areas just north of Madison saw some of the biggest growth in population, the black population declined by about a quarter in the same time period.
On the Hill, the area between 15th and I-5 surrounding Volunteer Park has seen an increase in housing units of 7%, but an increase in vacant housing of 242%.
Even in the "hot zone," the area bounded by Republican, Madison, Broadway and 15th has seen the number of housing units increase by 18% and the number of vacant units has gone up 144%. ..."

Some commentators are labeling this zoning change as "Social Engineering", when in fact it is the removal of social engineering. These zoning changes are removing market distorting forces, allowing people to build taller buildings. No one is forcing them to build taller.

It is simple supply and demand; taller buildings and more places to live should cause rents to lower, or at least not rise as high as they would have.

I suspect the real reason neighborhood NIMBY's don't want the change is so that they can still have their free, subsidized street parking.

This isn't just an issue about the Roosevelt neighborhood. All of us are paying for the station, all of us will pay if the light rail line's operating costs go up because of lower than expected ridership, and all of us will have a harder time finding a home in Seattle if there isn't a level of supply to match the demand.

The Roosevelt neighborhood will not be destroyed by taller buildings. The Roosevelt neighborhood will be destroyed if it's residents are priced out of the area because there isn't enough housing.

As for this whole "working with the neighborhood" argument. I'm a Roosevelt neighbor, and I was never allowed in on these discussions. These people do not represent Roosevelt. They represent themselves and their own NIMBY ideologies.

Please note all the editorial picks are not in favor of increasing heigh limits, and all favor a similar theme of "not opposing up zoning, but oppose it in this case". A recent Atlantic article notes the immense need for increasing hight limits for new buildings in urban areas: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/03/how-skyscrapers-can-save-the-city/8387/

We have an unprecedented opportunity to build a transit oriented community in a great Seattle neighborhood. Obviously I don't know the economic context of the the other folks commenting on this site, but I do ask: have you tried to find an apartment or house to rent in a transit oriented community close the employment centers in the Puget Sound region while living on a reasonable income? There is a current lack of availability, one that will grow worse as the modern workforce grows in our region. Look toward the future! We need more housing in our fair city!

"And the end result is more housing, something we desperately need in the city."

Not exactly.
Look at the Thornton Place development next to the Northgate bus terminal in the Roosevelt area where the light rail station will be built. The developer initially spent $millions for a dream urban condominium community. Well, sales were dismal. The developer lost his shirt. Eventually, the property was turned into apartment rentals. Go by there today and you will see many units are sitting vacant. The property is like a ghost "urban village" - eerily uninhabited, albeit with impressive urban art installations.

People do not want just any housing. They do not want cookie-cutter apartments stacked on top of one another. They do not want slow-moving transit, no matter how technically savvy. People want homes. Yards. Safe places to raise their children (without families and children, a city does not grow - it implodes), and good highways and roads so they can drive their automobiles where they want to go, efficiently and quickly.

The sooner urban planners give up their pipe-dream, politically-correct notions of social utopias where everyone sacrifices their space and privacy, the sooner we will start seeing some realistic plans that people actually want and are willing to pay for, rather than having shoved down their collective throats by ivory-tower, out-of-touch politicians and "planners."

I'm not sure I know anything new after reading this article. What are the exact proposals by the neighborhood group, the RDG, and the mayor? Some links would be nice. Has anything been approved? Is it all just talk?

I've watched the Sisley properties deteriorate year after year for decades. In my opinion, just about any kind of development would be better than what is currently along 65th. I don't really have a dog in this fight, though I have thought about moving to Roosevelt or Ravenna after the light rail station is in.

At least the current process gives the neighbors some say. News flash: Seattle is hot, and developers want to develop. Giving existing residents some input is better than giving them nothing. It's hard to tell from the article, but the current situation seems to give neighbors some rights.

I'm not sure the Thornton Place development is a good argument for any view. It was supposed to be condos, true, but opened just as the economy crashed. Now that it is apartments, it is more than 70% full, hardly a ghost town, even at the eye-watering prices they are charging.

Those who think we desperately need more housing (and more density) in Seattle should check into the condos still unbought in the Thornton Place development at Northgate, right next to a transit station and across from a convenient shopping center. They've sat there for at least 5 years.