March 29, 2012

Are neighborhoods too privileged in Seattle land-use debates?

Historically, Seattle has deferred to the residents most directly affected by decisions such as development around rail stations. This is starting to change, enlarging the table for democratic debate.

litlnemo (Flickr)

Mike O'Brien at the Neighborhood Plan Update meeting for North Beacon Hill with locals

By Roger Valdez

Land use decisions have become more contentious in Seattle, and are often less about land use than about how we make decisions. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Rather than a potent concoction of change, our process distills a gentle but bland broth of status quo. In Seattle, making the process more robust means taking a closer look at who makes decisions, whether the decisions are fair, and what outcomes we want as a city.

In reactions to a recent post, many commenters challenged whether advocates for moving more people into the city are "anti-democratic." Democracy has been defined variously as either maximum, broad participation in the process, or drawing lines around neighborhoods and limiting important decisions to people who live inside those lines.

But those boundary lines are starting to change. Until now, Seattle’s land use questions have been posed by planners at the city and the city council, and usually answered by neighborhoods and developers of a single project. Unusual for a large city, the denizens of single-family neighborhoods have held the trump cards in most of these contests.

Lately, though, the questions have become bigger, such as: “how can we limit environmental damage using land use?” and “how do we align local land use decisions to regional investment in light rail?” Such questions represent an expansion of the franchise for people affected by local land use decisions, especially users of light rail.

A related question, when you enlarge the area under discussion, is fairness. Who has to give up some things when population growth starts to force changes on the way we live? Seattle residents who have worked hard for their money and invested it in single-family homes can legitimately feel that growth advocates are trying to change their neighborhoods and the rules of the game. One single-family advocate, MVH, commented, “I believe that people who live and/or own property in a neighborhood should have a special status in planning for their neighborhood's future.” The commenter concluded, “A clear majority of Seattle voters agrees with me.”

Fairness is a complex calculation for elected officials and growth advocates. Which way do they tilt the political balance? Today, elected officials recite the environmental creed all politicians recite, but then, often, will make decisions that benefit the people who are already living here at the expense of people new to the region. This supports MVH’s position. Meanwhile, density advocates and developers seem averse to hardball politics, preferring to find good arguments and messages, rather than to defeat the “special status” party that has a lock on City Hall. That will soon change.

At the bottom of these debates is the question about desired outcomes from our land use debates. Consider We some inexorable and quickly advancing facts. More people are coming to our region every day seeking a better life or simply being born here. We have limited resources, including real estate, to accommodate them. We can either allow them to live in places where we won’t see them, like the rural outskirts of our cities, sacrificing habitat, farmland, and open space; or we can welcome them in our cities. One choice leads to environmentally destructive and expensive sprawl; the other can lead to a sustainable, efficient, and economical outcome of livable density.

This choice presents some unpleasant sensations to the parties in the land use debates in Seattle. After all this is Seattle and we are all fleece-wearing, Subaru-wagon-driving, Al-Gore-believing environmentalists. We like our way of life here in this region, and we want it to get slightly better over years, not change radically in a short period. And we don’t like crockery-throwing debates over the civic dinner table.

It comes down to hard choices. Do we choose today’s rhetorical comfort, or a sustainable future? Who gets to decide the big land use questions facing us, the protectionist neighborhoods or the broader metropolitan area? I believe we all should make these decisions, not just people who live near new projects such as transit stations.

And there isn’t anything wrong or even inconsistent with environmental values to advocate for slow or no growth. But advocates of that position ought to be explicit, and face up to the implications of such a policy across the region. Likewise, politicians and elected officials should tell us if that is what they believe too. It’s the honest thing to do.

The best course, in my view, would be to welcome the fact of growth and then argue with each other, as a city, long and loud about how and where in our city we accommodate lots of growth, and how we leverage that growth to make our city better over time, and more environmentally and economically self sufficient. Then we can decide how and where we grow as a city.

Seattle is often seen nationally as a paragon of environmental values. I hope we will decide to align those values with action. If we can't, I would hope some other city in our region will.

Topics: Neighborhoods and Communities, Real Estate / Land Use, Seattle City Hall, Sound Transit

About the Author

Roger Valdez is a Seattle researcher and writer. He recently read through Seattle's land use code and blogged about it. He currently directs housing programs at a local non-profit.

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Comments:

Posted Thu, Mar 29, 12:54 p.m. Inappropriate

Roger: The premise of your argument is faulty. There is no reason to believe that loosening regulations now applicable to new developments near light rail stations will make ANY difference in terms of future sprawl around here.

You advocate for the significant loosening of the height, density, setback, and required parking space regulations that now limit multifamily developers who want to build projects near light rail stations. Those changes certainly would increase a number of developers’ profits, and that appears to be the primary aim of your advocacy. However, those changes would not ameliorate the potential for "sprawl" into this region's "habitat, farmland, and open space". That is because the suburban single-family-dwelling market operates entirely independently of the market for condos and apartments next to passenger rail stations. If somebody’s in the market for a larger family home with a yard they aren’t going to consider buying a condo next to Roosevelt High School or Northgate Mall.

If you are truly trying to curb "sprawl" of the type described in this piece, loosening zoning ordinance limits around light rail stations isn't the way to do it. A more efficacious tack would be tightening up GMA limits at the state level and/or get counties to enact more limits on s.f.d. projects in the exurbs.

— crossrip

Posted Thu, Mar 29, 1:11 p.m. Inappropriate

This article is very one-sided. Seattle elects all its council citywide and so most people would argue that neighborhoods often lack any substantive voice in land use decisions. While one can couch land use issues in terms of the "feel-good" need to increase density, the realities of rezoning on the fly around light rail stations is that it also just happens to provide enormous financial benefits to land speculators. Such special interests are much more likely to have the financial resources necessary to get a favorable hearing than grass roots neighborhood associations especially if they have the support of gullible liberals.

While in Roger's utopian world the people living around light rail stations use transit all the time, in reality most will be affluent enough to own car and even it they take transit to work, they will be clogging the streets for much of their leisure time. There are only so many places accessible by light rail, and bus transit is poor outside rush hour. Most destinations are more accessible by car (just try getting yourself, or if you have them your kids, to evening or weekend activities on public transport from one suburban location to another).

To make Seattle a European style city in which one can live in the suburbs without a car, one would have to do an awful lot more than build a sparse expensive slow light rail system over several decades and allow high-rise condominiums and apartments around its stations. Nobody seems to have even considered this let along presented a coherent plan about how to do it. A more sensible approach to densifying Seattle, would be to focus on increasing the number of people and affordability of living downtown or right next to downtown. Unlike the suburbs, downtown Seattle already has much of the infrastructure to support a good quality of life without a car and with the addition of schools, micro-parks and improved policing it could appeal even more broadly.

Rather than redesigning the Seattle Center with some of the fanciful designs that have been recently proposed, perhaps we could raze its underused buildings and build playgrounds and sports fields to attract families downtown. We could even do the same with some of the disjointed green expanses on the architects' plans for the waterfront.

— David_Smith

Posted Thu, Mar 29, 4:35 p.m. Inappropriate

Shorter Roger -

I am a self-appointed expert and know what's best for these people, who need to be cut out of the process if they dare disagree with me.

Good luck with that. I'm sure glad you're out of government now.

— bubbleator

Posted Thu, Mar 29, 8:16 p.m. Inappropriate

This guy thinksif he keeps saying the same thing over and over, it will make it true. Nope.

— westello

Posted Thu, Mar 29, 8:43 p.m. Inappropriate

"Today, elected officials recite the environmental creed all politicians recite, but then, often, will make decisions that benefit the people who are already living here at the expense of people new to the region"

"People already here" like those gullible heathens we pushed aside a couple of centuries ago because of their lesser grasp of the future?

Now that you've mastered the SLUC, how about taking on "Pandora's Seed, the Unforeseen Cost of Civilization," Spencer Wells, 2010.

— afreeman

Posted Thu, Mar 29, 8:52 p.m. Inappropriate

This “create density and call it Paris” baloney has been slung around since the 80s. It was obvious then that no one understood (or would be truthful about) the fact that there was more required than just cramming people into warrens of high rise dwellings. Things like corresponding levels of taxation; special service districts, cultural/social issues, community health, public safety, human nature, transportation, etc. But 30 years later it continues to be defined in simplistic terms of densification and infill. Just let speculators jam them in and somehow the rest will work itself out.

People who yearn for Paris on Puget Sound should stop daydreaming about creating similarities between that city and Seattle, and start understanding the differences between the U.S. and Europe. Europeans pay significantly more in taxes than we “free market capitalists” would ever tolerate, and thus can allocate more for the infrastructure necessary to make cities work. They also have a different sense of community than we have here in the land of “greed is good.”

It might also help us stifle these delusional growth and transportation projects that disproportionately suck the resources out of the entire city for the sake of a few affluent neighborhoods.