Sometimes the whole really is greater than the sum of its parts. I found this to be true in spades for “Seattle of the Future? Closing Shorts,” Northwest Film Forum’s curation of three films intended to spur a thought-provoking conversation about what Seattle we want for the future. The festival ran through September 29.

For me personally, it’s fair to say that my experience hit close to home, as the longest of the three is about the neighborhood I’ve lived in for the last 20 years, Wallingford. (I’ve written about it here, and even make an appearance as a participant in one of the walking tours conducted during its filming.)

But even as someone  previously familiar with that project, viewing it in this context gave me a fresh perspective on how to wrestle with a question posed by the Northwest Film Forum: “how do we provide an antidote to ‘placelessness?’”

Here’s why.

I admit I was primed for disappointment with “The Beacon,” a short film about the break-dancing studio founded by Seattle hip-hop b-boy crew, Massive Monkees. 

By that, I don’t at all mean disappointment with the film’s quality. Instead, because its producer, Vanishing Seattle, describes itself as “a media movement that documents displaced and disappearing institutions, small businesses,  and cultures of Seattle” I was expecting something along the lines of  “a tragic story, with a sad ending.”

But then I found myself delighted by learning about the group’s passion, resilience, and (in the end) success.

The specific phrase “emerging Seattle” came to mind while watching it. It was literally a story about something new under the sun coming into being here (beginning with after school programs at the Jefferson Community Center in the 1990s), taking enduring root in the community, and (with a two year interruption between 2020 and 2022) also finding a physical location through which to serve its mission. 

And this gave me the gift of seeing “Visions of Wallingford” in a new light.

On one of the project’s walking tours, another Wallingford resident described “placelessness” this way: “Placelessness, according to Oxford, is a condition of [an] environment lacking significant places and [an] associated attitude of lack of attachment to a place caused by the homogenizing effects of modernity.”

I know it is something many of our respective neighbors are concerned about either consciously or unconsciously. And the film highlights “anti-placeleness” activism large and small. (In the case of the former, for example, preventing the Good Shepherd Center property from being turned into a shopping mall in the 1970s. In the case of the latter, community volunteers placing a bench in a traffic circle and then decorating it with handcrafted, bespoke tiling.)

But I don’t think the Oxford definition of placelessness is our neighborhood’s biggest problem.

Instead I think it is that what becomes the next “Beacon” has no place to emerge here. And that’s because the people who will bring into being the next movement or innovation that differs from the dominant culture–the people who are “poorer, browner, younger, and more diverse” largely have no place here.

Why did the hip hop community take root in the South End? Because that’s where Seattle’s White majority chose where they wanted Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) and poorer people to live.

Why didn’t the first hub for that community emerge at the Good Shepherd Center? Because Wallingford’s White majority didn’t care to create places for those communities to live here.

If you think that’s an exaggeration, let’s briefly set the record straight.

North Seattle (Wallingford included) was a “sundown” zone until the late 1960s (that is, “virtually no people of color lived” and “that African Americans were expected to be out of the area when the workday ended”). Wallingford was both redlined and largely zoned for single family homes by the Seattle’s avowedly racist 1923 zoning commission (as the City acknowledged in page 19 in the housing appendix of the draft One Seattle Comp Plan).

More recently, the neighborhood’s community council fought creation of more affordable homes here in the 1970s–getting “places students and laborers could afford” banned by law. And in the 1990s neighborhood planning process, the community’s answer to the question of whether “zoning changes to accommodate a greater variety of housing  types in the community, and to support home ownership at lower levels of income” should be made was largely “no.”

It’s damning with faint praise that the concession to diversity and inclusion enshrined in the neighborhood plan – new housing along Aurora, I-5, and by the Fremont industrial area – was indistinguishable from the intentionally environmentally racist planning decisions from the 1920s and 1950s. (This is something the City has documented and is explained in the context of the current comprehensive plan update in a 20-minute video, “Harland to Harrell.”)

The upshot is that, as one elder community member stated in the film: “Wallingford is a wealthy, White, older neighborhood. And I think we ought to acknowledge the very Whiteness of it…”

Now, more than ever, I believe she’s right.

One of the goals of the “Visions of Wallingford” project was to “reframe challenging conversations” about our changing physical environment. I’ve been in my share of challenging conversations about housing and land use and city planning both online and in-person at community events and city forums over the past decade. 

But even as someone who has devoted a lot of time and attention to these issues, after viewing this trio of films together I’ll readily admit I may have missed the forest for the trees. A lot of words and ink has been devoted to debating how many parking spaces apartment buildings should have, or whether adding accessory dwelling units should come with an owner occupancy requirement, or on which blocks townhomes should be legalized.

So let me suggest starting again with some different questions:

We’re a very White neighborhood.

Do we want to change that?

Are we willing to try?

Today from where I sit, the jury remains out, and our track record is not good.

But now, after watching “Seattle of the Future? Closing Shorts,” when I think about “how we would like to see Wallingford in the next 50 years” I have a new short answer. The next equivalent to that Jefferson Community Center afterschool program that evolved into a community and eventually The Beacon ought to be able to happen here.

In the meantime, The Beacon is open for business on Rainier Avenue S and accepts donations.

The post Op-Ed: Wallingford Can Build a Brighter ‘Seattle of the Future’ first appeared on The Urbanist.

History of single-family zoning

Take a time machine back to when these kit homes showed up from national catalogues and John Wallingford mowed down a forest to build the neighborhood we see today. You will notice one critical thing is missing: zoning. Single-family homes, and triplexes, and sixplexes and small apartments, were legal to build anywhere and everywhere in Seattle when developers like Mr. Wallingford created neighborhoods. Back then, Seattle was short on restrictions, and big on building housing. Queen Anne, which got its start sooner, was able to build a rich neighborhood of diverse housing, housing that is no longer legal to build on many of the sites these buildings sit on today. 

A lot has changed since we named entire neighborhoods after the developers that clear cut forests, built houses, and sold them for profit. Today we have something called “single-family zoning”, an artificial suburban-style, restrictive land use invented 50 years after the founding of Seattle. Even the name is a misnomer, since nothing regulates more than one “single-family” from living on each lot. This zoning first showed up in the mid-1920s, ten years after John Wallingford’s death and thirty or so years after he hired those lumberjacks.

As recently as the 1970s, Seattle had far less single-family zoning than we do today. Over the course of a few decades, local advocates, community councils, and city planners grew this restrictive zoning classification aggressively, whether the lot was used for a single-family home or not, to its present 30 square-mile extent. For scale, this is 10 square miles larger than the entire island of Manhattan.

Seattle has the space, but not if single-family zoning dominates

Of its 84 total square miles of land, Seattle currently has just 40 square miles of land where housing is permitted to be built. Of that, only 10 square miles allow apartments and townhomes. Sure, our single-family zones now allow the construction of accessory dwelling units (ADUs), but reform to encourage that option was passed only recently in 2019 and depends upon homeowners wanting build and finance an expensive project on top of their mortgage. To build a good-sized ADU could cost $400,000 and have a breakeven point in 2050 if we started construction tomorrow. We simply do not have the space for people to all live in single-family homes or detached accessory dwellings and must change the path we are on.

Mark Twain once said, “buy land, they’re not making anymore of it”. Our city’s planning department should have this carved on a gold plaque hung above the entrance and have every member read it as they entire the office — which we will return to shortly. Seattle’s population has outgrown single-family neighborhoods, and is still continuing to grow. Mark is right; Seattle is not getting any more land so we might as well use what we have. Unless we want to keep mowing down those forests just a few miles from our city, we need to look at growing from within. Seattle needs to allow something denser than a single-family home across the entire city. 

Since 2010, Seattle has bulldozed 3,000 single-family homes for new larger single-family homes. Had these been sixplexes, nearly a quarter of our population growth this decade could have been housed in these new homes. Hindsight is 20/20, but something tells me this would have relaxed the housing crisis as the city grew.

New construction is expensive, but density creates affordable options

Most people are right when they say new housing is expensive. That’s usually how new things work, they cost more. Buy a brand-new car and you will lose $10,000 the moment you drive it off the lot. At that point, the recouped cost to pay the labor that built it, the innovation to design and plan it, and the salesperson to sell it, has already been awarded. This too is how new housing works. New construction needs to recoup the cost to acquire the land, build the space, and pay their team that designed and built it whether it’s a for-profit project or not. By building more homes on a single lot, this financial need is shared among multiple buyers, which is why new townhomes in Seattle cost less than new single-family homes, which increasingly cost north of $1 million. 

By building more new housing, the price of older housing stock doesn’t have to skyrocket each year, jumping nearly 10% in the last year and projected to keep going. Supply slows the growth of real estate in established homes that aren’t in need of recouping labor costs or profits unlike new builds. Let wealthy buyers bid for space in new homes so older homes can remain available and relatively affordable.

This brings me to parking requirements. Seattle currently requires on-site parking for new homes anywhere outside urban centers and urban villages. Parking requirements do nothing other than make housing more expensive and consume the precious land we cannot afford to waste. You cannot demand on-site parking for an apartment while complaining about how expensive the new homes cost. It’s a contradiction. A single-family home has the cheapest cost of constructing on-site parking because it only needs to provide one space and has plenty of land. As you get into the denser apartments, you cannot supply one spot per home unless you go underground, which is a tipping point that creates a financial anchor that kills projects. Not to mention, many cars parked on Seattle streets today are cars that belong to single-family home dwellers that bought more cars than parking spots.

To address affordability, we need to add more density and remove parking minimums. We already waive parking minimums in Downtown, South Lake Union, Ballard, the U District, and the other two dozen urban village neighborhoods citywide. So why bother with them everywhere else? Just get rid of them and let a developer or homeowner decide if it’s worth constructing on their lot.

Working with homeowners

What if we partnered with homeowners to stay in place, let a new sixplex be built, and give them a unit in the new building? This brings down costs for the developer, lets us add density where we desperately need it, lets homeowners stay where they are, and takes the burden of being a developer off the homeowner’s plate. I imagine more homeowners would be glad to participate in a developer partnership like that rather than building a detached unit in their backyard by themselves. Some homeowners in Wallingford are ready to do this if we allow density citywide. Maybe with healthy partnerships like these developers could cease being a boogeyman and scapegoat.

We also need to educate ourselves to the climate impacts of low-density zoning. Seattle is a progressive, left-leaning city, dotted with slogan signs in front yards everywhere. Would more homeowners be willing to develop density in place with a public or private development partner if they knew the scientific impacts single-family zoning does for climate change? And what about the racial and economic segregation associated with single-family zoning? Growing density in single-family neighborhoods touches every subject on those “in this house, we believe” signs.

We need more homes, less restriction, more variety, more opportunity

We do not know what Seattle’s population is going to do in 10, 20, or 50 years. All we can do is think about what Mark Twain said, that we need to think about the land we have because Seattle is not getting any more of it. If we let the entire city stock of single-family homes allow a sixplex, we have the potential to become a city of two million people. If we allow five-story apartments everywhere, that grows to four million. None of this is to say we will get to these population figures overnight, nor will this bulldoze our city in an instant. Change takes time, but we need actions in place or we will repeat the mistakes of this last decade’s housing crisis. The 3,000 homes demolished and replaced with new single-family homes this last decade was slow — about 300 homes per year — which is a whopping total of 1.8% of the entire single-family housing stock. What if in the next decade that same change occurs and this time we add 15,000 new homes we didn’t have before? This will relax pressures on older homes and let them remain more affordable.

Let’s finally admit what we are, a city. We need to address the problems of housing and affordability by leveraging the space we have. We cannot stop people from moving to this great city. If we do, it will only exasperate more sprawl and deforestation. We cannot continue the path of pretending we are a low-density suburb disguised as a major city. We need to move forward and add more housing, that’s what John Wallingford did and he got himself elected twice to Seattle City Council.

The post Seattle Has the Space first appeared on The Urbanist.

A neighborhood inventory published in 1976 by Folke Nyberg and Victor Steinbrueck noted that “Wallingford reached its physical development peak in the 1910s” even while lamenting the population decline that started in the 1950s as “families increasingly moved to the suburbs leaving behind a growing proportion of elderly and transient young people.” 

In the midst of this population decline, leaders in the Wallingford Community Council proudly orchestrated a downzoning of residential zones in the 1970s to exclude duplexes and prevent University of Washington students from over-running the neighborhood.  

That decline reversed in the mid-1980s. In the last 40 years — nearly the same amount of time between the construction of my house and the founding of our city — Seattle’s population has grown by nearly 60% from 493,000 to 776,000. Because our single-family homes in Wallingford have obstinately done the land-use equivalent of manspreading for more than a century — taking up an inequitable amount of space despite the population boom — since 1982, the assessed value of this house and land has increased about 1,300%.  

While my single-family house — and a Craftsman to boot! — isn’t unique, it’s also not the only type of home here. This formerly redlined and declining area of Wallingford — and in fact many areas of the neighborhood — is generously sprinkled with housing that became outlawed by the 1970s Wallingford Community Council. 

I bought my first house in Wallingford in 1998, also in this redlined district, with generational wealth. Two homes down the street is a duplex built in the 1940s into which one of the current mayoral candidates moved a couple years later. Across the street is a phalanx of three duplexes. My present block has a duplex built in 1900, a triplex built in 1911, a duplex built in 1950, and another built (somehow) in 1982. That last duplex, assessed for $153,000 in 1982 recently sold for around $1.4 million, an 800% increase in 40 years, a sum that even generational wealth gasps to attain.  

These multifamily homes scattered among the formerly “hazardous” and “blighted” blocks near me aren’t unusual. When we look across the neighborhood, there are about 350 multifamily or commercial buildings in zones where building such homes is banned today. This non-conforming housing includes a couple of condominiums, many duplexes, a healthy number of triplexes and quadplexes, two “rooming houses”, units above corner stores, and even a couple dozen apartments.  

In the 1998 — the year I moved to Wallingford — a group of residents recommended that Seattle reduce density in the new Wallingford urban village area bounded by Aurora Avenue to the west, 40th and 50th Streets, and where Ezell’s Famous Chicken now resides.

There is somewhat of a pattern to this development. In the 130 years since Wallingford streets and parcels were first platted, most of the neighborhood was built as single-family homes. Nevertheless, hundreds of multifamily homes were built before they were banned completely in 1970s. But these homes tended to be built outside of the district that became the Urban Village. 

The Wallingford Urban Village was created in 1994 with the intention to “deliver services more equitably, pursue a development pattern that is environmentally and economically sound, and provide a better means of managing growth and change through collaboration with the community in planning for the future of these areas.” As a “residential urban village,” Wallingford was intended to provide a “focus of goods and services for residents and surrounding communities but may not provide a concentration of employment.”  

Despite these goals of equitable services and environmentally sound and managed growth, about half of the Urban Village banned housing other than single-family houses until 2019 (see the light yellow areas in the map above). Only the Stone Way and N/NE 45 St corridors and the blocks along Aurora Ave allowed apartments.  

And here is where the echoes of history become visible like the reverberations of a dinosaur in a Jurassic Park cup. The redlining in Wallingford didn’t serve to segregate Black people as it did in many other Seattle neighborhoods; Wallingford had sundown laws to keep out anyone but White people. (See also this excellent history by Shaun Scott for more on racism and zoning.) 

A 1939 UW thesis by Gordon Beebe drew the connection between housing and environmental conditions, stating, “The gas plant on the north shore of Lake Union has exerted such an effect by depressing the value of residential property which is a considerable distance from it.” We can see this echoed in the non-conforming multifamily housing today. 

There tends to be more multifamily housing in south Wallingford closer to the old gas plant, which closed in 1956. In addition, along the shoreline were an asphalt company, a garbage incinerator, an ammonia plant, and lumber mills. The east side, in a few blocks just up the hill from a legacy industrial zone, saw duplex development in the 1950s and 1960s simultaneous with planning and construction for I-5. The west side is predominantly zoned multifamily between the historically industrial Stone Way and the Aurora Avenue freeway. The few western blocks that remained single-family zoning until this century thus similarly saw a concentration of multifamily development. As we go further north to the heart of the Wallingford commercial district and the Urban Village, there’s fewer multifamily homes.

The Department of Commerce inventoried the housing south of N/NE 40th St in 1934, finding that 10% of the area was multifamily housing, compared to 9% citywide. Beebe did a further inventory, finding both that only Whites lived in the area and that 21% of the district was substandard housing, compared to 17% citywide. However, Beebe made the claim that the housing quality below N/NE 40th St was starkly lower than north of N/NE 40th St, where the modern Urban Village is located. 

In the map below of Wallingford, I’ve indicated multifamily housing on parcels that were zoned single-family prior to 2019. You can see from the map below that the concentration of multifamily housing is rather light within the Urban Village (the area within the black boundary). I’ve indicated the redlined area with red and the “blighted area” with a purple line. 

The historical legacy has echoes in political power as well. In the wake of the construction of the North Transfer Station in the formerly redlined district, the Wallingford Community Council formed, stating “Our community is the victim of the automobile. The residential character of our neighborhood is in jeopardy, and we believe it to be essential that major improvements be made. Otherwise our neighborhood, as we know it, will cease to exist.” 

This apocalyptic concern for the “residential character” — though not for the destruction wrought by the automobile — persists in the heart of the neighborhood, including a 2017 Wallingford Community Council-led stunt funeral for the “neighborhood voice”. The opposition to the Mandatory Housing Affordability (MHA) upzones of the Urban Village came largely from residents north of N/NE 40th St, the area with a lower density of non-conforming housing sprinkled throughout the single-family houses. The south end of neighborhood, having less economic power due to environmental degradation, saw more multifamily development. The north end, having experienced less of it, came to see single-family houses as their birthright character, and thus strongly opposed the change. 

This power has been employed to concentrate multifamily housing in “less desirable” locations. In the first half of last century, this meant locations such as near a gas plant. Today, this means along arterials that we know are harmful to residents health and safety. During the MHA battle of 2015-19, Seattle Fair Growth was formed by a group of long-time Seattle homeowners including a former Wallingford Community Council board member and a current Seattle Council member’s legislative aide. Their foundational argument was that current zoning — zoning that concentrates new housing along arterials — was more than sufficient for our needs. Seattle Fair Growth used their power to weaponize environmental review to delay implementation of a minor rezone. (Only 6% of single-family zoned land was upzoned for MHA, while all multifamily land was.)  

But sometimes the echoes of history are lost. Neighborhood conversations opposing new construction tend to forget that our historical development patterns gave us corner stores within walking distance of most homes. They’ve lost the concerns prior residents had about the negative impact the automobile had on the neighborhood and our local businesses. Most every new multifamily building is greeted with outrage on Nextdoor or the Wallingford Facebook page that there won’t be an off-street parking spot for each new home, despite many of us in single-family homes not having, or not using, our own off-street parking.  

This new construction is also condemned for the quality of construction versus that of all these old houses, complaints that, as Beebe reminded us, are certainly not new and that many of our century-old homes were subjected to decades ago. 

Another persistent complaint is that new construction simply enriches developers, despite our neighborhood being named for the developer John Wallingford. What this ignores is the vast wealth that accrues to homeowners, wealth gained not by creating housing, but by simply holding it. Across the street from Hamilton Middle School, a multifamily development within the urban village is garnering organized opposition. The single-family house was sold to the developer in 2020 for $1.19 million, a 22% profit over the purchase price in 2018. All told over the last 30 years, this parcel increased in value by $1.05 million, or 845%. 

Research done by Microsoft in 2019 found that Seattle lacks nearly 200,000 affordable homes. Today — after 100 years of reducing where apartments, condominiums, duplexes and quadplexes can be built, and despite the 2019 MHA upzones — approximately 70% of the land where housing can be built is restricted to only single-family homes. The result is we’re seeing older and smaller apartments in multifamily zoning torn down and replaced by larger buildings. We’re seeing older single-family homes demolished not to house more people, but just to create more house. In Wallingford over the last decade, we’ve seen about 100 single-family homes demolished and replaced by newer, larger single-family houses. There’s currently two dozen in the permitting process. The map below tells that story, the yellow dots new single-family houses, the yellow squares pending construction.

And here’s another echo from history. The redlining in Wallingford created economic separation. This same economic separation is raging around us today. About 47% of Seattle renters are rent burdened, which both drives homelessness and flight from the city. This economic and housing policy choice has hollowed out the Central District, where the percentage of Black residents has plummeted from 75% to 15%. Seattle’s Black population is at its lowest percentage since the 1960s. Median income for Black households is less than half that of White ones. And 73% of Black households rent. Meanwhile, the Black population in King County has risen dramatically. This points to an undeniable reality: our housing policy has created a new redlining, not one drawn on maps, but one implicit in our Zillow valuations.  

And for my fellow Wallingford homeowners: don’t think we’re immune. With the median house value topping $800,000, our generational wealth is increasingly insufficient for our children to live in the city in which they were raised. Instead of fighting against neighborhood change and housing, we can instead embrace it and shape it so that we can welcome back those who’ve been displaced, and so Generation Z will have equitable opportunity to build a more welcoming Wallingford and a better Seattle.  

Since 2010 we’ve averaged just 6,600 new homes per year, only a meager percentage of those affordable. We need a vision for massive and sustainable public investment in housing that commits to eliminating the deficit of affordable housing in five years. We need a robust discussion about whether design review, a hurdle homeowners created in 1994, achieves better buildings or if it simply results in expensive delays and environmentally destructive and costly modulations. We need vigorous innovation in financing, and land use, and building standards if we’re going to create 15-minute cities this century let alone this decade.  

Coming soon is a major revision to the Growth Management Act. Our housing policy with concomitant transportation, environmental, and economic plans must be improved. Washington State legislators this season punted on many housing bills, even ones that would have offered the most gentle density in keeping with “neighborhood character”. And worse, we still aren’t earmarking enough money to fund public investment in the hundreds of thousands of homes we need. 

This year is a mayoral election, and housing opportunities must be central to the conversation. It’s time to stop debating whether we should end the duplex ban across all of our residential land. The Seattle Planning Commission resoundingly concluded in 2018 that we must expand the forms of housing permitted across all of our residential land.  

Two years later with a housing crisis that has only worsened, the question before us is now whether the historical development model of single story duplexes and two story apartments is adequate to the massive deficit in housing we face today, or if we need more. 

I say, let’s go bold: open the city to at minimum four floors and corner stores across every residential parcel. That’s what a 15-minute city requires. It’s what our teachers, and nurses, and paralegals, and artists, and line cooks need. It’s what our kids will need to find a home in the city in which they were raised.

I for one would be near first in line to volunteer my home for redevelopment according to housing patterns proven around the world.  

Want to take action? If you’d like to ensure that Wallingford becomes more welcoming to new neighbors, you can join the campaign to ask the Seattle City Council to review historic preservation and its role in undermining equitable housing across Seattle.

Want to learn more? Here’s a few resources: 

• Robert K. Nelson, LaDale Winling, Richard Marciano, Nathan Connolly, et al., “Mapping Inequality”.  
• Thomas Veith, “A Preliminary Sketch of Wallingford’s History 1855-1985”.  
• University of Washington Seattle Civil Rights & Labor History Project 
• Mike Eliason, “Narrowing of a Neighborhood“, Sightline. 
• Shaun Scott, “Housing is the question and the answer”, Crosscut.
• Zillow, Homelessness Rises Faster Where Rent Exceeds a Third of Income.
• Futurewise, Washington Can’t Wait Campaign: Updating the GMA for Today’s Challenges.
• Seattle Planning Commission, Neighborhoods for All. 
• Seattle Planning Commission 
• Seattle Housing Growth Report 
• Microsoft Puget Sound Housing Study (2019) 
• Karen Kreis, The Urban Centres and Urban Villages Strategy of Seattle 
• Seattle 2035 Urban Village Report (2015) 
• Seattle 2035 Urban Village Indicators Monitoring Report (2018)  
• Seattle Comprehensive Plan, Urban Village Element  

Correction: Data around the number of single-family home demolitions replaced by larger single-family homes was corrected.

The post The Historic Preservation We Need: Four Floors and Corner Stores first appeared on The Urbanist.

The Stone Way corridor has changed a lot over the past decade. Thousands of new apartments have replaced warehouses, parking lots, and low-slung retail. Trendy new restaurants, bars, and cafes have joined the old standby dive bars and greasy spoons–and I’ve feasted on the spoils as a local resident.

I wrote about that trend in 2015 and again 2018, and the area around Stone Way just keeps booming. Active construction projects would bring hundreds more homes into existence. Within a few blocks of Stone Way, about 2,000 new apartments have went in since 2012 or are under construction. Another 650 homes are in the design review and permitting phase, give or take.

Recent proposals have taken advantage of the Mandatory Housing Affordability (MHA) rezones that added an extra floor or two of zoning capacity along the corridor. Three eight-story proposals have materialized. One at 3665 Stone Way would add 242 homes, replacing the old Stone Way Electric warehouse, and another eight-story proposal at 3831 Stone Way would add 146 homes and replace a garden center and parking lot. An eight-story design just north of Fremont Brewing will bring 130 apartments, mostly small efficiencies, and replace two dilapidated single family homes. Small efficiencies will allow a five-story proposal at 4009 Stone Way to provide 128 homes on a relatively modest lot.

I mapped out recent and pending projects along Stone Way below, an area I’ve referred to as “Frelingford” much to the chagrin of Seattle old-timers. The dark grey shapes are buildings completed since 2012. Orange polygons denote projects under construction, and yellow ones are proposals in design review or are awaiting construction permits.

Why Stone Way is Booming

Why Stone Way has been the focal point of growth for the surrounding neighborhoods is one part design and one part happenstance. When crafting neighborhood plans back in 1994, as the state implemented the Growth Management Act, both the Wallingford Community Council and Fremont Neighborhood Council focused their zoned capacity in their urban villages to their edges along Aurora Avenue and Stone Way, which was a warehouse district then, with some single-family and multi-family housing mixed in. By contrast, the Wallingford Urban Village is very skinny to the east, tapering to a half block on each side along N 45th Street, sparing Craftsmen homeowners on the blocks to the north or south from the thought of apartments sprouting next door. The Fremont Urban Village, meanwhile, pretends like anything north of 40th Street doesn’t exist and has generated more office development than large apartment buildings. In both cases, the largest residential buildings are zoned for the Stone Way corridor. Funneling growth to the fringe allowed the respective neighborhood groups to put less zoned capacity in their cores and still meet their growth targets on paper.

One of the benefits of the extensive multifamily growth in the Stone Way corridor is it has increased the diversity of neighborhood demographics in terms or race, age, and wealth. While the census tract to the east (the core of Wallingford) has a median age of 38.3, a median household income of almost $120,000, is 68% single family homes, and 80% White–all higher than the citywide and countywide median–the two Stone Way census tracts (50 and 54) hover just above 30 years old, about 70% apartments (or other multifamily), and a median household income that is about $15,000 lower. While Wallingford was 85% White (non-Hispanic) in the 2010 census, the Stone Way tracts were 73% and 74% White, as of the 2019 American Community Survey figures. The density is also higher: roughly 15,000 versus 10,000 residents per square mile.

While the whole neighborhood could be growing and diversifying in this way, instead much of the rest is shielded by single family zoning. For some Wallingford homeowners, restrictive zoning is not enough; they are seeking to get their single family homes listed on the National Historic Registry in an attempt to stymie attempts to repeal apartment bans and add another hurdle to redevelopment. Mike Eliason traced the lineage back to racial covenants that barred people of color from owning homes in North Seattle. Efforts to freeze Wallingford in amber inspired pro-housing activists to organize a counter-movement with a petition opposing the historic designation. That petition had more than 900 signatures at time of publication.

Stone Way’s growth in context

The growth in the Stone Way corridor is fairly dramatic, but plenty of other Seattle neighborhoods have seen similar or larger booms over the past decade. Back in 2017, Seattle in Progress tallied nearly 10,000 homes in development in Denny Triangle, more than doubling the total for the area. The U District has seen a frenzy of development activity ahead of light rail arrival, as has Roosevelt and to a lesser extent Northgate. First Hill, Belltown, Uptown, Ballard, Columbia City, Capitol Hill, the Central District, North Rainier, and Lake City look like pincushions in Seattle in Progress, given the number of proposals under construction or in the pipeline.

The sum total is that Seattle is averaging more than 10,000 homes per year over since 2017 (though the 2020 may temper that a bit due to Covid disruptions.) It’s still not enough to keep pace with demand, but it blows away the pace of apartment construction in the suburbs. Since 2016, Bellevue has led the suburbs with 3,932 new apartments, according to RentCafé — note that they only count buildings of at least 50 units where a final certificate of occupancy has been issued. Tacoma clocked in at 1,482, Lynnwood at 1,010, Kirkland at 969, and both Everett and Bothell each had 957 apartments, using the same timeframe and parameters. Since Bellevue, Tacoma, and Everett are designated as “principal cities” rather than suburbs in the definitions RentCafé uses, Lynnwood got the headlines for “fastest growing suburb.”

Lynnwood’s 1,010 new apartments in five years, though commendable, is basically matched by this half square mile area I’ve described sandwiched between two neighborhoods known for blocking growth rather than embracing it. Overall, Seattle has added 35,783 housing units since 2015, according to the City’s Housing Growth Report, and has another 19,718 homes under construction.

Construction photo tour

While some pundits claim people are headed for the (suburban) hills and abandoning Seattle, the continued construction activity across the city suggests otherwise–at least that developers and their investors are betting otherwise. Another hot take has been that people are clamoring for more space and parking due to pandemic living, but the low parking ratios along the corridor again suggest builders have faith this isn’t the only story and dynamic at play.

I speak for myself when I say keep your garage and give me a bevy of restaurants, cafes, stunning parks, the Burke-Gilman trail all within a 10-minute walk. But it seems like plenty of other folks are ready to take that trade as well. Here are the projects rising along Stone Way as we speak.

At a glance

• 3421 WOODLAND PARK AVE N – 122 apartments, 10 parking stalls
• 3524 STONE WAY N – 100,000 square feet office space, 148 parking stalls
• 3665 STONE WAY N – 243 apartments, eight stories, 77 parking stalls
• 3831 STONE WAY N – 145 apartments, eight stories, 75 parking stalls
• 3320 CLAREMONT AVE S – 35 apartments, no parking
• 4035 STONE WAY N – 49 apartments, 33 parking stalls
• 4106 STONE WAY N – 118 apartments, 59 parking stalls
• 4201 STONE WAY N – 95 apartments, 22 parking stalls (formerly 4201 STONE WAY N – 51 apartments, 4 parking spots)
• 4453 STONE WAY N – 42 apartments, 15 parking stalls
• 4612 STONE WAY N – 40 small efficiency apartments, 0 parking
• 909 N 39TH ST – 153 apartments, 58 parking stalls. (This is an affordable housing project)
• 3926 AURORA AVE N – 120 hotel rooms, 121 parking stalls

The post Stone Way: Still Booming first appeared on The Urbanist.

The first session is today (November 19th) at the UW Bookstore in the U District from 2pm to 3:30pm. The second is tomorrow in Leif Erikson Hall from 6pm to 7:30pm, and the third is Thursday, November 21st at Wallingford Community Senior Service Center.

The Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) says it will consider the following upgrades to the corridor:

• Dedicated bus lanes and queue jumps;
• Signal upgrades (e.g., transit signal priority);
• Road channelization changes and/or turn restrictions; and
• Safety, pedestrian access, and intersection improvements.

The Move All Seattle Sustainably (MASS) coalition is pushing the City to add dedicated bus lanes along key Route 44 stretches in the U District and Ballard. The U District bus lanes will become even more important as a surge of light rail riders arrive in 2021 with the opening of U District Station. A more north-south-oriented city, Seattle doesn’t have many frequent crosstown bus routes, and the ones it does have are plagued by congestion and reliability issues (cough: Route 8). With smart upgrades, Route 44 could be the exception and show that Seattle can excel at crosstown bus service.

What is not being considered at this time is RapidRide branding, which includes red upgraded articulated buses, red upgraded bus stops, and off-board payment. The City promised a full “RapidRide+” upgrade of Route 44 with the Move Seattle Levy, which passed in 2015 with 58.7% of the vote. Seven new RapidRide corridors were pledged in all. But as for keeping that promise, a number of obstacles emerged.

A brief trip down nightmare lane

After Move Seattle passed, construction costs continued to escalate rapidly in red-hot Seattle, Donald Trump got elected and gutted federal transit grant programs, and then-Mayor Ed Murray spent 2017 battling back against multiple allegations of sexual abuse before resigning in September 2017 after the fifth claim surfaced.

This set up the year of four SDOT heads in 2018, as newly elected Mayor Jenny Durkan pushed out Scott Kubly without a replacement director ready–and she went through two interim directors before finally selecting Sam Zimbabwe to fill the role at the end of the tumultuous year. Without permanent leadership, the transportation agency struggled to build momentum in 2018–more often backtracking or delaying.

Even an agency humming along like a well-oiled bicycle on a straight away would have struggled with the headwinds it was facing. But for a City led by four different transportation directors in a year’s time it was debilitating. The Mayor began floating a “Move Seattle Reset” in the spring of 2018 to address shortfalls in the transit, bicycle, and pedestrian budgets. By September, it was clear that the Move Seattle Levy would no longer deliver Route 44, Route 40, and Route 48 as RapidRide lines and the four remaining corridors would have delayed timelines.

For Route 44 (and 40 and 48, too), what we get instead is lesser upgrades. Still, the changes could greatly improve service and quality of life for riders if they focus on the highest impact areas, which center around freeing buses as much as possible from traffic congestion.

RapidRide Rollout Schedule after "Reset"

The U District and Ballard bus lanes serve this purpose and they are relatively cheap to add. The biggest cost drivers for RapidRide projects are procuring new branded vehicles, repaving (especially if drainage or curbs are affected), and upgrading stops. Simply painting the outside lanes bus-only can speed up service without hitting those cost centers.

We have to get this right. Sound Transit isn’t planning crosstown light rail so the City and Metro are on their own. Despite its reliability issues, Route 44 is seeing rapid growth. Ridership averaged 7,500 daily riders in 2015, while it’s averaging 9,300 today. Rapid population growth in Ballard, Fremont/Wallingford, and the U District continues to drive up transit demand, as does climbing enrollment at the University of Washington. Demand in the Ballard-to-U District corridor is so strong, I even argued for a second frequent bus corridor along the waterfront. But first let’s get this Route 44 upgrade right.

UNIVERSITY DISTRICT
Tuesday, November 19
UW Bookstore
4326 University Way, Seattle 98105
2 – 3:30pm

BALLARD
Wednesday, November 20
Leif Erikson Hall
2245 NW 57th St, Seattle 98107
6 – 7:30pm

PHINNEY RIDGE & WALLINGFORD
Thursday, November 21
Wallingford Community Senior Service Center
4649 Sunnyside Ave N #140, Seattle 98103
6 – 7:30pm

The post Route 44 Upgrade Pursues Elusive High-Quality Crosstown Service first appeared on The Urbanist.

The existing bus lane in the neighborhood picks up a half-block west of Stone Way N as N 45th St bends north and turns into N Midvale Pl. That westbound bus lane extends as far as the Green Lake Way N intersection and includes a queue jump, the result of earlier corridor improvements for transit implemented several years ago.

“We estimate that the N Midvale Pl transit lane extension will lead to time savings for about 44% of bus trips,” said Ethan Bergeson of SDOT. “In addition to time savings, the transit lane extension will also have safety benefits because buses will not need to merge into the same lane as cars.” 

The vehicle-to-vehicle conflicts would be reduced in several ways:

• SDOT plans to partially eliminate an intersection point on N 45th St by removing the westbound lane west of the street bend where the street turns into N Midvale Pl. Currently, vehicles can stay straight on N 45th St to reach Midvale Ave N instead of following the bend, but that means crossing a lane of traffic heading the opposition direction on N 45th St. SDOT would remove the stop sign at this intersection and convert the north side of N 45th St between the bend and Midvale Ave N into angled back-in on-street parking.
• The new bus lane on N 45th St means that buses will not need to pull in and out of traffic, further reducing that potential conflict.

Rechannelization, as proposed, does mean changes for pedestrians. The existing midblock pedestrian crossing at the awkward bend-intersection would be moved back a half-block west on N Midvale Pl, which could mean longer walks for some people. This configuration realistically could result in safer crossings since the intersection at Midvale Ave N is more obvious to people driving. SDOT would also install a pedestrian crossing connecting the south side of N 45th St to the triangle island, which strangely is missing the marked crossing.

Under the preliminary schedule, improvements are planned for installation in winter 2020.

The post Spot Fix: Bus Lane Improvements Planned for Wallingford first appeared on The Urbanist.

The first project is on a spacious 35,000 square foot lot at 4106 Stone Way. The second is a snug 13,000 square foot lot sandwiched between Fremont Brewing and Urban Earth garden center at 3421 Woodland Park Ave N. Nonetheless, the first site will get only 113 homes and the second will get 123 homes. The project achieves more homes on a much smaller lot through the power of moderately-sized apartments and greater zoning capacity via imminent Mandatory Housing Affordability (MHA) rezones.

The first project is geared toward more of a luxury market and planning 87 underground parking spots–and by the way the developer is seeking a code departure to put the garage bay on Stone Way rather than N 42nd St (the side street), which the developer argues is too steep and has poor sight lines. The developer aims to hit 134,651 gross square feet and will have a MHA requirement of 6% (five units) or $13.75 per square foot (for in lieu payment of about $1.85 million). They aren’t broadcasting this MHA participation in their design packet, but their floor area ratio (FAR) of 3.75 (existing zoning allowed only 3.0) gives them away.

The second project is focused on modest apartments averaging 415 square feet in size, with 10 car parking spots and 136 bike parking spots planned. The smaller apartment sizes and smaller parking garage will translate into lower rents. Moreover, MHA participation will guarantee some new homes are affordable to low-income households (either 9% on-site or a $20 per square foot in-lieu fee).

Lots of homes for people rather than cars

Hybrid Architecture’s preferred scheme is a “Flying V” design could add some visual interest to the block while also allowing more light to the north where Urban Earth nursery sits–potentially defusing a landmine for the project.

Neither project is required to build off-street car parking because they are within an Urban Village and have access to frequent transit (Route 62 in this case). Even so, the first project still has a parking ratio of 0.77 stalls per unit and a large underground parking garage. The second project is taking greater advantage of waived parking minimums to build at a 0.08 ratio. This gives people within the building who really need a car the choice to get parking on-site, and a nudge to those who don’t need one. Some tenants would rather save money not subsidizing off-street parking for their neighbors, and solid transit, lots of bike parking, and access to the Burke-Gilman Trail provides plenty of good car-free options.

Partially, the different decisions may be driven by different intensity of zoning changes. The first project gains an extra story under MHA to five total–going from Neighborhood Commercial 40 (NC2P-40) to Neighborhood Commercial 55 (NC2P-55). Meanwhile, the second site goes from Commercial 40 (C-40) to Neighborhood Commercial 75 (NC2-75), which makes an eight-story design feasible. An higher “M1” intensity bumps the MHA requirement to 9% or $20 per square for this project.

The City could have opted to grant bigger upzones along Stone Way and gotten a larger percentage of MHA units and more market-rate units. Instead we see a one-story gain with the lowest “M” requirement intensity. Either way, it appears developers are itching to take advantage of the additional development capacity, giving another boost to the development of “Frelingford”–as I’ve playfully called the Fremont and Wallingford borderlands (don’t @ me).

Whatever the motivation, the end result is the second project aligns better with climate action goals and mode shift goals, while the first project’s large garage with a curb cut interrupting the sidewalk and Stone Way bike lanes continues in the American tradition of half-hearted change on transportation.

Is the case for a Stone Way curb cut convincing?

It appears the City is poised to support the code departure to build the Stone Way curb cut and access to 87-car garage. Both the Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections (SDCI) and the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) offered letters in support of the scheme, which the developer included in the design packet.

“Emily Ehlers (SDOT) sent an e-mail on September 8, 2018 in which she acknowledges the proposed Stone Way access curb alignment provides better sight lines, adequately alerts motorists of passing bicyclists, and allows space for vehicles to queue without blocking the sidewalk and that SDOT could support the Stone Way access,” the packet states. We’ll see if that works in practice.

The rationale for the code departure isn’t completely unreasonable. Building an access point on the steeper N 42nd St could lead to awkward sight lines, and the project does reduce the three existing curb cuts to one. However, the 87-car garage will create a much busier curb cut for people walking and biking. It seems like a shrinking the size of the parking garage even to a moderate 0.5 parking ratio (trimming 30 parking spots) could decrease the conflicts parking motorists create with pedestrians and cyclists.

The Northeast Design Review Board centered their comments from the first Early Design Guidance meeting on more facade modulation, which is designspeak for wanting lots of juts in and out and setbacks on the side of the building that won’t necessarily be functionally superior or more visually attractive, but does break up the blank “monolithic” facade which is deemed unsophisticated (side note: design boards and design guidelines and code seem overly obsessed with modulation). They also encouraged more attention to pedestrian features, which was more on the mark. The architect seems to have done a pretty good job responding and modulating as directed, as you can judge for yourself below.

As these projects likely move into the Recommendation phase of design review, you can still comment by contacting to the assigned City planner or attending the next design review meeting. For the five-story Stone Way design, contact Sean Conrad at sean.conrad@seattle.gov. For the eight-story Woodland Park Avenue project contact Abby Weber at abby.weber@seattle.gov. And remember passing the “citywide” MHA rezones makes projects like these possible and brings in big affordability contributions.

The post Two New Frelingford Projects Take Advantage of MHA but Show a Different Approach first appeared on The Urbanist.

At least 1,500 new apartment homes have been built in Frelingford since 2012, comparatively few have gone in the central districts of Fremont and Wallingford during that time span. Another 500 or so could be on the way based on construction and early designs.

I wrote about the 40 small efficiency homes planned at Stone Way and 47th St; those are still worming their way through design review. The 42 homes planned on Bridge Way–which the builder aims to make the first apartment building to meet the Living Building Challenge–are under construction. Three of the six floors have already emerged from the ground along the north side of Bridge Way.

Also under construction are 59 apartments designed by David Foster Architects at 4025 Stone Way N. The four story building has a handsome brick facade and simple elegance. Next door, 49 more apartments are planned by Clark Design Group in a similar vein. At 4453 Stone Way, 42 more apartments are planned in a four-story building. Each building will also have ground-floor retail on increasingly bustling Stone Way.

Along Aurora Avenue, 147 apartments long planned at 909 N 39th St also might finally be inching toward their master use permit.

The next batch of development includes two more Living Building Challenge contenders: office buildings at 900 N 34th St and 3524 Stone Way N. The new Stone Way five-story office project would replace buildings housing Stone Way Cafe, SeaOcean Books, and Hashtag Cannabis. Although billed as a green building, the developer proposes 110 underground parking stalls to go with approximately 90,000 square feet of office space and 6,000 to 8,000 square feet of street-level retail.

Based on the report from the first Early Design Guidance meeting, the building still has a ways to go to win support from the Northeast Review Board, which wanted to see more variety in massing options and more justifications for departures on Living Building Challenge standards.

The development boom is happening faster than the City is moving on the Mandatory Housing Affordability (MHA) program which would have provide an extra floor or two to redevelopment sites within Urban Villages like Fremont and Wallingford. That program has the Seattle City Council’s support, but is stalled out due to an appeal brought by homeowner groups united under the moniker SCALE. From a legal standpoint, that appeal doesn’t appear to be going terribly well for SCALE, but they have been succeeding in slowing down the process and delaying the upzones that unlock the affordability requirements.

The delay means a longer wait until every new apartment building or condominium brings guaranteed affordable homes to Fremont and Wallingford and urban villages across the city. Some Seattle corridors are in the midst of being transformed, and Stone Way is one of them. MHA could have made the boom more broadly shared across income groups.

The post Frelingford’s Stone Way Corridor Continues Building Boom first appeared on The Urbanist.

Some neighbors would dispute that the councils speak for them and point to elections to show they aren’t democratic–Wallingford residents are each required to pay $15 (or plead their case for a waiver) by tomorrow (Tuesday, April 24th) to participate in the WCC election on May 9th. Wallingford resident Paul Chapman, who ran unsuccessfully for a WCC board seat, last May pointed to the groups lack of published minutes and flouting of its own bylaws to illustrate his point.

“It’s hard to know if the WCC intentionally contravened its by-laws or if it was simply due to a lack of attention to details. Regardless, by failing to adhere to the spirit and letter of its by-laws, the WCC board is continuing a pattern of silencing the neighborhood voice by excluding broader engagement among the Wallingford community by concentrating control of the organization in the hands of an entrenched minority,” Chapman said. “The board has not provided the minutes of board meetings to the general membership since November of 2016, maintaining a lack of transparency and accountability.”

Much of the tension stems from the Mandatory Housing Affordability (MHA) program, which pairs modest upzones with mandatory contributions to low-income housing. Some Wallingford residents, such as the group Welcoming Wallingford, are organizing to pass MHA. Meanwhile, the WCC signed on to an Final Environment Impact Statement (FEIS) appeal seeking to block the rezone and affordability program. They’ve also printed and distributed anti-MHA lawn signs across the neighborhood.

“This pattern of silencing the neighborhood voice has been embodied in the WCC Board Appeal of the Seattle HALA MHA FEIS,” Chapman said. “A primary reason the WCC board entered into a legal appeal of the City’s environmental impact statement is because they saw ‘violations of citizen rights to meaningful participation’ and a lack of community engagement and transparency. However, while the WCC claims to “to encourage cooperative and democratic processes” and to ‘represent community interests,’ there was no advance notice to membership that the WCC Board was considering legal action. The general membership was not consulted nor given opportunity discuss whether the organization should start legal action. The board provided no minutes of the meeting where the decision was made. There was no transparency or democratic process.”

The WCC did not give much advance notice of its annual election for officers and board members. On April 15th the WCC posted an announcement on its website with the warning to get dues in within nine days or be ineligible to vote. Paying the poll tax at the poll would be too simple. WCC did email their subscriber list on April 3rd an update that included announcement of the Annual Membership meeting at the bottom, technically meeting the WCC by-laws dictate 30 days notice for the annual membership meeting. The by-laws also stipulate a lengthy nominating process that was supposed to start in January, when they didn’t hold a meeting. Nominations to be considered for a position were apparently due on April 18th three days after the website announcement. As such, it kind of seems like the same old guard leadership will stay in charge, with limited avenue for new input.

“I asked them if they had done outreach,” Welcoming Wallingford member Jessica Westgren said. “They started a mailing program, but by the last meeting I went to they hadn’t reached 50% of the Wallingford population before this vote.”

So why should you care who runs the Wallingford Community Council? The short answer is that we need to diversify the voices in neighborhood activism and reclaim the mantle of “neighborhood voice” from those who would abuse it.

The longer answer relates to history. It’s true that two years ago then-Mayor Ed Murray de-emphasized Neighborhood District Councils–to which the community councils get to elect representatives–by no longer earmarking City staff hours for attending District Council meetings. That move, announced in 2016, decreased the official power district councils (and thus community councils) wield, which had involved controlling three important neighborhood grant streams. Seattle’s Department of Neighborhoods Coordinator Kathy Nyland pointed to the need to design a system that better incorporates the views of younger people, people of color, and renters and encourages their participation.

“District Councils work for a limited segment of the overall population…residents attending District Council meetings tend to be 40 years of age or older, Caucasian, and homeowners,” Nyland said. “This is in contrast to the Seattle population: Median age of 36…34 percent are people of color…and 52 percent rent.”

Even with the change, community councils retain considerable influence as well-resourced special interest groups and from their decades of agitating–with many of them focusing on maintaining status quo zoning or downzoning. Often you hear single-family-zoning preservationist longingly look to the halcyon days of the early 1990’s when the City allowed community councils to rewrite their neighborhood plans and zoning just how these homeowner groups liked them–typically this meant as little multi-family zoning as possible. If you go back far enough in land use history, you reach the days when detached single-family zoning was devised with an aim of keeping people of color and lower class people out of wealthy white neighborhoods. Urban single-family zoning is not as outwardly as segregationist as the racial covenants that outlawed people of color from many Seattle neighborhoods in the early 1900’s, but the effect is very similar.

Plus, if the neighborhood planning process doesn’t go their way, some councils have shown themselves to be deep-pocketed and all too willing to sue to delay changes as we saw with not just the MHA FEIS appeal, but also the backyard cottage bill and on a project by project level, such as this delayed Phinney Ridge project.

For my part, I tried my hand running for the WCC in 2016. I lost to a guy who opposes Seattle’s Housing Levy and got nominated from the floor. In a way, I’m relieved I lost. I stopped going to WCC meetings, but the handful I’ve attended have been fairly excruciating–usually with at least 30 minutes dedicated to complaining about parking and the apartment dwellers who are taking “their” on-street spots. It might come as a revelation, but people who do not own a car (e.g., me) do not find parking loss a riveting topic. My impression was that people wanting to work on things other than blocking MHA and hoarding parking may not find much for them at a WCC meeting.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Community councils could focus on parking reform, tenant protections, bike network upgrades, safe pedestrian crossings, wider sidewalks, Vision Zero, street/alley activation, Barcelona superbocks, or an aggressive climate action plan. Imagine the possibilities and the attention we could lavish on making better places for people when we stop worrying so much about car storage!

The Wallingford Community Council’s annual membership meeting starts with member sign-in at 6:30pm on Wednesday, May 9th at the Good Shepherd Center. If you want to vote, you’ll have to pay your dues of get a waiver by tomorrow (April 24th). You must live within the WCC’s boundaries which run from SR-99 to I-5 and from Lake Union north to 65th Street. Or if that sounds too intimidating, Welcoming Wallingford would be glad to have you, no dues necessary.

Author’s note: This article has been updated to reflect that WCC did email their subscribers list on April 3rd which technically met the requirement for 30 days notice set out in the by-laws–even if the website announcement lagged somewhat.

Homeowner Group Coalition Sues to Block MHA Rezone

The post Neighbors Call Shenanigans on Wallingford Community Council’s “Democratic” Process first appeared on The Urbanist.

A small efficiency dwelling unit (SEDU) is Seattle’s technical term for an apartment between 220 and 300 square feet. Each must have a kitchen and bathroom–somewhat distinguishing it from the congregate microhousing that earned the ire of many in the Seattle commentariat. Efficiency apartments might ruffle some feathers, but they represent an affordable home for middle class Seattlites without many options.

Returning from Early Design Guidance, the proposal has trimmed three apartments and fleshed out the design palate the team would use. The ground-floor retail would get a tan brick facade with large windows framed by an ample awning overhead. Flower planters and half a dozen trees would upgrade a front parking lot with a gaping curb cut and some scrappy shrubbery. No off-street parking means no curb cut, improving the quality of space and the comfort of the neighboring Stone Way bike lane, which might be upgraded to a protected bike lane soon. No off-street parking is key to making small apartment buildings financially viable in expensive neighborhoods like Wallingford, as some commenters mentioned at the last design review meeting. With Route 44, Route 62, and the RapidRide E close by, the site is blessed with three frequent bus routes.

The project is fine-grained because it takes a small trapezoidal lot and makes it really shine with small touches like well-thought-out landscaping and inviting storefronts sized to host independent businesses rather than big chains–and above them apartments targeted at the middle class. The three-story building includes a basement with a small back courtyard facing Wallingford’s handsome U.S. Post Office with its tree lined full-block parking lot.

One area for improvements that the sides of the building are a little drab. Perhaps some murals or vines could liven up the blank walls?

Though only three stories tall, this building provides significant density, and it upgrades the intersection of Stone Way N and N 47th St from a parking-dominated void to lively urban storefronts along a continuous sidewalk. Wallingford could use a lot more projects in this vein. Attend the March 26th meeting or email comments to design review planner David Landry to support this project and the increased housing options it brings to Wallingford.

Alchemy Plans 43 Homes Next To Wallingford Post Office

The post This Small Wallingford Apartment Building Is Fine-Grained Urbanism at Its Finest first appeared on The Urbanist.