hugeasscity

UPDATE:  didn’t mean to lock down the comments — they’re now back open, no need to register.

Two evenings ago I started working on a new post, hit the save button, and was redirected to the hugeasscity homepage.  Went back, and found that my draft was not saved.  Tried again.  And again.  Same deal.  Busted.

The horror…  the horror… 

Wordpress apparently just up and decided it didn’t feel like working anymore.  I hadn’t changed anything, wasn’t doing anything different.   That computer systems can and often do fail inexplicably like this is, pardon my French, completely fucked. 

So I was totally locked out of creating or editing anything on the blog.  I couldn’t even post something about how the site was broken.  Frozen in time on a photo of pink dogwood flowers.

The Yahoo support guy in India told me it was Wordpress’s problem not theirs.  Wordpress is open source code, so OK fine, I’m on my own, you get what you pay for.  I know just enough about this stuff to be dangerous.  It’s like trying to diffuse time bomb without knowing which color wire to cut.  First I tried all the obvious and benign things — turn off plugins, switch to default theme, the database “repair” button (whatever the hell that does), but nada.

So I googled.  Others had experienced the same problem, but the only solution offered was to upgrade.  I’ve got techie roots, but something about the process of flailing away at computer code that I barely understand turns me into a mean and ornery man.  Hack hack hack, I’d rather be in the dentists chair. 

Somehow the first unzip of the Wordpress upgrade is hosed but I don’t realize it so the install fails, then I take some shots in the dark at other bits that may or may not have anything to do with anything, and then later in the day, just for the hell of it, I unzip that wordpress download again, and huh? — didn’t see those three folders in there the first time, so in they go, and then it says database update required and I recall reading that Yahoo Wordpress SQL format is different from the standard, and then uh-oh, five database errors listed, but then at the bottom the message says “database update successful,” and then sweet Jesus and holy shit, there it is, HAC back in all its glory, all upgraded and looking fresh and innocent as if nothing  ever happened.

And yes, it lets me write new posts and edit again.

But not so fast.  The main page shows fine, but individual post pages and comments won’t display.  Google again, and of course others have had this problem too, and so I’m clicking, skimming the arcane techno-babble, hoping for a miracle, and ZAM! a link to an obscure plugin that fixes the problem, just a single line of magic code:

<?php
/*
Plugin Name: Disable Canonical URL Redirection
Description: Disables the ”Canonical URL Redirect” 
features of WordPress 2.3 and above.
Version: 1.0
Author: Mark Jaquith
Author URI: http://markjaquith.com/
*/
remove_filter(‘template_redirect’, ‘redirect_canonical’);
?>

It could only have been God’s will.  Can I get a witness?  Who in the world is this guy Mark Jaquith who just totally saved my butt through his generous geekery?  I’ll never know.  Miraculous, this webby web.  Though also, I would submit, a deadly lonely place – endless, endless data, but not a soul to help you understand which parts matter, or what any of it means . 

The footer of the wordpress.org site has a tag line that reads “CODE IS POETRY.”  Right, and war is peace.  But don’t tell the coders — we best be letting them feel good about what they do. 

Masses of lushness bursting from everywhere.  How is it possible for so much plant matter to be created so fast out of nothing?

Strolling through Capitol Hill’s Cal Anderson Park on a nice day you get the feeling that you’re in a real urban neighborhood in a real city.  No other park in Seattle does it better.

WHEN SOUND TRANSIT Light Link Rail makes its debut this July, outside of downtown Seattle, not a single significant new private development will be there to greet it. Transit-oriented development (TOD) is widely recognized to be an ideal land-use pattern for achieving sustainable growth. But while our “T” is finally arriving, so far the “D” is a no-show. What happened, and what might the future hold for development?

That’s the opening paragraph of my piece on TOD in SE Seattle that ran in the Daily Journal of Commerce yesterday.  And sorry but that’s all you get to see unless you’re a paid subscriber.  An unbearable tease, no?  Though if you read this, you already know the gist of it.

UPDATE:  The DJC was kind enough to unlock the piece, so you can now read the whole thing.

Apparently the DJC still clings to that so-last-century notion that if information has value then people should pay for it.  How quaint.   In this century, journalists like Josh Feit — who is currently producing the most dynamic political reporting in Seattle — subsist on Ramen noodles.

It’s totally understandable that the DJC charges for content, and because they have a well established niche of readers they can get away with it.  But at the same time it’s unfortunate that, with their content inaccessible to most, they are missing out on being a part of vibrant local discussions on urbanism at sites like this, this, and even this, not to mention this.

(Sad that it has come to this — posting a Dilbert.  Shux, my bad.)

The trust thing:  Capitalism requires it to operate, but it cannot create it, and in fact, when allowed to run amok, will devour trust until it chokes to death on it.

Social trust is built upon cultural institutions that lie outside the realm of money.  So when a culture starts to see all life through the lens of monetary exchange, the sources of trust wither.  And away with trust goes security and community cohesion — two qualities of life that are huge determinants of human well being.

Then we learn that people in most “socialist” European countries are happier than we are.  In these places, so it appears, capitalism is balanced with a strong belief in the common good, and the important role that government can play in maintaining that balance is widely understood.  Trust is preserved, and people thrive.

Which, of course, must be why so many wing nuts can’t utter the word “socialism” without a Cheney-eque sneer of contempt, some members of the Republican National Committee going so far as to propose that the GOP draft a resolution to rename the opposition the “Democratic Socialist Party.”  You want freedom fries with that?

All wing-nuttery aside, it’s encouraging that the financial meltdown has led many to reassess our little experiment with trust-crushing, extreme free-market capitalism.  Although others, apparently not so much:  Last week Paul Krugman wrote:  “Wall Street insiders are taking the mildness of bank policy so far as a sign that they’ll soon be able to go back to playing the same games as before.”  Not that you should trust that liberal elitist Krugman…

What it is:  Long on data, short on analysis.  The list below is a sampling of HAC-relevant media that has come bouncing across my personal echo chamber in the last day or two.  Who has time to take it all in, much less interpret what it means?

(And one bonus tangent:  Every item below came to me by way of facebook updates, several of them repeated from more than one person.  The predictions that social networking sites like facebook are destined to become the centralized source for all of our information are looking more and more spot on. And it’s a compelling thing for sure, this distributed system for news, prefiltered by people who share your interests.  Of course that strength is also a weakness, since such a system will tend to reinforce isolated social bubbles — whither opposing viewpoints?)

• A video on urban form
• A NYT article on a car-free suburb in Germany
• A summary of the legislative session
• Seattle City Council candidate Mike O’Brien’s commentary on the tunnel
• The launch of Seattle’s new Pedestrian Master Plan
• A public hearing on Seattle’s new Housing Levy proposal
• A cheery little screed called Bound to Burn
  
• Clusterfuck Nation:

“The Great Wish across America is to resume the life of comfort-and-convenience that seemed so nirvana-like just a few short years ago, when the very constellations of the heavens might have been renamed after heroic Atlanta realtors and Connecticut hedge fund warriors, and the boomer portfolios groaned with earnings, and millions of graying corporate salary mules dreamed of their approaching retirement to a satori of golf and Viagra, and the interior decorators grew so rich installing granite countertops that they could buy their own houses in the East Hampton, and every microcephalic parking valet in Las Vegas qualified for a bucket full of Ninja mortgages, and Lloyd Blankfein could dream of divorcing his wife to marry his cappuccino machine.”

[ Governor Gregoire speaking at the tunnel legislation signing ceremony today at the Seattle Aquarium ]

Mayoral candidate Michael McGinn said that yesterday, in reference to the plan to replace the Alaskan Way viaduct with a deep bore tunnel. Today Governor Gregoire is scheduled to sign the bill that authorizes the tunnel.

The conventional wisdom on this is that the tunnel is a done deal, we should all be grateful that a decision was finally made, and it’s time to move on. From this perspective, McGinn’s anti-tunnel position would seem to be a very risky, and perhaps even foolishly naive political move. But if you ask me, it demonstrates the kind of integrity and leadership we desperately need if we hope to successfully transform our society before it’s too late.

Conventional wisdom doesn’t cut it any more.

I’ve ridden my bike under this thing more than 800 times and somehow have remained lethargically ambivalent about it. Sure is big and fancy all glistening in light and shadow.

When it was completed back in 2001, some folks — most notably Peter Steinbrueck — were not so equivocal. The main gripe was that it blocked the view corridor from Capitol Hill down to Elliott Bay — true enough. And the fallout has made it far more difficult to get new street overpass structures approved in Seattle.

The other major flaw in this “galleria” is that it doesn’t do much other than look interesting. Ideally, the goal of putting up such a structure would to form a comfortable urban room below, where people would gather, out of the weather, to window shop or sit at cafe tables spilling out on to the sidewalk. But this one has an inherent defect — it’s out of human scale — too high and wide to create a cozy sense of enclosure. And besides, there aren’t enough street-oriented businesses along that block of Pike to sufficiently activate the street. The Convention Center is an internally focused use.

It does block the rain. A nice perk for conventioneers walking to a cab, but when it’s raining in Seattle it’s also usually too cold to hang out at a sidewalk table. And when it isn’t raining we crave the sun, but get robbed by overhead structures.

Huh, maybe I don’t like this thing after all.

It was pretty much just biggerer and biggerer up until the early 1970s when everything changed. Since then, the plot has thickened, as it were. A few highlights:

• Buh-bye industry.
• Hello more and more driving.
• We got better at home energy efficiency but we also chose bigger homes and filled them more stuff that uses energy — a zero sum gain.
• Er, I skimmed the part about commercial buildings so I’ll hazard a guess that operational efficiency gains were overwhelmed by more energy intensive office equipment (i.e. computers), and also possibly by more building per capita.

Total U.S. per capita energy consumption in 1950 was one third lower than it was in 2007. Same goes for greenhouse gas emissions, give or take, since the two are roughly proportional.

Over the past three decades or so, the general trend has been to do more with less, but all told there has been more more and less less, so that net energy use has risen.

Any reality-based assessment of the state of the planet indicates that we must tackle lifestyle in addition to efficiency. The combination of continued advances in efficiency with a scaled-back lifestyle more like how people lived in 1950 has the potential to get us where we need to be to avoid catastrophic climate change.

This might mean living in a smaller home in a neighborhood where you can walk to a market or a bus stop. Or perhaps it might also mean spending less time in a car and owning fewer home entertainment systems and flying less. You know, like the way they suffered so horribly back in those dismal 1950s.

When Obama chose Republican Ray LaHood to lead the U.S. Department of Transportation last December, transit advocates were nonplussed. But they must be serving up the hard stuff in the White House, cause here’s what LaHood had to say last week:

“In the past, population and economic growth have always led to large increases in highway travel. This is because most communities’ have built transportation systems that only allow people and goods to move by road. This Administration believes that people should have options to get to work, school, the grocery or the doctor that do not rely solely on driving. We want to transform our transportation system into a truly multimodal system with strong alternatives to driving in order to maximize highway capacity, combat traffic congestion, reduce our reliance on oil and decrease greenhouse gas emissions…

“Linking transportation and land-use planning to promote improved access to transit and creating walkable, bikeable communities will increase overall mobility and benefit all Americans.”

Read the rest here (pdf). It’s all so right on. What the hell is going on in America?

If not strong Kool-Aid, then perhaps someone has been channeling Lewis Mumford, who in 1958* wrote:

“The fatal mistake we have been making is to sacrifice every other form of transportation to the private motorcar… That is why we need a better transportation system, not just more highways… If we want to make the most of our national highway program, we must keep most of the proposed expressways in abeyance until we have done two other things. We must replan the inner city for pedestrian circulation, and we must rebuild and extend our public forms of mass transportation.”

Well, as they say, better half a century late than never.

*The Highway and the City, Architectural Record, April 1958.

[ Lowrise apartments on 10th Ave, just north of Broadway on Capitol Hill ]

About a year ago the good people of the City of Seattle became exceedingly alarmed about the assault of the awful townhouse. Piling on, I put forth a theory on the root causes of the suckiness, and also pointed out that the City is full of examples of good alternatives to townhouses for lowrise housing, but that we almost never build them anymore.

Tonight the City of Seattle is holding a public meeting on a proposal for a new administrative design review process that would apply to townhouse development. The idea has been gaining momentum. I’m agnostic.

No doubt there are cases when design review can enable a better design response. But I can’t help being skeptical about whether design review will have the power to put much of a dent in the fundamentals that are driving the 4-pack model — condo liability, the requirement to accommodate cars, and inexpensive cookie-cutter design and construction.

When you’re out of ideas, recycle old ones — so I’m posting pictures of some nice old lowrise apartments. We need to figure out the current barriers to this building type, and then dismantle those barriers. Because getting better housing in Seattle’s lowrise zones is about more than just raising the bar for townhouses. At some not too distant point in the future, lowrise apartments like these examples will start to seem a lot smarter than townhouses, and the City’s interests would be well served by enabling more building type diversity in its lowrise zones ASAP.

[ Narrow lowrise apartment near 13th and Spring in the Central District ]

Not too shabby, this Brix condo building on Broadway.  Clean, well-proportioned, legible design; no extraneous decoration, and not afraid to let one style run the entire height and length of the facade; big but not monstrous; scaled down on the back side of the block with ground-related entries.   Even the retail tenants — Broadway institutions Dillitante and Vivace — are about as good as a building could hope for.  Well done, Mithun and Schnitzer West.

Of course, you get what you pay for, and this is not a cheap building.  The price tag on the smallest units — 550 square foot “open one bedrooms” — is about $300k (needless to say, sales have slowed as of late).  This is the reality of market rate multifamily housing:  good buildings are expensive to construct, and the cost gets passed on to the buyer.

Even if it had been designed to be “affordable” housing, the cost picture wouldn’t be much different, because the guts of the mid-rise multifamily buildings are typically all about the same — it’s only the facades and finishes that vary. So if we hope to keep our densifying neighborhoods like Capitol Hill economically diverse, we ought to be pushing for more programs like the proposed Seattle housing levy renewal — serious market intervention is the only way it’s going to happen.

[ The guts of Brix, under construction in December 2007 ]

And one more thing about the architecture of Brix:  hmm, do I detect a bit of a Mithuny signature?  Check out Gallery condos in the photo below:

[ Gallery condos on 2nd Ave in Belltown ]

Now, take three floors of Gallery for your base, turn Brix sideways and stack it on top, borrow the rooftop spoiler from the NBBJ Federal Courthouse, et voila: Mosler Lofts!

[ Mosler Lofts ]

As the latest downcycle of our fanastically cruel economic system continues to shred the design community, my motivation has hit the wall. 

Your turn.  What’s on your mind?  An open thread.  Or something. 

A: This. No this. No this. No this. OK, I give up.

If you’d be interested in hearing some far more cogent and nuanced perspectives on that question, you may want to take your lunch this Friday May 1 in the Bertha Landes Knight Room at Seattle City Hall. There from 12 to 1:30pm you’ll find part one of a Town Hall series on “Visioning Puget Sound Region’s Transportation Future,” featuring these panelists:

Jan Drago, Chair, Transportation Committee, Seattle City Council
Kevin Desmond, General Manager, King County Metro
Chuck Ayers, Executive Director, Cascade Bicycle Club
Carla Archambault, General Manager, Zipcar Seattle
Eric de Place, Senior Researcher, Sightline Institute
Carla Saulter, Transit advocate and author of the Bus Chick blog on Seattle PI.com

My friend Eric de Place was kind enough to provide hugeasscity with a preview of his current thinking on the topic: “Oh, dude, you don’t even know, man. It’s gonna be crazy: jetpacks, freaking conveyor belt sidewalks, and lots of segways.” (Now, the cool thing about blogs is that there is zero accountability, which means you the reader can never be sure whether Eric actually said that, or I made it up. Truth be told, Eric is one of my favorite Seattle blogstars — cause though he’s a certified wonk he also writes things like this: “I’m glad they started a blog because now instead of waiting for one big annual reminder of my mortality, I can find frequent updates about how my life is passing.”)

Twenty years. Something like three quarters of a million more people in the region. Peak oil peaked. A few degrees warmer. That should be more than enough to put some serious fog in any crystal ball.

Looking back 20 years, nothing much changed in the transportation landscape of the Puget Sound region. Yes, there was incremental change along the established trajectory (i.e. more cars and roads), but nothing transformational. The prospects for transformational change appear to be much greater in the coming 20 years. But that’s what they all say.

Just most of them.

Whoa.  Did somebody just hack this blog?

As I was saying, check out this excellent essay on transit, car-dependence, and compact, walkable communities.  It was written for conservatives by a conservative (just guessing) who is assistant editor at this conservative online publication that is part of this this conservative institute.  (Yes, and the recommendation comes by way of this famous conservative blogger who is fond of reminding us that he’s not like all those other so-called conservatives.)

Don’t trust me?  Take a few sips:

…Support for government-subsidized highway projects and contempt for efficient mass transit does not follow from any of the core principles of social conservatism.

…A common misperception is that the current American state of auto-dependency is a result of the free market doing its work. In fact, a variety of government interventions ensure that the transportation “market” is skewed towards car-ownership.

…We often hear complaints that transit systems do not earn profits. This is true (with a few exceptions), but this does not mean that transit systems are a waste of money. When was the last time you heard someone complain about how a local road never manages to turn a profit? If we held roads and transit projects to similar standards of profitability, we would build very few roads indeed.

…Pro-highway, anti-transit, anti-pedestrian policies work against the core beliefs of American conservatives in another and even more important way: they create social environments that are hostile to real community.

…Since businesses are obliged by zoning restrictions to locate far away from residential areas, most Americans drive to every store they visit. This means that store visits are often discrete trips that must be undertaken consciously and planned out ahead of time. As a consequence, shoppers will want to visit stores that carry the most diverse inventory—Wal-Mart, Costco, et al.—and avoid shops that specialize in one particular kind of good—the local paint store or flower shop, for instance.

…In neighborhoods where it is easy to walk, residents see their neighbors often, and are given ample opportunity for spontaneous or chance encounters. Community is built out of many weak inter-personal links, and seeing your neighbors informally, episodically, but frequently reinforces these links.

…Car-dependency also requires the nuclear family to become a primary transportation resource. Parents must shuttle their children to school, soccer practice, and even their friends’ houses until the children can shuttle themselves (at peril to their lives) in late adolescence.

Precisely.  Exactly.  Yup.

The author was once employed at the totally awesome Center for Neighborhood Technology, which explains a lot.

Three neighbors, on the ridge somewhere between Leschi and Mount Baker.

First, the 411:
AIA Seattle’s annual What Makes It Green? awards event is this Tuesday, April 28th, 5 - 7pm at the Farestart Restaurant at 7th and Virginia. It will be a unique opportunity to view examples of the latest and best green design efforts in the region.

Second, the gratuitious rant:
Can we please, for the merciful love of the deity of your choice, move on from chattering endlessly about what is and isn’t green? Cause anybody with a pulse who’s paying the slightest bit of attention already knows. OK, so the What Makes It Green? competition is a good thing and doesn’t deserve snark, but something about that tag line question brings out the petulant bee-awtch in me — like a tipping point in a rising ocean of green cognitive dissonance.

Like most in the endless parade of green lectures and meetings in Seattle, the AIA event this Tuesday will be overflowing with big-brained folks who possess piles of knowledge, skills, and desire to make green development happen. But the vast a majority never get the opportunity to implement all their great ideas in real projects. And that is our integral predicament: we know what to do, but we’re not doing it. Green buildng is not a design problem or an engineering problem, it is a people problem — institutional, political, economic, cultural.

Take for example the new Weber Thompson HQ that has been piling up green design awards. The two key design features that make that building most exceptional — passive ventilation and daylighting — have been understood and practiced in buildings for millennia. It’s not the design that is the big mystery here. No, the mystery that we need to solve is why, given the dire need to make buildings more energy efficient, isn’t every new midrise office building being designed for no air-conditioning in a temperate climate like Seattle’s?

There is more processing power in an iPod than would be required to monitor and provide real-time optimization of energy use in a large building. So why is that most of our buildings are operated as if the integrated circuit had never been invented?

Over the past half century it has become blindingly obvious that the single most important strategy for greening cities is to reduce car dependence. So why is it that in the vast majority of Seattle, we still have laws that require on-site parking for development? And why is it that after Metro bus ridership has risen 20 percent over the past three years it now faces a 20 percent budget shortfall and has to go begging to the State for permission to establish new revenue sources, even as the State signs off on $2.4 billion for an underground bypass freeway for cars?

Transit-oriented development (TOD) is widely recognized to be a critical ingredient for sustainable growth in the Puget Sound region. So why is it that so little progress has been made in terms of planning for and establishing TOD at the new light rail stations in Seattle? And why such animosity towards our established policy experts in sustainable growth and urbanism when they propose policy to promote TOD at the State level where it actually would stand a chance of being effective?

It is not new information that sprawling development is destroying salmon habitat and creating massive runoff pollution in Puget Sound. So why is it that as you read these words, billions of dollars and the creative energies of millions of people are being directed towards creating the same formulaic combination of pavement and dispersed single-use buildings that we all know is killing the planet?

It is not, I am afraid, because we don’t know what makes it green.

>>>

Ah well, that’s this world over
Ah well, next one begins
Ah well, that’s this world over
You sadly grin…

Will you tell them about that far off and mythical land
And how a child to the virgin came?
Will you tell them that the reason why we murdered
Everything upon the surface of the world
So we can stand right up and say we did it in his name?*

*This World Over lyrics by XTC, written in the context of the threat of nuclear war during the Reagan years, but the “ah well” sentiment nails what often seems to be the prevailing attitude today as well.

Wow. And now the PI’s on it.

My previous takes here and here.

On Wednesday the City of Seattle announced some excellent new proposals to promote energy efficiency in buildings, see related stories here, here, and here (too bad the DJC is a pay site). It’s all good stuff, but what I find particularly compelling is the proposal to require commercial and multifamily buildings to track and report their energy use.

Starting in 2010, the new reporting rules will apply to residential buildings with 20 or more units. For the past three years GGLO (my employer) has been conducting a study of energy use that has focussed on midrise mixed-use buildings that fall in this category. One of the motivations for the study is that there is very little information available on real-world energy use in multifamily buildings.

The plot above shows a summary of energy use for all the buildings in the GGLO study, expressed in terms of energy use intensity (EUI), which is energy use, per square foot of floor space, per year. So how do these buildings rate compared to the status quo? That’s a much harder question to answer than you would think — there simply isn’t a reliable regional average EUI for this building type.

The best available data source is the EIA’s Residential Energy Consumption Survey, but their sample is not large enough to produce accurate numbers for a specific region and building type. Furthermore, for multifamily buildings the survey does not include energy use in the building common spaces, i.e. hallways, rec rooms, parking garages, etc. But the GGLO study has shown that energy consumed in common spaces accounts for about 20 to 30 percent of total building energy use.

In the U.S, buildings consume nearly half of all energy, and produce 43 percent of CO2 emissions. The importance of reducing energy use in buildings is becoming widely acknowledged, and programs like the 2030 Challenge are beginning penetrate popular consciousness. But one wrinkle is that the 2030 Challenge calls for buildings to reduce their energy use in comparison to a regional average for existing buildings — and for multifamily that baseline data point doesn’t exist.

When the new City of Seattle program for reporting on energy use kicks in, we will finally start to amass the data we need to assess where we are, and how far we need to go. But I’ll also add that based on experience, although collecting energy use data would seem like a relatively straightforward task, it’s going to be a massive undertaking to obtain and process this data city-wide.

1.  Worldchanging:

Here are 10 big, difficult, world-changing concepts we can get behind…

10. BUILD NO NEW HIGHWAYS:  It’s time to stop building highways, and stop developing the disconnected, suburban sprawl they support…

2.  Mayoral candidate Michael McGinn:

Today Michael announced his opposition to the Alaskan Way Viaduct replacement plan emerging in the Legislature. “This deal keeps getting worse”, said Michael. “As Mayor, I will not authorize the use of city tax dollars for the tunnel or associated cost overruns.”

(note:  this post was entirely fueled by facebook.  meh.)

She was born in spring, but I was born too late
Blame it on a simple twist of fate*

At the corner of Terry and Stewart, the 37-story Aspira is destined to be the last of the bubble-era downtown high-rise residential projects to come on line, right on the heels of Escala.  It’s been a good run, and a major accomplishment for the City of Seattle to bring in so much new housing to the downtown area.  But dang, it’s gotta hurt being so late to the party.

Aspira will deliver 231 apartments, 6000 sf retail, and 355 parking stalls, with 5 levels above, and two levels below-grade (some of the stalls replace the pre-existing surface parking for the church next door).  Designed by LMN, the project will meet BuiltGreen standards.  No hiding the fact that it’s just a glass tower, but I like how it’s not afraid to be boxy, and how the punched-in balconies reinforce the checkerboard. 

Terry Street is a designated Green Street, and it is hoped that it will eventually provide a pedestrian-friendly connection all the way to Lake Union.  The photo below shows how Aspira meets Terry, with retail at the base topped by five levels of parking.  Presumably those randomly arranged boxes will hold planted material that will soften the parking deck facade.

Some of the more recent downtown high-rise completions include 1521 2nd Ave, 5th and Madison, Mosler Lofts, Gallery, The Four Seasons, The Olivian, Olive8, and The Parc.  Numerous others have been killed or delayed.  Possibilities for next up high-rise projects include the Pine Street Group’s 240-foot twin tower at 6th and Lenora, and HAL’s 400-foot tower at 2116 4th Ave, but nothing firm has been announced.  The DJC recently reported that the Lexas plans to break ground on their 1200 Stewart project in spring or summer 2010. 

In any case, there will no doubt be a major dip in the flow of new downtown housing coming on-line over the next few years.  So in all liklihood, any hit that Aspira takes over it’s timing in the near term will be temporary. 

The interesting thing to watch will be to what extent all the new housing works as a catalyst to transform downtown.   And in particular, will all the high-end housing help pave the way for more moderately priced housing projects downtown, or is it a given that market forces will always keep housing prices high in the downtown of an economically successful major city?

*Dylan

Happy global warming scenarios like the methane “time bomb“  have the tendency to push my imagination toward delusional futuristic realms in which hastily built nuclear reactors sprout up in urban neighborhoods as a last resort.  But that’s just me.  And James Lovelock.

Of course that’s no nuclear power plant cooling tower in the photo above — it’s the Temple de Hirsch Sinai Alhadeff Sanctuary at 16th and Pike in the Central District, built in 1960 and designed by B. Marcus Priteca, who also designed the Langston Hughes Center.

But hold on: the thing is, micro-nuclear is not just a delusion.  Google “micro-nuclear” and the first hit announces this:

Toshiba has developed a new class of micro size Nuclear Reactors that is designed to power individual apartment buildings or city blocks. The new reactor, which is only 20 feet by 6 feet, could change everything for small remote communities, small businesses or even a group of neighbors who are fed up with the power companies and want more control over their energy needs.

WTF you say?  How could you not have heard about this before?  And um, wouldn’t there be preposterous security and safety risks with such a system?

And so while you’re still furrowing your brow over this, you think, well, technology moves so fast it’s impossible to keep up with it all, and anyway you’ve probably got lots of other things to think about right now, you need to check your facebook, so you just file this one away for the time being, maybe to bring it up casually a few days later over drinks with friends.

Or, perhaps your curiosity drives you to take another 30 seconds and drill a bit further down the list of google hits, and just maybe you get lucky like I did and you click on hit number 12:

This story got picked up by Dvorak Uncensored, Engadget, Gizmodo, Wired, and others. Strangely, I could find no mention of this on Toshiba’s main corporate site, and I know they do some stuff with nuclear reactors in Japan. Eventually, someone actually asked Toshiba about it and confirmed it was a hoax.

Isn’t the information age fabulous?

In the photo above, from left to right, along the north side of Denny Way just west of Aurora Ave: Taylor 28, Hyatt Place Hotel/Apartments*, and Marselle Condos. 

In Seattle, the combined effects of zoning and construction-type economics has led to the prevalence of a mixed-use residential building form affectionately known as the “bread loaf” (see for example Breadloaves & Pencils).  The NC-65 zone was essentially written for this building type, which puts five stories of wood frame on top of a one story concrete base, typically with multiple parking levels below grade.  The sweet spot for building depth is about 70 feet, which accomodates both a double loaded corridor plan, and a double row of parking stalls below.  Building length tends to be maximized, so you end up with a 70×65-foot slab two or three hundred feet long — not a particularly inspiring form. 

But to me, what’s more uncanny than the fact that these three of loaves happened to land in a row, is where that row is located.  As you may notice in the photo above, it’s not exactly a cozy pedestrian-oriented urban village.  Need a gas station, a car wash, or a convenient place to store your white Escalade stretch limo?  You’re covered.    

Denny Way west of I-5 is one of the most pedestrian-hostile arterials in the entire city.  The need to accomodate four travel lanes leaves very little room for sidewalk, and eliminates the possiblity for substantial planting strips or parallel parking to buffer pedestrians from fast moving traffic.  You might think that new development would be seized on as an opportunity to set new buildings further back from Denny and humanize the sidewalk, but as far as I can tell it has yet to happen.

The entire length of the Marselle condo building directly abuts the Aurora exit ramp.  Are there people who don’t notice such subtleties when they go condo shopping?

Oh, and things are going to get really interesting in this area if and when deep-bore tunnel construction begins.  Sixth Ave has been proposed as the primary connector from Mercer to points south through the tunnel.  Yummy — a depressed freeway entrance ramp.   

Of course, the main selling point for this location is its proximity to downtown.  That it is.  And the plaza at Denny and 5th Ave is a hidden gem of an amenity.  Seattle Center is also nearby, though that’s more of an infrequent destination than a regularly visited neighborly gathering place.  

But even being so close to downtown, it’s hard to imagine how this location can compete with so many other established, complete city neighborhoods.  And not only will these three loaves be competing with each other and with other neighborhoods for tenants: just across Denny is the mammoth Archstone Belltown apartment high rise (photo below). “Lease Today!”

But here’s the deal:  I declare that these developments shall be forgiven for every bit of their loafiness if they succeed in catalyzing a transformation of the Denny-Aurora area into a place that’s pleasant and safe for humans who don’t happen to be protected by a two-ton glass and steel shell.

*The Hyatt is concrete frame and is two or three stories taller than your typical bread loaf — it got a little more yeast.

Sadly, no.

But ooh, I do love a good bar chart, and so couldn’t stop myself from doing my part to keep this one bouncing around the echo chamber — all the more so because I found it on that other blog with “ass” in the name.

As reported back in 2003 by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, Washington State has the most regressive tax system in the nation.  Now’s the time for a dose of disaster socialism.

What’s all this then, Seattle’s first Euro-modern mid-rise housing? One way to check is if you can take major sections of the building, flip them upside down in your mind’s eye, and it all still looks about the same.  As in, vertical symmetry.  Apparently the designers think we don’t need a cornice or some other decoration to remind us where the top of the building is.  Audacious.

Located on the northeast corner of Westlake and Denny in South Lake Union, they call it Rollin Street Flats, and it was designed by Portland-based Ankrom Moisan.  That firm is currently designing another project right next door at 975 John St, and also is responsible for the not-so-Euro — more Floridian, you might say — stocky hulk known as Mirabella.

Up until now, NBBJ’s Alley 24 was about the most Euro midrise project in Seattle.  But Rollin St pushes it further with the picture frame motif — like Pb Elemental’s cliche trademark writ large (not that Pb invented it).   And I can’t help thinking that Rollin St must have been heavily influenced by the building shown at the bottom of this post.

All rambling aside, I like it a lot.

[ Aerial photo of Thornton Place, as of March 13, 2009 ]

Cruising by Northgate Mall on I-5, the nearly completed Thornton Place evokes images of sci-fi outposts rising from the barren landscapes of distant planets.  In reality, Thornton Place is, in fact, a daring pioneer in a built environment that is likewise hostile to human life.  And the conversion of nine acres of asphalt into the development shown in the photo above is phenomenal accomplishment: Thornton Place is Seattle’s first real transit-oriented development (TOD).

Aye, it’s a big one: 109 condos, 278 apartments (20 percent affordable), a 14-screen cinema, 50,000 sf of retail, and a 143-units of senior housing, along with a new daylit section of Thornton Creek.  The block is roughly 600 feet square — about twice the length of typical Seattle block.

Ideally, it would have been better to break up the block with bisecting streets, though some folks who object to the size of the project would seem to be under the impression that everything you need to know about urban development can be picked up from a few chapters of Jane Jacobs.  Small-scale, incremental development is wonderful.  But in some cases, big projects make sense, and Thornton Place is one of those cases.

Northgate has been targeted for growth by city planners for decades:  It is a designated Urban Center, a bus transit hub and future light rail station area.  But the existing car-oriented, single-use built environment around the mall is a highly unappealing site for small-scale mixed-used residential development — what developer would risk being the lonely pioneer amidst a sea of big box and parking lots?  In contrast, a large project like Thornton Place creates a center of gravity powerful enough both to keep itself alive, and to be a catalyst for future adjacent development.

[ Thornton Place, rendering via Stellar Holdings ]

And no, Thornton Place will never be the ideal walkable community, but it gets about as close to that ideal as you could realistically expect, given its context.  As mentioned above, reconnecting the existing street grid through the project would have been a good urban design move, but then who would pay for those streets?  They ain’t cheap.  For the Burien Town Square project — a similar pioneering outpost — the stars aligned to bring in $7 million in grants to pay for interior streets.

In any case, Northgate neighbors objected to through-streets over fears of increased traffic.  And a north-south through-street would have interrupted the creek bed.  All and all, given the circumstances, the Thornton Place plan does an admirable job of breaking down the block and creating a permeable site, with a dogleg street in the northwest corner, and numerous pedestrian walkways, most of which are permanent public easements.

The project includes 880 subterranean parking stalls, which sounds like a lot for a site next to a transit hub.  But through no small amount of cajoling, the developer was able to convince the City and County to allow about 350 of those stalls to be shared as Metro Park&Ride stalls.  This enabled a reduction of the total stall count to about 200 below what city code normally requires. At $40k a stall, that’s $8 million not spent on parking.  You’d think shared parking arrangements like this would be a no-brainer, but they are still almost unheard of in Washington State.

[ Rendering of Thornton Place interior open space ]

The intended social heart of the development is an internal plaza in the northwest quadrant (see rendering above).  It’s a space that turns its back on the outside world, but was there really any choice when the outside world is currently a wasteland of giant mall parking lots?  Given the density of residences and the draw of the movie theaters, this plaza has great potential to become a vibrant people place.

Obviously, the massive box of a cinema is the clunker of the project, and not only physically. Mega-retail that must by necessity draw from a wide geographical area is antithetical to pedestrian-oriented communities.  Even though someday lots of people may ride the train to the movies, it still means other neighborhoods are likely to be deprived of a local theater.

The 2.5-acre landscaped area around the daylit creek provides an open space with a character opposite to that of the plaza:  It’s green, relatively quiet, and extends to the outside borders of the project.  When the landscape grows in and development starts to fill in across the streets, this open space will be a cherished amenity. And while the ecological contribution of the daylit creek to salmon habitat may be relatively minor, the symbolic value is immense.

Subtracting off the 2.5 acre open space and another one acre for the cinema, the net density for the project comes out to 96 dwelling units per acre.  Remember how HB1490 proposed allowing at least 50 units/acre in high-capacity transit station areas?  Here’s an example that about doubles that density with a combination of three and six story buildings — no high-rise necessary.

All said, what makes Thornton Place so noteworthy is also the biggest challenge to its success:  the location.  Market rate rents are expected to be just under $2/sf, while condos start at $300k for 600 sf.  This pricing is competitive with similar housing in established neighborhoods like Ballard.  Which would you choose?

But it would behoove us to figure out how to make developments like Thornton Place work.  Large-scale mixed-use infill projects are likely to be the essential catalytic medicine for bringing transformational change to countless urban and suburban malls across the country.

I’m doing some research on the relationship between density and energy use in buildings.  Can any of you big-brained readers point me to sources of the best available science?

The EIA’s Residential Energy Consumption Survey and Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Survey are good sources, but do not provide quantitative data on density.

In general, energy use per household can be expected to decline as density increases, because smaller units require less energy to heat/cool/light, and because multifamily units share walls, which reduces heat loss.  But unfortunately there are heaps of variables that can complicate this relationship.

Ideally, my goal is to establish an order of magnitude approximation, as in:  an X percent increase in housing unit density will result in a Y percent reduction in building energy use.

Please help!

[ Rainier Beach Light Link Station, at the corner of MLK and Henderson:  no TOD happening here any time soon ]

According to this Seattle Times piece, the recession ate it.  But that’s too convenient a scapegoat — no doubt partially to blame, but there’s more to the story.

When Sound Transit Light Link Rail starts running this summer, outside of the downtown stations not a single significantly sized new private development will be on the ground to greet it.  Zip.  Nada.

Meanwhile, during the last development cycle mid-rise mixed-use residential projects grew like weeds in neighborhoods all over the city.

A year ago the Seattle Times reported that private developers had planned 1,500 housing units within a 10-minute walk to a southeast Seattle light rail station.  Remarkable yes, but the question is, why didn’t any of these projects get under way before the bust, like they seemed to have no trouble doing in much of the rest of Seattle?  It’s not as if opening day for light rail was a tightly held secret.

The primary reason is that the value added by the light rail line alone is not enough to make up for the comparatively low rents in southeast Seattle.  As discussed here, since construction costs are relatively fixed, and land is typically a small fraction of the total cost of development, other neighborhoods that can demand higher rents simply pencil better.  And thus so far along the MLK corridor the notable trailblazers have been the Seattle Housing Authority’s Rainier Vista and New Holly.

The one and only one large private development that may break ground by the time the train opens is the Othello Partners project adjacent to the the Othello Station. In addition to deep-pocketed financiers, there are two key reasons why this project has progressed further than any other:  (1) the availability of a large development site at a prime corner location, and (2) a city park immediately adjacent to the site. Number one speaks the importance of site assembly and the economies of scale that can be achieved in large housing projects.  And number two speaks to the importance of public investment as a catalyst for private development.

The MLK light rail corridor in southeast Seattle stands to be a revealing testing ground for what it takes to create new transit-oriented communities in an urban area with a deficient built environment, as well as a rich and fragile cultural mosaic.  So far, results show that if we rely completely on the private sector we better not get our hopes up.  But then we shouldn’t be too surprised, given examples of successful TOD like Collingwood in Vancouver, B.C., for which the public sector played an essential, multi-faceted role.

This is what Alaska Junction in West Seattle looks like today, looking southeast.  The building in the background is a nearly completed seven-story residential building known as Mural, developed by Harbor Properties, and designed by Hewitt Architects.

Shown below is a rendering of the proposed building for that money corner site.   The project just had its fourth Design Review Board meeting, at which it was decided that the developer, Connor Homes, would have to come back for yet another round.  Read all the gory details here, if you can stand it (I couldn’t).

While I have to admire the tenacity of the DRB and West Seattle residents, should there be a limit to how long this process can be dragged out?  The cost to the developer must be in the hundreds of thousands by now.  Is this an example of the DRB working as intended to enforce appropriate design, or is it Seattle process run amok?  Discuss.

[ Rendering:  Weber Thompson, via West Seattle Blog ]

On California Ave, just north of Fauntleroy, this is West Seattle’s tallest building:  the 73-unit, eight-story Cal-Mor Circle, low-income housing owned by Seattle Housing Authority.

UPDATE:  Tracy from WSB corrected me:  “We actually have a NINE-story building in West Seattle … Alaska House in The Junction, 42nd SW just north of Alaska.”