Don't look now, but your bias is showing. The status quo was that this is a single-family lot - and it was that way when Mr. Howland bought it. It isn't "kooky" to say this should be a SF lot - IT ALREADY WAS ONE.

This is exactly the kind of thing people who initially raised objections to the 1995 Comprehensive Plan warned about. The City (Mayor/Council/DCLU now DPD) solemnly promised that existing multi-family zoning would be adequate to meet 20 year growth targets, and promised that single family properties would not be affected.

They lied.

Maybe they lied, or maybe they just didn't think it through, but Josh's point stands--for all sorts of reasons we need to drop or modify the idea that existing single-family zoning is sacrosanct wherever it is found. It's a city.

In other words, whenever the City makes a promise as part of a compromise to pass a plan, Stranger readers get to decide if it's abrogated.

I'll remember that the next time I spend a bunch of time offering public comment on a City proposal.

Oh jeez. So the guy buys a single-family lot. And it takes the Council awhile to GIVE HIM WINDFALL PROFITS by rezoning his property.

Poor thing. How will he survive?

Oh for crying out loud Mr. X,
Stranger readers didn't decide anything. The council, after several reports and studies, decided—9-0—to change the zoning. It's embarrassing that it took so long.
Do me a favor and go over the spot on 113th that Matt Howland wants to develop.
Your orthodoxy to adhere to rules drafted in 1995 just to prove a point—rather than compromising with the reality of the situation in that neighborhood—is weird grand standing.

Attitudes like yours, Ted, are what drive developers to build on Snoqualmie Ridge instead. The area in question is a wasteland. The single-family zealots act like they're knocking down beautiful garden homes to build Soviet-style concrete tower blocks. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Did the 1995 compromise obligate the City never to change the zoning of any single-family property? In reality, it seems to me what Mr. X's position wants to preserve is not some understanding from 1995, but the original single-family zoning of this property--from the 50s, no doubt, when the Northgate area became part of the City. A rather different era.

Hey, FNARF, you're right, except that Snoqualmie Ridge is nice! In a way. (Even out there there is a mix of uses, and no tyranny of single-family-ness.) Dollars to donuts Mr. X also opposes master planned communities in the suburbs. or traffic improvements or the development of other infrastructure out there.

I agree totally with Josh and Fnarf. Ku Klux Klansmen who defend the purity of white womanhood have nothing on those who defend the sanctity of single family housing.

Each case needs to stand on its own merits.

You'll feel different when our masked riders come to your house at night and burn a Conditional Use Permit on your front lawn!

Fixo,

Your speculation regarding my positions in post 8 is wrong (I have no problem with any of the three things you cite).

However, Growth Management Act principles (including traffic concurrency - which means DPD's current policy of allowing any and all amounts of development despite significant and measurable negative traffic effects) do apply to cities, too. So the notion that there is no amount of development that Seattle can't sustain (which pretty much seems to be at the core of every Stranger argument extolling the virtues of unbridled density) is just flat wrong under the GMA.

OTOH - Snoqualmie Ridge should never have been permitted in the first place (the County gerrymandered the Urban Growth Boundary to allow it). Of course, the developers ought to pay for the traffic improvments through impact fees and the like, but I ain't holding my breath (it is telling that even Eastside suburban cities charge development fees where Seattle refuses too, though)

With regard to post 7, hell yes, they ought to keep their promises - doubly so given that Seattle is doing just fine meeting its growth estimates - both in terms of the goals it set for itself, and also vis a vis the share of the overall growth it splits with other jurisdictions throughout King County.

Regarding post #7 - should the City keep the promise it is now making that the Mayor's proposed $1.8 billion bond won't be used for the Alaskan Way Viaduct Tunnel proposal in 10 years when it runs over budget? Should they keep their non-binding promise to limit collecting those taxes to 20 years even though state law says they can levy them indefinitely - which will certainly be a difficult (if not impossible) promise to hold them to 20 years from now if City voters are dumb enough to approve that levy.

Or does the City's word only matter if you agree with it?

I guess I am left wondering, Mr. X, where you think growth ought to go around here. You seem to be too thoughtful to be arguing "nowhere." But where should the residents of Snoqualmie Ridge be living if not there and not in Seattle? Arlington? Black Diamond? A barge in Elliott Bay?

No one has answered my question--did the City actually obligate itself never to rezone single-family properties in 1995? Things change, that's the reality, and the job of elected officials is to deal with it.

And who ever said "there is no amount of development that Seattle can't sustain"? To take the position that Seattle ought to be denser as The Stranger generally (but not entirely) has is not to argue that there should be no restrictions on growth.

Mr. X confirms my comment that opponents of density make out every project to be replacing garden homes with thousand-storey tower blocks. He is unable to distinguish between extremely modest density increases -- a whopping FOUR UNITS -- and infinite "unbridled" density. He doesn't want to bridle density; he wants to shoot it dead.

The real argument here is class-based, and has to do not with the barely-noticeable density of two townhouses but with the magic word "rental". The neighbors would in fact much prefer a couple of $600,000 houses. But they're too sensitive to say so.

Mr. X, I agree with you in principal. The city made a promise to make some areas more dense, and leave certain single family zoned areas alone. As a general principal, that is fine. It would be ridiculous to tear down a nice home on a quiet street of single family home, and build a huge apartment/condo/retail building there.

But sometimes you have to look beyond blanket neighborhood viewpoint, and look at a specific property and the specific circumstances. That's why they have "variances" to the building code. Sure, technically it was zoned single family residential. But in reality it abutted a bunch of low grade strip malls. This was not a fantasy pristine middle class single family home, and it never will be. It makes perfect sense for the city to look at this particular piece of property, and grant a variance. Which it did. Eventually.

What is stupid, and where I agree with Josh, is that this process to obtain a re-zone or variance should not take FIVE YEARS. In this case, the process worked, but at glacial speed. There is no reason that the building department or city council should have taken more than 6 months, or maybe a year, tops, to either approve or reject the request for a change.

FIXO,

Here's some language from a story I found citing the City's promise not to upzone SF property (it was from a Seattle Weekly story by James Bush back in 2000 - just five years after the Complan was adopted. http://www.seattleweekly.com/news/0043/4th-bush.php

"...Some of the changes are shocking! (Well, maybe only to people with long memories.) For instance, certain provisions would rezone single-family neighborhoods with an obscure zoning designation known as "single-family small lot." This is important because when this new zoning designation was created, city officials promised it would be used only in the urban villages (the city's designated growth areas) and only after residents specifically asked for its use through the neighborhood planning process. Well, the neighborhood plans are completed, and neighborhoods' desire for tiny houses on tiny lots proved negligible. So city planners now want to see the zoning authorized in not just the neighborhoods that didn't want it, but also in adjacent areas outside the villages.

Planners also included language to allow folks to build mother-in-law apartments in separate buildings on their property. This proposal has been considered twice by the City Council and rejected twice, but planners try not to let little things like that stand in their way.

Having been forced to sit through long, boring meetings as codes have been updated over the past two decades, neighbors are rightly frustrated to see proposals they managed to defeat reintroduced through this sneaky, backdoor process.

Of course, Paul Schell, our beloved developer-mayor, is in the mix. His unpopular proposal to remove on-street parking from arterials would get a boost here from a provision mandating that parking removal be decided solely on the basis of traffic circulation and commerce. The opinions of area residents wouldn't matter at all. Schell also wants language to allow up-zones along major arterials. This is annoying because the "deal" behind the urban village plan was that residential densities would be lessened along arterials in exchange for allowing bigger buildings in the villages.

Beyond all the broken promises, planners also seek to lay the groundwork for future "bonus" programs, allowing developers to build bigger buildings, cram in extra living units, and provide less parking. Don't worry about being turned down—the open-ended language should allow city building regulators to rubber-stamp any development proposal."

Like I said - lies.

As to your second question, I have no doubt that existing suburban cities within the urban growth boundary could well have accomodated the units that have gone to Snoqualmie Ridge instead.

The larger issue for me, though, is that growth is already going to Arlington and points north, south, east and west (though Tim Eyman managed to slow Kitsap and Mason County growth down some when his initiatives gutted the funding for the ferry system) regardless of whether Seattle upzones a single family neighborhood or allows even larger Belltown condos, and regardless of where I think it should go, either.

If you don't think the Stranger is arguing that Seattle's infrastructure can sustain way more growth than even the current Complan calls for, you really haven't been paying attention.

SDA,

I don't necessarily disagree with your point on the merits of the property in question, but I do think that maybe the neighbors - you know, the people who actually live next to it - ought to have something to say about it without being called "kooky" by a Capital Hill writer with an axe to grind (sorry, Josh).

Oops - "Capitol".

BTW - the Neighborhood Plan that adopted the current Northgate area zoning was adopted in 2001. I guess the shelf life of City promises is getting even shorter...

You wear one down, Mr. X. Kind of a broad brush you paint with with the "Like I said. Lies." The Bush article mentions arterial development and mother in law apartments, but is the property that is the subject of this thread a "single-family small lot?"

As long as we're on the topic of not paying attention (you changed my argument, to knock it down, and you aren't giving credit to The Stranger for its calls for ongoing urban infrastructure development), I am taken with your idea that regional growth can be handled through infill development in the nearby 'burbs. Have you had a pleasant afternoon drive in Redmond, Bellevue, Kent or Kirkland lately? And to my eyes, there's nothing but very rapid growth in Kitsap County right now, Tim Eyman notwithstanding.

The new Tacoma Narrows bridge has already sparked a massive building boom on the Key Peninsula, and they haven't even got the road decking on yet. Gig Harbor will look like Federal Way in a few years.

Fixo,

My initial point is that the City explicitly promised residents of single family areas (and lots of lowrise residential areas too, btw) that their neighborhoods would not be subject to zoning changes - generally when the Complan was adopted, and - even in areas targeted for some growth - on a more specific parcel by parcel basis when neighborhood planning was done.

Allowing a "single family small lot" as described in the article was legally an upzone to a single family property that wasn't meant to be granted lightly outside of an urban village/center, and was something that raised legitimate objections to those who remembered that the City had promised to protect single family zoning when it implemented the 1994 Complan. Properties in single family zones aren't supposed to be upzoned under the Complan, and there is a reason it is this way - people demanded it. The situation at Northgate is analagous, and it's fair to point at the earlier example as being part of a trend. Hence, for those of us with long memories, the use of the term liars (and I think you're just nitpicking anyway, given how the article pretty much makes my point for me regarding promises made to protect lower density neighborhoods and not kept during the Complan/N'd planning).

Bush also cites neighborhood planning, where the details of land use/zoning in particular neighborhoods were supposed to be developed with the community, and which were supposed to have some force with regard to City decision making.

Speaking of putting words in someone's mouth, you evidently didn't read mine too clearly. I said that growth is happening in all of the areas you cite - I just happen to think that since the initial idea of the GMA was to prevent further sprawl into the Cascade foothills, Snoqualmie Ridge was a big mistake (and, as it happens, it was also a particularly egregious case of a politically influential company getting their way).

Did I say that I think that suburban growth is a good thing? No, I said that it's occurring - and it will continue to occur whether we scrap a long discussed neighborhood plans and add 20' to heights on Broadway or the U-District, or whether some guy gets his upzone to build 4 townhouses on a single family lot outside of an urban village.

As to the Stranger, last I checked, they want to tear down a State highway that carries 100,000+ trips a day without a meaningful replacement, so I'm not exactly dazzled by their commitment to the infrastructure to support growth (some would also point at their issues with Sound Transit, but I'm not so sold on ST's performance myself - though I did vote for it in 1996).

There's a difference between thinking that growth in Seattle (and other areas, to a point) is a necessary evil that needs to be reasonably accomodated (in my view, preferably without displacing existing residents and in a manner in which it isn't subsidized directly or indirectly by them), and the view that apparently prevails here at Slog that all growth is in Seattle (but nowhere else - even the urbanizing part of the suburban cities where County and regional growth plans expect to put it) is intrinsically good and must be facilitated.

It occured to me in this post that Josh Feit sounds every day more and more like Knut Berger. Man, Josh is tiresome.

It IS the principle of the thing…

Both sides of this argument are correct in their ways. Steinbrueck’s legislation amended the Comp Plan element for Northgate (and other ‘hoods) in Dec 2004. This is the right way to add development capacity in a way that respects neighborhood planning…despite the fact that many of the ‘hood planners opposed the Steinbrueck amendment. They lost the fight against amending their plan, but AT LEAST the plan was changed, before changing the rules of the game. As Josh wrote in his Dec. 2004 column, “Steinbrueck's proposal, an amendment to the city's overarching Comp Plan, would make Northgate's regulations less restrictive--allowing the DPD to permit zoning changes in single-family zones on a case-by-case basis.�

Now that the plans are amended to make these kinds of variances easier, I don’t know that anyone opposed this project after those comp plan amendments passed in Dec. 2004. Citizens like Mr. X are just asking that we support these decisions being made in a way that respects the process that involved them and that the city asked them to participate in. Josh saying it’s “much to do about nothing� is missing a point that is important to the people that the city has said it wanted to engage.

Ordinance 121701 passed today (partially why it took some time to negotiate) included a PUDA (Property Use and Development Agreement), requiring that:

A. Future development shall be limited to twelve (12) dwelling units in six (6) duplex structures;
B. Future development shall have only one (1) curb cut and driveway for vehicular ingress and egress;
C. Future development shall be setback at least ten (10) feet from the westerly side lot line and the setback area shall be fully landscaped with trees and shade tolerant shrubs; and
D. Future development shall be setback at least twenty-nine (29) feet from the rear lot.

This thread is totally wonking me out. Is there anything on Santorum I can read about?

Sandy,
I don't follow you. It seems to me that Feit has taken the exact opposite position than the one I'm used to hearing from Berger. Feit's post, and the article he linked, argues for less single family zoning and more density. By way of contrast, Berger's columns in the Weekly are consistently about fighting density and preserving the single family neighborhoods of old school Seattle. Tiresome=Berger.

You all act suprised. If Mr Howland or his representatives would have distributed significant cash contributions (preferably unmarked, nonsequential $100's) to certain people- he would have gotten his zoning variance in 5 weeks instead of 5 months.
"Washington Good Government" is a myth. Washington's corrupt politicians and bureaucrats simply aren't as blatant about it as they are in Texas and Louisiana.

Two duplexes. Four homes. And given it's a single family lot, how big could those homes have been? You're talking a whopping extra 2-4 residents over what would've resulted from a single family home.

That the neighborhood fought this at all, let alone for five years, illustrates the backwards, stubborn NIMBYism of many Seattlites.

No Gomez (AND Josh) - twelve (12) dwelling units in six (6) duplex structures.

See here: http://clerk.ci.seattle.wa.us/~scripts/nph-brs.exe?s1=&s2=&s3=&s4=&s5=howland+&Sect4=AND&l=20&Sect1=IMAGE&Sect2=THESON&Sect3=PLURON&Sect5=CBOR1&Sect6=HITOFF&d=CBOR&p=1&u=%2F%7Epublic%2Fcbor1.htm&r=1&f=G

Well then.

But still, are we talking about a severe, thousand-people influx? No. Not even hundreds. Maybe a couple dozen. And it's likely the majority of them would live there quietly.