Same exact thing happened in Vancouver BC years ago - ever heard of a "Vancouver Special"?

It's all about the zoning. Just wake up and realize we need 40-100 story inexpensive residential rental apartment buildings with surrounding greenspace near all the transit hubs and stop pretending we're a city of lower-middle-class single-family-home-owning citizens.

It just makes Seattle look gullible and foolish, IMHO.

The city is so hungry for cash that destroying anything and everything to bring in the cash blinds them to the damage done to the only 4 remaining uncovered urban streams in Seattle. Oh the love of money...

MAKE TOWNHOUSE DEVELOPERS GO THROUGH DESIGN REVIEW - AND MAKE THEM PUT IN GARAGES THAT CARS (if the owners choose to have cars) CAN PARK IN.

Photo is totally confusing, too. Is this an example of nonpiecemealing such that this went through design review -- if so it looks so crappy what's the point of design review???

Anyway, we need townhouses that have stairs and stoops to the street or some kind of connection to the street.

Parking should be optional, not required. The whole ugly design is being forced by having required parking in the unit. Developers are doing TH's because then they don't have to do the underground parking garages of condos. Without required parking, they might put up 14 apts. instead of 4 TH's on a smaller lot.

They do the TH's because they instead of underground parking they can do ground level parking -- the typical ground level garage entered from the common alley of the bloc of TH's.

As a result the first floor of the Town Home is a garage, connected in the back to the common driveway, and not connected to the street in the front.

Thus, ugliness and that vacant, ass to the street look.

The lovely rowhouses of brownstone in NY or brick in DC and Boston would look ugly, too, if they had to have a parking garage on the first floor.
(OMG, citing stuff from somehwere else! Doesn't he realize it's different here!! Attack at will!!)

We also need to have the TH be able to have a little apt. on the bottom floor or on the top floor (without parking being required). A nice 6 story TH (semi bsmt. and 1-5) with a semi basement apt. (half a flight down from the street, ground level in back), with a owner's unit on 1-3 (and stoop going to the street; it's nice to be elevated above the street, but connected, like that), and walk up apts. on 4 and 5 (nice for grandma, renters, your 22 y.o. who needs space to smoke dope, etc.) fills up the zoning envelope in a nicer way. And can look great. See that Spike Lee movie about that family in Brooklyn with the great brownstone.

But mandating that parking kills the whole thing. It makes the floor that connect to the street functional and ugly and just a garage.

I'm not sure grandma would enjoy the climb to a 4th or 5th story walkup, and anyway you can't build that high without providing an elevator.

Oh, and Will, we got your point. You can now start working on a second idea.

The market cares nothing about what you want, just what is most profitable under the current legal framework (including what they can get away with).

Sorry if you don't like it, but so long as Seattle keeps increasing population and trying to "preserve single-family homes" it will get Worse not Better.

It's your repeated references to those goddamn towers! I thought he had knocked some sense into you with his last outburst, as you seemed to manage to not make reference to them for few weeks. But, alas, it looks like he'll have to keep the 2x4 handy.

No one here (that I can tell) is arguing against zoning changes and the need for denser building. It's your one-track obsession with towers...towers that even if they were feasible would absolutely suck in terms of urban design.

Combine it with the antiquated technology we have for storing info (excel spreadsheets and file cabinets full of paper) and it really becomes a drag.