By Frank on April 7, 2009
One of the few great things about Seattle’s urban development over the past decade or so has been the large amount of “mixed use” developments we’ve seen in the more urban parts of town: multi-story apartment buildings (or, more likely, condos) with ground floor retail. Seattle encourages such developments with a variety of tax incentives that make ground-floor retail very worthwhile to the developer.
But what happens now that condo and apartment construction has ground to a halt? Are we too reliant on condo and apartment developers to create new commercial space? Even when construction eventually starts up again, the post-bubble incentives may be different. There may not be the extra funds to develop as much ground-floor retail. Or, we may want more retail but not have the demand for multi-story underground parking garages that are sadly required in most new multi-story construction projects. Can we decouple commercial and residential development, having joined them at the hip for so long?
I got to thinking about this while reading this Central District News post about stalled projects around the CD. The population of the area grew in recent years, mostly due to increased townhome construction. A few retail establishments have popped up (notably around 18th & Union), but there’s probably more pent-up demand than can be met with existing commercial stock.
Put another way, we don’t need the apartment buildings, but we still ned the retail. Can we we get more of the latter without the former?
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By Frank on April 5, 2009
Following up on my recent post about Walkscore’s new transit feature, Brian Ferris from One Bus Away writes in the comments about his indispensable site’s Explore feature, which lets you find restaurants and other things around transit lines.
Also, Galen Ward, of local real estate search site Estately, writes in to note his site’s feature that lets you search for houses within walking distance of transit or search by Walk Score. Very cool.
During a recent foray into the housing market, I spent some time on Estately and found it to be a very useful site. Recommended.
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By Frank on April 5, 2009
I’ve been too busy to blog the last few weeks, but hearty thanks are due to the STB guys and Rep Geoff Simpson for putting the kibosh on what could have been a huge PITA for East Link. Way to go.
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By serial catowner on April 4, 2009
Any real American can tell you how we love the freedom we have with a car. Like the apochryphal frog in a slowly warming skillet, we haven’t noticed the freedom we’ve lost with the car. Joe Klein reminds us of what freedom might look like with a proposal that retired seniors might be willing to trade their driving licenses for the freedom to smoke pot.
In reality, the automobile has served as the excuse for the imposition of a police state an American of 1900 would have considered to be literally unimaginable. At various points of the past century it has included Ford’s secret police spying on the home life of his workers, the great panic of the 30s about motels, cars and interstate crime which empowered the FBI to become a black-mailing and all-intrusive secret police, and so to the present day when driving a car places you outside the protections of the Bill of Rights.
What Klein has observed is that, in order to enjoy the freedom of not driving, we need to have some freedom to enjoy.
It’s a tall order for a society that has narrowed freedom to car and gun ownership. With good transit, we could enjoy the freedom of not having to park the car or worry about thieves and vandals. With walkable neighborhoods, pedestrians could enjoy the freedom of strolling and not being accosted by police when they’re doing nothing wrong. Most of us don’t live near good transit, so at the present time we don’t get any freedom from not owning a car.
In fact, even in the past half century, so much freedom has been given up that young people can hardly remember what it might look like. Understandably, they’re somewhat confused, so let me clarify- it doesn’t look like owning a car. We’ve lost a lot more freedom with the car than we ever gained.
To deal with global warming we need to create dense energy-efficient transit oriented development and cut our use of cars sharply. I am more than ready to trade my driver’s license for housing on a transit line and some real freedom. It’s time to start talking about what really makes us free.
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