Photography by Laura Schmitt
Few things in life sound as unsexy as urban planning. The term is inextricably linked to public hearings, pushy developers, whiny good- government types, building codes, legalese, and vague buzzwords like "smart growth" and "livability."
Frigid as urban planning sounds, Seattle politics and civic life are about to heat up because of it—and the question of how you do urban planning in such a way that it makes the downtown city core denser without chasing away the very people without whom increasing density makes little sense.
We've arrived at such a pass because of two forces. One is population growth and urban sprawl; the other is Mayor Greg Nickels.
Last May, Nickels introduced a proposal to rewrite the city's planning code and dramatically raise building heights for office and residential buildings in downtown Seattle and in the Denny Triangle (an area north of downtown roughly bounded by Denny Way, Sixth Avenue, and I-5) in anticipation of as many as 44,000 more people and 50,000 more jobs flooding the center city—Lower Queen Anne to the International District—over the next 20 years.
Vancouver, B.C., and Portland, Ore., are the exemplars that Nickels and many others in urban planning point to as evidence that big cities can absorb many thousands of new residents in their urban core. Both Northwest cities largely pulled off the trick of getting more people living and working downtown and limiting suburban sprawl, while making the whole thing look damn good in the process. Both cities worked overtime to create residential housing that made the new construction an integral and revitalizing part of downtown neighborhoods.
As it exists now, Nickels envisions proposed code changes that would do little to instill a neighborhood feel in the city center. His plan would lift Seattle's two-decades-old building height cap of 450 feet (about 45 stories) to accommodate 700-foot-high office buildings downtown (about the height of the WaMu Tower) and 400-foot-high residential towers in downtown and the Denny Triangle (about 40 stories). It's a move that would reshape Seattle's skyline, alter views from surrounding hills, and change the city's streetscape for the next 100 years.
"We've got to do it gracefully," Nickels says. Many Seattleites wouldn't use "grace" to describe the mayor's political style. His is the buccaneering, mailed-fist style of governance versus the old Seattle style of consensus and death by process.
The trouble is that the mayor's original plan did little to address the very things that have made Portland and Vancouver so livable and walkable, such as parks and trees. It was mute on how buildings should look, especially at street level where presumably future generations of Seattleites will spend most of their waking hours. And it was silent on whether these would be urban enclaves for the rich and the single or if people of more modest incomes could afford to live there as well, especially families.
"If you want to impact sprawl, you have to impact families," says City Council member Peter Steinbrueck. "That's why there's sprawl in the first place. They can't find housing in the city that meets their income level." An architect by training, Steinbrueck was the prime mover behind the 1980s-era building cap. He's literally a child of the old Seattle, a champion of process and son of Victor Steinbrueck, the architect and activist often credited with saving Pike Place Market from developers in the 1970s.
Where Nickels pushes to change both Seattle and the Seattle way of doing things, Steinbrueck stands as a kind of gatekeeper to the city's hard-won livability, a voice for balancing Seattle's world-city ambitions with its traditional values.
The City Council will ultimately hold the keys to the mayor's city vision. It will determine how future development is translated into the dry language of the municipal code. For the mayor to realize his ideas, he will have to go through Steinbrueck, who chairs the council's Urban Development & Planning Committee.
Steinbrueck isn't exactly in love with the mayor's plan. No sooner had the details hit his desk last spring than he hired two consultants to look it over. These weren't any old consultants, either. They were Ray Spaxman and Larry Beasley, the planners credited with making modern Vancouver, a city of glass and urban neighborhoods, as vibrant as Manhattan or San Francisco. Where Nickels wants to rush ahead and get his plan adopted by year-end, Steinbrueck wants to exercise patience and diligence. After all, if we're reshaping the city for the next century, what's the hurry?
His approach already seems to have had an effect.
On Monday, Aug. 8, Steinbrueck's two consultants delivered a report to the City Council that in careful, diplomatic terms poked holes in the Nickels plan, particularly as it relates to attracting families to downtown.
"Make sure you are absolutely clear about what kind of place you want," Beasley said. "Otherwise, the consumer won't come, and it won't work."
Nickels must have been grinning to himself in his seventh floor City Hall office. He had quietly pre-empted some of the report's anticipated objections the week before. On Aug. 2, Nickels' office released a proposal to generate funding for center city parks and green space, two of the prime ingredients for creating successful neighborhoods. That move only began to address the consultants' criticisms—and went almost nowhere toward addressing Steinbrueck's concerns about who will actually live in the core.
It was the opening battle cry over whether downtown and the Denny Triangle will be real neighborhoods that people will actually want to live in or neighborhoods in name only.
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