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“Out of Scale”

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Another small blow to affordable housing in Seattle:

“A majority of Seattle City Council members Monday sided with neighborhood activists and agreed to set lower height limits for homes built on small lots in single-family zones,” reports Lynn Thompson. The city had a moratorium on small-lot development in place since September 2012, “after an outcry from neighbors over 30-foot-tall, modern houses on lots as small as 1,050 square feet that were permitted using obscure tax and mortgage records discovered by developers on historic, archived city maps.”

“Councilmember Mike O’Brien, chair of the Land Use and Planning Committee, said that the new regulations eliminated the most extreme small-lot development and give neighbors and developers more predictability about what can be built.”

“Under the new rules, no development will be permitted on lots smaller than 2,500 square feet. Many historic records can no longer be used to qualify a small lot as buildable. And neighbors will be provided notice and the right to appeal to a city hearing examiner any construction requests on lots smaller than 3,200 square feet.”

The arguments offered for pushing down height limits on small lot development below the level of normal sized lot development (with is 30 feet +5 for a sloped roof), as far as I can tell, come in two forms.

1) They reduce the sunlight and or views of existing property owners.

2) They are “out of scale” and “don’t fit in” with the existing neighborhood.

(A third possible reason, “they reduce the scarcity, and therefore the rate of appreciation, of my own investment” never seems to get vocalized for some reason.)

Setting aside the too easy jokes about sunlight in Seattle, the first reason simply asserts an easement right where none exists. (View easements do exist, of course, but these people obviously don’t have them). Obviously if we took this category of complaints seriously in all cases, cities would never have been able to come into existence in the first place.

The second one goes unchallenged much of the time. This seems utterly nonsensical to me. Of course some developments are ugly; that’s a problem everywhere with any human endeavor. Size restrictions don’t fix this. But the notion that having houses of different sizes and shapes, and lots of different sizes and shapes, is significantly detrimental to the quality of life in that neighborhood, doesn’t make any sense. One of the reasons my bike commute is so (weather permitting) pleasant is because it takes me through the charming neighborhood of South Park in Dayton, which is generally considered to be one of the 2-3 best neighborhoods in the city. The neighborhood features an eclectic mix of small apartment buildings, 3500 SF+ mansions, 1500 SF skinny two stories, and tiny 700 SF cottages, all on varying lot sizes (including some tiny ones for some of the cottages). This variation is always identified as a charming feature of the neighborhood, not a detriment. It’s an argument you find in suburban settings the people who live in these Seattle neighborhoods might otherwise sneer at.

As a policy matter, the restriction on any development on >2500 SF lots, especially given the height restrictions put in place, is particularly indefensible. If such building were allowed to go forward they would be tiny, and would as such be more affordable than most of the neighborhood. Making them unavailable will most likely push that cottage’s dweller into a larger unit with a longer commute, creating adverse environmental impact in two ways.

For better or worse, the vast majority of Seattle’s growth over the next few decades is not going to occur in the ~90% of the city zoned for single family. But most zoning decisions are working at the margins, and this creates wasted opportunities for infill development, and moves the overall environmental impact and affordability in the wrong directions. If you like having a nice big lawn, you ought to be able to buy a house with one. That shouldn’t entitle you to force everyone on the block to have the same, whether they want/need it or not.

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