Seattle 3.0

By Mark Hinshaw, FAICP

The last time I wrote in a big way about Seattle was 15 years ago — just before the last National Planning Conference that was held here. My book Citistate Seattle, which paid homage to Neal Peirce's terrific essays on various cities, was meant to chronicle 30 years of planning and managing growth in this region. Looking back at that book now, I see a kind of innocence. Seattle was still figuring out how to be a big city. The corresponding article in Planning magazine (March 1999) was upbeat but did not foresee the pace and scope of change that began soon after. The forces at work in the 1980s and '90s did not explode until the boom of the early 2000s.

That decade saw the long-term effect of the state's urban growth policies. It was a rare convergence of law, demographic change, and behavior. Since most of the state's growth occurred in the four counties clustered around the south end of Puget Sound, the results were palpable. We caught the economic wave and directed it — into cities and towns and away from forests, farms, and wetlands. With regionally agreed-upon growth boundaries, peripheral development came to a screeching halt. No more shopping centers. No more huge subdivisions. No more industrial parks. No more horizontally expansive sewer districts and highway projects.

Instead, the new direction was inward and upward. The real estate industry predicted that people would still queue up to buy single-family houses on large lots, but that's not what happened. Lots of people — especially millennials and boomers — moved into the centers of cities and filled denser, bigger, taller buildings. The electorate approved repeated expansions of the transit system — plus bond issues for parks, libraries, and even low-income housing.

In other words, we were willing to tax ourselves for tangible, shared public goods. Astonishingly, all this was done without a state income tax. Taxes here derived from retail sales, real estate, and business revenue. There is a built-in incentive to retain, support, and attract businesses.

Moreover, Washington state law doesn't allow tax increment financing or tax exemptions, as other states often do. Advocates of the free-market theory of economics would surely predict a fiscal meltdown, with hordes of businesses and families fleeing high taxes and assessments.

Precisely the opposite has happened. Businesses want to come to this region because of the major public investments. We don't have to bribe them to come.

The results: Start-ups are starting up everywhere, attracting an educated workforce. Although Seattle is the headquarters of e-commerce — Amazon — the retail sector is thriving. Nordstrom is stronger than ever, as are REI and Boeing. New restaurants are opening every week. (In the city, these are local, handcrafted food purveyors; national chains are now found mainly in the hinterlands.) Dozens of neighborhoods are socially diverse and thriving. By mid-2014, the median value of single-family homes in a number of Seattle-area submarkets surpassed prerecession levels.

In the past, Seattle was usually the last to slide into a recession and, as a result, it was also one of the last to recover. (The region suffered a multiyear recession in the early 1970s, after Boeing laid off more than half its workforce of 80,000.) This time Seattle was one of the first to recover. I am convinced that we bolstered our economic and social capital through thoughtful and effective planning, both regional and local. A collective social compact, if you will.

Looking back

I have been writing about Seattle, my adopted city, for almost 25 years. Here's the deal: Despite its recent reputation, Seattle has not always been hip. I spent the first five years haranguing about what it lacked, what could be better, or what it should stop doing. When I first encountered the place in the mid-1970s, it was the last spot I would ever want to live: a boring company town.

Almost no restaurants to speak of. Barely any cultural presence, unless you counted the mummy in a waterfront trinket shop. Except for Mount Rainier, barely anything at all. A bunch of ugly boxes hard by a bay, with a withering industrial harbor.

In a way, though, this is a story of how a backwater city got its soul back and completely remade itself despite a massive economic setback that involved pink slips for 50,000 workers in the years 1970–1971. It might be one of the greatest urban comebacks of the last half-century.

So let's capture the course of this place over 150 years, Twitter style:

Seattle 1.0: The first 100 years (1850–1950)

Settlers arrive needing women, build brothels, and send for brides. Victorian city built; Alaskan gold rush happens. Victorian city burns; rebuilt in brick. Oops, built too low for tides; the city is raised, not razed. Irate theater owner shoots police chief in a drugstore. Lumberjacks, stevedores, and fishermen are everywhere and drunk. Smith Tower rises. A bunch of Wobblies riot; some get killed. Navy arrives, with more drunks on leave. Boeing starts building boats. Then planes happen. The world goes to war.

Seattle 2.0: Second half of second century (1950–2000)

Nothing much happens for a decade. Then the World's Fair opens, Elvis visits, and the Space Needle goes up. We save Pike Place Market. Blue Seattle breaks with the rest of the state, which remains red. A former governor declares: "All the votes I need I can see from the top of the Needle." Grunge happens. We invent the phrase "a double tall latte to go." Mayor sleeps through Mardi Gras riots, then fails to see WTO riots coming. City burns. Seattle Commons fails and Paul Allen becomes a major land baron. Many Microsoft millionaires appear. We waste time and millions with idea of a citywide monorail, then dump it.

Seattle 3.0: Third century (post-2000)

Trains appear. Towers rise. Parks are built. Seattle makes the top of every "best," "most," and "hottest" list. Amazon starts as a sort of garage band. Two weeks later it builds six million square feet. Then there's legalized weed. And marriage equality. And a $15 per hour minimum wage. And I didn't even mention electing a gay mayor and a socialist city council member in the same year.

You get the drift. "You can take the frontier out of the town, but you can't take the town out of the frontier." Or wait, maybe it's the other way around.

Many people in the rest of the country probably think of us as wealthy, left-leaning, dope-smoking, gay techies who ride bikes and light rail and have yurts as second homes. They would not be entirely wrong. Seattle is a sort of Portlandia, except one with an actual economy, rather than one based entirely on food trucks, artisanal bike shops, and retired 20-somethings.

Do-it-yourself growth management

Rarely does one meet an actual, born-in-Seattle Seattleite. I happen to be married to one of the rarities. Often, I'm told, "I remember when Seattle was low cost/low traffic/low tech/low brow" and "Hey, whatever happened to my funky, edgy, neighborhood known as Cap Hill?" This was such a backwater town for so long that natives find themselves living in a different culture: New Cascadia.

Old Cascadia was based on fishing and forestry, plus sales of airplanes and Gortex. By 1970, Boeing and the University of Washington were two of the state's largest employers. The origins of New Cascadia are found in Ernest Callenbach's 1975 opus, Ecotopia. Shortly before the book came out, the state followed California's lead and passed strict environmental laws to protect shorelines, steep slopes, wetlands, and waterways.

Developers balked and new arrivals rejoiced. We newcomers weren't going to let this pristine natural setting be trashed like so many other places were. Today these laws barely raise an eyebrow and we are raising the bar again. But back then the development industry fought the environmental laws tooth and nail. And lost. Big time. Now, no one can propose anything without fully disclosing its effects. Did this stop development? Sometimes yes, sometimes no.
One local developer tried to fill a pond. He was soon busted and the court made him restore the pond, pay a whopping fine, and work a few hundred hours of community service. Later, a local judge's maintenance crew "accidentally" cut down dozens of big trees on nearby parkland to enhance the view from his mansion. He was publicly shamed, too. After that, the land scraping pretty much stopped.

The last 40 years in this region has been a story of collective behavior modification. We all know what happens when you let a bunch of preschoolers run amuck. They bounce off the walls and break things. That was the "before" condition; we were on the way to recreating Southern California. So we made a bunch of rules and everyone started behaving themselves. I don't mean just developers. I mean city councils, planning commissions, mayors, city managers, and even citizen advocates. No back-room deals. No conflicts of interest. Not even any apparent conflicts of interest.

In some communities zoning decisions were placed in the hands of appointed zoning judges who would take testimony, allow cross-examination, and render nonpolitical decisions. (These are called hearing examiners.) A handful of landmark court decisions essentially took the lunchtime lobbying and trading of political capital out of land use.

So how did the liberal part of the state convince the conservative part to buy into a program of controlling growth? After all, most of the state wanted to allow any form of development anywhere. The answer is legislative brilliance. First, every slow-growing county was exempted from the law. The opposition almost instantly evaporated. Second, to those folks who fear big, top-down state agencies (like Oregon's), the law presumed that local elected officials would do the right thing. No big brother to watch and check the boxes. No one insisting on protocols, procedures, and process. Most people, in fact, did the right thing, following the letter and the spirit of the law. (See "Climbing the Mountain Called 'Growth Management'" elsewhere in this issue.)

But some did not. Anyone could appeal. And people did. Errant communities were quickly chastised. In the news. In headlines. In fines. In permits revoked. One county council was so repeatedly egregious that the governor said to them, "How would you like your transportation money taken away?" Within a few weeks, their behavior was corrected.

So finally, LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design). It was so earnestly embraced it is now almost commonplace. If you aren't building at least LEED Silver, you aren't going to be leasing up. Many developers raced to become the first Gold, then the first Platinum. Now the talk is Carbon Neutral. The Bullitt Foundation Building, several blocks east of downtown Seattle, is madly pumping power back into the grid and figuring out how to distill its own toilet water.

The state adopted a Growth Management Act in 1990. One of the benefits of this almost 25-year-old law is that you can see the results. In front of you. Around you. There are at least two dozen lively, well-cared for neighborhood districts, all with main streets chockablock with local, family-run businesses.

The inner ring of suburbs — former bastions of white flight — are now culturally and racially diverse. They have their own downtowns, and people live there. No one is suffering from the increased density. Crime isn't rampant. These minicities are walkable, livable, and — most importantly — authentic, each rooted in its own rich history and geographic context.

I am convinced that one reason form-based codes have never caught fire here is that we have figured out how to get there without prescriptive formulas. Developers know the terms street wall, set-to lines, and upper-level step-backs. They build that way because it makes for a better place. If anything, many developers want to push the edge, for example by eliminating onerous and costly parking requirements. The regional chapter of the Urban Land Institute often joins hands with other advocacy groups such as Futurewise, Forterra, and Feet First to push for better policies and projects.

Seattle's transportation choices have changed radically in the last 15 years as well. We now have light rail to the south, expanding to the north and eventually east. Two streetcar lines and a third being planned. Commuter rail, intercity rail. (Sleek, Spanish-built Talgo trains link the major cities in Cascadia multiple times every day.) Bike routes and bike sharing all over the city. Zipcars. The diminutive Cars2Go on almost every block. Hydrofoils to Victoria. Float planes to the islands. Passenger ferries to West Seattle. These, plus the venerable state-owned ferry system. I haven't owned a car for eight years.

Things to come

The next big thing in Seattle will be the total makeover of the waterfront — a 6,000-foot-long stretch of piers, bulkheads, and sheds between the stadium district on the south and the Olympic Sculpture Park on the north. Under a master plan by James Corner Field Operations, this corridor will evolve into a necklace of parks, boulevards, esplanades, beaches, overlooks, and marine habitats. The waterfront will be a cohesive addition to Seattle's public realm, with a transformative effect that could mimic what has happened in Barcelona and Boston. Most of all, the waterfront will be quiet because the elevated highway — the Viaduct — will be toast.

That 1950s-era monument to misguided civil engineering will come down by 2017. Already the southern segment is gone. But there's a glitch. A new underground highway has to be finished before the viaduct can be removed. And that isn't going particularly well.

The state hired a Japanese consortium to build a gargantuan drilling machine, 57 feet in diameter. Nicknamed Bertha, after the city's only female mayor, Bertha is simply stuck in the muck. After chewing 1,000 feet into a 9,000-foot-long course, it broke. Now there is a lot of multimillion dollar finger-pointing going on. The state claims the drilling machine was designed with faulty bearings and seals. The contractor argues it was busted by running into a big pipe that the state failed to remove. In any event, it's costing way more to fix the thing than it cost to build. And they have to first lift 2,000 tons of equipment in order to repair it.

As I write this, a few blocks away huge cranes and other heavy equipment is hovering around the site of below-ground Bertha, making a coffer dam that will hold back Elliott Bay. The contractor claims she will start up again later this year. No one is putting money on it. Right now, it looks like an oversized pit crew for a race car, except that the vehicle in question is wedged more than 100 feet into the earth. Even the drill's repair continues to be delayed. First excavation of oyster shells suggested a tribal midden, which proved untrue. And then, dewatering of the site has apparently caused the viaduct to sink.

This is all a great distraction and fodder for jokes and editorial cartoons. Perhaps that why Amazon's Jeff Bezos decided to grab some headlines with his hobby purchase of the Washington Post and his clever proposal to deliver his goods by an army of drones. Can you even imagine, with all the millions of purchases through Amazon, hordes of the little flying machines filling the skies — and the human hordes wanting to shoot them down? I'm sure some creative millennial will design an app that will announce the next overflight.

Fifty-two years ago, the Seattle World's Fair gave us a vision of the future that included flying saucers, the biggest example being the one sitting atop the Space Needle. Turns out, that vision has come true.

Mark Hinshaw is a planner and architect in Seattle. He is a frequent contributor to Planning and has written books for APA Planners Press, including True Urbanism: Living In and Near the Center. He is a regular columnist for crosscut.com, an online news magazine of the Pacific Northwest.

Resources

Images: Top — By day, Seattle is a mix of blue and green and foggy mountain white. Rising nearly as high as Mount Rainier, or so it seems, are the towers of South Lake Union, one of the newest man-made wonders. Photo by Jay Dotson, By night, Seattle neighborhoods continue to shine. A view from the south takes in the stadium district, Denny triangle, and Pike/Pine. Photo by Jay Dotson. Middle — The iconic Pike Place Market, opened in 1907, and was rescued from the wrecking ball in the 1970s. The market's latest renovations were completed in 2012. Photo by Stephen Ehlers/Getty images. Middle — The Fremont Troll staked out its spot under the Highway 99 overpass back in the 1990s, the result of a public art competition aimed at cleaning up this area of Fremont. Photo by Kevin Schafer/Getty images.