Where We Live: Patterns

Every area has a development pattern. It’s our job to pick the pattern that best fits what we want our future to look like. We’re distantly past wilderness, and rural is long gone, too. We’re a city, so we can’t be exurban sprawl, and that leaves suburb. Officially we are a “Larger Suburban City”, according to the Puget Sound Regional Council.

People are moving here. PSRC expects 1.5 million to come to the three-county area by 2040. Some predictions show much more growth. They’ll either move into the cities (Seattle, , and the others) or we’ll pave more green to house them. Some folks are fine with that, thinking that any landowner should be able to do anything s/he wants with a property, but that is not so and never has been. If you want to build a chemical plant don’t expect to get a permit to do it in an urban neighborhood!

Suburbs have various patterns, too. Ebenezer Howard came up with an idea he called “Garden Cities” in the late 1800s. The concept was that cities, as he saw them, were developing in harsh, unhealthy ways, and the country was healthy but devoid of economic and cultural opportunity, so he offered a third option, a mix of the two. A suburb was to be preplanned to be a complete small town of limited size, with guaranteed parks and greenbelts surrounding. Almost no subsequent suburbs, including those allegedly on the Howard model, have ever followed the whole plan.

The original US suburbs are exemplified in Seattle’s Columbia City and Madison Park neighborhoods, where a developer bought a big tract of land, subdivided it, and built streets, utilities, and houses around a streetcar line. The streets almost all were on a grid and were easily incorporated into the city as the areas were annexed. The transit was a necessary part of the concept, as it was how people got to the place to buy and how the new residents were expected to get into the city to work. Shops and services were built into the new neighborhoods because no one would have bought a house without those necessities an easy walk away.

Postwar suburbs, on the other hand, have been put up further and further from cities, have no commercial space allotted or transit included, are unconnected to other housing or retail areas, all streets feed into only one or two arterials and often are arbitrarily and pointlessly curvy, and are miles from anything else (work, school, shopping, etc.). This, of course, coincides with the rise of automobile dependancy and the greater sense of mobility it lends. Ironically, it also guarantees congestion, frustration, and reduced mobility.

Then there’s ‘city’. Many cities have a downtown and surrounding residential areas. Seattle has adopted a plan which enhances and nurtures its existing neighborhood structure to produce Urban Villages, mini-downtowns. The idea is to accept a great deal of new development and
densification without trading away all the single-family residential areas by
concentrating that development in specific places. This is the idea I’ve been
propounding for Shoreline/LFP in Where We Live and it’s worked mighty well.

Karen Kreis wrote in a 2002 report to Calgary, AB on progress with Seattle’s Urban Village strategy “The urban centre and urban village strategy has been successful in fostering a trend towards centralized housing growth since it is reported that 81% of the active permits are within these areas meeting the objective of the Settle [sic] Comprehensive Plan, which is to encourage majority of growth in the urban centres and villages. Furthermore, the majority of housing has been multifamily also fulfilling the Comprehensive Plan housing objective (Ibid., p.7). In regards to employment, Downtown also has the highest job growth at 19,000 new jobs in the first five years of the Plan’s adoption. It is thought that the strong employment growth in downtown is due to the advantageous role as the region’s transportation hub. Job growth has been higher than job growth in Seattle.

Overall, the urban centre and urban village strategies are working in Seattle to begin achieving the growth objectives of the Seattle Comprehensive Plan, which in turn is working towards meeting the growth targets set out in the GMA and the objectives of the Puget Sound Regional Council.”

Right now we are primarily a Postwar Suburb, with an incomplete and suboptimal grid. It’s up to us to make it better. A street grid need not be all right angles. Washington DC has a square grid overlain with radial avenues; London has a strikingly non-square grid. The point is not the exact alignment of the streets, but the fact that they connect- that there are few or no cul-de-sacs and multiple access options. From any street a driver or walker should have more than one option as to how to proceed.

Here, that means we must complete and integrate our street grid, adding sections, like connecting N 175^th St between Fremont Ave N through to Greenwood Pl N, or  NW 195^th St from 8^th Ave NW through to 14^th Ave NW and NW Richmond Beach Rd/NW 195^th St, or having NE 185^th St go through to 15^th Ave NE and 24^th Ave NE to better connect to North City and Lake Forest Park. For that matter, connecting almost any streets in LFP could help! There are instances where geography makes completing a street impractical, but the 'burbs are full of capricious examples just begging to be made right.

I suppose we could do all these grid tweaks by eminent domain but I’d rather we use selective acquisition and strategic trades to improve our city where possible. It will accomplish the larger goal while leaving much less bad feeling in its wake, and the smoother our progress toward a better, denser future the less resistance there will be if and when we have to do really big things.