7 responses so far ↓

• 1 Frederick D. S. Marshall // Sep 14, 2009 at 2:26 pm

  Dear Neighbors,

  Share Your Opinion!

  When: Monday Night, September 14th, 2009, 6:30 p.m.

  Where: Ballard High School, 1418 Northwest 65th Street, library

  The 6010 Phin­ney Project would replace the existing building with a four-story mixed-use building containing 19 residential units plus two commercial units on the first floor.

  Seattle’s Northwest Design Review Board is meeting tonight to review the latest proposed design for the 6010 Phinney Project, listen to your comments about the proposal, and offer their recommendations to the director of the Department of Planning and Development. Please come to help ensure the project-review process fully considers the design impact of this development on our neighborhood.

  For the new and previous designs, visit the project-review archives at http://www.seattle.gov/dpd/Planning/Design_Review_Program/Project_Reviews/Reports/default.asp?p=3006773.

  Yours truly,

  Rick Marshall
  607 North 61st Street

• 2 Frederick D. S. Marshall // Sep 14, 2009 at 5:16 pm

  Dear Neighbors,

  Because of a scheduling conflict, I can’t attend tonight’s meeting, much to my regret, but I hope many of you will. There are both positive and negative issues to be addressed with the new proposal.

  Above all, against the wishes of the designer and the neighborhood, the Design Review Board is still insisting that the garage entrance be placed not on Phinney Avenue North, which could easily handle the capacity, but on North 61st Street, a street so narrow that cars have to pull over to let each other pass, a street frequented by children and pets.

  The architects wisely originally put the driveway on Phinney where it belongs and where neighbors want it, but the Design Review Board not only required them to move it but also have consistently ignored neighborhood pleas to restore it to its originally designed location.

  The city has responded to neighbors’ complaints about this design element by commissioning a remarkably unrealistic study of the new traffic generated by this project and the proposed placement of the driveway. There are six obvious errors, each of which was honestly but mistakenly arrived at:

  1) That placing the driveway on 61st vs. Phinney would have no effect on driving habits. The option of a Phinney driveway is mentioned nowhere in the transportation study, so the possibility of there being a difference was simply not discussed or recognized. Actual experience driving around the neighborhood, on the contrary, strongly suggests that if the driveway is on 61st then drivers will commute via the 99 onramp at the bottom of 61st, but if it’s on Phinney they will tend to commute via the 50th Street onramp that Phinney naturally turns toward at the south. This distinction is important, but invisible in this report.

  2) That the actual number of cars owned and used by residents corresponds even remotely with the official figure used in these kinds of reports. For 19 residential units, the formulas say 22 parking spots need to be provided because each residential unit owns 1.17 vehicles. How tidy. If only it were true. These formulas based on averages only work in the average neighborhood, wherever that is.

  Actual neighborhoods have their own demographic and financial constraints that cause the actual number of cars owned to fit the neighborhood rather than the tidy equations. In the case of Phinney Ridge, these housing units will be more expensive than in most parts of the city, and thus rentable only by people with a higher income. People with higher incomes tend to be (1) more likely to own cars than the average, and (2) more likely to be two-income households and hence to have two cars rather than one.

  My guesstimate looks more like this: Most of these rental units will own cars, let’s say 18 of them (it’s hard to survive in the more expensive parts of the city if you don’t own a car, even if you don’t use it to commute). Of those, half (very conservatively) will be two-income apartments in which the second income-earner also drives a car. That brings our total up to 27. These people are not robots but actually have friends and family who sometimes want to come visit and also need somewhere to park. Let’s say two units a day want someone to come visit, sometimes one person, sometimes two (sometimes more, but let’s be conservative and average this at 1.5). That’s three additional spots, bringing the total up to 30.

  This guesstimate is already heresy, since it relies on real-life experience and human nature rather than tidy formulas, but let’s persevere and press on anyway.

  30 spots is only enough for the average Phinney apartment building with 19 units during average times of the week. Actual demand will ebb and flow. Sometimes no one is visiting and most people are at work, and sometimes everyone is home and several units will want friends and family over, and sometimes those will be parties (birthdays anyone? retirement parties? Oscar night?). These flow times will occur from time to time and not all that rarely, so let’s say a realistic estimate has to consider that occasionally another five to ten vehicles will be parking nearby so they can visit.

  So I’m guessing this project will actually need typically 30 parking spots with frequent spikes of demand of up to 40 parking spots needed. It might be reasonable to expect the periodic overflow guests to park on the street (except that now you need to study where they can do that), but if you don’t handle the 30 you’re being irresponsible.

  Now, the code doesn’t care about reality. It’s based on formulas and averages, and they say all these other cars that will in reality need to park here because of this project don’t exist. The developer is only held to the much lower imaginary figure, the average, so this design problem is one the city has to be held accountable for.

  3) That there is no difference between the number of cars that need to park and the number of cars that will be used to commute. Surprise: just because one can ride a bus or bike to work doesn’t mean one doesn’t actually own a car. I telecommute many days, and when I don’t my office is only twelve blocks away – I can walk – but I still own a car. The study pretends that only car commuters own cars, an amusing proposition that only makes sense in the magic world of averages and formulas.

  4) That the actual space needed to park a car roughly equals the size of the car. Surprise: a person parking needs to get into and out of that car, something the average space allocation formulas do not genuinely acknowledge (they pretend to), and also has to be able to handle big cars as well as lots and lots of Smart cars and Minis. The space required by code for parking places is so small that people living in the Roycroft have reported (in confirmation of everyone’s real-life experience) that sometimes it just isn’t worth it to try to squeeze your mid-size car between an SUV and a minivan. Therefore, the actual overflow from the proposed design is not the minimum of 8 that my guesstimate proposes, but more like 12 because of people who give up on trying to wedge themselves into the shoebox spots allotted them. Everyone but planners, evidently, already knows this happens because we notice the parking density go up whenever one of these inadequately garaged buildings goes up.

  5) That apples are oranges. The study directly does arithmetic comparing the kinds of parking and trips made to the current location with the number likely to occur if the proposed design becomes reality. The danger of math is the failure to recognize when this kind of arithmetic is precisely the wrong thing to do. It takes sound human judgment and common sense to figure out whether 10 equals 10, and in this case it doesn’t.

  The current location has no residential units, only retail ones. The traffic patterns of the two are wildly different. Take Chef Liao, an example I know well. People frequently drop in to dine or pick up take-out, parking just long enough to do so; such “trips,” as the report calls them, are very different from the “trips” made by commuters, not only in their duration but also in their source and destination. Home is usually at one or both ends of a trip to a restaurant. Work is usually at the other end of a commuter trip. Work and home are not in the same direction from 6010 Phinney. If you change the kinds of trips being made, you have to change your assumptions about which direction they’re going to be going, but the study precisely does not do this. Instead, it directly equates the two, from which much of the false information in this report derives.

  For example, since current traffic studies show that 97% of trips to or from 6010 use Phinney and only 3% use 61st, the report concludes this will be the case after the proposed design is built. This is an astonishingly thoughtless conclusion. Here’s why.

  6010′s retail spaces are mainly used by the neighborhood. The trips to and from it often terminate in homes elsewhere in the neighborhood. Phinney is the main avenue up and down this long, thin neighborhood. That is why 97% of current trips to and from 6010 use Phinney. Change the nature of 6010 and you will change the usage of Phinney away from 97%. It’s obvious to anyone who can put down the calculator and think about where these numbers are coming from.

  The proposed 6010 will consist of 19 residential units and 2 retail ones. For the moment let’s disregard the retail spaces – I’ll come back to them in point 6 – and just focus on the main shift. These 19 new units, and the 30 cars I estimate will be parking nearby, will not be owned by people who live elsewhere in Phinney Ridge and just drop in at 6010 for a few minutes or an hour. These people will commute from 6010 to their places of work in the morning and back again in the evening, and they will make additional short trips to and from 6010 to buy groceries, run errands, see movies, visit families, etc. In other words, the travel dynamic is reversed. 6010 is no longer a temporary destination; it is a permanent home base. And, the trips will tend to be to places outside the neighborhood, to wherever their jobs might be.

  Long-distance commuter trips take very different routes than local neighborhood retail ones. For those trips, the majority of drivers will need I-5 or 99, and there are a limited number of ways to get two and from those travel corridors.

  From the intersection of 61st and Phinney, 61st doesn’t take you to most local neighborhood destinations (which is why only 3% of 6010 trips use that route now), but it can lead you to all long-distance commute destinations (which is why this number will spike dramatically unless precautions are taken, such as letting the developers put the driveway back on Phinney where it belongs). The use of 61st for traffic changes dramatically when the makeup of trips centered at 6010 changes. It’s obvious, but it’s nowhere to be found in this report, which is why this report’s estimates about how the current design will change traffic are so grotesquely unrealistic.

  6) That the proposed project’s retail space will thrive with businesses whose parking and traffic patterns resemble our current ones. If only this were true! Buildings of this design that have gone up along Phinney and Greenwood have been killing small businesses in our neighborhood. This kind of building exists because of the way Seattle’s zoning laws are written. Developers design to maximize their profits within the constraints they are given, and the zoning laws are among the most significant of those constraints. In an attempt to protect small business space, the current generation of Seattle zoning laws requires certain kind of multi-residential units to allocate space for retail on the first floor – but the zoning laws don’t require enough space or specify the shape, and that omission has proven deadly for small businesses. Ironically, the attempt to protect small businesses is killing them.

  Walk along Phinney-Greenwood from 85th to the zoo. At every three- or four-story multi-unit residential building like this built in the last decade, count the number of vacancies. In most such buildings, vacancies outnumber occupancies, and they always have in such buildings, since long before the recession. The reason is that these spaces are small, awkwardly shaped, and too expensive for the businesses they displaced. For example, restaurants need deep spaces to leave room for a kitchen in the back and dining space in the front. Wide, shallow retail spaces, like those in the 6010 designs so far, simply cannot be used by most restaurants.

  Developers stack residential space above the first floor and then have to use part of the first floor for residential utilities, a lobby, and other such support space. Only the leftover is given over to the retail space, usually the bare minimum required by the code – if they give more than that they have to set aside additional parking for the retail space, which would hurt their profit margins – and its shape is absolutely not optimized for the needs of the kinds of businesses the neighborhood needs – the zoning laws don’t require it. Therefore, developers have to design their buildings to be profitable if the retail space remains empty – they plan for it – and a lot it does.

  So, with reality in mind rather than formulas, the traffic study’s estimate of the retail-related “trips” is revealed as the unrealistic fantasy it is. There is not going to need to be parking for 18 vehicles nearby related to 6010 businesses because it’s even odds there won’t be any, and if there are it will probably be one retail space given over to office space with only one or two cars parking there and no additional traffic to and from that business because it won’t really be a thriving retail, and the other retail space will be empty. Based on our history to date with this kind of building, anything else is extremely unlikely.

  If my scenario is right, that replaces 63 prime-time trips to and from the imaginary thriving retail businesses with between zero and four trips.

  The total then overall shifts from the imaginary scenario of 85 prime-time trips to and from 6010, with 97% of them accessing 6010 via Phinney, to a far more likely scenario of 40 prime-time trips, with a variable percentage of them using Phinney. Under the imaginary scenario, 2 or 3 retail trips during each day’s prime times use North 61st Street to reach 6010 – no wonder the city thinks there’s no problem. Under the realistic scenario, if the driveway’s on 61st I’d guess something like 20 commuter trips during each day’s prime time; if the driveway’s on Phinney I’d guess that drops to 5 or 6.

  On a street so narrow that cars have to pull over to let each other pass, a street frequented by children and pets, a street with blind spots due to sudden changes in the steepness of the hill, that is a big difference, and that’s only counting the additional trips during prime time; the difference is even bigger if we factor in the rest of the daily traffic.

  Hence, under a realistic evaluation of parking and driving patterns based on the current design, the placement of the driveway matters. If the design review board cannot bring themselves around to this position, you will have to do it for them.

  We like to think that our government makes rational decisions with an eye toward the greater good, toward a healthy balance of freedom and responsibility that protects community interests without trampling the rights of business owners and homeowners. The truth is very different. Government is underfunded and overworked. It doesn’t have time or money to figure out the truth about these situations. Instead it relies on formulas and guidelines to “think” for it, to make decisions for it, to exercise judgment for it. The more city planners rely on these processes, the more investment they have in believing they work; after all, if you point out a systematic flaw, you aren’t just criticizing the current project, you’re exposing a decade or more of widespread problems. Left to its own devices, under these kinds of no-win pressures, government tends to insulate itself from its citizens, to project a bubble of false reality that allows them to go on believing that the current approaches are working even when they obviously aren’t.

  If you stay home, if you fail to attend tonight’s design review board meeting, this process of entrenching a bad design is only going to get worse. Already the bubble of false reality around this design has thickened to the point where even the developer feels obliged to capitulate on the driveway location, even though there is no good reason to keep it on 61st and many reasons to move it back to Phinney. The lack of reality in the design of the retail spaces, in the parking estimates, in the traffic estimates, all of these things seem realistic to the people inside the bubble. They simply can’t break out of their bubble now. You need to go inject enough reality into the process that they become capable again of seeing the reality of the situation.

  You should insist on being allowed to review the June 17th Transpo Group memo for yourselves. If you agree with me that its projections and conclusions are too unrealistic to help the city or neighborhood make informed decisions about this proposed design, then you should not permit the city to rely on these figures in making its decision. Help guide them toward a realistic assessment of these and the other design flaws in the current proposal.

  I do not oppose this development, only this design. There is nothing wrong with it that can’t be fixed. I believe that if we want to protect our wild spaces and our farms then we have to increase urban density, including in our own neighborhood. But just because we have to grow, that doesn’t mean we have to grow dysfunctionally, incoherently. New developments, if designed correctly, strengthen their neighborhoods. This proposal could and should be better.

  Yours truly,

  Rick Marshall
  607 North 61st Street

• 3 Tahomajim // Sep 14, 2009 at 7:59 pm

  Parking is becoming dear around the zoo. Wish we had parking options…… there was a time we had a project that would help. Thanks to the PRCC and a handful of neighbors we’re doomed to walking blocks to our homes. Forget about inviting friends to a summer BBQ or brunch. A four story state of the art zoo parking facility was ouragious…. until five and six story proposed condos came on the scene. Now the parking facility seems attractive, but the funds are lost forever and so is parking relief. Thank you PRCC for you thoughtful input to our neighborhood.

• 4 jt // Sep 14, 2009 at 11:01 pm

  The proposed zoo parking garage was illegal and a waste of PUBLIC dollars. End of story. There are still plenty of empty parking spots at the zoo now if you want to tell your guests to park there and pay the fee.

  Thanks to everyone who gave their input at the meetings. The design is much improved thanks to neighbors who care.

• 5 Tahomajim // Sep 15, 2009 at 8:07 am

  How kind and thoughtful you are jt by suggesting neighbors guests pay for parking at the zoo when visiting because of lack of residential parking. As far as the parking facility being illegal… hmmm seems to me the zoo went through due process (many public meetings), and were issued a master use permit by DPD. Nothing illegal there. As far as waste of PUBLIC dollars, the public dollars were only 50% of the project. It was a good deal, the zoo paid for the other half. Finally, we had to sell the zoo on the project to build a parking garage. They did not come to us, it was the neighbors who started (demanded) the parking facility project. Funny how those things are forgotten. The zoo invested tens of thousands all for a few dozen selfish neighbors who suggest our guests should pay for parking and walk to our house because of limited street parking. The zoo is great in my eyes, you’re not. Phinney Ridge population will increase in density, street parking will get worse, that’s a fact. End of story jt!

• 6 Frederick D. S. Marshall // Sep 15, 2009 at 3:15 pm

  Dear Tahomajim,

  I’m over on 61st, and although I certainly notice the ebb and flow of zoo parking on my street – worse on sunny weekends and especially Zoo Tunes nights – it isn’t bad most of the time and it’s even tolerable at those times.

  But I imagine it must be worse the closer you get to the zoo, since patrons will tend to park closer if they can.

  I’d like to better understand the shape of the parking problem. Tahomajim, are you over toward 60th or 59th?

  I just got elected to the Phinney Ridge Community Council, and I’d like to do the neighborhood some good during my term if I can. If I understand the parking problem better, maybe I can help come up with a solution. I’m willing to put some time into it.

  Beverly and I moved to Phinney Ridge seven years ago, and we just love the neighborhood and our neighbors. If I can help us solve some problems, I’d sure love to contribute in some way.

  Yours truly,

  Rick Marshall
  607 North 61st Street

• 7 Tahomajim // Sep 15, 2009 at 8:37 pm

  Thank you Mr. Marshall for your kind concerns. I live off Fremont, north side of the zoo third house from the corner toward the lake. I prefer not to give you my address, here’s why. In the latter part of 2004 I attended my first PRCC meeting. I don’t remember the topic that night but clearly remember asking about the PRCC bylaws. I asked if they were available to read. I was not being nasty, only curious. I was told they exist and that’s it. From that point on I was treated like a Democrat at the Republican convention. About two years later I was asked to attend another PRCC meeting because neighbors wanted representation. The website had been online for a while. At that meeting I asked about minutes, I asked that the minutes be online for the benefit of the neighborhood. I was told they could not be for technical difficulties. Finally, about 18 months ago I saw there was a speaker at a PRCC meeting I wanted to hear and articulate with. When I arrived the President started the meeting with “I forgot the agenda at home, I’ll do it from memory.” Meaning there’s a outsider here we cannot pass around the agenda…. to me that equals censorship. I’m not naming names here but I know who they are/were. Good luck on the PRCC Rick. You seem like a nice chap. I hope you’re more successful than I. Beyond commenting on this blog I prefer not to be involved, time is too dear. My leisure time is spent at the zoo, perhaps 150 days a year. I’d rather spend my time with the great apes than with those conniving PRCC members.

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