It’s Time to Review Design Review
Last night I read a fantastic thread that perfectly encapsulates Seattle’s Design Review Program. A modest mixed-use residential project, with a grocery store at the ground level, was sent back to the drawing board for the 4th time. This project began it’s public review process back in the Obama administration and, in it’s next meeting, will be under it’s 3rd US President when it is *hopefully* approved. The reason for this delay? The board members were ‘concerned’ that it didn’t have enough store fronts (IT’S A GROCERY STORE), one member wanted to remove a fire exit stair and an accessibility access elevator so they could add a flower shop (for real!) and one board member was just concerned that the “red brick” wasn’t “red brick enough”. So 300 homes — Seattle is in a housing crisis — and a grocery store — Seattle has food deserts — get to go back to the drawing board and likely kills the development from proceeding. Hurray community input! [sarcasm]
What is Design Review?
Saving my adjectives like “insufferable”, “useless”, “dumb”, and many other offensive words, the program is Seattle’s community led process that either approves or denies projects from proceeding to construction. Every proposed project is required to schedule a public meeting. Meetings are only available in the evening on two days a month, and the board only listens to two projects per meeting. That’s 4 projects per month per region. Appointments book up fast, as you can imagine, so most of the time projects are ready to go but have to sit in traffic waiting for their turn, and have to swerve around the wrecks of failed projects trying to reschedule their follow up meetings.
Which Projects go Through Design Review?
It’s probably worth noting that only townhouses, small apartments and larger developments go through design review. Your average white modern farmhouse $2 million dollar mansion doesn’t have to get these nitpicky comments criticizing where their deck is or what color their windows are. The ‘community’ thinks we need to review development proposals, but is perfectly fine with craftsmen bungalows being bulldozed for mansions, as long as they maintain 1 family per lot (don’t even get me started on single family zoning).
Why Do We Have Design Review?
In 1989 Seattle’s angry NIMBY crowd grew fearful that their city was changing too rapidly (the H O R R O R!). Seattle had just seen some of it’s tallest office high rises get built, as was the case in every US city, and the fear was “they’re coming for our neighborhoods”. So some active citizens got together and, with 23% voter turnout (the lowest in the city’s history), passed the Citizens Alternative Plan, perfectly dubbed “CAP”. This plan capped downtown buildings to 85', or, 7 stories, and even set a limit of how much office space could be built in a single year (500,000 square feet!). This initiative came with the creation of the Design Review Program. With it, no development could proceed until the board of community volunteers deemed it worthy to build.
Who Are The Board Members?
The city is divided into eight geographic regions, which defines each of the eight boards. Board members are volunteers who apply for positions in Development, Design, Landscape Design, Small Business, Local Resident, and Community. Outside of the Development position, nearly every other spot is filled with an architect. And all but three are white (out of 42).
The Small Business position is usually filled by an owner of a small architecture firm, the Local Resident is usually a local architect in the regional area, and the Community advocate is always an architect who has their own community volunteer effort, whether it’s sitting on some boring community council or working with kids to teach them how to become insufferable design critics someday.
Hey, wait a minute, I’ve seen a billion 40 story towers go up, what happened to CAP???
You are right! The city council was wise enough in 2006 to eliminate all of CAP’s downtown limits to building heights and annual built area with one easy ordinance. It raised downtown to 40 story buildings, 400 feet tall, didn’t limit residential area at all, and uncapped all the development constraints previously passed in 1989. In 2016, most of these areas were upzoned yet again, adding an additional floor (or four!) to every building in pockets around the city.
So if CAP was gutted, why does Design Review remain?
I HAVE NO IDEA!!! In fact, much of the same city council that passed the last upzone in 2016 knows that design review causes unnecessary delay over subjective, nitpicky bullshit, so they raised the threshold for which projects go through it! Meaning, they are letting bigger projects bypass this program in order to keep moving to construction. Last week, a city councilmember introduced legislation to remove all affordable housing projects from design review, citing yet again the delay it causes.
But hey, I’m community, why can’t I be on the board?
You are free to apply. The planning department is always looking to fill vacant seats. But good luck. The field is crowded by architects who can’t wait to tell their competition how wrong they are about design, and the Mayor and several city councilmembers actually get to hand pick members themselves. The process is a greased wheel of political favors and word of mouth appointees. Nobody who says they’d rubber stamp all housing projects would ever make it past the interview process. Indeed, the program prefers to “hold developers accountable”, so if you think your pro-housing YIMBY ass is getting on it, think again.
Wow, this is disheartening, what can we do next?
For starters, we can keep bitching about the useless program. Even some members of a design review board are! But, legally, we can kill the stupid program entirely with legislation. We passed massive upzones without public vote, and we can pass legislation to kill this program entirely. No, construction wouldn’t become the Wild West, we still have plenty of checks and balances for proposals. Bellevue doesn’t have a board of volunteers approve their projects, they do it in house with the city staff and they only hold one public meeting, to inform what the proposal is. No commentary, no deliberation. Seattle is well equipped to approve these projects in-house, and the planning staff already works heavily on project proposals to make sure they comply with zoning, land use code, and building code. We can write our councilmembers, our Mayor, and volunteer our time to attend these meetings and remind the board how little they represent “us” in the community.
This Program has to Go
I don’t know about you, but I don’t really care for “Brian”, who hates the fact that an elevator is visible from the street, designing my community or my neighborhood on my behalf. And something tells me he also hates this process when he’s on the other side of the table, proposing a tower he worked his ass off to design just to have some insufferable jerk tell him “I don’t think you achieved your concept”.
KILL IT
