Wow. What a difference a week makes. One week ago I stood feeling helpless, frustrated, and angry as I watched our Mayor, City Attorney, and two Councilmembers promise Roosevelt neighbors a park where we had fought for housing. Today, after a week of spontaneous discussion and brain storming, there is a petition circulating on the City Builders Facebook page with ideas to get housing and open space. I feel a lot better. And it all happened collaboratively on social media. What follows is the petition signed by about 30 people but thought sourced by over 200 comments on the City Builder page. I think we have a chance to turn this around. I hope you’ll join us.

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March 18, 2015 

To:                  Mayor Murray, Seattle City Council Members, and the City Attorney Pete Holmes.

From:             City Builders

Re:                  Parks Proposal in Roosevelt

We are writing about the announcement on March 13, 2015 of the City’s plan to seize a portion of the Sisley properties on the west side of 14th Ave NE between NE 65th and 66th Streets and create a new public park. The following issues are important to acknowledge and have, we believe, widespread consensus:

• The properties are currently a blight and an eyesore to the community,
• Your efforts to secure this land for community purposes are laudable, demonstrate innovative vision and a willingness to take bold action,
•  We recognize and support the community process and hard work of numerous community members, advocates, Sound Transit and City employees that led to the zoning designation of these parcels of NC2P-65, and
• We acknowledge the investment of the City in Sound Transit’s Link Light Rail station and the positive effects that investment will have on the Roosevelt neighborhood as well as the impacts of additional residents, and
• Affordable housing is a Public Good of which the City unquestionably needs vastly more,
• Other progressive jurisdictions (e.g. Amsterdam, Stuttgart, Helsinki, Vienna) use long term leases and land trusts to remove land from the speculative market and provide permanently affordable housing to their citizens,
• We acknowledge the nexus between social justice and climate change, and remind the recipients of this letter of the City of Seattle’s commitment to be carbon neutral by 2050 and that buildings emit approximately 26% of Seattle’s carbon emissions, and
• We recognize that the Passive House (Passivhaus) standard of energy conservation is an internationally proven, widely adapted approach to reducing energy used in the heating and cooling of buildings by 90%, as well as providing a more durable, comfortable and healthier building than conventional construction with marginal increase in initial capital cost,

Therefore, we the undersigned, propose and endorse that,

1) The City allocate the parcels in question to affordable housing, in perpetuity, for families earning less than 50 percent of Area Median Income (AMI) through either a long-term (99-year) lease or the establishment of a land trust, and

2) The City designate that the parcels shall be used to create Seattle’s first multifamily Passivhaus building, developed by one of Seattle’s non-profit housing corporations, selected by a public competition, and

3) The Right-of-Way of 14th Ave NE between NE 65th and 66th Streets be vacated and a new innovative green multiuse public open space created on that land, designed in conjunction with and in support of the proposed multi-family developments to the west and east.

Sincerely

City Builders[1]

Charlie Cunniff	Ben Schiendelman
Dan Bertolet	Joel Sisolak
David Neiman	David Moser
Matt Gangemi	Paul Byron Crane
Rob Harrison	Roger Valdez
Owen Pickford	Josh Mahar
Zachary Pullin	Keri Fowles Williams
Rae Anne Rushing	Erik Schwab
Zach Shaner	Kim Mulligan
Jon Clarke	Will Green
Ed Hodapp	Michael Maddux
Patti Southard	Ben Ahrens
Craig Ratchford	Nick Etheredge
Joe Wolf	David Sucher
Michael Eliason Ryan Carson Craig Ratchford	Dale Jonathan Bryan Fiedorczyk Alex Steffen