Last Saturday Smart Growth Seattle was fortunate to have the board of the Osprey Foundation visit for a tour and introduction to growth issues in Seattle. We didn’t have a lot of time, but we covered some good ground. This is the introduction to the tour and the stops we made. The tour, as it turns out, highlights the positive aspects of growth in the city that we’ll continue to highlight. While these projects seem high end and glitzy, they actually combine accessibility, efficiency, sustainability, and preservation. These projects give us a glimpse what Ideas for Change: Seattle’s Housing Future can look like if we encourage them. 

Seattle is a place people want to live and work. Like the Bay Area, Seattle is rapidly becoming a center for job creation in the tech and ancillary fields. By 2040 Seattle’s population will have grown by 32 percent, roughly half a million new people.

All this growth is causing some serious anxiety among people who already live here. Worries about traffic congestion, housing price, and resource allocation are increasingly occupying the time of local elected officials and planners who are trying to respond to growth.

The problem in Seattle is that while we have a mandated comprehensive planning process, we haven’t been able to develop an agenda for growth that has been consistent. Instead, Seattle City government has responded to issues on an ad hoc basis, and often on a lot-by-lot, block-by-block, crisis-by-crisis way.

A previous regimen of neighborhood planning fell into disuse in the early part of the last decade. Since that time neighborhood groups have shifted their attention away from “how we grow” to questions about “whether we grow.” This movement of slow or no growth has merged with anti-corporate sentiment inspired by the occupy movement. What has resulted is a very vocal group that is highly suspicious of growth and urging local elected officials to go slow, and impose restrictions on new housing and job growth.

Ironically, this movement to clamp down on housing supply is in the name of affordable housing. The view has emerged from this group that all the new housing is actually driving the prices of housing up, even though there is no data to support that. Quite the opposite: housing growth in the middle level income range has created a small housing surplus which has kept that housing within the limits set by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

South Lake Union is the flashpoint for this debate, although it is playing out all over the city. The projects you will see on the tour are emblematic of the great potential to grow sustainably and efficiently. However, this growth is often seen as rapacious, disrespectful of local culture and the history of the city.

What I hope to show today is a glimpse of our vision of how we can build new, innovative office and housing projects that fit well into our past and our future, and that, given the constraints of land, economics, and climate change, we really have no choice but to grow in this way.

Smart Growth Seattle at We Work, South Lake Union

500 Yale Avenue North

WeWork is a platform that empowers small businesses to succeed by making them more connected with each other. Our services make running a small business easier and allow freelancers and entrepreneurs to focus on what they do best. Our people, our work space & our technology are all dedicated to inspiring creativity, productivity and innovation. We constantly strive to make meeting new people and having interesting conversations seem obvious, natural and effortless.

Stack House Apartments, South Lake Union

1280 Harrison Street

The Stack House Apartments are on a full city block in the South Lake Union neighborhood of Seattle. The Stack House project combines two new mixed-use residential projects with the restoration and adaptive reuse of the Supply Laundry Building, a historic landmark.

Supply Laundry was made a landmark because it is a unique example of commercial laundry facilities dominant in the first half of the 20^th century. Supply Laundry was one of several laundries in South Lake Union including Troy Laundry, also the site of a new development and adaptive reuse.

The full block development is broken into a series of smaller, quarter-block masses more characteristic of the neighborhood. Pedestrian-oriented mews create north-south and east-west through-block connections that preserve view corridors to Seattle landmarks and guide residents and passersby into the public plaza and courtyard spaces.

The Bullitt Center

1501 East Madison Street

Denis Hayes on the Bullitt Center

Arguably, our chief innovation is that we brought all these ideas together in one place at the same time. The Bullitt Center — instead of pursuing just net zero energy, net zero water, net zero carbon, composting toilets, toxic-free materials, an enticing stairway, 80+ percent day lighting using high-performance windows — chose all-of-the-above. And we chose them for a six-story urban infill project in a dense neighborhood in one of the greatest cities in the world, Seattle.

Our goal is to drive change in the marketplace faster and further. Three years ago, a solar-powered, six-story office building in cloud-covered Seattle would have struck most people as not merely foolhardy but impossible. Today it exists. To really change a market, the economics of the project must support it. Today’s reality is that economic policy promotes environmental decay.

While we work to repair these market failures, we have to operate in the world, as it exists, not as we wish it were. We estimate the Bullitt Center cost about 23 percent more than a typical class-A office building in Seattle. When it is fully leased, we expect the building to be cash-flow positive. While the initial financial returns will not be as great as if we had merely built it to code, leased it, and flipped its ownership to a REIT, we expect the Bullitt Center to perform over time at least as well as other fixed-income investments in the Bullitt Foundation’s portfolio.

Dwell Passivhaus projects in Rainier

3153 S. Oregon St

Dwell Development’s Passivhaus is the first in-fill spec Passivhaus development in Seattle. This high-design approx. 2,000 square feet, 3 bedroom, 2.5 bath features signature Dwell finishes, clean lines, volume, a 15’ by 24’ roof top deck and a large private parking space. Located in Dwell Development’s celebrated 15 home micro-community just blocks from Columbia City shopping and dining and the Light Rail Station. According to Tadashi Shiga, of Evergreen Certified, third-party verifier “the Passivhaus is the highest efficient home for energy efficiencies in the World. It’s 90% efficient. It’s like getting a 90% off space heating and cooling bills”.