Seattle Nice: Is Design Review Dying in Seattle?
We discuss a plan to eliminate design review for some buildings downtown.
By Erica C. Barnett
This week's Seattle Nice takes on one of the wonkiest, yet most contentious, issues facing Seattle: Design review!
Specifically: Should the city exempt housing, hotels, and life sciences buildings in the downtown core from design review, a protracted process in which panels of architects and activists (yes, activists) get to raise objections, and force changes, to new buildings. Historically, design review has been weaponized to delay the development of new housing.
In neighborhoods across the city, design review has forced housing developers to change details as picayune as the color of exterior brick and the orientation of exterior landscaping. It has also been used to reduce the number of housing units available to renters (requiring additional setbacks from the street, for instance, or forcing "wedding cake"-style tiered buildings) as well as dictate what kind of amenities a building must have.
In one example I covered several years ago, the Northwest Design Review Board delayed a 57-unit, four-story apartment building on Greenwood Ave., an arterial street, because neighbors insisted that each of the 57 studio apartments should have its own washer and dryer and central air conditioning; they were also furious that the building would have a common space on the roof, because you know how THOSE kind of people get with their wild parties. (Seriously: They wanted to kill the outdoor space because people would, quote, "party.")
Design review can add hundreds of thousands of dollars and months, sometimes years, of delay to a project—costs that get passed on directly to the renters who will ultimately live in the building. Still, advocates (including our own devil's advocate on the podcast, David) argue that if we didn't have it, Seattle would be chock full of ugly buildings.
Um... Have they looked around Seattle lately? I would argue that design review, which focuses intensely on "neighborhood character," has contributed greatly to the homogenization of the city, shaving off any and all unique design elements in pursuit of the sameness we see in new developments all around us. After agonizing for months over whether a building's brick cladding should be dark brown or brown, or whether some apartment should be removed to achieve a curvilinear exterior wall that gestures toward the riparian history of blah blah blah, design review still spits out ugly buildings—at significant cost to the people who will ultimately have to foot the bill.
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Kill it dead now...