Growth at any Cost? Seattle’s Sense of Place is at Risk

Is it utopian to think that a city squeezed between high tech’s algorithms, the rapacious hunger of private equity and the Master Builders’ Association can “grow gracefully?” Recently I attended an event sponsored by Design Review Reboot Coalition and Allied Arts to hear a panel discuss “Creating Buildings and Places that Enhance our Neighborhoods: An engaging discussion on how residents and developers can collaborate to help Seattle Grow Gracefully and help the Comp Plan succeed.” The evening was part of the recurring “Beer and Culture” series sponsored by Allied Arts, the storied organization that helped to save the Pike Place Market.

When I had my design office downtown I was on the Allied Arts board, the only artist among planners and architects. I loved the camaraderie and sense of possibility the gatherings inspired. After a period of dormancy during the pandemic, it is exciting to see new energy in this group. The collaboration with Design Review Reboot has brought together people from across the city who care about sense of place, and who understand the importance of urban design.

Design done well fosters the intangible values that make a city not just livable, but lovable: an environment where arts and culture can thrive. Culture is under assault right now in the unnecessary war between those who want affordable housing (and see maximum density as the only way to get there) and those who want Seattle to retain its gardens, its low-rise business districts and existing single family homes during the growth process.

Urbanists have rebranded Seattle’s low-rise garden neighborhoods as “suburbs” inappropriate to a “city.” These leafy, often historic areas, filled with Craftsman homes, post-war “neo-sheds” and modest bungalows, are portrayed as enclaves of rolling pristine pesticide-laced lawns, filled with wealthy, white, complacent NIMBY’s who do not want renters or people of color next door. This caricature bears no resemblance to what I see as I walk around Greenwood and Bitter Lake, nor is it accurate for many of the rest of Seattle’s neighborhood residential zones.

I see lawns supporting vast populations of clover and bees, green in spring and dormant brown in the summer. I see front yards used as installations for art and politics and wild, personal expression. Yards confronting the trauma of climate change with flocks of plastic pink flamingos. Grizzly bears carved out of stumps, and shady refuges of bonsai, river rock and ponds.

I see third generation gardens filled with zinnias and sunflowers and corn, tumbling grape arbors and runner beans reaching for the sky. I see children and families, barbecues, swing sets, chalk and rust Camaros stacked on blocks waiting for a tune-up. Here and there, increasingly rare, I come across a garage and hear the percussion of an actual garage band.

Every time I step outside my gate to prune the Camelia people stop to talk, or to offer me a chain saw when I am tackling the hedge, and I talk to them too: walking around and seeing people outside in their gardens is how I have met almost everyone in my neighborhood. When we tear down these homes and subtract the yards we subtract an irreplaceable opportunity for human connection.

The supposedly monolithic affluence and exclusionary privilege of residential neighborhoods is belied by the prevalence of rentals. A house just-sold around the corner from me (hidden behind 80-foot firs and a rainbow fence of reclaimed doors) housed three young men as an affordable rental home.

The doors and the renters will all be removed for a cluster of Hardie Plank structures that look exactly like every other structure being built, selling upwards of $800,000. Within a 2-block radius of my home there are 12 rentals, tucked away behind shrubs and trees, indistinguishable from homes lived in by their owners. In the rush to densify the city, all of these rentals are vanishing – and with them some of the only available housing for families.

The discussion of zoning, design review, growth and grace is not abstract. It is the lived, visceral experience of Seattle residents. I hope that in the next installments of Design Review Reboot we can hear more from community members about the effect of development on displacement and tree loss and look at how harmonies of scale and greenspace can be thoughtfully protected.

The changes already finalized in Phase One of the Comprehensive Plan are huge, yet few people know about them until they see the house next door torn down, replaced by four new taller houses, and find strangers looking directly into their bedrooms.

The changes being proposed in the next phases under the banner of Taller Denser Faster, go far beyond this. Leading voices on Seattle’s land use committee are pushing for ever greater expansions of areas zoned for apartment buildings from 1/4 to 1/2 mile on either side of bus lines. No attention has been paid to buffers, and low rise one and two story homes will potentially be pushed up against 6-story apartments.

All of this is being done under an insistence on the urgency of a housing emergency, guided by the unproven assumptions that growth in supply leads to affordability, and that there is not (and should not) be any limits to growth.

There has been no acknowledgement of the drastic upheaval in the tech sector that has fueled growth, the current 35.8% vacancy rate in downtown office buildings and indications of a housing glut in the residential sector. There has been no good faith effort to study the effects of Seattle’s already passed upzones and to analyze whether they address our actual needs.

This despite the hundreds of testimonials at city hearings and what we can see with our own eyes happening in every neighborhood: Under Seattle’s new zoning the average new home being built in Seattle is priced at $961,460, a price requiring an income of between $200-$260k. The for-profit sector does not build the family-sized affordable rental housing we need, and we are tearing down what we have so that builders can charge prices of $550-$650k per square foot to the wealthiest buyers.

The “missing middle” housing promise of Washington State’s HB1110 – that was supposed to bring affordable duplexes and backyard cottages – is nowhere to be seen.

Not only are we not getting affordable housing, we are losing everything that has made Seattle a uniquely livable city. Nowhere in the city’s Comprehensive Plan is serious consideration given to the fabric of our existing neighborhoods, which relies largely on harmonies of scale.

In the interest of “affordability” we are told that all that matters is density, and more of it, at any cost. Words like “anti-displacement” and “equity” are taped onto proposed upzones (now disingenuously disguised as “rezones”) to legitimize pure market-driven deregulation of the housing market. The result is the exact opposite of the lofty redistribution of housing opportunity we have been promised.

To challenge this is to be called a “NIMBY,” and shamed for “privilege.” Why do we never hear discussed the enormous benefits to quality of life when people have a sense of place, and what is lost to physical and mental health when privacy, light, history, trees, gardens and creative spaces are erased? Why do we ignore the fact that in the face of added density we have not zoned for any new parks, and our tree canopy is going down with each building permit? Since mid 2024 we have lost over 6,600 trees — the equivalent of Lincoln Park plus another 2,000 trees.

What is replacing sense of place and responsible stewardship of our environment is blanket upzones and an expedient architecture by template, designed to satisfy builders and the urbanist zealots that we have extracted as much monetary value as possible from Seattle’s buildable lots.

Sustainable development is not just heat pumps and electric car plug-ins, or the maximum warehousing of people. Any serious reboot of design review needs to look holistically at how the built environment affects our mental and physical health, and our cultural ecosystem.

For 24 years my neighbor and I have been growing our gardens next to each other. We both have ponds, and our yards are refuges for pollinators and birds. Each August the lilies bloom along our shared picket fence and the scent crosses over into my windows.

The house next door is small, yet as retired not-wealthy school counselors, my neighbors struggle with the astronomical rise in property taxes; as in every neighborhood in the city, their displacement is a real risk. I am grateful for every season of lilies, not knowing when it will be replaced by the season of the developer, the blasting song of compressors, and the scent of freshly poured concrete.

Sense of place, character, creativity, connection, these are values that have no dollars attached to them. My friends, how do you effectively organize to lobby for something with “no value?”