Tag Archives: city council

News, Politics, Transportation

Pacific Place Parking Wants Your Two Dollars

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Mayor McGinn, parking magnate

Yesterday the Mayor and the City Council agreed on something, which is that the rent parking at Pacific Place was too damn high.

The good news for bargain parking shoppers is that overall parking rates at Pacific Place downtown have been reduced 20 to 60 percent for the first three-and-a-half hours of parking. Evening rates now top out at $6 total, and there will be a game day special of $6 for major sporting events if you show your game ticket.

The new rates, below, went into effect as of June 1, 2011, and will remain good through September 30, at which point, presumably, they’ll be renewed if they have worked to bring the cars back to their traditional spawning grounds at Pacific Place.

  • $2 for 30 minutes (previously parkers had to pay $5 for one hour, with no 30-minute rate);
  • $3 for one hour (this is nearly half of the old rate);
  • $5 for two hours (reduced from $7);
  • $7 for three hours (reduced from $9 – more than a 20 percent discount);
  • A cap of $6 for evenings (previously, people paid more for stays of more than four hours);
  • A cap of $10 on weekends;
  • A “game day special” for fans of the Mariners, Sounders, Seahawks and Huskies, where they will pay $6 if they arrive no more than three hours before the game. Fans then ride convenient light rail and buses from the Pacific Place Garage and avoid the game traffic.

That is good news for SIFF attendees, since they still have half a fest to go, and can possibly get in and out for the $5-for-two-hours rate if they sprint ($7 if they need to use the restroom). Out of curiosity, I checked with the AMC Pacific Place guest services desk, to see if the theatre might begin offering even an hour of validation, but it’s not something they’re talking about at the moment.

This is a good decision: The back story on why it needed to be made is here. The garage at Pacific Place had been wildly popular for years, and the city raised rates until it wasn’t, and began losing money to competing parking options. The city has a stake in the garage’s success, because we are paying for the debt incurred in its construction, and lately it has been costing the city over $1 million per year from the General Fund to service that debt. (That’s more of a liquidity crunch “cost” because the debt will be paid off, eventually, and the garage will be delivering its revenue still. In the longer run, it’s a money-maker.)

News, Politics

Home of REI, Seattle Wrestles With Urban Tent Cities

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Slightlynorth found this encampment under the West Seattle Bridge, and dropped it into our Flickr pool.

Seattle-based outdoor outfitter REI has a logo that includes two mountain peaks that could also double as tents, pitched on top of its logotype. Camping outdoors is a symbol of autonomy, self-sufficiency, living close to nature.

But camping outdoors in Seattle is a civic headache that’s become chronic as the recession’s effects drag on. The longer it takes the city’s leaders to decide how best to help the homeless families who aren’t well-served by shelters, or homeless adults who bridle at shelter rules and regulations they have little input on, the more entrenched a nomadic tent-city lifestyle becomes.

Last week, just as Mayor McGinn and City Council members Nick Licata and Mike O’Brien announced one practical and one policy fix–proposing the ongoing use of the Lake City’s old Fire Station 39 structure as a shelter, and passing an ordinance to let churches host encampments on their own recognizance, as it were, “while providing standards and guidelines for hosts and peace of mind for neighbors”–Nickelsville moved back to West Seattle, saying they were tired of being strung along by the city. From their site:

Last May, 2010 we were advised to give the new Mayor a chance. Last August the Mayor’s Encampment Panel got started and recommended giving us a permanent site. 7 months ago we were told that the Sunny Jim site would be ready in 5 months. Now Council President Conlin says he’ll decide what to do by the fall. We think this fall Council President Conlin will say maybe something will be ready next spring.

You can sympathize with the residents of Nickelsville–they were promised a semi-permanent location south of downtown (SoDo). Because of mild industrial-use contamination at the site, though, readying the location for human habitation was going to cost money, and the City Council (not unwisely) stopped to reflect whether the money might be better spent on, perhaps, rental vouchers, rather than a homeless campground.

On the other hand, this is a stunningly obvious solution, and yet Nickelsville has been tramping around since fall of 2008. So some part of this is not that simple. At issue is the homeless activism behind Nickelsville’s existence–you get the sense that in their view, they are a community looking for a home, whereas government sees a social ill that needs to be ended. (It should be noted that while Nickelsville is a tent city, not all tent cities argue Nickelsville’s brand of self-determination.)

There’s public resistance to “institutionalizing homelessness” if the city or county creates a permanent encampment (which has lead to linguistic contortions such as a “semi-permanent home”)–or even rents housing.

But the homeless know that programs end, whether or not homelessness has, so the alternative is to institutionalize urban nomadism, which, in the absence of productive reasons to move, can become the self-fulfilling purpose of tent city life. Instead of a barren plain of joblessness and homelessness stretching into the future, the view is broken up by quarterly relocations that give everyone something to do. This is the most important facet of a tent city–its self-organization is evidence that its inhabitants are capable of looking after themselves in ways that many other homeless people are not.

It’s a fact of history that Seattle’s Hoovervilles (which sprang up during the Depression in the SoDo area, ironically enough) were difficult as a blackberry patch to get rid off, even when the economy began to improve. The shacks were burnt down, and popped back up, just as today “homeless sweeps” often raze illegal encampments, trashing tents and belongings.

Seattle’s largest Hooverville took up nine acres and lasted ten years, until 1941, when it was doused with kerosene and burnt to the ground. There was a war on, and the land was needed. There are many things you can learn from that history, but one salient lesson is that permanence isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, not in city limits, anyway.

It’s a trying situation, but Seattle can’t tell Nickelsville what to do, really, until the group has something they don’t want to lose: a home. So far the city has been unwilling to risk making that offer, even if that would provide the foundation for future negotiations. Maybe the word “home” is simply too fraught with associations and expectations. A previous era generated the term “residence hotel,” which strains to sound posh. How about, after REI, a residence cooperative?

News, Politics, Real Estate

Licata, Clark, O’Brien Say Keep Pioneer Square People-Sized

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(Photo: MvB)

You’d think that, with Pioneer Square being the state’s first national historic district, Seattle wouldn’t have to keep fighting the preservation vs. development fight all over again. I mean, if you were new here, you might think that.

This Monday, April 25, the Seattle City Council will be voting on Council Bill 117140, to amend the zoning for South Downtown including Pioneer Square. The council has a committee that considers height limits, before forwarding bills to the full council, and it split 2-to-2 on a vote for a lower level of building heights in the Pioneer Square Historic District, as recommended by the Department of Planning and Development.

Council members Sally Clark and Mike O’Brien favored the DPD recommendations, while Sally Bagshaw and Tim Burgess can’t get high enough. Clark and O’Brien needed a majority, so the Pioneer Square rezone marches on. The Council’s Nick Licata explains that heights “could go up to 140 ft. in some instances, whereas the current height of most of the buildings there is between 20 and 50 feet.”

What’s in all about, Alfie? Here are dueling op-eds at Publicola on the subject: Cary Moon, carrying the preservationist’s shield, and Anne Fennessy and Jen Kelly, talking up development’s sword.

The argument here, as it has played out in other parts of the city as well, revolves around the amount of money that builders can make by adding extra stories. Developers, in fact, would like 180-foot-tall buildings. But should Pioneer Square look like Belltown?

To that point, argues Licata, the Pioneer Square Preservation Board spent the last four years working with the DPD to settle on suitable height limits: in this case, the proposed maximum height of 120 feet, if developers use an incentive zoning program. “130 and 140 foot heights could eventually risk the removal of the District from the National Register of Historic Places,” cautions Licata, before turning to the economic facts on the ground:

Other factors, such as market demand, are much more critical.  For example, the Pike/Pine neighborhood just east of downtown is experiencing a lot of multifamily housing development with height limits of 65 to 75 feet.

One thing Seattle is not short on at the moment is condominiums. As the recession slowly loosens its grip, apartment projects are starting to take off again. But developers are remarkable resistant to learning the boom-bust lesson; they nearly always prefer their financial incentives on steroids. Some strike it rich, some go bankrupt, and some end up tearing down a 10-year-old building. That last is historic, in its way, but the entire process has little to add to a historic district.

Health, News, Politics, Real Estate

City Council to Homeless: Hang in There, Guys!

City Council President Richard Conlin, who sleeps inside most nights

The boldness of our City Council sometimes leaves me breathless. Recently they announced that, having failed to address the existence of the roving homeless camp Nickelsville, they plan to “review alternatives to the Sunny Jim site” suggested by Mayor McGinn as a temporary encampment, which plan has since bogged down due to concerns about site contamination, which, you know, as a former Sunny Jim products consumer, I’d like to know substantially more about.

You may remember that Nickelsville’s patience was bought off last November by the promise of the Sunny Jim resettlement:

Last week, the 100 to 150 inhabitants of the roving homeless camp Nickelsville were grumbling that the good news about a semi-permanent SoDo site, at the former Sunny Jim factory, was not great news, as there was still a winter to get through before the SoDo site would be ready for campers.

So: YOINK! Instead, the homeless can live comfortably in a review of alternatives. After all, here it is spring, and if the homeless have made it through the winter, then why not wait until July to make recommendations?

“The council is rehashing legwork that’s already been done by proactive homeless advocacy organizations and the mayor’s office over the past year (and beyond),” reports Cienna Madrid for The Stranger. She quotes Reverend Bill Kirlin-Hackett, director of the Interfaith Task Force on Homelessness, as saying: “This is a series of seemingly meaningless statements that could’ve been said last October.”

That makes a good segué to this post written by the Council’s Richard Conlin, between what I imagine are crippling bouts of smugness. It’s like epilepsy, except he’s mainly in danger of choking on his self-regard. He begins with this assertion:

Over the past two years, homelessness in Seattle has decreased by 15 percent – an extraordinary achievement in the face of this recession, and a testament to the success of the Seattle community’s ‘Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness’.

That would be something, if true, but Conlin has no hard evidence of that. What he refers to is a 15 percent difference between One Night Counts in 2011 and 2010. I have no problem with the awareness-raising of the One Night Count, but as a reliable sampling method, it seems dubious to me. A quick glance at past counts show that 15 percent swings aren’t unusual, and that the count may also measure other factors.

Conlin goes on to count, himself, the ways in which the Council was not consulted about the Sunny Jim site. (In Seattle, the primary duty of the mayor is to consult with the City Council about their wishes.) Then he goes on to describe the ways in which the Council will do nothing substantive over the next several months:

In considering these alternatives, we will examine the legal and policy constraints for each as well as feasibility and costs.  Our goal is to approve one or more options by the end of July.  In the meantime, the Council will hold the proposed legislation regarding the Sunny Jim site, since it is not legally permissible to approve it before the environmental review is completed.  The Council will review the legislation concerning the $2.4 million proceeds received by the City in the settlement from the fire at the Sunny Jim settlement.  We will decide whether funds should be spent on environmental remediation at the site, used for other shelter purposes, or reserved for other priority purposes in the light of continuing concerns about the budget.

Finally, he closes with this gem, in case your head has not exploded yet:

As HL Mencken noted, “For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.” Let’s not make the mistake of thinking that we can solve issues around homelessness without putting in the energy to figure out what really works.

Absolutely, Mr. Conlin. When it comes to finding a temporary place for homeless people currently living in tents to stay–an issue never before studied by the City, I gather–there is no real rush. Nothing was done last winter, or this spring, and come summer, the weather’s nice. However, I do encourage you to reread that Mencken quotation while keeping in mind your support for the deep-bore tunnel.