CommentsPLATKIN ON PLANNING-My roots as a city planner go back to Seattle, where I studied city planning at the University of Washington and worked for the City of Seattle, before heading south to Los Angeles.
I have just returned from a visit to Seattle, and this city offers some clear lessons for Los Angeles, both positive and negative.
While Seattle cannot yet compete with Los Angeles when it comes to homeless encampments, traffic gridlock, and poor air and water quality, its traffic situation has become much worse, especially for its freeways and lively downtown.
The reasons are not hard to find. Seattle has become the West Coast’s premier destination city, eclipsing Los Angeles, the Bay Area, Portland, and Vancouver. While all of these cities have enormous foreign investment in speculative real estate, Seattle now has the largest of number of crane construction projects of any American city. This construction boom also parallels the city’s population boom. While LA hobbles along at about a .5 percent annual population increase, Seattle is now the fastest growing large American city, at 3 % per year, because of highly successful local companies, especially Microsoft, Amazon, Starbucks and Costco.
This accelerating growth is now obvious in other ways, too, not just traffic congestion. The rebuilding of the city’s transportation corridors is dramatic. Low-rise buildings have given way to well-designed, four and five story market rate apartments throughout the entire city, with rents that now rival LA’s. Furthermore, these new apartment buildings and their affluent tenants have spawned many trendy neighborhood commercial areas like Larchmont in Los Angeles.
These real estate and related demographic changes have largely pushed Seattle’s low-income residents, especially racial and ethnic minorities, as well as recent immigrants, into homeless encampments and South Seattle. The once predominantly African-American Central District, not far from the downtown, has been rapidly re-built, pushing its residents south, rubbing elbows with many new Latino, Vietnamese, and Ethiopian residents.
How has Seattle coped with these dramatic changes, especially rapid gentrification?
On the negative side, the city has reduced parking requirements in new residential projects and in the new downtown apartment complexes that have no parking requirements at all. While this no-on-site-parking approach has historically worked in New York City, where its dense mass transit system is matched by dense public and private amenities, Seattle is putting the cart before the horse. This lack of on-site parking results in enormous traffic congestion because drivers circle through neighborhoods looking for parking places. This approach also promotes urban sprawl in all directions, especially to the I-5 corridor to the north and south of Seattle, and the I-90 corridor to the city’s east.
The other downside is growing homelessness, despite the perpetual claims of the real estate industry and its sycophants that increasing the supply of market housing automatically reduces costs.
But, Seattle’s response to rapid economic and population expansion also has an upside that could become a model for Los Angeles.
Seattle how has a partially undergrounded light rail system that connects SEA-TAC, its international airport, to South Seattle, many stops in the downtown, Capital Hill, and the University of Washington. This light rail system is also undergoing extensive expansion, which will link the airport, the downtown, and the University to the southern, northern, and eastern cities and suburbs. Furthermore, this mass transit system already has high-ridership and serves all demographic categories, not just the transit dependent, like LA’s METRO.
In addition to light rail, Seattle also has a dense and reliable system of electric and natural gas busses. When I was there, the people I talked to raved about the bus system, as well as several alternative transportation options that are truly cutting edge.
One of these is Car2Go, a short-term car rental system that puts LA’s zipcar service to shame. In Seattle’s new system, users park their rental car at their destination. The next user finds nearby parked cars through a cell phone app, which will also unlock the car. The rates vary from $15 to $19 per hour. While not cheap, it beats the costs of owning a car or taking taxis.
Like Portland, Seattle has also become a bicycle-oriented city, despite its hills, rain, and narrow streets. This trend has ushered in another cutting edge system of shared bikes. Unlike LA’s METRO Bike Share and even NYC’s well know CitiBike, Seattle’s bicyclists can leave these quasi-public bikes anywhere they want, like Amsterdam under the Provos. The next rider finds the nearest parked bikes from a cell phone app, which also unlocks a specific bike for riding. At this point, Seattle has three competing bike sharing companies, the Lime, Orange (Spin), and Yellow (Ofo) firms, and the city will soon have 10,000 low cost rental bikes scattered around the entire town.
This, of course, leads to an obvious question. With its 300 days of sun, wide-streets, and mostly flat areas, why can’t Los Angeles become as bicycle-centric as Seattle and Portland?
While we are looking up north, there are several other features that should be imitated.
- Seattle does not have billboards.
- Seattle carefully enforces codes for commercial signs.
- Seattle is rapidly planting trees on streets where the parkways were previously treeless.
- Seattle has created many new pocket parks to complement its renowned Olmsted-designed park system.
When it comes to these things, Seattle is cutting edge and it could become a model for us to get people out of their cars to reduce gridlock and to also upgrade LA’s unattractive and rundown built environment. If enforcement of building and sign codes, extensive design review and tree planting, pocket parks, and shared cars and bicycles are a success in Seattle, is there any reason they cannot succeed in Los Angeles -- despite the difference in size and terrain between the two cities?
We won’t know until we try, which means all eyes should be on LA’s City Hall, especially our elected officials. While just as obsessed with real estate investment as their Seattle counterparts, they are laggards when it comes to the rest of a comprehensive urban agenda.
(Dick Platkin is a former LA city planner who reports on local planning issues and controversies for City Watch LA. Please send any comments or corrections to [email protected]) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
-cw
