This winter Seattle faced a major snow storm and because our city is not quite used to such events, the public transportation department response was wholly inadequate and obviously unprepared. Simply, there was lack of organization, combined with too few plows serving the community. Normalcy returned in a week or so. After the storm the city spent some 400,000 dollars on consultants to determine what had gone wrong. Read the second sentence. Seattle has also been facing a storm of criticism for its horrible multi-family housing standards. The Department of Planning has been trying to figure out a way to change rules to create a better denser community. Past administrations and council members (one even an architect) have been dealing with this issue at least as long as I've been in the Puget Sound, some 25 years. And its only gotten worse, especially when the architect got on board. The problem is, politicians are more context players, not content providers. Invariably the political decision making process naturally leans toward pleasing the masses within the context of the community in place of understanding what the community really needs.
Recently, the City Council spent the astronomical sum of 15,000 dollars for three architectural consultants($5,000 each) on a multi-family study. Obviously snow storms are a bigger priority. They were asked to produce 3 good schemes and 3 bad schemes for small infill sites. One over zealous consultant produced 18. During their presentations, the chair of the Planning, Land Use and Neighborhood committee, council member Sally Clark presided over the proceedings seemingly trying to grasp the material in front of her.
Politicians have a habit of needing information presented in the form of an elevator speech to grasp concepts. Let alone numbers and graphics. More disappointing, was the information itself, pictures of Spain, Brooklyn and London were offered as examples of good planning stewardship. I know, I know, context! But, what about Seattle? Architects have a tendency to define things visually. The reason we're dealing with these issues is that the regulations in place have created a single building typology that is both intolerable and inflexible to different site situations. Planning has become a beauty contest. You could see in the presentations, each offered a meager fix all solution of what new development should look like. Spending much more effort to design something instead of developing ordinance. By not fully understanding issues related to the specific existing community infrastructure(not London or Brooklyn) of right of ways, siting, setbacks, and open space, we are only creating another specific building example that will replace the previous disaster.
Politicians believe that if they simply address issues, progress will ensue. Scarier are the lack of intellectual voices that are not politically connected. Its hard to tell which might be worse, a layperson politician trying to grasp the complexity of city development or politically connected consultants in the pockets of politicians working to forward narrow specific agendas. The real issue is the lack of intellectual content available to make viable decisions and politicians reluctance to think outside the box. Read the second sentence.