This story is from our sister site My Green Lake.
On Monday, December 13, the Seattle City Council unanimously adopted a comprehensive update to how townhomes, apartments, row houses, and cottages are developed in Seattle’s low-rise multifamily zones.
These changes will allow for more variety in housing types, improved landscaping and open space use, incentives for green building, along with greater flexibility and improvement in building design.
“Over the past decade, many townhouses popped up and multiplied in ways that caused unfortunate impacts to the surrounding communities,” said Councilmember Sally J. Clark in a press release. “We saw too few other housing styles and what we did see wasn’t welcomed by neighbors in most cases. I think these new rules will lead developers to build housing that fits better in our neighborhoods and creates a better home in which to live.”
According to the press release, the new code should prevent most of the features that inspired the majority of neighborhood complaints by creating a new Streamlined Design Review (SDR) process that will allow for closer scrutiny of project design. SDR will be required for townhouses with three or more units, but not for row houses, cottages or apartments in multi-family zones.
The new low-rise multifamily code will:
- Encourage a diversity of housing types among townhomes, row houses, cottages, apartments, and auto-court townhomes;
- Require new design features. For example: At least 20 percent of street facing façades must be windows and doors, building materials must be varied, townhouse parking garages must be designed to fit large cars;
- Incentivize “green building” and hiding parking underground or at the back of the lot;
- Use the City’s “Green Factor” landscaping requirement, incentivizing keeping trees or planting new ones;
- Reduce the number of zones from three to five (LR1, LR2, LR3) for code simplicity;
- Change the low-rise height limits to match the height limit for single family zones in most cases:
- Allow for shared open space, for larger usable common areas;
- Waive parking requirements for projects in growth areas and within .25 mile of frequent transit service (15 minute headways), allowing the market to dictate the level of parking to provide;
- Waive density limits for certain housing types when good design features are achieved; and,
- Use a new flexible standard of measuring floor space, “Floor Area Ratio”, rather than previously restrictive setback and lot coverage requirements.
The multifamily code update was adopted after substantial rounds of review and feedback from neighbors, architects, builders, and other design professionals. Multifamily zones comprise approximately nine percent of the developable land in Seattle and are meant to serve as a transition between single family and commercial zones.