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Collection: Family-Friendly Cities

A Missed Opportunity for Seattle’s Downtown School

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Update: The federal General Services Administration plans to auction off the Federal Reserve Bank building, with an opening bid of $1 million and a closing date of Jan. 28, 2015.

The Seattle Public Schools Board of Directors disappointed hundreds of downtown families and residents yesterday by unanimously voting against plans to acquire the vacant Federal Reserve Bank building—at least through a federal disposition process that would let the district have it for free—and turn it into a downtown school.

It’s an enormous missed opportunity, based largely on what seems like a solvable timing conflict. The decision will almost certainly cost the district more in the long run, whether it winds up serving downtown’s growing population of children there or somewhere else. As Jon Scholes, a downtown parent and vice-president of the Downtown Seattle Association put it: “The growth and the challenge isn’t going away. This isn’t a blip. This is a need.”

Some board members expressed interest in letting the building go to public action and trying to buy it then. That way the district wouldn’t be under a federal timetable that would force it to renovate and open the elementary school before it can line up the money to do so. It’s unclear how much that would add to the downtown school’s price tag, though Scholes pegged the acquisition costs at $20 million. It’s also unclear where that money would come from.

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Toxic Lead’s Home Demolition Loophole

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Residential construction is booming again in Seattle and other Northwest cities. To make way for the new, as well as needed increases in density, hundreds of older homes are being demolished every year. However, poor demolition practices—even by “green” builders—and lax regulation are creating an unnecessary hazard from lead-based paint.

Removing older or poorly maintained homes from the housing stock can be a good thing, in the long run, to prevent childhood exposure to lead-based paint dust—a highly potent neurotoxin that study after study has shown can cause life-changing effects in children even when they’re exposed to very small amounts. But improperly handled demolitions can create shorter-term risks. If you see clouds of dust at a construction site where an older home is being torn down, you are likely seeing the spread of airborne lead dust.

[prettyquote align=”right”]“No safe blood lead level in children has been identified. Even low levels of lead in blood have been shown to affect IQ, ability to pay attention, and academic achievement. And effects of lead exposure cannot be corrected.”—Centers for Disease Control, Healthy Homes and Lead Program, 2014. [/prettyquote]

A 2013 study of Chicago single-family home demolitions by David Jacobs, a leading expert on lead-based paint and housing, concludes that “large amounts of dust contaminated with lead and other heavy metals are generated from demolition of older housing.” When an excavator tears into an older home, lead that was once spread across walls, windowsills, and other surfaces in the form of paint gets pulverized into dust. And if relatively simple steps aren’t taken to control it, the contaminated dust can become airborne and settle on nearby yards, homes, sidewalks, and playgrounds.

Demolition lead dust that gets tracked into neighboring homes and finds its way into children’s bodies can increase children’s blood lead levels, especially in neighborhoods where multiple homes are being torn down. And toxic particles can travel far from demolition sites—up to 400 feet if conditions are right, according to Jacobs’ study.

Yet due to a loophole big enough to drive a backhoe through, knocking down an entire older home covered in lead-based paint in a single day doesn’t trigger any of the same health precautions as a construction crew would have to take if they remodeled the kitchen in that same house.

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A Fair Share of Streets (Part 2)

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In my last post, I took a look at streets that have been designed specifically so kids and cars can safely share space. That’s most definitely not the case on streets like this one, where a seven-year-old Seattle girl last week was critically injured by a car that hit her in a crosswalk, never even braked, and left her lying in the street.

MLK Way S and Genesee, Seattle
MLK Way S and Genesee, Seattle by Map data 2014, Google

A bold experiment in Portland last week offered a glimpse of how different things could be. Using a DIY approach that would make a traffic engineer wince, Better Block PDX temporarily transformed several blocks of 3rd Avenue in Old Town/Chinatown from a street that primarily moves people in cars to one that serves all kinds of people.

3rd Avenue Better Block PDX 1, by Greg Raisman
3rd Avenue Better Block PDX by Greg Raisman used under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

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A Fair Share of Streets (Part 1)

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One takeaway from my last post on Portland’s courtyard housing competition was that it makes little sense to squander large chunks of scarce urban land by designing them exclusively for cars. Parking spaces, driveways, and even low-volume residential streets that sit empty most of the day are simply a waste of valuable real estate in growing cities.

So Portland legalized the shared court—a common area in a residential development where cars can drive through (slowly) to park, but that primarily serves as a place for kids to play, neighbors to eat and socialize, or someone to build a sailboat. The landscaping, unconventional paving materials, and narrow or semi-obstructed pathways clearly say to drivers: “This space is going to have people wandering through it, and it’s your responsibility to drive at a safe speed and not mow them down.”

City of Portland Courtyard Housing Competition, by Steven Dangermond and Christopher Keane
Image by City of Portland Courtyard Housing Competition, by Steven Dangermond and Christopher Keane

Yet the idea of encouraging toddlers to ride tricycles or nine-year-olds to play kickball in the same spaces with moving cars can seem, well, wrong. After decades of conditioning children to stay out of the street, always look both ways, never assume that cars will stop, any parent has to wonder how safe that can be. But, in a sense, that just illustrates how skewed Americans’ thinking about streets has become.

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Courting Families in Portland

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When we moved into our house 10 years ago, no one on our street had kids. Now, there are eight on our side alone.

My daughter lurks at the bottom of our neighbors’ front stairs, hoping she can round up a gaggle of kids. But figuring out where they can physically play outside can be awkward. Some of us have small decks and front yards, but they’re high off the sidewalk and not quite childproof for younger siblings. Our narrow street gets a lot of cut-through traffic. And our back yard was laid out by someone who clearly had more interest in pruning than kids.

As I’ve said before, my holy parenting grail is finding places where your child can play happily and safely while you can keep a half eye on them AND get something social or useful done. In the earlier part of the 20th century, we used to build housing that facilitated this. It’s courtyard housing, with densely clustered homes or apartments built around common open spaces.

Main Courtyard 2, by John Herschell
Main Courtyard 2 by John Herschell used under CC BY-SA 2.0

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The Holy Grail of Parenting

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On a recent vacation, I had a perfect moment, one that so rarely occurs since I had a kid nearly six years ago. I was sitting on a deck, drinking a gin and tonic, and having civilized conversations with my husband’s oldest friends. Almost entirely uninterrupted.

That’s because sandwiched between our restaurant and another across the way was a grassy field full of roving kid gangs. They were far enough away that their entropic energy didn’t bother anyone, but close enough that you could still keep half an eye on them.

Our daughter befriended a local girl, cadged a piece of her birthday cake, and joined and lost interest in countless soccer scrimmages, dance parties, frisbee games, and sibling chases.The important point is that she was having a great time doing kid things, and we were having great time doing adult things. In the same place.

In my life, this doesn’t happen nearly as often as I’d like. Possibly because of byzantine liquor laws, the fact that urban land is pretty expensive to let kids run wild on it, and all the perfectly good reasons that not everyone wants our child around as much as we do.

Happening upon those urban spaces that serve children and adults equally well is like the Holy Grail of parenting.

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A Rx for Family-Sized Housing in Seattle

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Most Northwest parents trying to raise kids—in an urban setting or no—can appreciate the importance of space. There’s the avalanche of stuff that modern babies seem to require, from diapers to strollers to whatever jiggly thing puts them to sleep. Until parents of young children make a secret pact to stop handing out birthday goody bags, there will be rivers of useless stuff coming into our houses.

Urban families are often willing to trade compact living spaces for walkable neighborhoods, less brutal commutes, and quality time with each other. But there’s typically a limit to how small they’ll go.

Though some families with children certainly make it work, most prospective parents aren’t shopping for a studio or one-bedroom. If cities like Seattle and Portland are serious about offering families viable alternatives to expensive single-family neighborhoods or the suburbs, there must be multifamily housing units where they can live. But the private market simply isn’t building many affordable, family-sized apartments or condos.

That was one of the key findings from a 2011 housing report by the Seattle Planning Commission. A tiny fraction—just 2 percent—of market-rate apartment units in Seattle in 2009 had three or more bedrooms, as the chart below shows. Even worse, only half of those were affordable to low-income families.

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Are You Planning to Have Kids? (Part 2)

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In my last post about Vancouver BC, I outlined the family-friendly policies that have helped make its downtown a magnet for families with children. But how do those policies play out in real life? What works well for families and what drives urban parents crazy?

The University of British Columbia’s planning department has actually devoted a lot of studentpower to answering those questions. They’ve collected extensive feedback from residents and parents in False Creek North, one of the first major downtown redevelopment efforts. Other students have researched how well Vancouver’s urban rowhouses are working for families with kids.

The big picture is that downtown residents and parents really like living there. A whopping 96 percent of False Creek North residents said they would recommend living there. Kids were enthusiastic about their neighborhood, and particularly liked having so many friends and things to do within walking distance. That said, families with children were also more likely to be dissatisfied with their homes, and they were only half as likely to envision staying put for the next five years. So there’s still work to be done.

Based on their input, here are 10 takeaways from Vancouver’s efforts to build family-friendly urban housing:

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A Downtown School Just Dropped in Seattle’s Lap

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Andrea Miller’s third-grader has never been to school on May Day. She stays home each year, rather than risk the chance that her school bus will become hopelessly mired in the occasionally violent protests that engulf downtown Seattle streets.

Theoretically, it’s only an 8-minute drive between the Millers’ downtown Seattle apartment and John Hay Elementary, the public elementary school near the top of Queen Anne Hill to which (until recently) most children living downtown were assigned. But the family doesn’t own a car.

If the school calls because her daughter is sick or hurt, it can take anywhere from 30 to 50 minutes for Miller and her two younger children to find a Zipcar or get there on a bus. Her eldest spends an hour and a half on a school bus each day. And that won’t improve much when she starts this fall at Lowell Elementary, the Capitol Hill school to which many downtown families were recently reassigned because of overcrowding at John Hay.

Those tortured logistics are at odds with the very reasons many families live downtown—to shorten commutes, have everyone and everything close by, and actually see more of each other. As Miller put it:

You throw in homework, and family time is pretty much gone Monday through Thursday. It’s also harder for us as parents to be involved in the school.  You can’t say you’ll go volunteer for an hour because you know one hour will be three. I don’t know a lot of the other parents because I’m never on the playground after school, and you just really miss having that sense of community.

Downtown Seattle Federal Reserve Bank, by Mark Plummer
DSC_6926 by Mark Plummer used under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

That could all change, given an insanely rare opportunity for Seattle Public Schools (SPS) to acquire a 100,000 square foot building in downtown Seattle—for free.

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Are You Planning to Have Kids? (Part 1)

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When a developer builds a family apartment in Vancouver BC’s downtown peninsula, the dining room comes with easy-to-clean floors that can handle spilled yogurt or spaghetti. Condo and rowhouse projects must have accessible stroller storage and outdoor play spaces, ideally where parents can look out a kitchen window and keep an eye on their kids.

As of Canada’s 2011 Census, downtown Vancouver’s urban neighborhoods were home to nearly five times more kids than Seattle’s and nearly 9 times more than Portland’s.

That’s in part because more than 20 years ago, Vancouver’s planners and politicians made a conscious choice: Not to relinquish the city’s urban core to empty nesters, low-income singles, and the childless.

As formerly industrial neighborhoods were converted to glass towers, Vancouver required at least 25 percent of that new housing to be suitable for families. That means at least two bedrooms, with attention to hundreds of details that make high-density housing function more like single-family homes. Where those zoning changes created enormous wealth, the city required private landowners developing the sites to incorporate parks, open space, daycares, libraries, community centers, elementary school sites, and other public amenities that families need.

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