City Council Townhouse Tour

Yesterday CORA joined the city council on a tour of some of Seattle's outstanding townhouse projects. Projects included the Secret Garden (by Marty Liebowitz & Joseph Hurley), 25th & Denny Rowhouses by David Foster, and Urban Trees by Bradley Khouri.

Councilmembers Sally Clark, Tim Burgess, Tom Rasmussen, and Jean Godden came on the tour, followed by the crew of the Seattle Channel. It was sizable commitment of time on behalf of the council & their staff & says a lot about how seriously they take the issue. Over the last few months we've been bombarding the council with drawings, diagrams, charts & the like. Hopefully the tour helped make the ideas we've been promoting a little more tangible.

CORA MFU report now available at Great City

A report version of the presentation is now available at the Great City Website. Thanks to Great City for all their support!
See http://www.greatcity.org/wp-content/uploads/bigPDF/CORA-MFHousingStudy-FinalReport%209-24-09.pdf

Other web links:
Great City Blog article about the effort: http://www.greatcity.org/2009/09/29/gaming-the-proposed-mulitifamily-land-use-code/
DJC article about the meeting: http://djc.com/news/re/12010527.html

Multi-family code update:

Follow the link to a synopsis that I put up on our blog regarding the multi-family code update:

Multi-family code

CORA Presents White Hat / Black Hat

Last night, CORA presented our study "White Hat / Black Hat" to the Council. The meeting can be seen on the Seattle Channel at http://www.seattlechannel.org/videos/video.asp?ID=2280942. CORA's portion of the presentation begins at 31:30. A copy of the study and our recommendations to the council will be posted on the Great City Website in a couple of days.

CAST architecture, one of the participating firms, posted an excellent summary of the meeting on their blog. See http://www.castarchitecture.com/blog/?p=154

CORA MFU Council Study - Update

CORA NW has completed our work for the City Council's Multi-family study. We were asked to produce 3 good scheme and 3 bad schemes for some small infill sites. Thanks to the efforts of our members we produced 18. Our work will be presented in Council Chambers on Sept. 24th, 4pm. A special thanks to all team members:

Sam Castro

David Foster

Matt Hutchins

Brad Khouri

David Neiman

Brandon Nicholson

Jeff Reibman

CORA invited to MFU design study

The City Council has asked CORA to participate in an exercise to study and illustrate the potential impact of the proposed multi-family update. We will be asked to produce a variety of schemes that demonstrate the positive potential of the new code, and explore if the code can be gamed and exploited to produce undesirable outcomes.

The project got thrown together very quickly, sorry for the short notice. Please look over the attached brief & RSVP if you're interested in participating.

Some useful links:

CORA Brief (required reading)

DPD summary of the Multi-Family Update

Full text of the Multi-family Update (277 pages)

Edited text of the Multi-family update (93 pages)

White Hat / Black Hat Excercise

After a few weeks of council meetings and presentations the PLUNC committee has reached an impasse.  The legislation is complicated enough that the council doesn't feels comfortable buying off on the idea that it'll do more good than harm.  The proposed solution is to run a white hat / black hat exercise.  They'll have a consultant develop schemes that will show potential good outcomes and another that will try to exploit the code for all that its worth to identify worst case scenarios.  This exercise will help councilmembers get comfortable with the various gating mechanisms in the code & allow them to identify loopholes that need to be closed.  

We've agreed to help them design the study so that they get the most out of the exercise.  For those of you that are worried/convinced that adopting the new code will lead to _________, fill in that blank and send it to me.  I'd like to construct a list of people's worst nightmares to give to the black hatters for inspiration.