Built for Public Transit

Walk to the light rail station and be whisked to work or the airport with no concern about parking or traffic jams. Stroll to neighborhood shops, pausing in a leafy courtyard, or drop by the local pub. Its easy to shape up and slim down, just by moving around the neighborhood under your own power.

Thats the life envisioned in transit-oriented development projects, or TOD. Whats missing in this picture is the family car and the vehicle trips that account for much of the average persons carbon footprint. Transit-oriented developments focus on reducing that carbon footprint is not only an attractive lifestyle but also a responsible one.

Now, an unlikely partnership between environmental advocacy groups like the Cascade Land Conservancy and Futurewise and traditional development organizations like Master Builders Association and NAIOP (an association for commercial real estate developers) is working to make transit-oriented development a reality, coming together in the Quality Growth Alliance. However, that reality is slow in coming, and these developments have drawn some opposition from the very people they were intended to benefit the most: the public.

Slow Train Coming
A handful of ambitious and amenity-rich, transit-oriented development projectsfrom south Seattle to Capitol Hill, Northgate, Bellevue and Redmondare on the drawing board, but few are coming out of the ground. One, The Station at Othello Park, developed by Othello Partners near the Othello light rail stop in south Seattle, will be leasing this spring at market rates. Other potential developers will be watching closely.

The Station at Othello Park development will include cafe-style seating and 20,000 square feet of retail space adjacent to light rail.

Those developers should be encouraged by news from Northgate. At Thornton Place, which has hundreds of market-rate condominium and apartment units in a mixed-use development surrounding open space and near a future light rail station, recently expiring one-year leases have been renewed at a very high rate, according to Tom Fitzsimmons, principal and chief operating officer of Lorig Associates, the master developer of Thornton Place. After a slow start in 2009, occupancy is now at 95 percent.

We are very pleased with the performance of the apartments, he says. We think we have created something very special there, and we think it says something about the future of transit-oriented development.

On Seattles Capitol Hill, the first stop on the next segment of Sound Transits Link light rail line near Seattle Central Community College promises to be a stellar example of transit-oriented development when the station opens in 2016. But the conditions there are unusual. Because of the large construction footprint of the deep station, Sound Transit controls two blocks of land. In this location, one of the most intensely urban on the light rail system, environmental advocacy groups and neighborhood residents are eager to see a magnet for one- and two-person households and a new haven for pedestrians along an already pedestrian-friendly corridor. At least four developable sites have been identified; they will be anchored by a public space next to the station that could house a farmers market.

But for every station area like Capitol Hill, there is another like Mt. Baker. Located where the southbound train emerges from Beacon Hill into Rainier Valley, there are many more obstacles to building a walkable utopia.

The adjacent intersection, for example, at busy Rainier Avenue South and South McClellan Street, is a cliche of auto-related uses, including a typical strip-mall grocery and drugstore, a big-box hardware store and a grab bag of retail that includes filling stations, an auto parts franchise and a pawnshop.

In Rainier Valley, where three other stations currently lie, land values have been historically low compared with other parts of the city. Lenders are slow to take risks on large, mixed-use projects. And existing commercial owners, who might be running profitable if not exactly transit-friendly businesses, are reluctant to sell at prices that developers want to pay.

But early efforts to engage the Mt. Baker community in planning for greater density around the station met with vociferous resistance from the nearby single-family neighborhood. Residents raised typical fears about public transitfrom snarling traffic to spillover parking to increased crimethat have slowed the process of upzoning and redevelopment in the neighborhood.

And the slowdown in Mt. Baker and the other 12 stations along the existing line could stall or compromise pedestrian-friendly developments at all the 19 additional stops that will open up as the light rail system spreads north to Lynnwood and east to Overlake in coming years.

Strange Bedfellows
Overcoming these obstacles is part of the reason why developers and environmental advocates are now teaming up. In October, the Puget Sound Regional Council (PSRC) announced a $5 million Sustainable Communities grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The grant is a package of tools designed to foster and speed up transit-oriented developments, and one of the key players in obtaining it was the Quality Growth Alliance, an advocacy group whose partner organizations include the Urban Land Institute, PSRC, NAIOP and environmental groups. The Alliance grew out of a 2008 regional planning exercise, which engaged regional leaders in a hands-on vision of sustainable development with density around transit.

The policy and outreach tools funded by the grant are intended to create a better environment for private investment in the areas around stations, and attract new developers who have built their businesses in typical auto-dependent suburban markets.

Were strong advocates of increasing density wherever it makes sense, says Glenn Amster, government affairs liaison for NAIOP. And increasing density around transit hubs makes a great deal of sense.

The grant includes money for planning and community outreach around equitable housing and employment opportunity projects as well as funding packages for pilot projects at Northgate and near the Tacoma Dome area (see Whats in the TOD grant and Sustainable Communities Catalyst Projects).

Also included in the funding is an interactive program called Decision Commons, which is now under development through the Runstad Center for Real Estate Studies at the University of Washington. With instant simulation and visualization, Decision Commons promises to allow community groups to compare, tweak and evaluate transit-smart development proposals, and also to see related data on things like fuel consumption and environmental benefits and effects.

You need a visual tool, particularly if it is interactive, says land use attorney and Alliance chairman John Hempelmann. I wont call it a video game, but its a very sophisticated visual platform.

As the grant proposal is set up, Decision Commons will be test-run in the Bel-Red Corridor in Bellevue around a large, mixed-use development plan called the Spring District. Working with Sound Transit on design, developer Wright Runstad & Co. will finance and construct a transit station on land it bought and cobbled together for the project.

Greg Johnson, president of Wright Runstad and past chair of the Quality Growth Alliance, calls this leveraging the private market for construction of a public project. Wright Runstad signed an agreement outlining the goals with Sound Transit last June, and expected to receive a master use permit by the end of 2011.

The arrangement allows the design of the development to be transit-oriented in a way that is not possible without that close collaboration, Johnson says. Utilities will serve the station as well as nearby development, and the platform will be integrated within a larger plaza that helps to anchor the whole projectall of which results in greater value and less cost for both parties.

The Spring District has already blazed trails for design and approval of transit-oriented development projects across the region. Its developer, in this case, was able to fund the necessary planning and design, usually something traditional lenders avoid. The new grant spreads R&D money over a very wide area.

For now, the Spring District looks like an isolated example of all the critical elements coming together to produce a favorable outcome. Indeed, its hard to compare a project in the Bel-Red corridoran underdeveloped commercial and light industrial area between Bellevue and Redmondwith tough cases like Mt. Baker Station.

G.B. Arrington, a planner in the Portland office of transit consultant Parsons Brinkerhoff, agrees that a tool like Decision Commons could be a breakthrough solution for development near suburban stations along upcoming links in the system. Too often a local governmentwith or without a developer partnerproposes changes to zoning around the station, only to retract them under not-in-my-backyard political pressure. Finally, there may be zoning changes, but no development because compromises like too-low height limits or requirements for underground parking take away any real benefits to the development or make them financially impractical.

Because of the emphasis on open space, pedestrian amenities and other benefits, even when there is land available near transit stations, transit-oriented development is more expensive than other types of projects with similar leasable square footage. Banks and other capital sources may be willing to bet on the market for TOD, but they need some assurance that the rules are not going to change.

Setting the rules
Sam Zimbabwe is director of Reconnecting America, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that studies transit-oriented development. Setting the rules is the way local governments do their part to make TOD happen, he says. For instance, they can put into place zoning that has the effect of suppressing real estate speculation and the inherent tendency for existing landowners to hold out for prices that make redevelopment impractical.

Bellevue has done a great job in the Bel-Red corridor, Zimbabwe says, referring to zoning changes there that set the stage for TOD by establishing a base floor-area-ratio limit (the ratio of interior square footage to the building footprint, a common measure of density). But the citys plans for the area also allow new buildings to be higher, provided that their design brings certain pedestrian and transit-friendly amenities, from open space to day-care facilities, into the neighborhood.

Zimbabwe points to some tools that local governments can use to help make the future bankable. Tax-increment financing, a way of borrowing against future increases in tax obligations, is perhaps the most typical of thesebut it is not legal in the state of Washington. A popular alternative is the special assessment district, in which special tax is levied on owners within the benefit area.

Wright Runstads Johnson puts it simply: For redevelopment to occur, the future value of the project has to be greater than the present value of the real estate in its current condition. However, the future value is always discounted heavily because of risk, he adds.

Whether its exceptional planning or rule setting or the boost given by federal money such as the Sustainable Communities grants, when transit-oriented development becomes less risky, high-quality projects should follow. For those trying to ditch the driving and find fun and affordable housing alternatives, it cant be too soon.