Building codes can’t save us – we’re at the mercy of developers’ moods

Apparently it’s not increased building heights in Tacoma’s neighborhoods that we need to worry about. It’s the greasy badgers.

I don’t know much about badgers, especially greasy ones. They were discussed, however, on Tuesday when the Planning Commission was explaining a sweeping new zoning code for the city’s neighborhood business districts.

The point is to make it financially attractive for developers to build in districts such as Lincoln, South Tacoma Way, Sixth Avenue and Pine, Sixth at the Narrows, McKinley Hill, 34th and Pacific, and Proctor. Tacoma wants them to build housing as well as amenities that make districts work for pedestrians and shoppers.

That means letting them build higher and reducing expensive parking requirements.

But in the back of everyone’s mind is what happened when the commission – and in turn the City Council – changed zoning to encourage development across South Pine Street from the Tacoma Mall. Rather than gaining an urban village, the result was cheap townhouses where a single-family neighborhood once stood.

Mayor Bill Baarsma calls them “dormitories on concrete.” The council has stopped giving property tax breaks to residential developers there, and Planning Commission chairman Scott Morris said the city learned a lesson.

“If someone is determined, they will find a way to build a bad building,” Morris said. “They were determined to build something as cheaply as possible.”

So how does the city increase density in the business districts while preventing them from putting up bad buildings?

Give them more height – up to 65 feet (about six stories) in most neighborhood business areas and up to 85 feet along Martin Luther King Jr. Way and in the Stadium District. At the same time, give them incentives to do nice things like include art, space for stores and restaurants, affordable housing, use better materials, make the sidewalks pedestrian friendly.

The more nice things, the more height. And the new code has townhouse standards to block the schlock.

Councilwoman Connie Ladenburg asked the Planning Commission if it will work. Will it attract developers who will put up projects that suspicious neighbors like? Will that multi-family development absorb population that is directed toward cities by the state Growth Management Act?

Well, maybe. Or not.

“My concern is we’re setting standards that the market can’t support,” said planning commissioner and developer Tom O’Connor. But if the economy recovers, O’Connor thought the increased heights would let developers make money and still absorb the extra costs of building.

Which is where the “greasy badgers” came in. That’s the phrase architect David Boe, the vice-chairman of the commission, used to describe the ornery animals he sometimes has as clients (figuratively, I hope). They ask him to design buildings that “maximize the site.” That is, they want him to get as much leaseable space as possible under existing codes and try to make a project “pencil.”

But the extra costs to build in the city and the high cost of the amenities envisioned in the new code will be the same for small buildings as for large buildings. So Boe thinks the new code will work only for very large projects.

“It’s really hard to build a small building,” he said.

Which might be fine for the dense-is-best crowd. But big buildings that add traffic and cause parking shortages and cast shadows and change the scale and character of neighborhoods are the ones that many residents fear most.

The code does have supporters who think Tacoma needs to become much-denser – and taller – not just downtown but in the business districts. That will attract more people to patronize shops, clubs and restaurants. It will spur the use of transit and the decline of single-occupancy car use.

If it works. Which it might not.

Because it sounds like the new code has about the same chance of producing something that looks like the Pearl District of Portland, something that looks like Pine Street or no change at all. The result depends on the economy and the temper of those greasy badgers.

Peter Callaghan: 253-597-8657

peter.callaghan@thenewstribune.com

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