The Redmond Technology Station’s magnificent pedestrian & bike bridge; the chord progression to Desmond Dekker’s “007 (Shanty Town)”; the Sightline Institute on Seattle’s housing plan fail.
I’m All Lost in…
The 3 things I’m obsessing over THIS week.
#29
1) Seattle’s regional transit agency (where I work) opened the first installment of its second light rail line on Saturday: a 6.6-mile, eight-station, trains-every-10-minutes service expansion.
More fantastical: We opened it in the suburbs across Lake Washington; the line will eventually cross the I-90 floating bridge and connect to our existing 1 Line in Seattle late next year.
My job at Sound Transit is speech writer, so I got to script a lot of exciting stuff for Saturday’s ribbon cutting:
It’s hard not to use the word historic today as we open service that will mark a before-and-after moment for residents here on the Eastside of Lake Washington.
Starting today, if you don’t want to deal with traffic and parking or spending your paycheck on more and more gas just to get from one neighborhood to another… to get to work, to get to your doctor’s appointment… you now have an easy, reliable, inexpensive option: Link light rail’s new 2 Line.
Starting today, Bellevue and Redmond are connected in ways they’ve never been before: to jobs and services, and all our magnificent regional trails.
To be honest though, I was more excited about writing the remarks for the ribbon cutting we did earlier in the week, on Monday, for the Redmond Technology Station’s elegant pedestrian/bike bridge that we also opened as part of the new Line.
I look forward to joining you this Saturday when 2 Line light rail trains officially begin to roll.
But debuting the Redmond Technology Station bridge today only heightens my excitement.
It puts Saturday in context: New trains cannot transform this region without the critical, accompanying investments that make it easy and safe for more people to get on board.
This capacious 1,100-foot bridge spans the coagulated SR 520 highway, integrating the Microsoft campus, the surrounding neighborhoods, bike parking stalls, regional bike paths, and plenty of bus connections (King County Metro’s Rapid Ride B Line, the Microsoft Connector Shuttle, and Sound Transit’s own 542, 545, 550, and 554 buses) all with the new train Station.
Featuring flowing bike lanes of its own (you can see those in the fifth picture below), garden starts, multiple pedestrian access points, bioswale rain features, wooden benches you’d more likely find in a cozy cabin, and a roof that looks like a giant kite in flight, this magnificent bridge is an urbanist rendering come to life.
The better pictures here, like this one, were taken by my pro photographer pal Glenn.
As much as our light rail trains are going to transform Seattle’s Microsoft suburbs (as much as one can transform a region of upscale french-fry breweries and Tesla dealerships), the ped bridge may be the bigger game changer.
It’s already a good scene: the setting for an airy stroll over 520’s hushed traffic that links Microsoft’s east and west campuses and funnels workers, pedestrians, and bikers to the light the rail station and convenient bus bays.
It also leads to the plazas, stores, and theater seating that are tucked up against Microsoft HQ—all open to the public. And this leads me to consider the bigger potential: Add a Saturday farmers’ market, daily pop-ups, food trucks, painters at their easels, buskers, info booths for local non-profits and suddenly we’re talking about a Highline of our own.
Microsoft should inaugurate it’s new status as a public destination spot by booking Taylor Swift to play a free outdoor concert on the bridge (and Sound Transit could run free trains to the show.)
2) Regular readers of this weekly roundup will have noticed that I’ve been brushing up my piano set lately, and that many of my recent aesthetic highs have come from going back to these tunes.
That’s definitely the case this week as I re-learned a tune from my 1960s ska subset: Desmond Dekker & the Aces’ two-minute—thirty-second burst of Highlife-adjacent pop, “007 (Shanty Town).”
It’s the chord progression sliding from the 4 chord to the 7 chord to the 1 chord underneath the lyrics And now rude boys a go wail/cause them out of jail/ rude boys cannot fail/ cause them must get bail that moves me so.
Dekker has an Elysian Fields voice, and the way he leans into each long-L rhyme catches your ear. But it’s the mix of inverted left hand chords with the sweet-spot notes in the right hand melody that tug at your heartstrings.
The 4 (tension and anticipation)/ 7 (leading back home)/ 1 (home) chord progression is certainly a standard bit of human condition magic. However, it’s Dekker’s melodic sleight—holding the same note, a D flat, above the 4 and the 7 chords (a D flat major chord and a G diminished chord here) that makes the passage so poignant.
More magic: that D flat note in Dekker’s longing melody line matches the top note in both chords he’s singing over—the 4 is an inverted D flat Major chord (F/A flat/ D flat) while the 7, the G diminished chord, keeps the notes in their standard order (G / B flat/ the D flat again). Meanwhile, that Major scale diminished chord adds more gorgeous tension because it includes the Devil’s flatted fifth, in this instance the G six semitones up to that same D flat.
Making the D flat ring out by having the melody echo it an octave up adds brightness to the Satanic tension foreshadowing the blissful resolution that’s next when Dekker drops back to the 1 chord, an A flat Major chord (the song is in A flat major.) And Dekker inverts this chord too: E flat/ A flat/ C. Perfect, because this is when he finally lets go of the D flat in the melody line, dropping a half step to that C. This move not only echoes the half-step drop from the 7 chord back home to the 1, but it replays the repeated D flat conceit by capping the C at the top of the inverted A flat chord with a C note an octave above in the melody.
And a final bit of magic. Some dance theory:
3) Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell is a single-family zone protectionist. As Erica and I reported on PubliCola in mid-March when he released his proposed Comp Plan—the document that governs city housing and city zoning—his reluctant interpretation of a state density mandate to allow apartments in the 75% of Seattle where they’ve traditionally been proscribed was a predictable reflection of his provincial politics.
(Back in January, I literally predicted the specifics of his obstructionist approach; and then, after the plan was released, Erica had the receipts, showing how Harrell took a red pen to his planning department’s original pro-density draft.)
However, the sharpest report on Harrell’s defining and embarrassing planning document comes to us from Seattle’s pro-city think tank, the Sightline Institute.
Last week, in their trademark straight forward prose, Sightline published a piece titled “Seattle Deserves a Better Comp Plan” calling for “abundant housing.” Written by Sightline’s urbanist smarty Dan Bertolet, the 3,500-word piece walks through the specific reasons why the mayor’s proposal is a fail (anemic targets for new housing, prohibitive building envelope regulations that squash the ability to actually build multi-family housing, and gross parking requirements. )
Wonderfully, Bertolet couples his critique with a series of detailed recommendations for Yes-in-My-Backyard fixes, such as adjusting zoning rules to allow six-unit stacked flats. Bertolet also seconds an idea I proposed in February—funded inclusionary zoning, FIZ (!)
Seattle’s zoning for larger apartments is confined to a small fraction (about 13 percent, not including lowrise zones) of its residential land, located almost entirely in designated urban centers and villages and along arterial streets. Seattle’s booming growth and robust job creation has rendered that 30-year-old strategy of confinement insufficient for meeting the city’s housing needs. Furthermore, the city’s own study concluded this “urban village” strategy has exacerbated racial segregation and inequity.
Seattle’s plan can expand opportunities for apartments and condos in multiple contexts and scales by allowing: Highrise towers throughout all regional centers and within a quarter-mile of all light rail stations outside regional centers; Eight stories throughout all urban centers; and Six stories within a quarter-mile of all frequent transit stops, schools, parks, libraries, and community centers.
The city can further expand apartment choices by designating more neighborhood centers and making them larger. The draft plan states that in these centers, “residential and mixed-use buildings of four to six stories would be appropriate.”
These two changes would be especially beneficial for creating opportunities for apartments located away from dangerous, polluted, and noisy arterial roads, where current apartment zoning is concentrated. Plentiful apartment zoning also supports the development of subsidized affordable housing, because its most common form is midrise apartment buildings.
An earlier proposal identified some 48 potential neighborhood centers, but only 24 made their way into the draft plan officially released last month after Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office scaled back changes. Also, the proposed size for neighborhood centers is only an 800-foot radius, which is just a few blocks. A quarter-mile radius would allow the critical mass for a functional center.