Seattle curbs city growth

Press, 3 June 1989, Page 22

Seattle curbs city growth

From a correspondent in Seattle for the “Economist”

TEMPERS are now shorter than business opportunities in America’s booming north-west. Worsening traffic congestion, soaring house prices and disgust with local politics last week led the indignant citizens of Seattle to vote by 62 per cent to 38 per cent to slow the growth of their city centre. Seattle thus becomes the latest city to leap aboard the slowgrowth caravan that has moved up and down the west coast since San Francisco imposed controls on construction in 1985. The measure approved by Seattle’s voters was called C.A.P., for Citizens’ Alternative Plan. It limits new downtown office space to 46,450 sq m — about one 20-storey tower — each year until 1994. After that the annual limit jumps to 92,900 sq m. The height of office buildings is also

limited — to 150 m in the city’s business centre and (o 50m in the shopping district. Last year, when a petition was circulated calling for limits on growth, neither the city council nor the developers paid much attention. They were both astonished when 13,000 residents signed up, enough to force the vote.

During the campaign, developers, architects and trade unions circulated leaflets saying that the C.A.P.’s plan would push up taxes, squeeze jobs and send urban sprawl out into the suburbs. The C.A.P.’s supporters painted the opposition as a mob of well-heeled land-grabbers like those who 17 years ago advocated the demolition of Pike Place Market, now a beloved landmark. They said Seattle is already surrounded by sprawl,

despite 50 years of any-thing-goes policies in the city’s centre.

Even if the C.A.P. had failed at the polls, it had already won in principle. The city council, smelling an election issue, had slapped tight interim controls oh downtown development and promised permanent ones in future. It imposed a temporary moratorium on new downtown construction, beginning in November.

The ironic but natural effect is a spurt of new construction as builders rush to beat the deadline. This, coupled with projects already in the pipeline, will keep the downtown area a maze of construction vehicles and cranes for years.

Views of Mount Rainier are already blocked by rows of 50storey towers.

Copyright — The Economist