West Seattle Blog has a post that is a couple of weeks old now, but is a great case study in why the City’s design review process is a complete and total failure. I’m going to quote extensively from Tracy Record’s amazingly detailed coverage of the proceedings. First the history of the project:

3824 California has never had it easy before the Southwest Design Review Board.

Seven years ago, when a standalone Petco store was proposed on the site, the project died after its first two Early Design Guidance proposals were shot down, and the Charlestown Café stayed open three more years before closing in 2011.

Now, the first post-café development proposal for 3824 California SW – a ~30-townhome/live-work-unit project – has been ordered to come back for a third round of Early Design Guidance, meaning it will appear before the board at least four times before, if, it gains approval to move ahead.

Here we have a proposal for more housing in a great neighborhood at a site where nothing is happening. Yet it is running the gauntlet yet again with the persnickety Southwest Design Review Board. Part of what Record reports is that the board itself didn’t have a clue what it was supposed to do. There was an extended discussion of what authority the board actually has. After arguing about it:

They plunged back into the 9 pages of guidelines they are supposed to review for each project. “Better quality spaces … with decent solar access, large enough for usable open space” would be important, McNamara noted. A weather-protection canopy should be required to help affirm the commercial intent of the ground-floor units, they agreed.

I am sure being at the meeting was far more painful than reading about it, but here’s how the meeting concluded:

So they’re asking for one more Early Design Guidance meeting, a fairly unusual step. No date yet – that will eventually appear on the city’s website, and as always, we’ll publish an update as soon as we hear about it. Once the project gets out of Early Design Guidance, it then will have at least one meeting for recommendations on a final proposed design.

As Record pointed out at the outset, the project was already killed in the design review process years ago. Now the board is, once again, in the process of bleeding a perfectly good project dry. Instead of housing for families who want it, the neighborhood will be left with an empty building. This is a bad outcome all by itself, but it will further validate the junta that board has clearly become. Apparently the City and the Department of Planning and Development have no control over the board or the process. This group has, de facto, become a land use control board dictating what gets built and what doesn’t.

This is why we can’t have design review imposed on microhousing projects. Design review is a great way to simply make it more difficult to create a product that many people in Seattle want. The longer the process takes, the more provincial and obscure the demands, the more costs and rents will go up.

Here’s a comment left by David Foster a West Seattle architect that pretty well sums the frustration both builders and neighborhoods feel about design review when it runs amuck.

As a former DRB member and practicing architect, I have to say that I left last night’s meeting ashamed and disgusted. Design Review, when it works, is a process that benefits the city by challenging designers to do better. When it fails, like it did last night, it is a disaster because it makes projects worse.

The board bullied the applicant in a most inappropriate and unprofessional way. Perhaps worse, it betrayed its lack of design expertise throughout the deliberations – to the point that I am embarrassed by the process. It’s so easy to make pseudo-informed pronouncements about design – “the units need to have varying heights” -”the facade needs to step in and out” – “garbage should be in one area not two” – “too much parking in the alley” – “the parking should be under the building.” Such statements are banal, amateurish, agenda driven and ignorant.

Requiring a THIRD Early Design Guidance meeting is a travesty. This board does not understand the

protocol of Design Review, which is to identify the design guidelines that have highest priority in the first meeting, and then get out of the way so the applicant can respond with a well worked-out proposal. Like all bullies, this board doesn’t know when to stop.

In this sad case, we would get a better project if we just cancelled Design Review and let the architect do his work. Alas, this won’t happen. But I do plan to get in touch with people I know at DPD to tell them what I think. Disgusting.