Infill Townhomes: Sustainable Solution or Urban Blight?
Drive through Seattle and this term will begin to seem synonymous with plain woodframe structures that crowd the streets like like weeds.
According to an article in the Seattle P-I,
Townhomes don’t have to be ugly and dampen the human spirit. But so many of them are eyesores that townhomes have become a lighting rod in the local debate over housing. They’ve been blamed for the decline of community and called a threat to single-family neighborhoods. Their rapid proliferation has even prompted recent City Council-led community forums… [But] townhomes aren’t the problem. … Bad design and laziness are the real problem.
There is also growing concern that the new crop of townhomes is not sustainable (for a discussion of this, as well as a thourough recounting of Seattle’s recent forum on townhomes, see Smarter Neighbors: Seattle Land Use Blog, Seattle Channel’s Planning, Land Use and Neighborhoods Committee, and the West Seattle Blog).
