Town houses can be town homes

The town house, an architectural form sprouting all over metropolitan Seattle, is a good idea with visible flaws. Seattle City Councilmember Sally Clark is right to push for better designs and for changing the land-use code to allow them.

A Seattle town house, unlike a condo, sits on individually owned land. It is not a condo, but a kind of single-family house. At a time when land is expensive, and there is a political desire not to spread the urban carpet farther into fields and forests, town houses make sense. The way they are built sometimes does not. The most obvious problem is the clustering of buildings around an interior "auto court," with individual, one-car garages branching off in two directions. The result has been garages built at angles that make them inconvenient — and sometimes nearly impossible — to use.

Many of them, Clark says, "are being used as storage lockers," with the cars parked on the street.

Builders have constructed these unusable garages because of city restrictions on curb cuts and requirements for mini-yards, which the city calls "accessible private space."

The rules need to be changed. Perhaps the area between blocs of town houses could be common space, with a play area for kids. Perhaps it could have trees. Now, it is pavement.

Town houses built on alleys also present a wall of high fence, a design that is neither neighbor-friendly nor safe.

Some objections cannot be solved with design. People who don't like density will not like town houses.

Some increases in density are probably inevitable, and town houses, done right, are among the better ways to do it.