Seattle returns to an era of mattress-filled garages

The newest trend in Seattle housing — the townhouse — has led to the rebirth of an old architectural form: the unusable garage.

The old neighborhoods of Seattle are rife with unusable garages. I have a shed of this sort, built in the 1920s. The builder put it as far from the street as possible, and at an angle that requires repeated jockeying. The last time I had a car in it was during the Reagan administration.

Other Seattle houses have one-car garages squeezed between concrete walls, which would have felt claustrophobic even for owners of the 66-inch-wide Model T. Many of these garages are sunk below street level, forcing drivers to back blindly out of a hole.

In those days, American homebuilders did not know how to construct a decent garage. It took them a generation to learn it. But they did, and I thought they had it down until I visited one of Seattle's new townhouses. An architectural form newly popular, the townhouse offers homeownership at less than the price of a comparable new house. This one sold last year for about $375,000. It is in a cluster of four, which is the most common package: two buildings, one behind the other.

One building is along a quiet street and the other on an alley. Each building has two townhouses and two garages. The right way to do the garages would be two facing the street and two facing the alley — the right way, that is, if the owners were expected to put cars in them. But this project has all four garages facing inward, into a constricted "auto court" between the buildings.

The unit I visited was next to the driveway connecting the auto court to the alley. To use its garage, the owner would have to drive from the alley and back into a narrow, one-car opening with a turn as if parallel parking. Exiting would require a similar maneuver.

The owners don't do this. They park on the street.

I looked at several other townhouse projects. Each provided parking in this weird way, with narrow, one-car garages facing either 90 degrees or 180 degrees away from the street.

I asked builders about this. They admitted it was a customer-unfriendly design.

"We have created these auto courts nobody uses," said one. Another wrote that the garages are usable, "but not before some paint gets scratched off both house and car."

Why build unfriendly garages? The builders say the city makes them do it. The city allows a townhouse project to have only one driveway to the street, and if the property abuts an alley, they have to use that.

Individual garages may empty into alleys, but each mini-driveway would pave over a bit of land, and each townhouse is required by city code to have "private open space." The amount is hardly enough for a picnic table, but they can't trade it for a driveway. The result is that all the garages face inward, to the "auto court."

Builders say Seattle is the only jurisdiction with such rules. Portland — the other Northwest city big on townhouses — allows garages that work.

At Seattle's Department of Planning and Development, Cliff Portman, the principal land-use planner, is aware of the difficulty of using townhouse garages. "Everyone looks at them and says the same thing. I do, as I drive by," he says.

But the city has other priorities. Planners want to protect sidewalks. They want to preserve the little green bit of open space. They want an attractive "streetscape," meaning streets unmarred by rows of garages.

The result is a garage that points in the wrong direction.

Of course, a garage does not have to be used for a car. The owners of Seattle's new townhouses can always do with their garages what we owners of 1920s houses do with ours: fill them with mattresses, bird cages, ladders and old backpacks, and park the car somewhere else, probably on the street.

Bruce Ramsey's column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. His e-mail address is bramsey@seattletimes.com; for a podcast Q&A with the author, go to Opinion at seattletimes.com