[Lobby at Hill7 Project, photo courtesy of Touchstone]
In the summer of 2018, BUILD sat down with developer, professor, author, and urban planning super-hero A-P Hurd. We discussed making the world a better place through sustainable lifestyle patterns and taking action on Seattle’s prickly density and parking issues. Part 1 can be read here.
You’ve mentioned that growing up in Ottowa allowed you to be part of several identity groups at once because of the different languages and cultural diversity. Is there a corollary to this in terms of your success here in the Pacific Northwest?
Working as a developer, you have all these different audiences that you have to move into the space of possibility where your project is going to exist. You have a community that wants certain things out of the design, like granularity, integration with the streetscape, a great retail experience, comfortable sidewalks, and a humanizing connection between the building and the street.
Another set of stakeholders is your tenant. They want certain things out of the building design, some of which may be in tension with the first group’s criteria. For instance, tech companies want really large floor plates, and that objective is in tension with having a granular human-scale streetscape.
Then you’ve got your investor partners and your lenders. While your investor partner is more focused on the upside and the lender is focused more on the potential downside, they’re generally more interested in risk management and in the financial performance of the project.
You’ve got your architectural and construction team and they want to make money and build something they can be proud of. The architect wants to contribute to their own body of work and their vision of the city.
Then you’ve got the government, at both the local and state levels. The state government may want the site to be cleaned up because a lot of sites are contaminated and the local government wants certain things like new sidewalks, trees or a bike route.
You want to make sure you build something that meets each of those groups’ needs but, at the same time, the project is only going to be one thing. The trick is to find the common solution space: before the project exists, it is a story, and those stories have to speak to the needs of each stakeholder. At the same time, those stories have to be true to the core of what you’re going to build. Each of these groups has a different language and making the project happen requires the ability to speak their language in a way that’s meaningful to each of them. You have to go deeply into how they look at the world. My job is to balance all of this and create the possibility of a development project that addresses all these needs.
How is Seattle doing on the possibility meter?
I feel very hopeful about Seattle’s future and one of the things that makes me most optimistic is that it’s a culture where individuals are willing to connect with people who are different from themselves. There’s an idea in economics that transactions between people who are different unlock more value because they have more to trade with each other. People in Seattle are willing to meet each other on spec. much more so than other places I’ve lived, like New York and Boston.
Why do you suppose this is?
Places like New York and Boston have more of a hierarchy. When a society is more stratified, people are only connecting, transacting, and doing deals with people who are in their circle and in their comfort zone. These societies can’t unlock as much value, both in terms of having new ideas but also in terms of what they can exchange with each other.
On the other hand, if you have a society where people are always willing to meet somebody who is totally different, then there’s so much more potential to have transactions with people who bring something new and better to the table, thereby unlocking more value. Someone once told me that Seattle is one of the only major cities in the US that you can move to and if you’re really passionate about opera, in ten years you can be on the opera board. You could never do that in New York or Boston.
What are the challenges of creating possibility in Seattle?
There is a lot of angst about how the city and culture are changing because of growth and there’s ambiguity about where we’re going. When things are changing slowly, there’s not as much uncertainty about where a city is headed. When things are changing fast, the cone of uncertainty becomes very large. For people who are more comfortable with ambiguity or things that are unknown, it’s easier to face a future that’s more uncertain. For me, it’s a source of anticipation and excitement.
As founder of Skipstone, following your role as President of Touchstone, what would you like more people to understand/ appreciate about your work?
One thing that I’ve heard some people at the City say is that developers don’t care about retail. That’s so interesting to me because though that might have been true historically, people who are building office projects care so much about getting the right retail into their buildings. Many urban developers now understand how the retail they have on their ground floor needs to connect with the street, and how it can contribute to the brand of their building.
Hill7 at the corner of Stewart St. & Boren Ave is a Class A office building that we developed and it’s a great example of how investing in the ground-floor retail experience can work. The lobby feels super hip and has a strong connection to the street. It’s a multi-tenant building and we wanted people to have a third place to hang out that feels like a living room rather than a sterile lobby. I got very involved in the design and decorating of the lobby, because I wanted to try some new things.
Also, we made a conscious effort to find small, local retailers that had a track record in the residential neighborhoods of Seattle and to bring them downtown to open another store. Having small independent retailers created some challenges when the building opened because Redfin was working on tenant improvements and HBO had not moved in. The buildings across the street were still under construction and there was a significant amount of street work occurring. I had brought several local retailers to the building and worked with them on their business plans, but now they were struggling because the customers hadn’t arrived yet. So we bought gift certificates for their establishments and distributed them to surrounding office buildings to jump-start their clientele. We helped the retailers with more tenant improvement funding, helped with rent reductions, and mentored their businesses through that transition period. These are all things that people don’t really think developers do, but it’s all happening behind the scenes in order to make these projects special. Now the retailers are doing much better, and the lobby has turned out great. I don’t have any regrets about going to such efforts, but I wish the City understood that some developers are really rolling up their sleeves and working hard to make these people-oriented street fronts with interesting local retailers.
Some of the best sustainability methods don’t make for exciting dinner conversation, like saving an older foundation. How do we make saving the world cool?
Unfortunately, I think a lot of our sustainability culture has been focused on more gadgets that people can buy. The biggest barriers to sustainable building re-use are within energy, accessibility and seismic codes. We need to better balance our expectations of bringing buildings up to code with the value of reuse. Most building codes are written for new buildings where they can define the perfect solution and then sometimes adapted to codes for building re-use—but it’s hard to anticipate the challenges that might crop up or the flexibility that might be needed to make a re-use project work. This tends to make these kinds of projects more difficult and more risky.
Even more significantly, much more energy is consumed getting to and from buildings than there is embodied within the buildings themselves or in the operation of these buildings. Despite this, it’s easier and more politically straightforward for local governments to create tighter and tighter energy codes which the public doesn’t see. This gets passed on to businesses and home-buyers and renters as rising prices, but the cause is less visible and therefore less political. The really thorny battle around true sustainability concerns cars, roads, and land use.
It’s relatively easy for a city council to pass building codes making the energy code 15% more efficient than the one three years ago. It is much more difficult for them to address zoning that could change the land use pattern and mobility patterns in a city. Single-family neighborhoods really don’t lend themselves to people taking transit, which is major challenge from a sustainability perspective.
Is there a book that you consider required reading for design professionals?
Animal Spirits which is about behavioral economics, and Nudge, which is about how you present choices and how people choose.
A-P Hurd is the president of SkipStone, and the former president of Touchstone. She is also a faculty member and Runstad Fellow in the College of Built Environments at the University of Washington, where she teaches a course on land economics and public policy. She is on the Executive Committee of the Seattle Chamber Board and co-chairs the Chamber’s Policy Leadership Group. A-P is also on the boards of the Pacific Real Estate Institute and of CityBldr. She was the 2014 president of NAIOP Washington and published The Carbon Efficient City with the University of Washington Press in 2012.