One bright day last week, people making their way to the Columbia City light-rail station might have noticed a “For Sale” sign on a vacant, litter-strewn parcel of land that climbs up Beacon Hill from Martin Luther King Way South. Or they might not have. The sign had been knocked to the ground, with the placard bearing the real-estate agent’s name unhinged from the post.
Passersby might have overlooked the sign for another reason too: It’s been there before, and to no avail. That piece of property has been vacant at least since 2009, when light rail started running in Seattle’s South End.
What’s more, this is not the only such parcel around there. The station is surrounded by seemingly unwanted land, much of it fenced off, waiting to be developed.
For much of the city, this would be an odd sight. In neighborhoods like Ballard and Capitol Hill, developers are maximizing construction on every inch of land they can find. So fast and fierce is the development that some residents say they scarcely recognize their neighborhoods anymore.
The contrast with the unused land around the Columbia City station is even more striking because it’s precisely this corridor that was supposed to see an economic boom when light rail came in. In fact, that’s why city leaders decided to start light-rail development in the South End first. “The hope was that if you got light rail in, everything would follow,” says longtime Columbia City booster and former Deputy Mayor Darryl Smith. “That’s not always the case.” Sometimes, he adds, it takes a pioneering project to get things going.
That may be happening now—finally—but the vacant properties serve as a glaring reminder that underdevelopment still exists in many parts of the Rainier Valley, the most economically and racially diverse area of town.
Listing agent Scott Goodrich of Remax explains that the litter-strewn property that’s long gone begging for a buyer has some unique problems. Part of the 18,000-square-foot parcel is wetlands, and the city requires that part of it be kept as a buffer to those wetlands. The rest of it lies on a steep slope. Between that and the city restrictions, Goodrich bemoans, “it’s virtually unbuildable.”
He says the city has indicated it would be willing to consider a variance on its restrictions to allow for development. But the four or five potential buyers who initially expressed interest decided such a variance wasn’t worth the time, effort, and application fee. You have to wonder, though, whether a developer wouldn’t have decided differently were the property in, say, red-hot Ballard, especially given that its price is just $149,000.
The nearby fenced-in area is even more puzzling. That’s because all 39,000 square feet of it—including a little sliver across a side street on the west side of the station and a much larger section on the east side—belongs to Sound Transit, an agency committed to fostering economic development along the tracks it has laid down.
Those parcels, Smith recounts, “have been a bone of contention for a long time.” Vacant land makes a neighborhood seem unwanted and unwatched, and local residents worry that the property might be a magnet for crime. “In my time in the mayor’s office, myself and a colleague at DPD [the city Department of Planning and Development] began the process of reaching out to Sound Transit,” Smith says. “Our feeling was that they should start either marketing the properties or doing something with it.” Instead, he says, the agency was “sitting around waiting.”
What was it waiting for? The recession to end, for one thing. “I think you’re familiar with the real-estate market in the valley,” says Sound Transit spokesperson Bruce Gray. “It’s just now starting to come around.”
Sound Transit is dedicated to using its property for public benefit. So say Gray, Transit-Oriented Development manager Sarah Lovell, and Brooke Belman, who oversees the disposition of the agency’s surplus property, all of them speaking on a conference call with Seattle Weekly. But the agency is also determined to achieve “fair market value” for its properties.
That goal was reviewed a year ago by the Sound Transit board, chaired by King County Executive Dow Constantine. Belman says the board felt “very strongly that property purchased with transit dollars” should be used to generate revenue that can be plowed back into transit.
“Fair market value, I think, is not the way to go,” counters newly re-elected state Speaker of the House Frank Chopp. Hammered on the issue of affordable housing by challenger Jess Spear, he told the Weekly during the campaign that he had been “pushing” Sound Transit “very hard” to sell its land cheaply or even donate it to the cause.
Belman and Lovell say they haven’t heard of this proposal, and Chopp clarifies that talks are just beginning. But he says he’s already helped achieve one such deal on Capitol Hill, where Sound Transit recently issued an Request for Proposals that would create affordable housing around its soon-to-be completed station there.
That deal is actually quite complicated, and involves recouping lost value on that discounted parcel with revenue gained from adjacent Sound Transit properties, Lovell and Belman explain. It’s also in an already hyper-developed neighborhood, not the Rainier Valley.
Still, they stress that things are happening on the South End. In Mount Baker, Sound Transit knocked $600,000 off the price of land adjacent to its station there, partly to account for poor soil and slope conditions and partly to encourage an affordable live/work complex that was built by the nonprofit Artspace. The four-story, 57-unit complex opened in October and pitches itself as “jump-starting an urban village.”
Meanwhile, nonprofit Mercy Housing Northwest is slated to build an affordable-housing complex around the Othello station, which will also house the organization’s headquarters.
As for the land around the Columbia City station, Lovell says Sound Transit is engaged in “predevelopment work,” which includes figuring out “what the neighborhood wants as well as what the neighborhood can support.” That process takes about 18 months, she says, and will result in the land going on the market probably sometime next year.
Sound Transit is not a pioneer in this area. Already an incubator of charming small businesses, Columbia City has become a magnet for bigger development over the past couple of years. A stylish apartment complex called Green House, boasting granite countertops and a rooftop garden, opened in late 2012 just off the business district’s main drag. A few blocks north, on the site of a once-derelict little strip mall that Smith says used to draw laughs when he and others proposed it as a site for development, Security Properties is building a complex the order of which Columbia City has not yet seen. Due to open next summer, it will hold 193 apartments above what will be one of PCC’s biggest stores, complete with a smoothie bar and space for cooking classes.
Even on the western edge of Columbia City, which includes the light-rail station but an otherwise neglected stretch of Martin Luther King Way, a massive new development is on the way. The Arizona-based Wolff Company has just broken ground on six acres it bought from Zion Preparatory Academy. A six-building, 244-unit apartment complex will go in there, featuring “high-end interior finishes and outdoor amenity spaces,” according to Chris Rossman, the company’s vice-president for development.
Wolff tends to build in Seattle’s hottest neighborhoods, including South Lake Union and Capitol Hill, and its pick of Columbia City was well-considered, according to Rossman. “We’ve been keeping a close eye on the neighborhood,” he says. He calls the area “evolving,” adding that he expects Wolff’s own project to serve as a “catalyst.”
Rob Mohn, a smaller-scale Columbia City developer who runs an extended-stay hotel, says he thinks so too. In fact, despite trying to drum up more development in the area for years, he worries about it. “There’s a fine line between trying to get something happening and too much happening,” he says.
The valley has always been conflicted about development. On the one hand, residents want more amenities and are resentful about being overlooked by the city, developers, and many Seattleites in general. “Look,” Smith says, “a lot of people in Seattle have never been south of Jackson Street . . . I think there’s still a little racism out there.”
On the other hand, Smith, Mohn and others worry about gentrification and the effect of rising rents on beloved small businesses. “My hope is that there will be a homegrown type of redevelopment,” Smith says.
That conversation has gone on even while “For Sale” signs have hung for years on the same properties. Is this time different? One indication will be whether Goodrich’s listing ever gets sold.
In the meantime, the Weekly’s inquiries last week about whether the city’s restrictions on the lot might be too stringent, as Goodrich suggested, prompted DPD to reach out to the agent, according to department spokesperson Bryan Stevens. He says the city offered help in “activating the space with different uses or activities” until a buyer comes along. No word yet on what those might be.
nshapiro@seattleweekly.com
