November 9, 2006

By CYDNEY GILLIS
Staff Reporter

Today, it’s a run-down thrift store. But, in 2010, if all goes as planned, the Seattle Goodwill on South Dearborn Street will be part of a 10-acre retail complex that will include a Target discount store, a Lowe’s hardware, a major grocer, and 30 to 40 smaller shops.

The four-story retail buildings will be topped by 400 to 500 condos and apartments and include two plazas, four water features, private streets, and 2,300 parking stalls. The result will be a condensed “lifestyle mall” that will be the largest shopping center between Northgate and Southcenter.

The question is: Whose lifestyle will it serve? And whose livelihood will it destroy?

That’s what business owners and residents from Beacon Hill, Little Saigon, and Yesler Terrace wanted to know last week at a community forum on the proposed project, which will take up a four-block area bordered by South Dearborn Street, Rainier Avenue South, South Weller Street, and 13th Avenue East.

Opponents say the development will lead to traffic snarls and higher rents that could force out low-income residents and small businesses, particularly the Vietnamese-owned markets, shops, and restaurants of Little Saigon, which is just north of the Goodwill site along South Jackson St.

The district is a cultural and business hub that serves many other Vietnamese businesses throughout the city, according to Bang Nguyen, a Rainier Valley real estate agent who attended Thursday’s meeting at the Jefferson Community Center on Beacon Hill.

The businesses of Little Saigon will be “financially pressured by this shopping fortress,” Nguyen said. “If they go belly up, we disappear.”

Nguyen also noted that the Lowe’s, which is moving out of its current location in Rainier Valley, will leave a big hole on Rainier Avenue South at South McClellan Street.

The Goodwill plan is “basically a suburban mall with big-box retail and national chains,” says Quang H. Nguyen, director of Seattle’s Vietnamese American Economic Development Association. “There should be more character to the retail component, more places for small businesses.”

Michael Jurich, vice president and chief financial officer at Seattle Goodwill, says the charity has been working with the community and the developer, Ravenhurst Development, for two years to see that the project fits into the neighborhood.

“It’s not a typical suburban anything,” developer Darrell Vange said at Thursday’s meeting. “No one has brought in these types of retailers and put housing on top and put in someone like Goodwill,” he said. “It’s never been done.”

Goodwill gave the 10-acre site to Ravenhurst, which agreed to build the charity a four-story building. The deal gives Goodwill more space for classes, job training, and donation processing, Jurich says, along with a new, 37,000-square-foot retail store — about the same size as today’s. The store is expected to open in early 2009, with other retail to follow in late 2010.

But already, Quang Nguyen says, speculation on property values is starting to drive prices up in Little Saigon. And he fears the developer will charge retail rents far above the area’s current average of $14 a square foot.

“A family-owned business,” Nguyen says, “isn’t going to be able to stay very long if rents are that expensive.”

Nguyen says he is working with a coalition of non-profits on a community benefits proposal to present to Ravenhurst. Before the developer can proceed, it must still get the Seattle City Council to approve zoning changes, which include raising heights in the area from 65 to 85 feet.

[Event]

The Beacon Alliance of Neighbors plans a community forum on the proposed Goodwill site development on Tues., Nov. 21, 7 p.m., at the PacMed campus, Quarters 1, located on the northwest corner of 14th Ave. S. and S. Judkins Street, Seattle. To see the plans, go to www.cityofseattle.net/BAN/.