December 14, 2006

Who Benefits?
Before a mall reshapes the I.D., community groups want an agreement

By CYDNEY GILLIS
Staff Reporter

“Goodwill is not Wal-Mart.”

That’s what Seattle City Councilmember Peter Steinbrueck said last week of a plan to replace south downtown’s Seattle Goodwill with a 10-acre shopping mall that Steinbrueck told councilmembers “should not be seen as Godzilla taking over the community.”

With two of the nation’s other largest retailers slated to anchor the Dearborn Street project — Lowe’s and Target, which the magazine Chain Store Age ranks at No. 6 and No. 7, respectively — that’s exactly what community leaders in and around Seattle’s Little Saigon and Chinatown-International District are worried about. They say the mall, which will include 600,000 square feet of retail with 400 rental units and condos on top, will gut the area.

“We are concerned that the big-box retailers occupying this mall will eviscerate the character and the microentrepreneurship in Little Saigon,” attorney Peter Chu told the City Council last Tuesday, Nov. 28, at a hearing on proposed changes to the city’s Comprehensive Plan that would allow the mall to move forward.

Chu was one of 32 business owners and residents of the newly formed Dearborn Street Coalition for a Livable Neighborhood who spoke at the meeting, urging the council to delay its vote on the Goodwill site until the developer signs a contract with them guaranteeing public benefits such as jobs, low-income housing, and funding to promote Little Saigon and establish a Vietnamese Cultural Center.

It’s called a “community benefits agreement”: a contract with citizens that allows them to sue a developer if he fails to keep his promises. In an age of big-box encroachment on local retail, citizens have started using CBAs across the nation to mitigate the impact of development.

It’s the first time citizens in Washington state have tried to get one, but, so far, developer Darrell Vange hasn’t agreed to formal negotiations.

In exchange for the street vacations that he needs to build the four-block site at South Dearborn Street and Rainier Avenue South, Vange is already working with the city on a public amenities package that the Seattle Department of Transportation would have to approve early next year.

Between that and the 60 meetings he’s held in the past two years with community groups, Vange says the project addresses many of the Dearborn Street Coalition’s demands. That includes making 100 of the project’s housing units affordable to people earning 60 percent of median income, setting aside 10 percent of the site as open space, providing 50 small spaces for neighborhood restaurants and shops, and using a union contractor for the construction.

Vange, who is building Goodwill a new, bigger facility as part of the deal, says he has also agreed to help start and fund a Business Improvement Area, which would provide Little Saigon with things such as signage, security, and marketing. Vange says all retail tenants at the new development would be members. “That in itself would be 50 percent of the BIA’s revenue. That’s a non-trivial proposal.”

Representatives of the 20 groups that make up the coalition told the council last Tuesday that promises aren’t the same as a binding agreement, which they’d like to get before the site’s use is changed.

One of them was Quang H. Nguyen, director of the Vietnamese-American Economic Development Association, which leads the coalition with the Jackson Place Community Council.

“He’s been good at listening to us,” Nguyen says of the developer. “The thing that concerns us is he’s unwilling to accept a formal negotiation process whereby at the end of it, you have some legally enforceable document.

“He wants to work within [the city] framework,” Nguyen says, which is “skewed toward the developer for the benefit of the developer.”

Nguyen and other members of the coalition say they’re not against development; they’re just trying to ensure it’s done in a way that protects existing shops, restaurants, and livelihoods.

Even if some shops are small, says Bill Bradburd, co-chair of the Jackson Place Community Council, commercial leases at the Dearborn Street project will command top dollar. “What kind of business can you put in there?” he asks. “What [the developer] has talked about is Jamba Juice and World Wrapps, but how does that tie into the cultural identity of Little Saigon?”

“This thing is suburbia rolling into our neighborhood” — a community, Bradburd adds, that is “ethnically mixed, lower on the economic scale, and certainly not a Jamba Juice kind of neighborhood.”

[Event]

A vote impacting the Goodwill site is scheduled for Dec. 7, 2 p.m., at City Hall Chambers, 600 Fourth Ave., with a full City Council vote planned Dec. 11. Information: (206) 684-8804

[Resource]

A list of the community benefits that the Dearborn Street Coalition has requested of the developer, along with his responses, can be viewed at www.seattlegoodwill.org. Click on the link to Goodwill’s plans, then click on “Dearborn Street Vision Response Document.”