Real Change News | Latest Yesler Terrace design gives Seattle new skyline

November 18, 2009
Vol: 16 No: 50

Feature

Latest Yesler Terrace design gives Seattle new skyline

by: Cydney Gillis , Staff Reporter

A sweeping plan, though numbers are still in flux

Development manager Brian Sullivan shares a new design for Yesler Terrace with resident Jamila Abdi. The Seattle Housing Authority unveiled a plan last week to remake the 561 units of public housing into a mixed-use area of office, housing and retail with buildings up to 22 stories high.

Photo by: Charles Sweney , Contributing Photographer

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Yesler Terrace sits on a hill directly above downtown Seattle, but its 30 acres of giant shade trees and two-story apartment buildings are barely visible from downtown today.

Twenty years from now, it will be impossible not to notice Yesler Terrace from downtown if the Seattle Housing Authority succeeds in its redevelopment plans. A fourth and final concept design and site model unveiled Nov. 12 for the project—which could break ground as early as 2012 and cost the agency more than $300 million—calls, in part, for putting office towers on the edges of the old “garden community” along Interstate 5 and Alder Street.

But it won’t be a wall of buildings, says development manager Brian Sullivan. Similar to Vancouver, B.C., he says, the offices will be interspersed with a mix of seven- to 22-story apartment and condo buildings with 3,000 to 5,000 units. The buildings will surround a central park planned to the back and south of the existing Yesler Community Center, where there’s a ballfield today. Each quadrant of the new development will also have its own mini-park.
Yesler Way and Broadway will serve as the core of a new neighborhood retail area. Straight streets will replace today’s curved lanes and, down the slope from the community center and new central park, high-rises and towers will replace today’s panorama with “view corridors.”

It’s a sweeping plan that will require a city rezone for greater heights, take at least 15 years to complete and includes a commitment by the housing authority to replace each of the 561 low-income public units it operates at the site today. It also plans another 250 low-income units and 950 units affordable to those earning up to 80 percent of area media income.

The housing authority plans to finance the project by selling off much of Yesler Terrace’s public land to private apartment, condo and office developers, who won’t submit any specific designs to the agency for years to come.

The designs of buildings, their exact locations, the exact number of units and how much of its own public housing units SHA will actually build — nonprofits could do the job, it says — are just a few of many details that remain in flux as the agency prepares to take its design through a year-long environmental impact study which is expected to produce a final Yesler Terrace redevelopment plan.

On Nov. 12, when the housing authority unveiled its latest model at a meeting of an advisory group, the Yesler Terrace Citizen Review Committee, SHA Project Manager Judith Kilgore said the environmental study will start in January with the issuance of a “scoping” notice for not one, but five site options that the public will have 45 days to comment on.

The options include doing nothing, Kilgore said, rebuilding Yesler Terrace to its existing height limit (currently 30 feet) or developing the site in one of three density ranges, each of which would require a city rezone of up to 240 feet — the size of the tallest of Harborview Medical Center’s neighboring buildings.

One of the density ranges is 3,000 units with 800,000 square feet of office and 30,000 square feet of retail. Another is 4,000 units with 1 million square feet of office and 50,000 square feet of retail or, at the top range, 5,000 units with 1.2 million square feet of office and 50,000 square feet or more of retail.

The Styrofoam and wood model presented Nov. 12 showed the medium range, 4,000 units. Whether public or private, Sullivan said, the housing authority wants each unit to have a useable balcony or, for the family-sized units planned on the ground floor, a patio with a small yard set back from the street. All the residential buildings should also have community rooms on each floor, ample lobbies and green courtyards to ensure that upstairs residents have enough socializing and open space, he said.

As she perused the model, Yesler Terrace resident Jamila Abdi, 13, said she is very excited about the redevelopment. “I like the way they’re going to rebuild it,” Abdi said. “We’re going to have more space and inside the buildings we’re going to be able to hang out and stuff.”

M. Michelle Mattox, a member of the advisory committee representing the Seattle Planning Commission, said she is happy that the housing authority is committed to having small, neighborhood shops. She also sees increased density as inevitable.

“I’ve lived in other places where it’s a lot more dense,” Mattox said, “so density is not so much my issue, if you will, as the safety, the walkability [and] the proximity to mass transit.”

A planned new First Hill streetcar may or may not stop in Yesler Terrace; that decision, too, has yet to be made. In the meantime, some residents of the 60-year-old housing project and nearby neighborhoods are dismayed by the plan, which detractors say may end up quite different than promised.

“It’s big, it’s dense, and it’s going to be ugly,” said Kristin O’Donnell, a Yesler Terrace resident who sits on the advisory committee.

“The surrounding neighborhood where I live has various concerns about the impact if they did go to the level of 5,000 residents. It’s too dense,” said Sonya Richter, a Cherry Hill resident who attended the meeting.

She’s also concerned about public safety. “I never heard any discussion of when you increase the resident population and the daytime office building population… are we going to increase the staffing at the East Precinct and the West Precinct?” Richter said. “No one talks about that.”

The citizen review committee meets again in January. In the meantime, Kilgore says, the housing authority will start work on two projects: site quality studies aimed at refining guidelines for housing designs and open space and a “social infrastructure plan” aimed at providing low-income residents with business, job training and educational opportunities.

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Comments

It is good to see that SHA is including everyone in the early planning of redevelopment. Everyone needs to be patient and open to all ideas until the final design is agreed upon. Whatever the result, I am sure it will be much better for everyone than what is currently being operated and maintained by SHA.

Joe Walior | submitted on 11/20/2009, 7:20am

I’m encouraged to see SHA’s promised to replace all existing public housing units. In other words, there’ll be gentrification, yes, but the poor folks intermix with the rest of us. But I don’t know, Joe, that “whatever” they could do will be better than the area as is. Cities are filled with living examples of urban planning gone bad. I hope those low-income apartment dwellers aren’t surrounded by empty condos, storefronts and office towers.

Adam Hyla | submitted on 11/20/2009, 3:52pm

An Alternative to Capitalism

The following link, takes you to a “utopian” article, entitled “Home of the Brave?” which I wrote and appeared in the Athenaeum Library of Philosophy:

http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/steinsvold.htm

John Steinsvold

John Steinsvold | submitted on 11/23/2009, 8:20pm

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