The odds are against him, but Bill Bradburd isn't giving up.
Bradburd is a resident of a South Seattle neighborhood called Jackson Place, where he and his wife are raising two little girls. For two years, he's been fighting a planned shopping mall just down the street that he says will pack more cars onto Rainier Ave. S., pollute his children's air and wreck a homespun little shopping district called Little Saigon.
Those are some of the reasons Bradburd and a group of allies in the International District and Squire Park neighborhoods continue to fight the project. But, so far, the group isn't having much luck -- in part, he says, because city staff from the planning department to the hearing examiner are ignoring Seattle's municipal code and comprehensive plan.
On Oct. 28, Bradburd filed an appeal with the Seattle City Council challenging a decision made Oct. 14 by the city hearing examiner who ruled for the developer and against Bradburd and his fellow detractors, recommending the project go forward and that the council approve a one-time rezone the developer is seeking in order to build the $300 million mall at the site of the Seattle Goodwill Store on S. Dearborn St.
Goodwill owns the 10-acre site and plans to deed it over to the developer in exchange for a new, four-story building that the developer has promised to build at the site. The mall would include 700,000 square feet of retail (including big-box stores and a grocery), with 565 units of housing on top and 2,200 parking stalls.
Bradburd originally fought the project through the Jackson Place Community Council and a group called the Dearborn Street Coalition for a Livable Neighborhood, but the coalition dropped its own appeal in September and agreed to support the project at council after getting the developer to sign a "community benefits agreement." The agreement includes a guarantee for 200 units of affordable housing, union jobs, traffic mitigation for Jackson Place, and cash support for the Little Saigon business district -- a groundbreaking win-win for the developer and the community, says coalition co-organizer David West of Puget Sound SAGE.
But Bradburd and others who broke away from the coalition -- including the International District's Inter*Im Community Development and the Squire Park Community Council -- say the deal reflects little of what residents originally sought.
In its appeal to the City Council, the group is challenging the developer's request for a contract rezone from an Industrial Commercial category with a height limit of 65 feet to Neighborhood Commercial 3 at 85 feet -- a change that Bradburd and neighborhood planner Tom Im of Inter*Im say the city's Department of Planning and Development should never have allowed.
NC3 is for small, walkable neighborhood shopping districts, which the Dearborn Street mall would not be, the two say. With its proximity to the freeway ramps of Interstates 5 and 90 and its automobile orientation -- a study by the developer anticipates 17,000 customers a day will arrive by car -- Im says the project clearly belongs in a commercial zoning category that's not in keeping with the surrounding retail hubs of Little Saigon and the International District.
"I thought it was perplexing," Im says, "that basically the Department of Planning is pigeonholing it as a pedestrian-oriented development, which is what the neighborhood wants -- it's what most neighborhoods want -- but for some reason they're not qualifying it as automobile-oriented."
The group argues that the mall represents a new business district that would not only swallow Little Saigon as other national chain stores move into the area, but add traffic and exhaust fumes that wreak havoc on residents' health and the environment, causing more asthma in children and more heart disease in adults.
"The project is outdated [and] it hasn't even started," says Jane Koenig, a University of Washington air pollution expert who testified in September before the hearing examiner. "We're not going to establish a truly green city by keeping up the same habit of automobile use."
"We take great pride in our city's sources of electricity being green, [but] we're building malls where people have to drive," she says. "It seems a little schizophrenic to me."
And inappropriate, Bradburd says. "We fundamentally think that this proposal for a big box mall is inconsistent with the [city's] urban village strategy," he says, as well as the Livable South Downtown Plan the mayor unveiled in May.
The appeal has pushed the City Council's deadline to Feb. 11 for holding a hearing and making a decision on the rezone request, after which Seattle's Department of Transportation would take up the developer's request for street vacations at the site.
In the meantime, Bradburd and Im have been working with architecture students at the UW to come up with alternative proposals for the Goodwill site that might include more housing units at rent levels Goodwill workers and shoppers could afford, smaller stores, more greenery, and public space for community events or farmer's markets.
"Compare that to people driving in, parking in the basement, and going up in an elevator," he says. "That doesn't engage the community at all."