Neighborhood Planning Forum - Part II recap

Saturday morning at City Hall the city neighborhood council sponsored a neighborhood planning workshop. Personally, it reminded me quite a bit of one I attended last year where the city says it is gathering comments, neighbors give examples of where the city needs help, and everyone leaves having enjoyed some snacks and coffee.

This particular planning forum was a follow-up to one in March held at the UW.

Some interesting highlights for me were:

• When asked what a neighborhood without a plan should do, city reps said, get busy now, tap into some Neighborhood Matching Funds, get active, etc…
  OK…great, but they didn’t have any specific answers about what doing this research will guarantee for your neighborhood or even if they would listen to this work any neighborhood completes.
• The audience was predominantly older and white. I’ve heard the city talk about the importance of increasing the diversity of those who are involved with this process - but as far as how they’re going to do it? No real plan yet.
• The concern with institutional players like the Seattle School District, Seattle Housing Authority, Parks Department, Hospitals, the Zoo and Universities who do their own planning outside of neighborhood planning. The concern here is that their planning isn’t aligned with neighborhood planning so the result is that these groups frequently are at odds with one another. Some comments were brought up mentioning that one problem is that when neighborhoods do make connections with these institutions, sometimes these people at the institutions leave and nobody is there to pick up the relationship.
• The Central District and Hillman City both had issues with their plans. The Central District’s issue is that many of the economic investment parts of their plan have been pulled out and reassigned to other neighborhoods (like Capitol Hill). And Hillman City feels that although it is included in the Columbia City neighborhood plan, that they’re getting the short end of the stick - where streetscaping improvements have happened in Columbia City but not Hillman.
• And finally, I liked David Miller’s comments on how the city loves to solicit comments from neighborhoods rather than driving neighborhood participation. And I liked these comments because I kind of felt like today’s meetings (and the other two before them) were mostly about comment gathering.

Photos from the Neighborhood Planning Forum