Category — Lake City Way

Lots of condos, apartments and townhomes (even a mobile home park) up in this corner of Ravenna Ave by Lake City Way. Not as much investment in pedestrian safety.

Thank the neighbors for the bench!

Walking home on a busy street from that bus stop.

Okay, these photos at the bottom of this post are from a new townhome unit for sale that Gordon from RPASeattle showed me a couple of weeks ago, however the conversation below is with someone who owns a new townhome in Lake City and allowed me to tour her home. Here are some quick highlights of the discussion:

• She is a single person who chose to buy a townhome because it was a nice affordable alternative to condos and apartments. She specifically wanted to avoid noise that she found in both apartments and condos.
• She chose the neighborhood because it has good access to transit and because she used to live in Lake City, also, the neighborhood is showing some potential to become nicer.
• I asked her what she thought about townhome criticism from folks like me and she didn’t seem to really notice it. She also felt like she was now a part of the neighborhood and excited by future development.
• Parking was a bit of a concern for her, and I noticed that fitting her car in the garage was a pretty tight venture. She had installed an infrared system in the garage to make sure the car was perfectly parked before closing the garage door. And one concern she had about making sidewalk frontage improvements - that this would have a negative impact on the availability of on-street parking.

I’m not sure how representative she is of the typical townhome buyer, but for me it was good to put a face to a development. And if anyone else ever wants to take me on a tour of a local development (good or bad), just let me know.

This is from my tour with Gordon in Lake City a couple of weeks ago. Which fence do you like better, and do you know why they were built at different heights? (by the way - both developments are two different 5 unit townhouse sites)

Last week, Gordon, a local townhouse developer from RPA Seattle was kind enough to invite me on a tour of some of his townhomes in the Lake City area. I really appreciated the time, and it gave me the opportunity to learn more about things from the development point of view. I’ll follow-up with some more posts, but here was the first thing I learned.

Do you know why the townhomes on the left have a built out front with sidewalks while the townhomes on the right don’t?

Well…the answer is that the threshold level for requiring sidewalks used to be 6 units. So…if you built 6 or more housing units on your plot you were required to build sidewalks. However, if you built out 5 or fewer you weren’t required to (and you guessed it, only 5 townhomes were built on the lot to the right).

Starting this year the threshold was moved down to three units, so if the units on the right were built today they would be required to also build out sidewalks.

Anyway, this photo below is a great example of the pedestrian and landscaping improvements you gain with sidewalks.

Boy, do I know the difference between writing blog posts about land use and actually doing something about it. Things are easy online, I find something interesting (or somebody sends me some information) and in just a few minutes I publish a generally accurate and somewhat gramatically correct post.

However, the hard part is actually getting something done in this town. If you’re serious about it, you will be going to evening meetings after work, communicating your updates to your neighborhood, and then taking heat from others who don’t agree with your decisions.

And in Seattle, compromise generally means prioritizing projects against a certain pool of available funds. Tons of research, compromise, paperwork and discussion went into determining the 40 really critical Neighborhood Street Fund projects proposed by the North Seattle. And the North District Council put in even more work to determine which are their top 8 projects - and at the end of the day - guess how many of these they think will get funded? Probably just 1.  

So…when you hear about neighborhoods talking about how they want infrastructure investments to go along with new development in their neighborhoods - think about the fact that they have alot of outstanding infrastructure needs that aren’t being met. In addition to the North District’s top project’s below here’s a nice starting point to understand the kind of projects being proposed by other neighborhoods.

North District Council’s top Neighborhood Street Fund projects

Lake City (including Cedar Park)
#1 - 117 feet of sidewalk to be added to NE 137th between 30th Ave NE & 32nd Ave NE
It was noted that many seniors use this street to get back and forth from the Remington Senior apartments complex to the nearby park, bus stop, and to core shopping areas.
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Lots of apartment and condo buildings here (and even a few nicely designed ones tucked in here and there), but walking around this part of north Seattle, I just couldn’t find where the city has invested in building a neighborhood for these people?

North of NE 120th St in the area between Lake City Way and 35th Ave NE there are blocks and blocks of streets like these. There are very few sidewalks, corner stores, or parks. The place is packed with cars on the street, the gravel areas in front of the buildings are so worn down by traffic that they are give way to mudholes during the lightest rain, and good luck walking around as you dodge the cars that cut through here to get from Lake City to 35th Ave.

Forget the design of these buildings, but is this kind of urban planning what we mean by a sustainable urban village/neighborhood?

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The Sugar Shack Baking Company took over this space on Lake City Way earlier this year and commissioned this killer mural. You’ve gotta love this kinda creativity and it’s something sorely missing from most new development in town.

In today’s list of DPD application announcements, one that caught my eye was for a

Land Use Application to allow a six-story building containing 4,000 sq. ft. of retail at ground level and 145 residential units above in an environmentally critical area. Parking for 167 vehicles to be provided in a below-grade garage. Project includes 21,900 cu. yds. of grading. Existing 14,500 sq. ft. commercial structure to remain.

This building will be situated above a trailer park and single family homes to the East. The application doesn’t make it clear whether these will be condos or apartments, but this part of Lake City Way near Maple Leaf is really changing from used car dealerships and smaller one-story business to 4-6 story multi-family housing. As someone who commutes down Lake City Way to work, hopefully the city will require some investment in mass transit infrastructure improvements here. It also will be interesting to see what the neighbors think of this project.