Category — Pinehurst

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.
  [Read more →]

Following tonight’s Early Design Review meeting for the Amazon development, there will be another one at 8pm for Pinehurst’s upcoming Safeway redevelopment.

What’s unique about this proposal is that it’s not everyday when a developer walks into an Early Design Review meeting having already done their homework with the neighborhood and is able to say,

Safeway has been meeting informally with the community during the past several years to better understand what is important for the neighbors concerning this new store. The following ten items are a summary of the most communicated comments from the community meetings:
- Attractive, larger store with more product selection
- “Green” design elements
- Safety concerns (i.e., improved lighting, sidewalks/pedestrian access)
- Adequate on-site parking and parking access points
- Loading dock location and screening
- Store entrance locations, street front design and windows
- Relationship of store to residential areas on east and south sides of site and to sidewalk on 15th Ave NE
- Outdoor seating, community gathering space and bike rack
- Preserve large trees at perimeter of site / consider native vegetation
- Keep store open through construction duration (if economically feasible)
- Safeway and the design team have made a commitment to the Pinehurst community to address these important community concerns along with the applicable DPD design guidelines for this location.

The Pinehurst neighborhood does a great job of calling out problems in its neighborhood and having been burned by a developer before (check out the comments), actively monitors all DPD activity to make sure the same developer doesn’t strike again. Following up on a discussion about piecemealing/micropermitting that The Stranger picked up from the WestSeattleBlog.com, The Stranger followed up today with this article about Pinehurst’s experience with piecemealing.

This is definitely one loophole that needs to be closed sooner rather than later, and here’s hoping that when it is finally closed that no ‘grandfather’ status is granted to any piecemeal projects that happen to be in progress at the time.

(Below: the result of piecemealing.)