Category — Summit/Belmont

In Wedgwood we pulled the rip cord on our the condo building process right before our appeal to the Hearing Examiner, and so we didn’t get to the land use petition stage that Dennis Saxman has with the Pine Street and Belmont building on Capitol Hill. Of course, the ironic thing is that both of our developments are currently stalled - ours due to the economy and Capitol Hill’s due to the petition (or perhaps due to the economy too - could the developer be receiving better tax benefits due to the pending petition).

If there’s development in your neighborhood that you absolutely want to challenge, here is a quick summary of a path we took.

1. Engage your community council or neighborhood organization ASAP. Your council’s willingness to challenge a development may be good (ie Maple Leaf, Laurelhurst) or not (ie POWHAT, Wedgwood), but they’re good channels for finding like-minded individuals who can help.
2. Put together your case of what you don’t want, and what you do want.
3. Publish that information, send it off to the media, your land use planner, and any government official who will listen.
4. Attend all the Design Review Board meetings and collect names of people who attend.
5. Keep going back to point 5 until the DPD issues a Master Use Permit (MUP).
6. Within 2 weeks of the MUP, you can then appeal the decision with a $50 filing fee.
7. The Hearing Examiner will call you, the developer, and a DPD representative to a pre-hearing meeting to clarify your testimony, witnesses, and exhibits. This is a quasi-legal process, so anything you present during the hearing you need to offer up here. (It’s a good idea to work with a lawyer here).
8. (At this point, this is when we negotiated a settlement with the developer)
9. You present your case to the Hearing Examiner. Don’t be late to this one!
10. The Hearing Examiner rules.
11. You can appeal the Hearing Examiner’s decision by filing a petition against the decision with the State of Washington.

However, a word of caution. This is a grueling process, and it takes a rare individual to be able to tackle this on their own. We were so exhausted by stage 8 (and there were four of us!) that I really can’t imagine how much work we’d have if we were at stage 11 right now.

Want to read the Hearing Examiner’s decision, you can find it here. And if you want to read the entire Capitol Hill petition, you can grab a copy here.

(Stranger photo - Pine Street and Belmont building being challenged)

I was down at the South Lake Union Discovery Center today checking out all the displays about the upcoming South Lake Union redevelopment and had a thought, “what if the city spent as much time thinking about neighborhood development in other neighborhoods throughout Seattle as it is doing in South Lake Union?”

I have a feeling that if the city did spend time carefully looking at developing neighborhoods as a whole instead of piecemeal, I don’t think you’d see bad development like we’re seeing in:

• The Denny Triangle neighborhood, where the city is permitting a high-rise to be built just 16 feet away from a neighboring residential high-rise?!? This kind of close-in high-rise development has not been successful in any major city and is terrible urban planning. 
• The Pinehurst neighborhood (North Seattle) where Kohary Construction has pretty much ticked off the neighborhood by using a loophole to avoid the DPD’s Design Review Process and using this lack of review to build dull, characterless townhomes that push most of their development’s traffic issues into the surrounding neighborhood.
• Wedgwood (again in North Seattle) where Murray Franklyn wants to build a huge mixed commercial/residential property that is only 8 feet away from single family homes and is going to really screw up traffic on 35th Ave NE.
• Summit and Belmont on Capitol Hill where Murray Franklyn is planning to put in a less than dynamic mixed use building leased out to even duller tenants.
• Dearborn Street just south of downtown where there are plans to build a major shopping complex, which the neighborhood feels will have a devestating Walmart effect on their neighborhood businesses.

Anyway, this is just a list of problem developments I’ve learned about while working on this blog, and I’m sure there are many more out there. Perhaps what we need is the DPD to put together a ‘South Lake Union Discovery Center’ that covers the entire city and lets us think about development holistically. Or perhaps what we need is a mayor or city council to realize that this is the major issue facing Seattle neighborhoods.

This came to us from POWHAT, a community group on Capitol Hill.

Don’t forget, the Design Review meeting for the Pike and Summit/Belmont condos is tonight(9/5)! It’s at 8PM at the Miller Community Center (19th and Thomas). If you won’t be able to attend, please send your comments to the city planner, Bradley Wilburn - bradley.wilburn@seattle.gov. Please put the project number (3005493) on your comments.