Category — Wedgwood

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(Photo from Wedgwood Community Council site)

Sure, it’s just a regular ol’ cell phone pole, but Peter Steinbrueck recently suggested to the Wedgwood neighborhood that they make lemonade out of lemons and turn it into a ‘community totem’ like they did for one NYC pole (see the photo at the bottom of this page).

Personally, I have a better idea - use it as a community Festivus pole, where every year neighbors could gather to ‘Air their grievences’ and perform ‘Feats of Strength’ underneath the warm aluminum glow of this 59.5 foot pole.

Of course some of you may be wondering, why install a 59′ 6″ pole, wouldn’t you just round up to 60′? Well, if rounding up to 60′ feet meant you had to go through SEPA, and if you were T-Mobile trying to get this done sooner rather than later, than I bet you’d want to trim off a little from the top. Here’s what Seattle City Light had to say,

Both the Seattle Municipal Code and SEPA establish parameters for public process for these types of facilities.

Antenna towers under 60′ in commercial zones are exempt from SEPA requirements, including any public process required for non-exempt facilities.

However, I don’t think anyone in the neighborhood can be too upset with this pole because nobody complained about it,

The subject pole is in a Neighborhood Commercial 2-30 (NC 2-30) zone, and the proposed height (59′6″) is under 60′, so DPD review is not required by code and the facility is exempt from SEPA review. T-Mobile provided SCL a copy of the notice of a neighborhood meeting held at Eckstein Middle School on 12/11/06 and reported that the notice was sent to property owners (151) within 500′ of the pole. T-Mobile also reported that only one person attended the meeting; she did not want to sign in but was in favor of the project because her T-Mobile service is so poor. SCL did not receive any written comments.

So…the lesson here for those who aren’t fans of Festivus poles (or metal community totems), don’t miss those public comment meetings.

(Wait ’til the folks back home see what I found in New York - a community totem for our NC2-30 zoned parcel!)

Saw this on 35th Avenue NE right across from the shops south of the Wedgwood Broiler. It looks like four trees were damaged. Anyway, the city is right on top of it, and expressed their displeasure with it.

Saw this on the Pinehurst Neighborhood blog today, an invitation to submit your neighborhood’s most dangerous intersection photos to his assistant. (Kinda sucks to be that dude - couldn’t your boss have sprung for your web dev to link to a free flickr or Live account?)

You can check out their ‘Critical Crossings’ site here.

Of course, one question I have to ask is, how is this different from the dangerous intersection cataloging work that is being done by the Bridging the Gap process? I wrote about the many worthy projects that were submitted to Bridging the Gap last year but didn’t get approved (there was only $4.5 mil available for $239 mil worth of submitted requests). You can check out the list of neighborhood projects submitted to the city last year.

Of course, you have to keep in mind that SDOT has a very different idea of which intersections are worthy of upgrading vs. the Seattle Police Department. Dave has a nice comment about this, and I’ll post a letter from SDOT explaining why they couldn’t add a lighted crosswalk to the following dangerous intersection.

(Wedgwood intersection in need of help (35th Ave NE and NE 80th). The NE District Council ranked as the NE’s #2 Bridging the Gap priority for 2008. And as someone who catches the bus here - I would agree with that.) 

Over in Wedgwood the mixed use retail-condo development that we fought (and then eventually negotiated an agreement on) was supposed to break ground in March, but market conditions have pushed that out another 6 to 9 months.

It’s definitely a sign of a cooling market and hopefully Seattle will be smart and use this downtime to focus on how to prepare for the next wave of growth that follows this one.

(Wedgwood development - on hold for now)

Here are two new single family homes available for sale in Wedgwood. And what do you think happens when the neighbors next door rebuild in the same MegaStyle, and then the next ones, and the ones next to them?

Will this help Seattle build a more affordable, sustainable and environmentally friendly neighborhood?

(click on the photos for larger images)
View from the south

View from the north

I posted this neighbor’s reaction to a proposed demolition of a 1904 Wedgwood farmhouse on NE 85th.

The major reason this blog came into existence was because of the frustration my neighbors and I felt while trying to reduce the scale of a mixed-use multi-family building in our neighborhood (scenic Wedgwood). The whole situation took about an entire year for us to resolve, and I’m happy to report that we were able to negotiate an agreement with the developer that we felt ended up well for Wedgwood.

However, none of us was pleased with the process the city put us through. Looking back on the whole situation, most of the conflict could have been resolved or minimized with just a few improvements to our city’s out-of-date zoning, its permitting process, and how the whole process sets up developers and neighbors to start fighting right from the start. 

Of course, this is just one neighborhood’s story, but hopefully it will provide some insight into others who are facing the same situation. And for those of you who aren’t facing this kind of situation, hopefully it helps show that there’s no bad side here (well, at least in this case there wasn’t)- just a bad situation. 

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.

In addition to blogging about land use, I’m also the chair of Wedgwood’s land use committee. On Sept 13th at 7pm we’ll be embarking down a path towards building a neighborhood plan for our NE Seattle neighborhood. Since I’ll be learning about Seattle’s land use and neighborhood planning as I go through this plan, I thought it would be interesting to chronicle those efforts here. For those who don’t know where Wedgwood is, we’re about a mile north of University Village.

Up in Wedgwood (Northeast Seattle), neighbors have organized themselves into the Wedgwood Action Group. This group is working to reduce the scale of a proposed 80+ unit condo building by developer Murray Franklyn.

You can visit the Wedgwood blog here.

Wedgwood condo map