hugeasscity

[ Excavation at 505 1st Ave; photo: Scott Durham ]

What fun it must have been excavating the 4-story underground parking garage for the new Starbucks building at 505 1st Ave S, as shown in the photos (thank you Scott at CD News). The spectacular mess they encountered—reportedly extending down as far as 40 to 50 feet—is typical of the fill that is found along the south waterfront, west of 1st Ave. It consists of leftover debris from the historic sawmills, along with the remains of the piles that once supported the piers and overwater railroad tracks that were built when the area was still a tidal flat.

The latest plan for the deep-bore tunnel moves the alignment from 1st Ave to Alaskan Way for the section south of Yesler Way. Which means the tunnel now has to traverse a massive underground heap of that unruly fill for about five city blocks.

Worth worrying about? Dunno. Perhaps deep-bore tunnel machines eat that kind of fill for breakfast. Perhaps the tunnel will be deep enough to go under it, and perhaps chewing a 54-foot diameter hole can be done without disturbing unstable fill above. Any experts out there care to weigh in?

If nothing else this a good example of the unanticipated complexities that inevitably arise when a mega-project starts to get real. For a good reality check on the potential challenges facing the deep-bore tunnel project, see Cary Moon’s recent Crosscut piece.* And this is why megaprojects so often go over budget. And this is why being on the hook for cost overruns matters.

But the bigger question this all circles back to is this: Why are we taking on the huge risk and expense of a piece of mega-infrastructure we don’t need?

[ Excavation at 505 1st Ave; photo: Scott Durham ]

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*Annoyingly, though alas, not surprisingly, the Crosscut editors headlined Moon’s piece “Tunnel Worries,” thereby framing it as the emotional ramblings of an amateur rather than what it actually is—that being serious analysis by one the City’s most knowledgable experts on the viaduct replacement issue.

[ Proposed mixed-used infill project at 1424 11th Ave; rendering:  Weinstein A|U ]

Pike/Pine has more examples of small-scale urban infill done right than any other neighborhood in Seattle, and Liz Dunn’s latest, shown above, promises to continue that trend.  Designed by Weinstein A|U — the same firm that designed Dunn’s Agnes Lofts just around the corner — the proposed project at 1424 11th Ave is only 65 feet wide at the street.  For comparison, 1310 E Union is 40 feet; 1111 E Pike is 60 feet; and the 500 block of E Pine is about 200 feet long.

The building will incorporate 60 apartments, 6148 sf of retail, and 27 parking stalls.  Most of the units are studios and they are relatively small:  the average gross floor area per unit is 600 sf, which translates to a rentable area of roughly 500 sf.  That’s small, though not too far below market norms — Moda in Belltown has units as small as 300 sf.

The parking ratio is fairly low, at 0.45 stalls per unit, which helps keep costs down.  And because the garage has less than 30 parking stalls, code allows a driveway width of  10-feet rather than 20, alleviating the necessity to put a gaping hole in the street wall.  The design as a whole de-emphasizes the base of the building, in contrast to the heavy, visually disconnected base that is so common on this building type in Seattle.

What’s not to like?  Well, as it the case with pretty much any new market rate housing, rents in this building are likely to be unaffordable to a large fraction of the people who established the colorful and magnetic urban character of Pike/Pine in the first place, and makes it such a marketable location for housing.  Small units and low parking ratios are about as much as a market rate developer can do to keep rents low.

The bottom line is that the market cannot provide affordable housing in expensive cities — subsidy is a prerequisite.  To the best of my knowledge, Pike/Pine has only one relatively new affordable urban infill project:  Broadway Crossing at the corner of Broadway and Pine.

Yes, BMW Seattle is finally leaving The Hill. New digs are currently under construction just north of I-90 between Airport Way and 7th Ave S. No longer will BMW Seattle suffer the embarrassment of modest historic brick buildings in a compact urban fabric. The new HQ will have that airport concourse look and feel today’s luxury car buyers demand. It’s going to be very big and it’s going to be very shiny — something you’d expect to see on auto row in Bellevue. (That BMW can spend the dollars on such a project is a telling indication of which income brackets have been treated well by the U.S. economy in recent years.)

But if you’re gonna have giant car dealerships in the city, then this is about as sensible a location as you could find. It’s practically underneath I-90 and surrounded by industrial uses, some functioning, some defunct. Definitely not an attractive area for housing. A few years ago Urban Visions had plans in the works for a project called Stadium East, consisting of one million square feet of office on the 6.5 acres across Airport Way from the BMW site (see rendering below), but I could find no info on the current status (another one falls into the memory hole?).

[ Stadium East rendering: Ruffcorn Mott Hinthorne Stine ]

When BMW Seattle exits, Pike-Pine’s land use diversity will be further diminished, and the neighborhood will lose blue collar jobs. Not to mention that I, along with countless other red-blooded American boy-men, will miss drooling over luxury cars in the heart of Capitol Hill (though we’ll still have Ferraris and Benzes to admire).

But from the perspective of overall urban sustainability, I believe it would be best to put the BMW site to a use more in line with a high-density urban neighborhood — and that means housing and retail/commercial. Storing all those cars simply takes too much space. And besides, it makes little sense for car dealership to be located in a neighborhood where the rate of car ownership is about a low as it gets in the entire city.

Now that the Seattle housing market is cooling, it will be interesting to see what becomes of the BMW site, especially in light of the stalled status of the condo project across the street on the 500 block of East Pine. Back in 2006, Pryde Johnson was developing plans for 208-unit condo project on the BMW site. The project made it as far as an early design guidance meeting, at which many concerns were voiced regarding potential noise conflicts with the surrounding nightclubs.

Given the neighborhood context and the state of the housing market, adaptive reuse of the BMW buildings would be the way to go. Liz Dunn’s Piston & Ring building on 12th Ave between Pike and Union is the perfect model.

My favorite mixed-use infill building in Seattle:

[ Photo: Dan Bertolet ]

1310 East Union Street, developed by Liz Dunn, designed by Miller/Hull. What makes this building exceptional is its modest size and scale. The lot is only 40 feet wide. It’s a 65-foot tall building but is not at all imposing from the street.

This building is a living example of how infill can be done without destroying diversity. Instead of mowing down and replacing a whole city block with a sterile, monolithic street frontage, as will be the case with the 500 block of East Pine and many, many other full block projects in Seattle, this development coexists peacefully between an older three-story brick apartment, and a nondescript one-story building that until recently (alas!) was home to the La Panzanella Italian bakery and cafe.

The problem is that the economic equation drives developers to do too much too fast. It’s cheaper to do a full-block mass-produced building all at once, than to do several separate smaller buildings over time. Pathetically, a significant component in this equation is the requirement to provide parking. Underground concrete parking is expensive ($20,000 – $30,000 per stall), and stalls can be much more efficiently packed into bigger structures.

So the question is then, what can the City do to encourage smaller-scale developments?

*In 1973 E.F. Schumacher wrote a book called Small is Beautiful, Economics as if People Mattered.

Holding the corner, all clean and simple, somehow just the right proportions. Located at 12th and Pike on Capitol Hill, formerly a surface parking lot. Designed by Weinstein A|U, developed by Dunn + Hobbes. How nice to see a new mixed-use building without a bulky brick storefront base. And it’s apartments, not condos. Could this be the perfect urban infill project? Well, almost: rents range from $1500 to $2500 for 680 to 990 sf, so it ain’t exactly cheap. But what are ya gonna do? High-quality construction is expensive.  Also, the developer chose to build three double-height residential floors instead of the typical five (e.g. Trace Lofts across the street), and so ended up with fewer rentable units.