COMMENTARY—Design review is intended to be a key tool in implementing the “Urban Villages Strategy” of Seattle’s Comprehensive Plan, locating the majority of growth in compact, mixed-use, walkable urban hubs that serve as the focal point of community life. The redevelopment of the Fred Meyer site in Seattle’s Greenwood neighborhood is a crucial step in seeing that vision for the Greenwood-Phinney Ridge Urban Village come to fruition. But the project’s early design guidance—the first official step in the city’s design review process—failed to correct for an incoherent, prescriptive code and appeared to work at odds with realizing the urban village vision.
The Northwest District Design Review Board (Board) approved the early design plan for the redevelopment of the 7.3-acre Fred Meyer site located on 85th Street within the Greenwood-Phinney Ridge Urban Village on Sept. 28. The project is subject to mandatory design review as it exceeds the thresholds for its C1-40 zoning.
The current plans for the site came into focus earlier this year, having evolved significantly from an expansion of the big box store to what Chris Libby from GGLO described at the early design guidance meeting as more “enlightened and mature.” The development team, consisting of GGLO, Fred Meyer and Lorig & Associates, can now move forward to applying for a Master Use Permit, where the design plan will undergo additional design review as more detailed proposals are drawn up.
While input from the community surely improved the design plans in the direction of creating a community hub, what the proposal didn’t accomplish is significant and reveals the limitations of the design review process’ ability to reshape our urban environment.
The Current Site and Project Proposal
It is not a stretch to describe the existing site as an ugly remnant of an era where urbanity was disembodied from community, and functionalism was the driving ideology of the built environment. The site, a superblock, takes up what would be four normal city blocks, with the front half of the site dominated by a large parking lot. The sidewalk in front of the store abuts the busy four-lane arterial with minimal buffer and is separated from the parking lot by an insignificant parking curb and a scattering of shrubbery. A walk along the street here is unnatural; it triggers your instinctual voice that says “I should not be here.”
The current proposal would go a long way toward transforming the site into a compact, walkable urban hub for the community. As approved by the Board, the new site would be dominated by a mostly subterranean single-story Fred Meyer store, made possible by the natural slope of the site. Some semblance of the street grid would be restored on what would be the roof of Fred Meyer, breaking the site into four quadrants. Additional retail space iwould be provided along 85th Street and apartment buildings would be located in each of the four quadrants. Key details of the proposal include:
- A 160,000-square-foot Fred Meyer store
- Approximately 25,000 square feet of additional retail along 85th Street and the southeast corner of the site
- Approximately 200 residential units
- A two-story parking garage on the northeast corner of the site
- A public plaza at the terminus of Morrow Lane on the east side of the site (which would also be the main entrance to Fred Meyer).
The Design Process and Early Design Guidance
Early proposals presented to the Greenwood community in a series of meetings earlier this year were met with significant opposition, as they consisted largely of an expansion of the existing big box store into an even bigger box store. By the time the first early design guidance meeting was held in July, the basic layout of the current proposal had taken shape with substantial community input. At that meeting the Board directed the development team to come back with three iterations of the generally accepted layout, including a two-story Fred Meyer option.
The second early design guidance meeting on Sept. 28 began with a presentation of these three options. The development team stressed that “Option A” (the option described above) was the preferred plan. With respect to the two-story option, Tom Gibbons, Fred Meyer’s director of real estate development, stated that due to the business realities of operating a two-story store, Fred Meyer was not willing to go that route. Drawing scoffs from the public and a shout of “that is a threat, Tom,” Gibbons asserted that if the Board attempted to force Fred Meyer down that road, they would remodel the existing store and avoid the Master Use Permitting process altogether.
The Board followed the presentation with a couple of questions for the development team that focused on some areas of concern, including the use of a footbridge between two apartment buildings over the pedestrian entrance on Third Avenue and the possibility of opening up the interior space to retail. The discussion was then opened up to the public with the design review planner, Scott Kemp, serving as moderator. The public’s main areas of concern were parking and traffic, as well as protection of the underlying peat bog. Two people commented that the retail store was simply too big and that the project’s residential density should be increased.
With admirable effort Kemp attempted to keep the comments germane to design and to help shape citizens’ questions into design comments. The process, however, was essentially a verbal drop-box of concerns and existing grievances and did not seem to be an effective way for the public to coherently express its concerns. All participants may have been better served if the public comment period operated as an issues-based open discussion, eschewing the comment-by-comment tedium to eliminate some bad or infeasible comments and draw out some good but unformed comments.
What Design Review Did and Did Not Accomplish
Vast improvement in the design plans were made prior to formally entering the design review process. After the first early design guidance meeting was held, however, density decreased and the site’s urbanity was muted, which are contrary to creating a dense, walkable urban hub. These changes included eliminating townhouses along 87th Street to retain the tree line, removing the apartments above the parking garage to lower the height, and hiding the truck access and loading zones.
It isn’t that trees and urbanity are mutually exclusive, but how many residential units were lost to preserve the trees? This may be an example of what Andrés Duany has called the ruralization of the city. And, while trees may come optional with urbanity, trucks and traffic are an inescapable fact, and not entirely to be lamented. A sanitized urban environment is not an urban environment, but a model set. Everybody wants density—they just want it somewhere else.
This case also illustrates the inherent limitations in attempting to get the urban environment the community wants from plan-by-plan reviews. Instead of making the hard legislative decisions to adopt a zoning scheme for the area that prescribes the high-minded development envisioned by the city’s comprehensive plan and various design review guidelines, the process is set up so that the community has to use the leverage granted by the design review process to extract concessions from the developer. There really is no reason that the code should allow a 160,000-square-foot store in an urban village.
A rezoning proposal submitted by the Greater Greenwood Design and Development Advisory Group back in June would have been much more in line with the creation of a true urban hub. It would have changed the project site and some of the surrounding area to a mix of Neighborhood Commercial and Low Rise zones with higher height limitations.
All of this is not to fault Fred Meyer and the development team; they are working with the code and appear to have gone well beyond what is required of them to address the communities’ priorities in their proposals. Developers should not be expected to act against their own interests, such as building an economically infeasible two-story store in order to correct what the political process could not.
The current design is solid and accomplishes much in the way of creating a built environment that manifests our values as presented in the comprehensive plan, but opportunities to reshape the urban environment come along only so often—34 years in this case. It is unfortunate that a true urban neighborhood could not have emerged with higher densities, less parking and the restoration of the street grid, returning the private regulated space in the interior of the site to the public and the unruly forces of urbanity.
Next Steps in the Process
Following the approval by the Board of the early design plans, the development team can now apply for a Master Use Permit (MUP). The MUP application must include a more detailed design proposal that shows responsiveness to the early design guidance, as well as additional details such as exterior materials and colors. The Board will then reconvene at least one more time in a review and recommendation meeting, where it can either ask the development team to revise its proposal and schedule another meeting, or approve the design and send its recommendations to the director of the Department of Planning and Development.
About the Author: Originally from Spokane, Joseph Skocilich is a lawyer who has recently made his way back to the Pacific Northwest after working as a corporate lawyer in New York for the past three years. His primary area of interest is the relationship between law and urban design. Joseph can be contacted by emailing the editor at editor@northwesthub.org.
