Tale of Two Cities: Why Vancouver and Seattle Downtowns Look So Different

While much of Vancouver’s investment in the public realm has gone into pedestrian and recreation improvements, most of Seattle’s has gone into moving workers and freight.  Homebuilding does not have a big voice here. The Port, Nordstrom, and Amazon do, and the public investment has ensured that  employees arrive on time and goods keep moving.

Think about the big projects in downtown the last 40 years:  the bus tunnel and light rail, the Route  99 replacement for the viaduct, fixing the Mercer Mess, a streetcar that got South Lake Union workers to Westlake Mall and back, and extra travel lanes for buses and ferry queues on the waterfront where more housing might have been built.  

In central Seattle, housing has mostly been an after-thought, and most of the new units built the last 30 years have been rental apartments, not owner-occupied.  There was never a master plan and financing scheme to build the network of parks and open spaces that would make more people want to live here long term, and to co-invest in the place.  It was first bio tech and then Amazon that sparked the redevelopment of South Lake Union, and until recently most of that redevelopment was office buildings.  

The number of highly-paid tech workers there eventually drew institutional investment in luxury rentals.  Lately that investment has taken the form of “Texas Donuts,” big, bulky apartments that wrap around a central courtyard and take up much or all of a city block.  The lavish rooftop gardens on these projects compensate for the fact that walking to a big park may take 20 minutes or more.  

Two Big Opportunities for Walkable Waterfront Neighborhoods

Still, Seattle has two big opportunities to walkable waterfront neighborhoods like those in Vancouver, but realizing this opportunity will require taking on the Port and the railroads. These sites have been subject to countless studies over the last four decades, but still sit underused.  

The first is Terminal 46 near the Coast Guard icebreakers, which at the north end is less than a quarter-mile from Pioneer Square.  If people lived and worked here, they’d be less than a 10-minute bike ride from the Pike Place Market.  The north half of that site is vacant, while the south half is used to load and unload containers.  Between the Port of Seattle and the Port of Tacoma, however, the Northwest Seaport has more than enough land to meet its needs, and it has told the federal government that its future lies in dredging a deeper channel west of Harbor Island to serve the next generation of ships.  This site could hold both large waterfront parks and about 5,000 housing units.  

The other area is Interbay, about a 1.5 mile bike up the waterfront from the Olympic Sculpture Park.  There is about 225 acres of under-used land there, which is about three times the size of the Seattle Center.  That’s enough to build about 15,000 housing units, plus parks.  This total includes 100 acres on the waterfront and (immediately north of the Magnolia Bridge) 50 acres in the golf course, 50 acres in fields, storage buildings and the shopping center near Whole Foods; and 25 acres of sidings where the railroads currently store box cars.  

Challenging the Status Quo

In the last 100 years, Seattle has comprehensively redeveloped its central waterfront only once, when Paul Schell – former mayor, former planning director and former head of Weyerhaeuser’s inner city development company – became president of the Port commission and bent that agency to his will in creating the condos, offices, marina, hotel and conference center at Bell Harbor.  More redevelopment like that elsewhere will require that the Port and railroads let go of land no longer needed for industry. 

That will require a countervailing economic force, like the loss of jobs to the Eastside or the hollowing out of downtown office towers. On the Eastside, the schools are better and Amazon is adding 25,000 people.  It could be argued that great waterfront neighborhoods to both live and work are essential to the city’s competitiveness.  The real power and money at the Port, however, are in the airport division, and it will probably take holding up a project there to get the Port’s attention. 

Meanwhile, the city can do more studies while Bellevue and Redmond to the east and Vancouver to the north take its talent.  

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