Saturday’s meeting was the first Squire Park Community Council’s first since the pandemic began (Image: CHS)
As Seattle urbanists dissect the 20-year growth plan being championed by Mayor Bruce Harrell and are identifying where in the city his administration excised more ambitious development and density goals, the “Squire Park exception” has emerged.
How did the residential blocks between 12th Ave and the Central District’s Cherry Hill end up a protected swath of single family housing-dominated growth goals in the mayor’s proposed plan?
As effective as the group may be, don’t look directly at the Squire Park Community Council.
It had not met in five years thanks to COVID-19 and the pandemic — until Saturday. But the issues raised in the group’s first meeting by attendees and during a session with District 3 Councilmember Joy Hollingsworth fit very much with a slower approach to Seattle growth.
“The pandemic had a really devastating impact, I think, on many community councils, and particularly in Squire Park,” William Zosel, board member, told CHS. “One of the things that happened during the several years of absence is that two members died.”
Zosel first became involved with the community council in the ‘90s due to the need for street improvements, and he believes enough momentum has been built up to start hosting the in-person meetings again. The group has been effective over the years working in tandem with community efforts like the Central Area Land Use Review Committee to help voice neighborhood issues with growth and development — and help shape it.
Squire Park has been heard. CHS reported here in March on the delayed release of the Harrell administration growth proposal for the city that would transition Seattle to a new “Regional Centers, Urban Centers, Neighborhood Centers, Industrial Centers, and Urban Neighborhoods” model that more aggressive growth advocates said was basically a repeat of the existing system and left many more wealthy, whiter areas of the city unchanged.
Earlier drafts of the proposals have since emerged from City Hall revealing that the Harrell administration backed off transit corridor upzones across the city and cut in half the proposed number of “neighborhood centers,” a new zoning designation with potential areas of increased density:
Neighborhood Centers are places with a diversity of housing options located around a locally focused commercial core and/or access to frequent transit. Neighborhood Centers in many cases represent the core of a neighborhood providing shops, services, grocery stores, restaurants, and other businesses that residents need to access on a regular basis. These areas provide an opportunity for people to access everyday needs within a short walk or bike ride from their homes. Allowing more housing in these areas can increase opportunities to live in complete connected neighborhoods, strengthen local businesses districts, and help people reduce reliance on cars.
24 such Neighborhood Centers in the city including Madison Park, Madison Valley, Madrona, and Montlake made it in the plan.
The original draft of the plan had 50 such zones, the Urbanist reports. Growth advocates are criticizing the mayor’s office for receiving “a plan to disrupt Seattle’s well-documented pattern of racial and economic exclusion” but moving forward with “a growth strategy that will reinforce these inequities.”
So, what is important to an area like Squire Park left out of the more aggressive approach to growth?
Saturday’s first Squire Park Community Council meeting since 2019 was illustrative of the issues the council has become involved with over the years as attendees heard an update on development and growth priorities from Hollingsworth, and voiced concerns over design plans for a possible hotel near Swedish and displacement through rocketing housing costs.
An issue with area hospitals that has been a longtime fight with the council is the need to take significant steps to encourage the use of transit and carpooling to reduce the number of hospital employees that travel in single-occupancy vehicles as directed under the city’s previous 20-year growth plan.
“They have failed to do that, and it appears the city has failed to enforce that requirement,” Zosel said.
Large employers in the City of Seattle are required to implement a Transportation Management Plan with the purpose of providing alternatives to single-occupancy vehicles.
“That is particularly true with an institution like Swedish, which is located in a mostly residential neighborhood, so the impact of hundreds of people driving their cars on the streets has a greater impact in a residential neighborhood than it might have for an employer that has 1,000 employees, but they’re in downtown Seattle,” Zosel said.
Guess we know what happened to create the Squire Park exception https://t.co/1gTXBLwnV5 pic.twitter.com/StC76LFx3j
— Jackson Teal (@jbteal) April 16, 2024
Reining in growth on the Swedish campus and in the neighborhood was a popular topic Saturday as Councilmember Hollingsworth found a receptive audience for her approach to development that she has said emphasizes preventing displacement and protecting opportunities for wealth creation in the real estate market.
“Give me a chance to be able to advocate for you,” Hollingsworth said. “I will be leaning heavily on you all,” she said as she asked for help shaping solutions to reduce displacement, and community input on how that can best be accomplished in Squire Park.
One neighborhood resident asked if longtime homeowners, like those who have lived in the area for 30 years, should get tax breaks so that when a home next to theirs sells for $2.5M, long-time residents won’t get slammed by property taxes. Hollingsworth said she has been hearing this regularly, and how she wants people to have the option to age in place as the city’s residents get older because it is becoming more challenging for those to stay in their homes.
“It’s something that is very high on my list, understanding that we got our grandmother to age in place,” Hollingsworth said. Hollingsworth said Saturday she hears regularly that people “want to see family housing…I can’t express how much I get that,” she said.
Hollingsworth said Saturday she has repeatedly heard that her constituents hope to increase housing — while ensuring it can be done in a thoughtful manner.
As for the veteran Squire Park Community Council leadership, the grassroots group says the approach is simple.
“I think that sometimes community councils are seen as a place where activists get together and do activist things, but I think it’s really more than that,” Zosel said. “Maybe the most important thing is that it’s a place where the people can just get to know their neighbors.”
The Squire Park Community Council will continue to host quarterly meetings at Byrd Barr Place, and Zosel encourages all to become involved through expressing ideas, gaining a stronger feel of community, and come up with creative ways to activate public spaces like 12th Avenue Square Park.
Learn more and get updates on the council at facebook.com/SquirePark/.
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Exception WHY? Build UP already. We have a housing crisis.
I didn’t know two members had died over the past five years. I’ve never been a member but attended the in-person meetings for many years. My condolences.
Leaving those blocks Single Family has to do with three things which affected a number of areas, including some LR. First, they are between two Urban Villages, and outside of UV boundaries. Second, they already had a lot of duplexing and backyard cottages, something that people demanded by ‘grandfathered’ when ADUs were outlawed so not quite the same as ‘exclusive’ gated communities. Third, without real programmatic, legal and zoning constraints and guardrails, the ‘solution’ in the 1990s was just don’t raise the price of land. We have known that for 3 decades.
It’s time for actually equitable and fair solutions with the outcome of housing more people. NO one should be ‘charged’ proportionally higher property taxes just because they live their lives and aren’t playing developer on their own land where they live.
It isn’t ‘infill’ if the people are pushed out. It’s people and land clearing.
No, the ones who came before SHOULD pay more in taxes. You shouldn’t be able to just get off scot-free in property taxes because you were a lucky boomer who inherited their parents’ house, who got it for like 5k in 1950.
Part of the problem here is that many of these long-time residents are retired and on fixed incomes. Even though many own their homes outright, their retirement incomes don’t increase commensurate to whatever amount their property taxes increase, so they gradually lose ground over the years, particularly in swaths where gentrification is in full-swing.
I lived in Squire Park for over a decade, and moved just prior to the development of the 23rd & E Union area, but gentrification had already been going on steadily, and increased substantially during the 2008 recession, when many properties in the area were snatched up by developers and real-estate conglomerates at fire-sale prices. Suddenly, as the article states, the 100 year old house next door to you would be demolished and a new in-city McMansion erected in its place, then sold for far more than the older houses adjacent to it, thus driving up property tax rates for people who had lived in the neighborhood their entire lives, forcing them to also sell out and move to more affordable places, like Kent or Des Moines or even Enumclaw.
Why do current residents belong on a pedestal compared to new residents? Isn’t housing more people as simple as housing more people?
The land is not owned by the public. Stop setting all land up to be owned by NYC financiers and their ilk. Or have that revolution and overthrow private property. Your choice. But, unleashing land flippers and developers is not the solution.
It would be helpful for CHS to explain why the Citizen Advisory Committee (CAC) for the Swedish master plan (MIMP) is not happy with a non-profit hospital relinquishing their development rights to a for-profit corporation (Sabey) to build a for-profit hotel by another national chain. Money, money, money. We can all agree that a hotel adjacent to a Hospital is not a bad use of land – since extremely sick patients would benefit from having their family stay nearby car-free. Nothing wrong with this on the surface. I understand that the CAC wrote a 14 page letter detailing their strong disagreement for this project and it is posted on the Dept of Neighborhoods website. In the long run, this corner lot should be reserved for a building more directly linked to the mission of healthcare. Why can’t SDCI and Council not let a smaller hotel be built on the many nearby underdeveloped lots (sensitively)? This should be a slam-dunk spot-upzone decision and leave the CAC out of the fight. Swedish is a major hospital and they should be doing a much better job at not putting their blank and uninviting rear-end to the neighborhood. The land around the hospital should also be upzoned to support an urban professional neighborhood since this campus supports 5,000 well paid jobs and they almost all drive to work. Many hundreds park in the adjacent streets outside 2-hour zoned parking. You can see them in scrubs walking 10 minutes from as far South as Yesler. If there was a dedicated (and free) shuttle like that which the UW Medical Center operates between Harborview and UW – we might move the needle on single-occupant vehicles. What is needed is an employee/patient shuttle from the I.D. train station up to Swedish Cherry, then up to Swedish First Hill and back to Broadway/Denny Sound Transit and back to Swedish Cherry. This would take care of several hundred employees and patients a day. Nobody in scrubs wants to walk from the ID or Denny and there are too many stupid transit transfers to get to work in a timely manner. Driving with free parking is still easier. If you stand outside the mega Swedish parking garage at 7am, you will see mostly nicely dressed Docs in $70k cars pulling in by the hundreds and very few nurses in scrubs. You will simply not get the specialists and Docs out of those luxury sofas until the cost for parking is closer to $50/day. Currently, the public pays $17 for 8 hours and a hospital employee gets a discount at $12. That’s only 1.5 Starbucks or about $2,500/year. Peanuts if you’re making $120k.
Improve mobility options – more people will bus, walk, bike, roll, if it’s safe, easy and accessible to do so. There are thousands of people moving here every year – traffic, parking drama, safety issues, and pollution will only get worse (let alone the increases in everyone’s insurance), unless the city invests in mobility infrastructure for everyone.
Not quite an exception for Squire Park. Less than 1/3 of this neighborhood is zoned NR. Not my part of it. Single family homes on my block and those surrounding have been torn down to be replaced by lot-line-to-lot line townhome developments. Density is happening in Squire Park. But it is with $1.3 million townhomes, replacing aging and in some cases, what had still been relatively affordable housing.
CHS Blog, thank your for covering neighborhood stories. Please consider most of the the urban villages reflect the redlined areas and have been up zoned several times, first for several of the neighbor plans like the 23rd Avenue E. Union to Jackson project, then again under MHA and have taken their fair share with a lot of capacity zoned that has not been used. We are transit friendly because we are already dense. Therefore, densify other areas of the city and county that are not transit friendly to make them transit friendly, and leave plenty of green and park space in all areas to avoid creating hot spots. There are ways of doing this that leaves some yard space, parks and gardening space that developers never want to provide.
The vacancy rate for apartments in South Lake Union is relatively high. Developers purposely leave rents high and write off losses. And we do need family homes and units for ownership. for all income levels. We don’t want just a few big landowners with rentals.
Where and what is the need? What is the capacity already zoned? How does the city escape its revenue dependence on construction sales tax and property tax, so that it can actually plan a city for people and families not driven by developers and cranes.