Plans are moving forward again for a mixed-use development that will replace a 23rd Ave church on the edge of a busy center of Central District growth.
New filings show plans for The Sarah Queen project are gearing up for required outreach before the public design review kicks off for the development planned to create 112 new apartment homes above street level commercial or live-work space and underground parking for about 20 vehicles. The building could rise seven or eight stories depending on the review process, zoning decisions, and the final design.
The new paperwork kicks a project that first took shape at the start of the pandemic into motion and continues hopes that Black-owned development can also be part of the growth in the Central District in addition to new buildings raised by affordable housing developers and nonprofit organizations like Africatown.
CHS reported here in June 2020 as Jaebadiah Gardner and Gardner Global announced it was acquiring the 23rd Ave Mount Calvary Christian Center property. Sandwiched between the Uncle Ike’s pot shop and the cannabis entrepreneur’s car wash on the other end of the block, the church property was an opportunity to continue “our mission of building wealth for Black and Brown communities,” Gardner said at the time.
The name will honor his grandmother, business owner and community leader Sarah Queen Gardner, who was murdered in Spokane in 1997 two days after losing a city council primary race.
Together with its land across the street, the Mount Calvary property acquisitions totaled around $6.9 million according to county records. In 2021, Gardner finalized a $3.75 million deal with Seattle-based real estate investment firm Heartland to bring them on to help develop the property.
In 2022, Gardner Global announced it had received a $4.5 million grant from Amazon to boost the project.
Gardner signing the acquisition deal in 2021 — “Uncle Ike, you got a new neighbor”
The new development will not be fully affordable housing. Gardner Global said that the investments will create a new “multifamily housing project” with a mix of market rate and affordable units and “intentional community space.” Brokerage office space was also planned to open in the building “providing the community boutique real estate and property management services.”
Growth of 23rd and Union has been driven by a mix of market-rate projects and affordable housing from Community Roots and Africatown. Developments from Lake Union Partners began the rapid transformation 23rd and Union where the developer created three projects including Midtown Square adding a combined 675 apartment units and more than 40,000 square feet of commercial and restaurant space. Meanwhile, the opening of Community Roots Housing’s Liberty Bank Building at 24th and Union that opened in 2019 created 115 100%-affordable apartment units and street level commercial and restaurant space.
Later this year, the Africatown Plaza mixed-use building on the southern end of the Midtown Square block will open as a 100% affordable, publicly funded project from Africatown Community Land Trust and Community Roots Housing. The 24th and Spring building’s ground floor has been planned to provide offices for Africatown’s new headquarters, and an affordable space that will include a commercial kitchen to be used by “local culinary entrepreneurs.”
The changes around 23rd and Union come as the city is considering its new 20-year growth plan and approaches critics say will still lean too heavily on communities already burdened with historically racist housing practices.
The development from Gardner Global and Heartland has been portrayed as proof a for-profit response can be part of balancing the city’s need for new housing with equitable growth. With the plans now moving ahead again, we’ll soon have a better view of what that approach to Central District development will look like.
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Parking in our neighborhood is an absolute nightmare already. If anything, the narrow streets need to move from two- to single-side parking to make them safe for bikes and pedestrians. I don’t understand how they keep designing/approving projects that intentionally lack sufficient parking spaces to support the new growth, much less alleviate the existing problem…
What would be the point of adding more parking capacity when the road capacity is already saturated, and can never be increased? The only way forward which does not include permanent gridlock is a shift away from cars toward bikes and public transit. As parking becomes more expensive, more people will choose not to own a car, or to stick with one car per household instead of one car per adult.
Sure… and monkeys may indeed fly from my butt someday. People were already supposed to have stopped choosing to have cars when their buildings didn’t include parking. That happened- not. The influx won’t stop unless we stop allowing development without adequate parking or we adopt a Tokyo style system where you cannot register a car in the city unless you can show you have a place to park it.. (and for the record, all inhabitants of my household already bike commute and have for years).
Where has a government mandate for “adequate parking” actually helped? Genuinely curious.
Japan doesn’t mandate parking be built BUT you can’t register a car unless you have proof you have a parking spot for it.. you live in a place with no parking and don’t want to rent a space, then easy peasy – no car.. You want density- fine, but leaving it up to people to choose to not bring cars is a fantasy..
Yes I agree with that approach. That seems very different than the government mandating MORE parking.
Using cars to be anti density in a housing crisis certainly is…something
BS – it’s nothing about density, it’s about cars. You can’t just wish and hope new people won’t bring new cars, because as long as they can they will. You either have to mandate parking be provided for new development or truly limit new vehicles. Just making it frustrating won’t stop anyone.
Frustration stops many people…including me. My wife and I would definitely have two cars if we lived in the suburbs, but we have one because it’s frustrating to deal with two in Capitol Hill. If our building had enough for us to just pay for another space, we would.
Bingo. To assume people won’t bring cars is insane
PS as a bike commuter I already laugh at all you yo-yos whining about sitting in traffic on Rainier and 23rd and blaming the city for restriping the lanes instead thinking huh, yeah we added thousands of new people to the city and guess what, most of them drive alone…. Even though we were assured that all these new people would definitely choose to car free. Sorry, but no, that’s a pipe dream. People will continue to drive and continue to bring new cars and just complain louder. We can either accommodate them, or if you don’t want to do that, truly exclude new cars. No proof of parking, no car…
Isn’t your own household evidence that this actually works? Mine is, too; we have downsized from two cars and a motorcycle to one car and an e-bike, and we no longer need to rely on street parking.
Perhaps we will someday need parking registration, like you mention; who knows. In the meantime, forcing developers to include parking spaces for more cars than our road network can accommodate would be foolish. Letting developers decide for themselves whether the market will be willing to pay for the parking spaces they could build makes more sense; otherwise they will just sit idle.
No… my household has never had more cars than we have parking… we haven’t been forced to downsize because we were never using too much… Most people here are not like us (ask me how many other bike commuters I see when it rains) nor will they willingly change. They will foist themselves in others and moan about it the whole time. It’s already time to limit new vehicles, before it’s an intractable problem. You want to live in a big building that has saved money by not digging and providing underground parking, fine, but you need to than not expect to bring a car… We’ve already got neighborhood limited parking, but it’s still too open… parking passes should be allocated by building and no building should be allowed more street parking passes than it has spaces along its curb….
Great – sounds fine, go lobby city council for that plan; I hope you succeed. In the meantime, we already have more parking than our street grid can support, so forcing developers to include more parking spaces when their business plans do not require them would be a recipe for failure. Why shouldn’t car-free people enjoy cheaper housing? Why should people who don’t need parking spaces be forced to pay for them?
Again, because without controls, those residences are not car free… only parking free… fine have parking free housing BUT only if there is a guarantee that the residents can’t bring extra cars anyway, rather than relying on the magical thinking that they won’t. If people really want that, they need to actually put their shoe leather where their mouth is. I’ll continue to oppose any new development that doesn’t include adequate parking until that happens.
You’re fooling yourself if you think Seattle is willing to voluntarily give up its cars… we’ve the 2nd highest rate of car ownership in the 10 most dense US cities… we rank just under Long Beach.
As much as I massively agree with the japanese approach of “no parking, no car”, their situation is entirely different in that they both have one of the world’s best transportation systems (not just a plethora of all forms within the city fabric, but also the lightning-fast Shinkansen bullet trains for regional travel), but also intentionally designed streets to be inhospitable to cars (in addition to the parking space restrictions) and therefore welcoming to pedestrians.
We need a multi-pronged approach here. Addressing parking is an issue, but it’s merely the storage of cars. The most valid complaints around cars (and how they’re wielded by the average citizen while driving within the city) corresponds mainly to safety and noise concerns associated with high speeds. I think the average person visiting Japan would notice the clean, safe, and people sized streets before they notice the lack of parked cars. Amsterdam (after an insane transformation away from auto-focused infrastructure in the 60’s and 70’s) has created a pedestrian paradise that still allows for street parking. Those drivers looked like they were having quite a hassle though, because they were constantly having to yield to the pedestrians who they were greatly outnumbered by. The roads are VERY tight, and physically incredibly difficult to drive on at dangerous speeds.
If I had to sum up the main issue with cars in Seattle, it’s not that their storage occupies so much space, but that they create noise pollution, air pollution, and are ‘encouraged’ to drive recklessly because of how we’ve designed our streets for cars and not people. Both storage and the actual direct running of vehicles need to be curtailed for a cleaner and safer Seattle, while simultaneously massively expanding rail transit and protected bus routes (and shrinking the size of lanes, adding more traffic circle barriers, etc.)
Public transportation is unfortunately a chicken and egg thing here… people won’t (understandably) use it because it’s super slow and inconvenient and doesn’t run often enough to enough places and the transit agencies won’t expand services because people aren’t using them.
Of course if it were harder to have a car…..
I just came back from Italy- which had all those tiny medieval streets but still has tons of cars and drivers… they cope by simply downsizing everything – the typical car there is 1/3rd of the size of one here, and with a level of tolerance of completely chaotic cooperation that simply would never work here. It’s not for the easily frustrated or the timid… most Americans would likely either have an apoplectic stroke or become catatonic if forced to drive for 15 min in Naples…
I disagree however that Japanese streets are particularly pedestrian friendly… off of main streets there’s often a lack of sidewalks or much in the way of traffic controls. The cities can be confusing and maze like… and they are not great drivers. Surprisingly they rank just under the US for auto fatalities per population.
That is somewhat surprising! But I’d imagine that could in part be due to a lot of the rural countryside still being auto dependent (and mountainous) in combination with a rapidly aging population. No real idea though lol.
Also, I get what you mean about the streets not appearing as pedestrian friendly, but from my observations of city life there, people do just walk in the middle of those smaller side streets in lieu of sidewalks (similar to US cities before the introduction of automobiles). Japan also has a much stronger communal culture, which I’d imagine helps tame their traffic woes.
As it stands, yes, US drivers are completely mentally unprepared to make an adequate transition away from cars, but if we don’t dream big we’ll never anywhere! Hoping that federal HSR investment will be the start of a new transportation zeitgeist.
Have you ever been to Japan?.. I’ve been twice. Aside from downtown core of Tokyo, the places everyone sees, like the famous 4 way crossing at Shibuya I wouldn’t call it exactly pedestrian friendly- it’s not car friendly either though… old cities with narrow alleys and no minimal sidewalks. Speeds generally are lower, so that’s a plus, but drivers aren’t really noticeably more conscientious. It does have superior public transport, better than anywhere I’ve ever been which means people do actually drive less.
Seattle is already hostile to families, and in particular children.
Does anyone believe that Seattle’s streets are remotely, or aspire to, being safe for children to bike on?
All of the infrastructure, road signs, etc… is being built out is being designed for only a very particular type of cyclist. It would look entirely different if we had families in mind. I state this as a parent that bikes my kid to school; there are only a handful of us.
Aspiring to be Tokyo? Children make up an even smaller portion of the population there than here.
If you remove cars, you remove children/families, as well a long list of adults.
People in general are already choosing (thankfully) to have fewer children and those who do are choosing to not live within the urban cores of Seattle for a lot more reasons than they can’t park a car… no, I’m not concerned that requiring a parking space if you have a car isn’t family friendly. Not in the slightest.
I agree Chris. It’s a fantasy that people will give up their cars. I’ve been to many cities throughout the world and many of them have incredible transportation systems that you can get just about anywhere quickly yet there are cars all over the place and people convert their front yards to driveways, park on sidewalks…just about anywhere they can find a piece of pavement. Then I look at Seattle where we don’t really have an adequate system and they think people will give up cars?
Some of us pay extra to live in a place where we don’t have to drive as much. Yes, people will give up cars, if they can – some people, anyway. People who don’t want to give up cars can move to the suburbs.
Commodification of housing is precisely the problem causing our affordability crisis–that and a lack of supply.
This is just another apartment building lol…maintaining the private profit incentive isn’t going to fix anything, unless we also implement rent control.
Fun PR stunt for Amazon though.
“Commodification” is causing our affordability crisis? I do not think you know what that word means…
I agree that lack of supply is an issue though.
No–you don’t understand what it means if you don’t think applies to the current housing market.
Shelter only being available *for a price*, and those who maintain that hierarchy (landlords) are the main opponents of the entire concept of affordable housing and market stabilization efforts like rent control. They are the cause for the US homelessness crisis, full stop.
Lack of supply doesn’t matter if a whole class of citizens are priced out and left to die.
That’s the absolute opposite of commodification then?
If you’re going to make me hold your hand…
Commodification is the selling of a raw good on a market–housing is no exception in the US. At least 1/3 of the US population are renters, and they are increasingly priced out of our housing “market” due to the inflated price of the commodity of housing.
The government should provide excess housing (by taxing the rich) if it wants to solve homelessness, because private businesses definitionally cannot be trusted to implement a tenable solution to this public problem–they will always seek profit, because that’s what businesses does under capitalism. No shade on selling things as commodities, just not the necessities IMO. Any current attempt to use non-profit organizations to facilitate new affordable housing is just a way to obscure the fact that the governmet could do it with our taxes just as easily, if not easier, and cut out the middleman. Problem solved, for those willing to accept this reality. Social security is the most popular federal program, followed closely by medicare and medicaid. All are publicly funded solutions to address the public issues that people care about–retirement savings and health care. Why not shelter too????
But in direct opposition to the concept of housing for all, landlords lobby the government to keep the market virtually free from regulation (in regards to rents at least, luckily we do have building regulations) which keeps the profits on their commodities HIGH. Seattle is also a desirable location to live, so that also commands some of the price of Seattle’s housing market, but no one can honestly convince me that my early 1900s home is actually worth 7 figures. East coast prices for the same house would be no more than half. The inflation out here is absolutely ridiculous, and people who think their “investment” is objectively worth what it’s listed for on Zillow are living in a fantasy.
Simply put, the lack of regulation from the government regarding the price of housing and rent has caused the commodity market of housing to MASSIVELY INFLATE, and those using that commodity as an investment vehicle see any regulation or form of control over that commodity as a threat to their investment. Lobbyists continue to lobby, and no solutions get put forward.
If you think Seattle has not regulated its rental housing market, you really have not been paying attention these last ten years. Councilmember Sawant published her renters rights agenda and was able to implement all of it except outright rent control. We now have disincentives to raising rents, including the 180 day rent raise requirement, three month penalties for raising rents ten percent or more if the tenant decides to move out, etc. Not out right rent control, but clear disincentives. And Seattle specific rents have been relatively flat for almost the last five years by many measurements. That may change now that recent building has been mostly absorbed by the market and current/near future projects are declining in number, but rents have been pretty stable for quite some time here, on average.
Of course Seattle has regulated its housing market to some extent, what right-wing libertarian hellhole do you think we live in? But conveniently, not regulated to the point of being advantageous for renters, because, as you stated, “outright rent control” aka rent control is nowhere to be found in this city.
I don’t care about your landlord complaints on how hard it is to own extra property, sorry. I care about the fact that you make your money in a market that should be dominated by the government. Private hands have shown throughout history to be too greedy and fragile to appreciate the great import that their “investments” have in regards to keeping the fabric of society from irreversably tearing apart. Keep bringing on the disincentives!!! There are other routes of investment. I do not believe there should be a class of society purely living off the profits from hoarding shelter and renting it out as private property.
And just to comment on your vaguely cited measurements…can you think of anything in the last 5 years that might have caused rents to skyrocket, to the extreme detriment of renters? Anything??? Just because the market has evened out doesn’t mean that there wasn’t massive acute damage done to Seattle renters that would never have been suffered in a properly regulated, rent-controlled housing market. It’s not a coincidence that all other developed countries with less cruel housing policies all had vastly lower rates and spread of COVID-19. Thank god for Seattle’s eviction moratorium.
Decommodify housing.
Yes, you do not believe in private ownership of rental property. That is an extreme position by most assessments. I am not clear why you seem alright with other versions of wealth accumulation, or hoarding as you call it, but there it is. I assume you are referring to the pandemic when you reference the terrible event of the last five years. Seattle rents fell during the pandemic as residents exited the city seeking more space. They have now recovered to slightly above 2019 levels. And while we do not have specific rent control we do have many recent regulations which make raising rents much more difficult. So rent control does not seem like a necessary further regulation to me.
Only extreme in the USA baby. It’s no surprise that the highest rates of home ownership by far are found in former soviet bloc countries. Make of that what you will. In principle, I’m against any other forms of wealth accumulation that are built off of exploited labor (unavoidable under a capitalist economic structure), however investment as a concept doesn’t have to be inherantly unethical if the workplaces being invested in are democratically organized and controlled by the workers. Also, similar to our transportation woes, if other better (more ethical) alternatives were available, like a massive increase in the payout of social security by raising the cap above 160k, people would no doubt take advantage and slowly remove the ‘reflex’ we have built toward corporate investment or property development being our only options for retirement savings (similar to overuse of cars in cities purely due to combined societal availability/lack of funding for public transport).
In contrast, investment in housing as a commodity (with property value being inextricably tied to the available supply), will always create an unjust hierarchy due to the nature of treating shelter (a necessity for all humans and animals) as a commodity without significant federal control over supply. Rent control measures are one side of the coin (which circumvent immediate construction and can be implemented through policy) and the other side being physically building and supplying affordable housing directly through our taxes to compete in the market and bring down prices. Think of our current private health insurance system vs. a government option vs. a single-payer system as analagous to current private market vs. rent control efforts against the private supply vs. national publicly funded housing made available for all who want it.
I’m using an extreme to outline my argument in full, but I’m not even against private rentals necessarily–however, there is no reason that private rentals should be such a lucrative business when a.) we have such a massive homelessness crisis, and b.) when the government can always do it better and cheaper, but just chooses not to in an obvious handout to the property development class. Private equity will continue to gobble up the market anyway, why lay out the red carpet for them?
If you’re coming from a time when housing was free, sure. We’re not. Commodification means making a sold product more interchangeable, cheaper, mass produced. Oil is a commodity because a barrel from one place is effectively the same as one from another place, so the price for all barrels converges.
Truly commodifying housing would be upzoning everywhere across the city so tall buildings can be built everywhere, removing the ability of some landowners to take a huge cut just because they happened to own the piece with government permission to build on.
Well, the point is there was never a time when housing was explicitly free in a legal sense…but there was the concept of “the commons”, to which the enclosure of we now owe our current gross philosophical understanding of public housing vs private property. I think you’re getting caught up in your understanding of how commodities are conventionally traded and standardized for efficiency and profit, instead of the inherent effect of the commodification of that good on society at large (which is what I’m getting at).
The whole problematic part of the commodification issue as it relates to housing is not about ‘how commodified’ it is, or ‘how uniform’ the good being sold is in comparison to all others in the market, but instead, that the use of a market (specifically the vague concept of a ‘free market’) to determine its value in the first place has effectively cut off a whole segment of the population from ever affording the price to buy a property through what equates to over-inflation of the value of the good due to market forces stemming from a lack of price regulation and lack of supply.
As “the commons” was increasingly privatized throughout history (see the medieval english enclosure of common or “waste” land) and the concept of public land was subsumed by private monied landlords, land once unowned and open to anyone who dared to venture into it was suddenly partitioned into tracts that were now legally owned (on the authority of the English govt. (aka monarchy)), and usually was used to make money for the owner (landlord) in the form of renting out the land and collecting rent from someone poorer and without the means to afford their own land. This concept was in stark contrast to the freedom to build shelter that common land once offered the average poor peasant.
This concept was upheld at its root by the unjust concept of divine rule by the monarchy in pursuit of profit (obviously), and has no place in a modern day democracy. We have substituted a king for the state, and being democratically inclined, it could be assumed that we, as a society, could use our country’s MASSIVE combined resources (tax base) to provide an excess of housing at little to no cost to the inhabitants. We’re fine with public schools right? The funds for such housing would functionally be a tax to prevent the concept of homelessness from ever existing. Yes, there will always be a few people “choosing” to be homeless, aka people who are suffering extreme mental distress or trauma and for whatever reason have refused services, but the numbers will dwindle as the problem dissolves and people regain autonomy over their lives by having accessable and affordable shelter in droves. And if you want to attack current conditions of public housing in the US, just ask where its tax funding went starting in the mid 1960s. Our hightest marginal tax rate at that time was around 77% and now it’s hovering around 37%. It’s all down to the regulation of housing prices through a federal insertion of a plethora of publicly-owned housing options at affordable prices, because only government intervention in the market will stop it from cleaving itself away from the masses who simply need stable, affordable shelter.
Sure, but the times when housing was the commons is literally centuries ago now.
I’m all for increasing supply, and I’d definitely be all for moving to a Henry George-style taxation scheme that removes the incentive to hoard land. I’d also be open to a Singapore-style public housing system, but not without ALSO committing to increased supply (public and private).
Right now we’re in the worst possible world where we’re blaming “the market” for the problems, but not actually allowing the market to solve the problems. If we flipped to just building public housing but limited the supply at the same level we have now we’d just end up blaming public housing for causing the problems. And the problems overwhelmingly are just lack of supply.
Hey, it seems like we actually agree on a lot in terms of practical outcomes. I have my qualms with Singapore-style vs. Austrian style because I don’t like the idea of “investment” in housing as a concept, but both are a hell of a lot better than the crap we’re dealing with now, and the lack of supply is a dire issue that if adequately addressed would surely lower prices for renters.
Not just shitting on markets for the heck of it btw. I, like many others, enjoy purchasing and consuming various items.
I’m just arguing that the impetus to find private solutions to housing market issues has been proven ineffectual regarding issues surrounding the most vulnerable populations in our society. We have to allow public housing to flourish unencumbered and compete with the private market at a minimum, because it is a solution that gets overlooked purely due to our obsession with private solutions (ones that coincidentally make increasingly massive profits for property conglomerates and private equity groups).
My main issue is that the current property market is not particularly market-based, since the levels of supply are pretty much entirely controlled by law. If we could loosen supply and have both private and public supply come online, I’m all for that – but the biggest problem by far is not the market or private ownership, but rather the extremely low level of supply allowed by our current laws.
You can certainly see the impact of low supply on our poorest folks that end up homeless, but it also impacts a lot of lower middle and middle income people who simply never come here because there’s nowhere to come to. So they go to Phoenix or Houston or Atlanta where job prospects and earning potential is lower, but housing supply is at least growing and not artificially restricted by law.
This^ all day. Rent control now!
Rent control won’t stop housing affordabilty issues in Seattle, it’ll just limit supply because developers will chose to develop elsewhere. Operating an apartment in Seattle today is damn near no profitable to start with, given all regulatory changes in the last 10 years. There are zero economic studies to show that rent control helps stabilize rents, let alone targeting those who need it. If you want more affordability, build more supply AND increase rent subsidy available to those who need it. Put the onus on the private market and they go elsewhere.
That’s so silly! Even if some developers go elsewhere, there will still be a demand for housing in Seattle because it’s a desirable place to live…and increasingly so.
And the developers who recognize that obvious fact will just replace the landlords who leave…
Rent control works amazingly in NYC, causing rent controlled apartments to be some of the most desirable in the city. The only reason the program doesn’t spread to the point of efficacy in combating high rents and homelessness is because there are SO FEW rent controlled units available at any given time. That is by design, and could easily be changed by the city government. Simple policy change. Everyone I’ve talked to feels so fortunate for their rent controlled unit, especially in times of financial uncertainty, like COVID19 for example. Sounds to me like a successful strategy for keeping people housed long-term.
Maybe people should just stop thinking of properties as an investment and instead as shelter–a fundimental human necessity. A “utility” if you will. I would rather the government just regulate the price of water and power, and I would appreciate a control on the price of shelter as well.
THIS^ all day!
Wow, excellent article, especially the link to the Spokane story. As for the building, I hope it’s 8 stories and more than the 20 parking spots indicated.
Hear hear! More housing, less parking, please.
I love this! People need to be less car-brained.
People simply don’t use cars around here. Everything is a walk or transit. The cost to park them is enormous.
Last I saw, the vast majority of Seattle residents use their cars on a daily basis. The number of users, compared to bike and transit, isnt even close.
This is Capitol Hill blog. Most don’t around here and if they do, they shouldn’t get free space. Pay to play. We need density. Cars are privilege.
Believing everyone is just like you is privileged.
Any new construction or renovations should be required to have underground parking.
Too expensive. What about, instead, they just don’t own cars.
Rentals that don’t come with parking should transit passes to renters based on the number of bedrooms or names on the lease.