Mary wrote to us this morning to let us know about the following meetings that are scheduled to discuss the development in lower Wallingford. First and foremost, there is a meeting tonight at 7pm at Varsity Inn (1801 N. 34th St.):
If you’re interested in helping frame the inevitable development of South Wallingford/North Lake Union, there are many opportunities to participate!
1) email <[email protected]> for more information
2) Join the next planning meeting this Tuesday, June 11, 7PM at Varsity Cafe to prepare for the June 19 meeting with AMLI (developers)
3) Share your thoughts with the City BY JUNE 26 – <[email protected]> and copy <[email protected]>; reference #3014232 and #3014233
4) Come to the Wednesday, June 19, 7PM meeting at Good Shepherd Center (room will be posted). The purpose of this meeting is to negotiate and dialogue with AMLI developers on aspects important to our community that aren’t being addressed.
Please jump in and let your voices be heard!
The meeting will be held in Room 202 of the Good Shepherd Center – the Community Council’s usual meeting room. Follow the WCC signs.
It’s very important to stand up now for sane development in Wallingford/North Lake Union. Show developers that we care about what happens in our neighborhood, attend this meeting.
See followup from `ellen, brian’, mis-posted as a comment on the 4H Poultry post. http://www.wallyhood.org/2013/05/cooped-seattle-4h-poultry-show/comment-page-1/#comment-253916
Some interesting ideas. My feeling is that most of them are too legally invasive – I mean, I agree that the building owners ought to be held responsible, but solutions that translate to a lot of “red tape” and arbitrary target numbers will be hard to sell.
But the Prescott residents who bought RPZ stickers – that could be fixed. Add restrictions that prevent it, for multi-residential buildings over 8 units or something. (Also make sure that the city’s RPZ qualification analysis addresses this situation – it’s usually about competition from non-residential uses.) Once there’s a remedy, however annoying, for the surrounding residents and the parking problem is between the building owners and their residents, they’ll either solve it or the buildings will be empty.
I don’t have a dog, er, car in this, but something I’ve always wondered about: in RPZs, do single-family home owners automatically qualify for stickers even if they have a garage? Meaning, they can use their garage for storage and park one or more cars on the street?
Anyone who lives in the neighborhood qualifies. Or strictly speaking, I believe, anyone who owns property in the neighborhood – renters need stickers too, but I believe they depend on their landlords’ cooperation to get them? Which is a relevant detail – wonder if the Prescott management helped the couple in the story get their RPZ stickers, so they wouldn’t have to pay $3000 a year in parking rent?
Anyway, if you think about the logistics of making it depend on whether you have a garage … what’s a garage? If you have a curb cut and paving that’s connected to the basement, but no one has driven a car into it for generations, and the interior space isn’t airtight enough to start a car in there without filling the house with exhaust gases? What if the door has been changed so it would no longer admit a car anyway? Is a carport a garage? Is any paved space fair game, but unpaved areas are assumed to be not for cars? What documentation do we need to present, to get this sorted out – is there even a way to do it without on-site inspection? Could be more grief than it’s worth.
… and not to be overly distracted by the parking question – there were other questions of general interest, that were touched on in the 4H Poultry comment. Street front retail, for example.
These developments are located as far as you can get from retail services like grocery stores, pharmacies, almost a mile away in “old Wallingford.” If they fill up (a big “if”!), put together it’s thousands of units, a lot of people milling around looking for that walkable urban experience.
From design review and other presentations, it sounds like developers intend to make either no street front retail (N 34th), or the most perfunctory accommodations required of them (38th & Stone.)
Regardless of the developer’s intentions, actual retail use depends on rates and other management policies. Existing retail in similar developments makes a kind of dismal picture – is that what our thousands of prospective new neighbors really need? Is this Wallingford? And, in the event the new developments do manage to create a viable, meaningful retail district, what happens to “old Wallingford” up on N 45th?