Last year, a vacant Red Apple supermarket guarding an empty parking lot was unceremoniously torn down. Today, behind a chain-link fence littered with dumb marketing phrases ("Zen Garden. Own... Theater Room. P-Patch. Grow!"), construction crews are building a huge condominium development, the Braeburn. When it opens next November, the two-building, 153-unit project will bring a few hundred additional residents to one of the city's sleepiest intersections.

Ordinarily, this is exactly the kind of large project that neighbors throw fits about. But the project's developer, Dana Behar, lucked out. His project is on Capitol Hill, between 14th and 15th Avenues on Pine Street, where neighbors understand that they live in an urban environment. "People reacted really, really well to this building," he says. It's hard to imagine the same reaction in Northgate or West Seattle. It's even hard to imagine that happening on Capitol Hill a few years ago: A proposal to raise height limits on neighborhood retail strip Broadway Avenue to 65 feet in some places--which would accommodate housing on top of retail--was loudly rejected by neighbors in the late '90s.

Over the past few years, however, opposition to new construction on Capitol Hill has subsided. The Press Apartments didn't devastate the Pike-Pine corridor, as some predicted. Instead, that sliver of Capitol Hill is thriving. And this fall, the mayor submitted legislation that could boost Broadway's building heights, and the neighborhood Stewardship Council recently passed on a chance to appeal the proposal.

Capitol Hill has learned that the benefits of density outweigh the annoyances, and the neighborhood has gotten smart about demanding smart density--including more interesting buildings, like the Braeburn--instead of blocking it. If only other urban nodes--like Northgate or West Seattle--would follow suit.