Comments

1
Skyrocketing rents for high priced apartments!! Fucking AWESOME!!!!!
2
No!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
3
Man, if I didn't know better, I'd say it was in a Transit Oriented Development zone and was part if the economic revitalization of America's Great Cities.

Bicycles ftw!
4
NONONONONONONONONO!! That's all some of my favorite retail on the Hill!
5
Dammit, I love that Mud Bay!
6
Sort of like subdivisions named after the forests cut down to make way for the houses.
7
Look on the bright side, at least there will be 3-5 new places to buy $23 pork belly dinners and $14 frothy cocktails.
8
CHS blog posted huge amounts of scoop almost an hour earlier - it's an Eastside developer. They posted tons of their research but here is some:
Here's the project description from an early filing with the Department of Planning and Development:
Construct new 7-story mixed use building apartment and commercial with 2 floors of underground parking in conjunction with identified character structures in the Pike/Pine Overlay District.
The filing lists Hewitt Architects as the firm working on the project's design.
Our attempts to reach Madison Development representatives have not yet been successful.
CHS has learned that the sale and the project plan was announced to commercial tenants this morning and that stores in the area were told they could face closure by June 13th if the planned development goes forward. "The developers want to keep the facades, but the interiors will be gutted and an underground parking garage added, so basically, the block will be a hole in the ground for 18 months following the June closure," one store owner told CHS.
http://www.capitolhillseattle.com/2012/0…
9
Capitol Hill is a huge strip mall at this point anyway. Can't wait for The Olive Garden to move in. The area actually makes more sense than the Funhouse location.
10
Oh great. I just vomited at hearing the news. First, they came for my bars, then they came for my pets, coffee, clothes, books, shoes, and music.

Sheeit, what's the benefit of living on Pine anymore? I might as well move out to Bellevue at this rate.
11
UGH.

what's the status of that historic overlay or whatever it's called that is supposed to preserve what's left of Cap Hill's older, better buildings?
12
If these buildings are torn down I think we can declare the Pike/Pine Historic Overlay District a failure.
13
Bauhaus has enough regulars that getting people to chain themselves to the cafe shouldn't be too much of a problem when the bulldozers arrive.

They may not have the best coffee or music, but it is the best physical space of any coffee house in Seattle. Without it, I'm pretty sure that I never would have finished writing my dissertation (let alone a majority of blog posts or photo edits).
14
Wait...I thought this building was a protected landmark?
15
"To understand our cities and what to do about them, we must hold on to these truths and dispatch harmful myths. We must discard the view that environmentalism means living around trees and that urbanites should always fight to preserve a city’s physical past. We must stop idolizing home ownership, which favors suburban tract homes over high-rise apartments, and stop romanticizing rural villages. We should eschew the simplistic view that better long-distance communication will reduce our desire and need to be near one another. Above all, we must free ourselves from our tendency to see cities as their buildings, and remember that the real city is made of flesh, not concrete."
16
@11 (myself) and @12 - from CHS it looks like they plan to keep the Pine St facade building (or part of it, anyway), and build a new building inside, below and above that frame. That's a fucking huge loophole of the Historic Overlay District if it passes. Why bother even having it?

Just look to the building on 12th/Pine (formerly Dixon's Furniture)....they used the facade and built above it, but does it have any of the character of the former building? Nope. The street level probably looks a hell of a lot better than if it was a new facade, but I would never think of the building as historic in any way.
17
@9, I'm holding out for Best Buy myself. I mean Olive Garden is way to low brow for Capitol Hill...too close to downtown.
18
@15 There's a lot of flesh spending a lot of time on that block. If it weren't so, I'd be cheering the addition of 5-6 stories. But it's packing a lot of punch despite lacking in vertical size. There are plenty of other plots along the corridor not being used adequately. How about some of those ferrari/porsche/maserati dealerships, eh?
19
@15 Replacing this pedestrian-oriented building with anything that has 2 floors of parking is anti-urban.
20
If the developer's portfolio is anything to go by, the replacement building will feature a Safeway or a 24 Hour Fitness as its only retail tenant.
21
I'm afraid this isn't just a rumor:

http://www.mdgllc.net/projects/mixed/003…
22
@20 - hey now, there's a Subway at the bottom of the 23rd/Madison project now! woo!
23
I remember the time before the smoking ban when the cigarette smoke would hang in the upper level of Bauhaus like stratus clouds.
24
Might as well just move to Ballard now.
25
I had the best sex of my life in that building! This is terrible news. Why couldn't they take the burned out shithole across the street? And can Wall of Sound move again?
26
amazing transformation of a neighborhood. people saying it was going to become the new belltown were exactly correct. it will live on in my memory. i cant imagine sticking around enduring another shitty construction rite aid plastic shit dongle. oh well, the hill was good while it lasted.
27
I feel like it is long overdo that the city do something to disincentivize this kind of cash-grab condo redevelopment. It's like cancer, and I don't mean that in the facile sense of "it's bad." It really is a spreading, out-of-control growth that subsumes healthy urban tissues into huge lumps of useless, ugly bloat; and like cancer, there has to be some sort of underlying genetic factor that makes it profitable.

We need to do some gene therapy on the municipal code. We already have way, way more huge, ugly cubes of overpriced condos in this city than we need, and yet for some reason it is apparently still profitable to build them even as most of the ones that exist either lie desperately empty or try to switch to overpriced leasing instead. Why are developers still making money off them? That's unnatural.
28
Hopefully all this gentrification can be stopped.
http://seattletransitblog.com/2012/04/01…
29
oh and club z is still around right? i hope they are always there now.
30
I hope everyone from MDG dies in a fire.
31
Ahhh, life between college and the ten years to takes you to start making decent money. Angry years! Entitled years!

Aren't you supposed to be moving to Skyway, the new hipster heaven? Or are there too many scary minorities there for you cheapskates?
32
Oh this makes me so sad! I love everything on that block. My friend Miss J is going to be so upset. She goes to Bauhaus every morning.
@29: I thought you didn't live around here. At least that's what you said last summer. So can I expect you at Slut Walk this year then aardvark? :P
33
"Might as well just move to Ballard now."

You can't afford Ballard either. Look south tough man, skyway, renton and Burien call.
34
@29...seriously, are we going to have to "defend" Club Z? Crap is it really at that point now?

Sad when Wedgwood and Ravenna are way cooler than Capitol Hill. Wonder when Cuff, Neighbors, Pony and Purr will be forced out along with The Crypt? I give those places two or three years at this point
35
Is this gonna be one of those threads where middle class white kids with college degrees, lip piercings and dead end jobs act like they're black people?
36
@32 hi lissa. i lived there 10 years. do you have to bring up slutwalk again? ive got my mensrights, you can have your slutwalk.
37
@24 Hey, *I* live in Ballard. Get off my lawn!
38
They're going to knock over that beautiful brick building and put people out of work just to make a buck. Sickening.
39
@24 Have you BEEN to Ballard lately? Though they haven't torn buildings down, it's getting just as irritatingly soulless and twee as Bellevue.
40
@38, I'm not defending the thing, but far more people will be put to work here than put out of it.
41
@39, haven't torn buildings down in Ballard? When's the last time you were there? The Denny's, Sunset Bowl, and whole blocks of houses. Those monster apartment houses didn't go up on vacant lots.
42
@39 I think the regulars at the Viking will still offer to kick your ass, if you ask nicely.
43
As unrealistic as it is, I wish the new buildings would be built with no parking to keep people walking and using transit. That's one of the great pressures created from having so many older apartment buildings with no parking built in, in my opinion.
44
New mixed-use building rarely add the affordable, deep retail density that it displaces, the sort of spaces that contribute to the street activity that makes neighborhoods like this so attractive to renters in the first place.

Huh? Isn't every sleek mixed-use building that has appeared on Capitol Hill in the last 5 years a counter-example to this? They are all full of restaurants, yoghurt bars, coffee shops, opticians, banks, and other places that people actually go all the time. Yeah, these shops are sleek, moderately upscale, and corporate, as opposed to the cheap, run-down, independent businesses they replaced, but that is hardly anathema to dense urban living. It seems you are covering your own vision of an ideal hip neighborhood with a thin verneer of urban planning rhetoric.
45
So, hey, what is going in at N 45th and Stone Way on the SE corner? Nice liquor license app - is it the new Trader Joe's Wallingford?

What does the property developer of the almost complete building at N 40th and Stone Way with ground floor retail (sized for a grocery store) and above that condos think?

Get off the hill sometime.
46
Ravenna and Wedgewood ftw. Until they complete the light rail to N 65th, that is.
47
Now that Belltown and the Hill have crossed the Gentrification Event Horizon, maybe Georgetown can finally be gentrified over the next dozen years or so. Get in early!
48
this is such a mind blowningly bad idea. why not tear down the great pyramids and stonehenge while their at it. it has to be new and shining right? keep the old buildings we're losing then fast.
49
@36: just giving you shit babe. :) I know you don't have the nads.
50
BAAAAAAAUUUUUUHAAAAAAAUUUUUSSSSSSS!!!!!! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!! And Le Frock is awesome. This is horrible. Eddie Izzard was right. " Yes, and I grew up in Europe, where the history comes from. Oh, yeah. You tear your history down, man! '30 years old, let's smash it to the floor and put a car park here!' I have seen it in stories."
51
@48 or we could just do what Paris did and did up all the church graveyards and turn them into low-cost housing.

They stored the bones underground.
52
Don't worry, guys, Madison Development designed the Jiffy Lube in Dupont and the Sleep Country Plus! in Auburn, among other beauties.
53
Georgetown is too far. It's gonna be the I.D.
54

Density works so well for you...that's why 1st and 5th are jammed up every day at rush hour with people fleeing to the I-5 and the safety of reasonably priced single family home in the suburbs.
55
this sucks.

but maybe people who live on Cap Hill will leave it, occasionally, to do things they'd be interested in, were they occurring on Cap Hill.
56
Here's one of the many ways the "city speaks to you":

https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-6VIRq…

It says please turn this nightmare into someplace I can get a decent night's sleep!

(Photographed yesterday on 1st Avenue Belltown).
57
For all the lamentations about the downscale businesses that will be lost - just wait a few years. Upscale businesses always go into the new buildings. In another few years the retail at the bottom of last decades new new new will be quaintly middle-aged and have lower and affordable rents for downscale tenants. The owners won't hold out empty storefronts for a hero retailer paying top dollar. They'll take what they can get and that's when the soul comes back.

58
Capitol Hill (or at least Broadway) has looked depressed for so long that it's the new normal. I want to believe that building apartments will help the area recover to its once greatness (remember the 80s and 90s when it was bustling and the envy of many other predominantly gay areas: The Market, The Cramp, Hamburger Mary's, the Jade, the Broadway cinemas, the Pink Zone, etc?). Time moves on, damn it, but I am not convinced that this will save the area. Look what it did to poor, old Belltown - once funky, once fun, once cool, once affordable, and liveable.

I'm finding all of these cranes very depressing.
59
@45, It's a Walgreens, halfwit. The giant illuminated signs reading "Walgreens" would be a clue for a normal person.

@44, no they're not. They're mostly filled with placeholder businesses like real estate offices, nail salons, check cashing places, and the like, because the retail spaces are too expensive and too poorly-shaped for more interesting uses. Yogurt shops? That's a big bonus in your book? It's yogurt because that's the only thing that will fit in the tiny strip of shopfront in front of the parking garage that really takes up almost all of the ground level. Yogurt shops don't need back rooms.

And even when the spaces are usable, good urban places are all about THE MIX, new AND old, slick AND shabby, hipster AND working class. These modern buildings are elephants trampling the neighborhood and driving out the possibility of diversity because they are so large.
60
the point at @59 is the point. there is almost no question- the small, affordable storefronts will be replaced by large expensive concrete box tubes with floor to ceiling glass. march of inevitability.

a stranger writer once commented that the convention center sky bridge is a monument to the future- that one day seattle too can be as ugly as orlando. in that spirit i offer a toast to you all still there tonight.
61

Here's the photo that Seattle Transit Blog deleted because it's too powerful a challenge to urban density!!

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-bNLQK…

Note the unfillled towers in the background.

Why are these people fleeing the city every night?!

They can't chain people to downtown...to live in apartments a few blocks from where they work.

If you can't answer why, then you aren't solving a problem, you're just filching money from the taxpayers!

62
I tried to tell everyone- they are destroying anything distinctly Seattle. We're going to look like every other big city. It sucks.
63
@62 I'll bet they said that in Rome too, before they put in the subway system.
64
@54: Density works for all of us who...live in the city and work in the city.

The folks who live in the sticks and then--OOPS! THERE'S NO JOBS HERE! have to commute in on the freeway, it sucks for them. They should consider moving closer to where they work.
65
@61 you can say the same thing about me, but i never have a fucking clue what you are talking about. i can read and reread what you say and every time come away more confused.
66
@65 Why would you read anything he writes even once? If I see his name on a comment I just skip right past it.
67
@61 You know what, Bailo? I love living close to where I work. Commuting by walking keeps me in shape, and I NEVER have to sit in horrific traffic jams on my way back to Kent every night. If I need groceries, I grab a bag and stroll down to the store. If I want to go out to eat, I have options beyond shitty fast food and generic teriyaki joints. I'm not dependent on other municipalities for quality entertainment, it's all in my own neighborhood. And I don't have to jump in my car to get anything done (with the associated fuel costs).

Some people want to live in bland, isolated suburbs and commute 2+ hours every day, I get that. But Jesus Christ, that sounds unappealing to me, and I'm not the only one who feels that way.
68
@57,

Tell that to the landlords in Ballard who have driven out longstanding tenants and have had their storefronts standing empty for YEARS. When did Horizon books get kicked out? 2008? 2009? That space is still empty.
69
This is all Obama's fault. Should have just left the economy continue to auger into the ground. Developments like this just would not happen in a totally dead economic environment!

All is not lost - vote Republican! Save the urban legacy!
70
I very very much enjoy all of the indignant people on this thread and how very little they understand about real estate economics and WHY things are expensive. Don't blame developers, blame policies that allow home owners to keep developments at bay in their neighborhoods, penting up demand to the point where ONLY high income-serving development gets built. Ask why the medium-wealth apartment buildings and retails spaces necessary to balancing the market aren't being built anywhere, especially Capitol Hill. You can have your affordability or your history, but when you cry when you don't get either you kinda look like a child.
71
Damn that sucks.
72
Lots of whining here, no real call to action. Worth keeping in mind that as long as we live in a society where private property and free markets are the way we organize our economy, this stuff is going to keep happening.

But there are things that can be done. Namely, organize protests that are persistent in their demand that the existing businesses be able to stay with the same rent. Let the developers make their money back on the residential side.
74
"Namely, organize protests"

Occupy the Mall!
75
If this dude were a true fan of the neighborhood, he'd fuck right off instead of ruining it with this bullshit.
76
"We are Capitol Hill fans—we love the neighborhood and we understand how important it is to get this block right," says Jim Gallaugher, a partner in the Madison Development Group. "Our goal is to keep the character of Pine Street the way it is today—and to build on that culture with a project the neighborhood will embrace."


Give me a break. It reminds me of Hunters Capital specifically saying "We will not rent to national chains" at the Broadway building - and literally EVERY tenant facing Broadway got rented to a national chain, except Emerald City Smoothie, a local chain. And Hunters Capital has a MUCH better track record than Madison Group, which sounds like they've never not rented to a national chain.
77
i live in this building. i'm so sad.
78
But there are things that can be done. Namely, organize protests that are persistent in their demand that the existing businesses be able to stay with the same rent. Let the developers make their money back on the residential side.

Okay, assuming you're actually serious--what are these businesses supposed to do for the 18+ months the new building is under construction? Moving a business isn't like getting a new apartment for a bunch of college kids.

Plus, there's no chance in hell the new landlord would go along with such a scheme unless the current rents happened to exactly match the rent projections they planned the development on. Threaten a "boycott" all you want--most folks won't go along with it, and all the new people who move into the New Improved Cap Hill certainly won't give a shit.
79
So, the people that own the property are located in the 1915 building. We need to start writing letters to these soul less people. Here is just a bit of information on them:

M&P Partnership:
Decades of commitment to historic Seattle neighborhoods.
Behind M&P Partnership is the native Seattle Lucurell family, who has watched the SW corner of Capitol Hill grow and change dramatically over the years, from automobile and industrial spaces to the thriving shops and urban living community it is today. Since 1945, the Lucurells have owned and managed three apartment buildings and nine spaces in the Pike/Pine neighborhood, including the many retail storefronts along E. Pine. The 1st and Lander building, offering Artist Studios, has as been in the Lucurell family since 1923.
A family tradition
The Lucurell family began leasing properties in the 1940s. The buildings are now managed by third generation family (fourth generation at the SoDo property), upholding a long tradition of taking a personal interest in property maintenance and being highly responsive to tenant requests.

The M&P management office is located at 305 E. Pine, a 1915 building at the “gateway” of Capitol Hill and a designated Seattle historical area.
80
I knew this neighborhood well. Remember that block two streets up with Bimbo's, the Manray, the Cha Cha, that Lipstick Traces whatever business happened to be at the time? And Kincoras in the corner. Remember all the foot traffic on this one block?

And what happened? Some business reopened somewhere else and others never did. Same thing will happen here, and the new building will look like the other new buildings on Capitol Hill. There'll be some small restaurant, some bank, some little expensive boutique place.

But if the residential density remains, there will still be the market demand for neighborhood businesses. It'll be like the current Capitol Hill, but shinier and more expensive, colder and not as lived in. It won't be the end of the world. But now we know how other NIMBYs around Seattle feel.

As for SROTU's "why are people fleeing" schtick? It's simple. It's too expensive to live in the city. Like Hernandez said, most people, given the choice, would love to live in a dense, wakable, pleasant, lightly urban neighborhood where everything is a fun walk away. Hands down. But we've hardened into this idea where residential and commercial areas are segregated from each other, and you have to drive everywhere. That's the only choice most people have. Sure, we'll start moving to Skyway and Burien, but only because we have to. I'm not buying the argument that people don't like living in cities, particularly cities as pleasant as Seattle, if that's SROTU's point.
81

Where will Wall of Sound and Spine and Crown go. This is just another case where developers drive out the soul of a neighborhood.
these developers are not locals, they live in gated communities with kids in private school. Yick. When they are not absentee owners, like the cretin who owns the American Apparel building who forced Blu Bistro to move. This, for no reason except that the were *not a chain store* and so he could not tell his friends what a cool *chain store* he had for a tenant.
If these developers had a soul, they would KEEP the tenants that they had, give them a reasonable rent, they will make enough obscene money from the other six floors.
Rapist(s), all of them. Too bad Heaven is a myth, because jerks like this would go to the lowest circle of Hell, in the afterlife, and fry there for ALL ETERNITY. And I do hope they read this, and know they are HATED.
82
sad day to lose a neighborhood so vibrant and interesting. I will not be going back to seattle if they allow thier souls to be sacrificed to capitalism. All is lost.
83
If you pay the money and buy the building, you can do whatever you want with it. Suck it, hipsters. Move to Bellingham if you don't like it.
84
Dense
Walkable
Transit rich
Urban

https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-2dBmQ…

And evacuated daily at by 8pm!!

Look at those taillights shine as they search out the nearest on ramp...
85
@84: I guess that's why it's so east to find parking in Belltown, Ballard, Fremont and the Hill after 8PM.

Those places are so crowded, no-one goes there any more.
86
Sad. Another smaller building with character replaced by a very-likely-to-be-hideous larger building with no soul. There have been plenty of these changes and there will be plenty more. One of my favorite places in Seattle, the B&O Espresso, will be meeting the same unfortunate fate, after a few stays of execution, at the end of this year.
87
NIMBYs.
88
I'm worried about Wall of Sound - the little record shop that could. Can they take another move?

I don't usually do this but... : (
89
I was born on Capitol Hill (Doctor's Hospital) grew up in the Glengarry Apartments and live in an Anhalt today. I've watched the historic buildings and homes in my neighborhood demolished for Apodments, boxy townhomes and mixed-use developments for chain retailers. Eventually every older structure, no matter how beautiful or historic that can be replaced by something bigger which will maximize profits, will be replaced. Only public involvement can stop this progression. Get involved - comment on every Land Use Action, attend meetings if you can. Don't sit back and let developers decide the fate of your community.
90
@89 No shit, you should see what you did to my peoples' long houses when you built all your soulless brick boxes!
91
I think the Broadway Building is actually pretty good by modern mega-development standards. Same with Brix. They both feel like natural extensions of the Broadway streetscape.

Contrast this with the Joule, where half the block is that fucking picture of that guy laughing his head off, and the other half is a bunch of entirely mediocre chain or pseudo-chain fast food. Saizen Sushi has to be the worst restaurant I've ever eaten at in my life.

Or, even worse, look at any of the new developments on Madison. One retail tenant, zero street activation.

If we get another Broadway Building, it won't be great, but I can live with that. But if we get another 23rd and Madison, god help us.
93
"This is really disgusting and disturbing news. Funny how developers can't quite connect the dots between art = architecture = history = identity = uniqueness = character, nor do they realize that development = money = mass appeal = mundane. If I ever do leave the city, the main reason I do and that I won't miss it will be for our inability to maintain our character, what made our city great in the first place...
"


Well, developers are only looking to make a lot of money in the near to medium future, so history/identity/uniqueness/character occupy very different positions in their Equation Of Desirable Outcomes from what I suspect you're using. They're too busy connecting the dots between dense upscale buildings=more people paying rent=profit=retirement chalet in Colorado to worry about that other stuff.
94
The Stranger -- Pro-Density and Pro-Development, unless it affects them directly. NIMBY FAIL once again.
95
I lived at the El Capitan for nearly two decades and watched that neighborhood really come into its own—on it's own. Now the area has hit its stride, and greedy developers want to make it shitty. It's disheartening that Capitol Hill is following the lead of Belltown, where generic development has obviously been a colossal failure. Remember when everyone wanted to move to Belltown? Greedy developers tore down all the cool buildings, raised the rents so interesting people could no longer afford to live there, and voila! We got Bellevue Lite, just with more crime and panhandling. Is this the fate of Capitol Hill?
97
Y'all who voted for Sally Clark. This is what you voted for.
98
The fact that their website actually states "Northwest Pride: Our understanding of the unique people and markets in our region is a powerful asset" makes me ill.

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