Mayor Greg Nickels' plans for South Lake Union, Northgate, and the U-District ["Mr. Nickels' Neighborhoods," Josh Feit and Amy Jenniges, May 1] are reigniting Seattle's most contentious powder keg: Developers vs. Neighbors. You've seen it before: the Commons vs. Matt Fox, Paul Schell vs. Charlie Chong. As of last week, the rhetoric from both sides was already obstinate, exaggerated, and inflammatory. (Neighbors accused Nickels of being a fast-track developer, while Nickels' staff fired back that the "NIMBYs" were anti-progress Luddites.)

In an effort to have a constructive debate (we happen to like Nickels' impulse for big-city growth), The Stranger got both sides to take a deep breath. First, we asked neighborhood leaders (who held a table-pounding May 1 press conference) to lay out specific concerns regarding Nickels' development plans. Then we met Deputy Mayor Tim Ceis and told him to stop spewing sound bites and answer the neighbors' real questions. Here's an excerpt from that 90-minute interview.

Housing growth in South Lake Union is currently under-target. Where are the "20,000 new employees" going to live?

The housing has to catch up. There are issues in the zoning that actually limit the amount of housing we can put into South Lake Union. Some of the zones that are on the ground don't allow a mix with commercial development. We will be proposing some code amendments to the council later this summer, which will allow housing in some of those zones.

The mayor has a $95 million plan to fix the "Mercer mess" with a two-way boulevard. Doesn't that conflict with the neighborhood plan's call for "modest" changes?

They have a one-way, six-lane freeway through the neighborhood now. What we're trying to do is create a calmer two-way boulevard that will move traffic better. If people want to put blinders on and say, "No, that's not the idea we had, you can't do that," I don't think that's very progressive. We should be able to go to the community and demonstrate why it's a good idea.

With unfunded basic transportation needs throughout the city, why pay $45 million for a streetcar? It seems like an amenity to please Paul Allen.

We have a lot of transportation needs, and they're all priorities. If we're going to create 20,000 jobs in South Lake Union, and 10,000 residential units, we need to move people in and out of that community. The streetcar isn't just an "amenity." With a connection at Westlake, you'll be able to get anywhere in downtown Seattle without a car.

Biotech needs billions in venture capital, and there are concerns that the money isn't there.

It's not risk-free. But we're not going to invest $500 million in the next five years. That $500 million is a 10- to 20-year plan for investment, depending on how quickly this starts building out and if it does catch on and take off. The risk is minimized by the fact that the public investment is incremental.

We've got to start building for a new economy, because we've got young people who will need employment, or they'll leave Seattle.

Does biotech create working-class and middle-income jobs?

There's a lot of spinoff from any job market: restaurants, stores, dry cleaners. Everybody needs to buy things. And biotech does manufacture when it creates a product. We'd like to compete for that too.

City council member Nick Licata points out that this is a lot of money for just one neighborhood. We're already at 132 percent of target job growth in South Lake Union. Can't the money be used in other neighborhoods?

With all due respect to Nick, the neighborhood plan said that if we're taking this growth, we should do the public investment to support it.

If we're saying there's going to be even more job growth [in South Lake Union], the city needs to follow that investment. You can't play catch-up. We're not going to be able to stop the growth. It's zoned for that purpose and if the market's there, people are going to build. Is it too much money for one community? No.

Some of that money is going to be paid directly by the ratepayers and the developers. [Local Improvement District] funding is real simple. You draw a boundary around the properties that will benefit from the investment. You have an assessor come in and estimate how much their property values will go up, and then assess them based on that increased value, a payment toward that infrastructure investment. That's in addition to their normal property tax [that goes into the city's general fund].

Northgate: Neighbors are worried they'll lose a pedestrian-friendly streetscape if the General Development Plan (GDP) is tossed.

When you get rid of the GDP, you aren't getting rid of the requirements that [Northgate mall owner] Simon Properties has to follow.

Besides the GDP, there is the Northgate Overlay. Below that, there is the regular building code, and below that is the Northgate Design Guidelines, and on top of all that you have to go through environmental requirements. All of those processes have community participation.

The proof of the GDP's failure is the fact that, during the mid-'90s, people invested all over the city with the exception of Northgate.

U-District: Neighbors worry the university will expand to Brooklyn and Roosevelt and won't honor the neighborhood's plan for more housing. They worry about a slippery slope to zone changes and the University District becoming one big office park.

Our development regulations don't allow office parks, so that's not going to happen. We're working right now with the council on incentives to make housing a mixture in the development that occurs in the U-District, like extending the multi-family tax exemption up to the U-District as an incentive to build housing.

The UW is not talking about 10 or 12 new buildings in the University District. They're talking about renting 100,000 or 50,000 square feet of space for a special research program.

To read the full transcript of Amy Jenniges interview with Tim Ceis, go to our website at www.thestranger.com.

amy@thestranger.com