That's a big turnaround for a neighborhood currently stuck with a gaping hole on Madison Street and Eighth Avenue where national, high-end developer AvalonBay Communities, Inc. broke ground in August 2001 on a 16-story luxury apartment, office, and retail complex, but pulled back in late 2002 as Seattle's office vacancy rates soared. Up the road, on Madison and Boren Avenue, a high-end retirement community was showing off model homes in 2001, but tore down its pre-sale signs by 2002. "Everything just stopped for a while," says Michael Gray, chair of the First Hill Improvement Association, an umbrella neighborhood group that includes representatives from the neighborhood's bigger institutions, plus residents and smaller businesses.
Now the AvalonBay project, and several others, may get a boost by a returning economy and a few First Hill-friendly changes to city land-use codes. Last year, the city revised the neighborhood's mixed-use requirement, which formerly forced developers to include residential, office, and retail space in a mixed-use project. Now, First Hill mixed-use projects only have to include two out of three (AvalonBay, for example, is likely to ditch office-space plans). And the city's Department of Planning and Development (DPD) is recommending two more code changes for First Hill. One would reduce the amount of required parking, and the other would ease open-space restrictions. "[First Hill developers] have needed a little bit of help," says DPD's Mike Podowski. "And we think these proposals make sense for neighborhoods close to downtown." If the code changes go through, AvalonBay is set to restart the Madison and Eigth Avenue project. In addition to filling that hole, four other major First Hill developments are in the works: a 75-unit residential complex, a nine-story commercial building, and two senior-housing projects, replacing things like empty lots and older apartment buildings.
