The Seattle City Council passed legislation today intended to preserve the Pike/Pine neighborhood, an old auto row on Capitol Hill defined by warehouses with swaths of windows, where proposed development was abundant before the recession.

The council sought to help "neighbors and developers... get on the same page with each other about how new construction will meld with existing structures,” Council Member Sally Clark, chair of the council's Committee on Built Environment, said in a statement released after the vote.

While neighbors agree that this is an improvement, it's not perfect. Chip Wall, a leader of the Pike/Pine Urban Neighborhood Coalition (PPUNC), says the measure indeed helps preserve the older character of the neighborhood and defines the boundaries of Pike/Pine. "But I think the downside is that there still needs to be much more serious effort on the part of the city, the building department, and rules and regulations to make it still easier to rehabilitate an older structure rather than to tear the damn thing down and put up a big new structure." He says, for instance, city council members had contemplated selling unused heights of above older, historic buildings to developers on other locations, but that was softened to the point that it "doesn't really have any teeth." When new buildings displace the older building, Wall continues, "That's when you get big-box stores that can afford the higher rents to come in. We not only want to keep the character buildings, we want incentives to keep older buildings that tend to rent for lower prices that give people affordable space and great restaurants."

The new ordinance updates design guidelines adopted in 2000, many of which were suggested by Pike/Pine residents. For example, when an older building is present at the site of a proposed new project, the developer must present to the Design Review Board at least one design proposal that maintains or reflects the key architectural elements of the older buildings. "There's no one magic bullet that would protect the buildings ... but we really want to push developers to think creatively that if you had to save the building, what would you do," Clark told The Stranger.

Some of the elements to be considered include large display windows on the first floor, prominent building entrances, and a building's size and scale in proportion to current structures. Legislation approved by the council in 2009 is already geared toward preserving culturally significant buildings in Pike/Pine. More than 70 percent of the buildings in the Pike/Pine neighborhood were built before 1930.