The Council has been taking a month off–which wasn’t my idea. I keep trying to take these little mini-breaks but also wanted to give you some random things I’ve been noticing.
Shield AI and Trees
First off, in case you hadn’t noticed, the Des Moines Creek Business Park West buildings, including Shield AI, are now almost done.
I know a bunch of you are concerned about trees. Me too. If you are, I hope you’ll take a walk back there via the still open 15th Ave entrance, because to my mind, this is a fantastic tree replacement opportunity. Going back decades, the original plan with SR 509, was to have a connection from 240th all the way north into the Des Moines Creek Trail. And as I look at the trees in the area within the new Business Park, along the required trail easement– they’re mostly trash.
That connection from 216th into the Des Moines Creek Trail is required. But ultimately, it’s Port property, so the quality of that portion is up to them. That is something people should be talking about. If you care about birds, raptors, all that stuff, they all have to have quality habitat. If you’re interested in tree canopy, take a walk through there. This is your trail.
Planning Commission and the airport
The October 6 Planning Commission meeting (video, agenda, transcript) was, to say the least lively. A ton of public comment. And that’s what you want with the Planning Commission.
Cards on the table: I always wanted a Planning Commission because I wanted a venue to raise more awareness that airport issues are land use issues. But that doesn’t mean the previous version was particularly great. They helped kill the sound code. They also opposed the noise wall around Blueberry Lane. Come to think of it, they went out of their way to be terrible on anything ‘airport-related’. 😀 So why on earth would I support a Planning Commission? Because the best you can do in ‘democracy’ is to get the right structure–and then hope you get the right people at the right time.
Downtown Redevelopment
Last week, members of the City Council got a visit from a group of real estate professionals lending their expertise and experience to evaluating development efforts in our downtown. They had a lot of very good insights.
Between that, and all the other presentations we’ve had from economists and planners over the past year, there’s certainly been more specific information to consider than in many years.
But ya know what? It’s not exactly new. These are all largely the same insights I recall hearing years ago. That’s not necessarily a bad thing–more like ‘confirmation’. There were chronic disagreements as to what to ‘do’. But IMHO, what was lacking most, then, as now? Money. I dunno if it always takes money to make money. But it doesn’t exactly hurt. 🙂
Speaking of which. Let’s say you have a piece of property. Most of us can’t afford to let it just lie there. You have to do something to make it pay. You can’t have it just lay fallow for years.
But if you’re a real estate investor people have done exactly that, here, a lot. Let’s say you have a commercial property and the property tax is seven thousand bucks a year. That may be the amount the land value is accruing every year, so even if it just sits there you’re kind of breaking even. But you could also sell it, throw $600,000 into a savings account and get $25,000 a year in interest, which is a lot better if you’re a poor, dumb guy like moi.
Tax laws make it possible for people with enough cash to sit on these kinds of properties for a very long time. The bet is that sooner or later there’s going to be this huge payday. It must be nice.
But what does that development look like? People have very different ideas. I know a lot of people would like things like a grocery store and cute little shops. But what developers seem to want to build in our downtown? Apartments. Which is fine from one POV.
However, there was always this notion that somehow we would make the place amenable to tens of thousands of tourists coming from somewhere else and spending money. Retail. That means a lot more parking and all sorts of other infrastructure. And then you have to find the businesses to rent the spaces.
The other theory is more like an urban village. If you build enough multi-family units downtown, eventually it yields the customer base that makes all the shops the rest of the community wants magically appear. Edmonds, which many residents mention, has that. But it takes decades of building to get there because we’re so far behind.
The theory everyone believed in for a long time was “Why not both?” Mixed-use, like the Theater and the Adriana, where you have ground-level businesses with apartments above. It sounds so ‘common sense’. The apartments provide rent for the developer, and the community gets the business at the ground level.
The state is now pushing to remove that requirement, encouraging more and more straight residential. Because if you look at most mixed-use developments now, ground level has been tough to rent. Downtowns need many times more living units to support shops. It’s a Catch-22.
To add to the fun, one of the presentations we had, which seems like forever ago (more like six months ago) was from a company that did some “what-ifs” on each type of land use. It turned out that apartments are not exactly huge tax drivers. We definitely want to encourage people to live here, but in theory, residential costs more to serve than commercial.
So… do you build something that theoretically generates more taxes now, or do you build something that, in practice, you could rent immediately, but doesn’t provide the amenities the entire community has been begging for–for decades.
That’s the question. How do you bridge to the next 10, 15 or 20 years?
This is why I’ve made my career on pushing on the airport. That’s why obtaining as much revenue as possible from the business park was always the right move. As is building boat storage next year at the Marina.
It’ll take years for zoning and other changes to bear fruit. So the above are the things you do now to get and keep services going until you get to the better future.
My biggest grouse about the different workshops we’ve had over the past year is not the information. They all had really good information. But they all told different pieces of the story. When these presentatons happen so far apart, it’s like watching Episode 9 of Game of Thrones six months after Episode 8–and then trying to remember which dragon is doing what.
I wish all these presentations, including their conclusions, had been put together in some kind of summary. Without that context, without bringing all of these different professional critiques together, my concern is that, as so often happens, people will only remember the last voice in the room.
