Seattle Sun Newspaper - Vol. 7, Issue 3, March 2003

Copyright 2003 Seattle Sun. Please feel free to use the article and photos below in your research. Be sure to quote the Seattle Sun as your source.

What is the Comp Plan?

The Northgate Area Comprehensive Plan is a City document that has provided guidelines for development in the Northgate business district for the past decade.

Four years in the making, the plan was originally suggested by community activists from the five neighborhoods which intersect where the Northgate business area lies: Haller Lake, Maple Leaf, Licton Springs, Victory Heights and Pinehurst.

Barbara Maxwell, a member of the Maple Leaf Community Council who has lived in the area since 1975, said the decision to create the Comp Plan arose from a traffic study that was conducted in the late 1980s by the City's Engineering Department on the potential impacts of the County's proposed Northgate Transit Center, which was eventually built just south of Northgate Mall.

The study found that the area already suffered from severe traffic congestion on the roads surrounding the mall, even though the density in the area was only 11 percent of what the zoning code allowed.

What's more, Northgate Mall's owners at the time, DeBartolo Property Management, which bought the shopping center in 1986, announced plans for a massive expansion (which ultimately was dropped).

"It scared everybody," recalls Maxwell. "It was significant enough that the City decided to put an interim cap on development while the Northgate Area Comp Plan was developed."

One of the chief goals of the citizens who participated in the committee to write the Comp Plan was to establish development guidelines that could transform the Northgate area "from an environment dominated by automobiles to one that's more pedestrian friendly," Maxwell said.

A group of business owners and developers submitted to the City a plan of their own, titled "Economically Viable Alternative to the Draft Northgate Area Comprehensive Plan."

The City revised the Northgate Area Comp Plan, which as a compromise incorporated some elements of the alternative plan, which was then signed into law by Seattle's then-mayor, Norm Rice, in 1993.

The Northgate plan would also serve as the template for a city-wide Comp Plan which was added later, as well as Rice's initiative in the mid-'90s to create neighborhood plans for "urban villages" throughout Seattle.

Of those projects, Maxwell considers the Sleep Country store to be the most successful in terms of embodying the goals of the Comp Plan. It has public benches, wide sidewalks and parking in the rear, as opposed to in front of the building. It also has "real windows that let you see into the store," she said, noting that many of the other aforementioned buildings have windows that are either glazed or covered up entirely.

The jury is still out on Northgate North, says Maxwell. She said she personally dislikes the "bunker"-like appearance of the massive concrete building, but said part of the problem was that much of the shopping center had been vacant since its opening in October 2000, with the notable exception of the Target and Best Buy stores.

Now that Northgate North developer Douglas Howe has announced that the building is now fully leased, "maybe it will realize a little more of its potential" when the new stores open.