Seattle Sun Newspaper - Vol. 8, Issue 2, February 2004

Copyright 2004 Seattle Sun. Please feel free to use the article below in your research. Be sure to cite the Seattle Sun as your source.

Ballard's busting from building boom

By JAMES BUSH

In this rapidly growing urban neighborhood, suburban-style supermarkets are giving way to six-story condo towers and a space-age mass transit system in the works. The biggest point of argument in the planning process for the new central park is over how large a skateboard area to include.

Surprise! It's Ballard.

Exhibit A for making the case that this isn't your father's Ballard anymore came the night of Jan. 12, as about 30 people crowded into a tiny meeting room at the Ballard Community Center and raised barely a peep over plans to demolish the QFC supermarket on 24th Avenue NW and replace it with a new mixed-use building with a new, 45,525-square-foot QFC store on the ground level and 230 apartments above.

Exhibit B came the following night as about 140 people viewed a trio of possible concept plans for the Ballard Civic Center Park, two of which included skateboard park elements. The two projects share the same superblock in the middle of the Ballard commercial area, bordered by NW 57th and 58th streets and 22nd and 24th avenues NW.

Of course, it's not like no one saw this coming. Ballard's neighborhood plan envisioned high-density, large-scale development in this core area. At the QFC site meeting, scheduled as the first step in the design review process for the new building proposed by Seattle-based housing developer Security Properties, City planner Scott Kemp blandly deflected the issue of increased traffic from the new building. "It's an area that's slated for more density, more traffic," he said.

That's a hard point to dispute. Davidya Kasperzyk, an architect who served as consultant on both the neighborhood plan and the Central Ballard overlay, notes that Central Ballard has long been zoned to accommodate far more dense development.

The planning process "wasn't aimed at pushing density, it was kind of acknowledging that the zoning is already there," Kasperzyk said.

Most parcels in the Ballard core are zoned for commercial structures (which can cover the entire lot) up to 65 feet in height. Some parcels along Market Street have 85-foot height limits.

Making projects such as the QFC site project and the park work together may take some doing. The park property currently contains a concrete skateboard facility, the Ballard Bowl, which is built at the southwest corner of the lot. Preliminary designs for the QFC site project would place a row of townhouses on that building's east facade, right up against the skateboard park.

While there's still plenty of support for keeping the bowl as is, one school of thought is that it could be placed slightly below grade to muffle sound and provide park visitors with a better view of the skaters. However, as this would require rebuilding the bowl, the City could opt to move it to a different site.

Another possibility is that a less challenging "street skating" course could be created in place of the relocated bowl, in order to encourage use of the park by younger skaters.

One thing which seems to be missing from the current park plans is the fountain or other significant water feature proposed in the neighborhood plan. Parks planners, leery of the high cost of maintaining a fountain, included a water feature in just one of their three concept drawings. It would take the form of a faux creek bed, which could store rain water (sounds more like a "mud feature").

Kasperzyk argues that the park would work better with a legitimate water feature or fountain, and says he thinks that a community group or groups might agree to underwrite ongoing maintenance. Planners will debut their final park design at a March 9 public meeting at 7 p.m. at the Ballard Segway Building (the former Safeway store at 5701 22nd Ave. NW).

The park is intended to someday be a green oasis is the middle of a densely-developed urban neighborhood. Participants in the QFC site design review meeting got a glimpse of the future in one drawing presented by architect Mark Simpson. It includes the outlines of large mixed-use structures that might potentially be built along the south side of NW 57th Street, a stretch now largely dominated by low-rise buildings and surface parking lots.

The Ballard neighborhood plan envisioned the addition of some 1,520 residential units during the 20-year period from 1995 to 2015. By Jan. 1, 2003, the City's Department of Planning and Development reported that just 407 units had been built (or 27 percent of the total), but additional projects totaling 477 units had received permits. Add those together and that's 58 percent of the expected 20-year growth after eight years. Not included in these figures are projects that are still in the design review and permit processes, including the QFC site project and a 180-unit structure slated for the former Key Bank site on Market Street.

And there's plenty more to come. Barry Hawley, whose Hawley Realty has sold properties in northwest Seattle for the past 42 years, gave a presentation on coming development at October's Ballard District Council meeting. In it, he estimated that as many as 1,300 residential units could be built in and around downtown Ballard over the next five years, in projects both large and small.

Two high-end condo complexes built just west of 15th Avenue NW by Vancouver, British Columbia-based developer Continental-Bentall LLC are already enjoying great success.

The 162-unit Ballard Condominiums were completed in August 2001 and completely sold by the following April. The Web site for the 174-unit Ballard Place condominiums, constructed on an adjacent site, lists just 31 available units (an 82 percent sales rate). This, despite relatively high prices, ranging from $135,900 for a 515-square foot studio to $379,900 for a two bedroom/two bathroom unit with a den.

With most of the new housing serving people at higher income levels, a group of Ballard activists recently met with Rick Hooper of the City's Department of Housing to discuss the need for low-income units, said Jennifer Macuiba, vice president of the Ballard District Council. "We're meeting to find out what we can do to promote affordable housing in Ballard," she said.

Has this new development already changed Ballard? And what will happen after the monorail line linking the neighborhood with Downtown and West Seattle opens in late 2007?

Hawley thinks the housing-dominated new development has already had an effect. "You pretty much see it on Market Street right now," he said. "Who are the main tenants? They're pretty much restaurants or coffee shops, yoga, consignment shops. It's not the Ballard I grew up in."

The ongoing switch from destination stores to businesses aimed at serving the neighborhood will probably continue when the monorail starts running, enabling Ballardites easy access to downtown shopping, Hawley said. "I think it will help make Ballard more of a bedroom community."