With some fanfare, the Seattle Times announces this afternoon that groundbreaking is imminent for a 17-story, 284-unit apartment building at 3rd & Cedar in Belltown, noteworthy because it's the first new residential construction project downtown in three years. (Igor Keller took the daylight photo for his blog, Hideous Belltown, a couple of days ago. Thanks!)
But the good news, such as it may be, is short-lived. Directly across Third Avenue sits a quarter-block parcel occupied by the Washington Lung Association's one-story headquarters, with several parking spaces in back leased by Zipcar. The property owner would normally be authorized a 125-foot, 13-story buidling, but obtained a waiver from Seattle's Department of Planning and Development for a 240-foot, 25-story building.
The Belltown Housing & Land Use Subcommittee, a respected group of residents that follows these matters, says it will appeal the 3rd & Cedar proposal. Their grounds: that the city's Design Review Board "did not have authority to allow an increase in the height of the building."
This is similar to the sentiment in one of the neighborhood's oldest highrises, the 1996-vintage, 25-story Seattle Heights, where condominium owners are on the warpath. (One slight wrinkle: the chairman of the condo board was an employee of the architecture firm that designed the proposed new building. I should also disclose that I've rented--though not owned--various units in the building for the past ten years.) The Seattle Heights position is that the height limit for the quarter-block site cannot be waived. The building's attorneys, Buck Law Group, pointed out that another underused parcel at 3rd & Vine, currently occupied by a Rite-Aid drugstore, could in theory also receive the same waiver, resulting in a forest of 25-story high rises on a single block. "It is not within the authority of the Design Review Board to recommend waivers on building height," Buck Law Group stated on behalf if its client.
This may turn out to be the first volley in a series of downtown NIMBY battles: not so much "in my back yard" but "in my front window."
Meantime, one bit of apparently good news. The McGuire, the 25-story apartment building that was declared unsafe and evacuated earlier this year, has been spared from demolition. An enigmatic press release said simply that differences between the building's owner and the copntractor who built it had been resolved. The owner had determined it would be cheaper to tear down the building than to fix it, but within six months all outstanding legal issues related to the tower had been resolved.
"We are pleased to have reached a mutually agreeable settlement on all issues," said the builder, McCarthy Companies. Terms of the settlement were not released, and requests for further details from the concerned parties met with silence. The building, however, remains swathed in scaffolding. Most commercial ground-floor tenants were simply evicted, though Fed Ex Office,. at the corner of Second & Wall, never budged. "We have better lawyers, in Houston," the Fed Ex manager said with a smile.
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