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>Redeveloping Magnolia’s Fort Lawton was first floated in 2005 and the possibility remained a tension point in the community for over a decade as the Seattle Ci

>Redeveloping Magnolia’s Fort Lawton was first floated in 2005 and the possibility remained a tension point in the community for over a decade as the Seattle City Council voted unanimously to move forward on a major affordable housing project at the old Army Reserve Center site earlier this year. I live two blocks from this area. The concern many in the neighborhood have goes something like this. The city is viewed to be deep in the pockets of developers, who cash in on valuable public lands but put no effort towards supporting new or improved infrastructure. So, a new housing project will be built into Magnolia. There are currently only 3 bridges that connect Magnolia to the city. One of those bridges - The Magnolia Bridge - is falling apart and the city says they don't have the funds to repair it. This would lead many to assume it will be demolished at some stage in the near future (hopefully they aren't waiting for tragedy to strike first). Even without the new housing project, squeezing the population from 3 bridges down to two would be a nightmare. Add hundreds of families into an already crowded peninsula and the lack of that 3rd bridge is hard to fathom. Not to mention Magnolia was bypassed for easy access to the future light rail, too (which we also pay for). So yes, build more housing even if that means Discovery Park, one of the crown jewels of Seattle, will get filled with more humanity. But at least invest in the infrastructure and schools in a more balanced way to support all of those new folks and the ones who live here. You can probably imagine why tempers are rising.

GoodJokes 7y ago
More humanity in parks is a good thing. Parks are for people. Sorry, you can’t keep it for yourself. I agree with other commenters. This masked NIMBYism or you have been hoodwinked by the real NIMBYs. Same difference at this point.
Analemma_ 7y ago
This is NIMBYism trying to conceal itself with faux-progressivism ("but big developers! infrastructure!"). The more requirements you tack on to any kind of housing development, the more expensive it becomes to build housing, and so projects on the margin get killed and rents go ever-higher. That's not acceptable. If Magnolia needs new infrastructure, that should be handled by the city government, and funding for it should come from city-wide property taxes or municipal bonds. Tying infrastructure funding to individual housing projects is silly, and if I'm being cynically honest, I have a feeling it's a fig leaf to mask that the real goal is to just kill the project entirely.
- bcrosby95 7y ago
  One of the reasons why suburbs are so attractive is because other taxpayers subsidize their existence. New developments shouldn't get the same free ride regardless of density. Ideally what should happen is the city should plan the infrastructure, and the development should be forced to pay in their percentage of estimated load capacity into the building of it. But I don't know how realistic that is or isn't. Maybe it's more feasible to have a temporary special tax assessment on the property to help pay for their share of it.
  - journalctl 7y ago
    I mean, it’s realistic enough considering we used to build infrastructure and buildings. Only relatively recently did this become an issue.
    - lotsofpulp 7y ago
      Is it possible that a larger portion of government expenses goes towards debt service such as debt for infrastructure built years ago and pension payments? This would leave fewer resources to invest in the future.
      - sharkmerry 7y ago
        I think thats a big part of it. Strong Towns blog aruges that suburbs are a growth ponzi scheme. https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2011/6/16/the-growth-ponzi-scheme-part-4.html https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2011/6/16/the-growth-pon... From part 4: talking about the 70s when infrastructure maintanence and replacement bills started coming due "The critical insight today is to understand how we reacted to the end of the first life cycle of suburban development, when those maintenance costs started to come due and cut into our growth-generated wealth. This time there was no spatial shift as seen in the other large, economic corrections. Instead, we made a choice to double down on the suburban experiment by taking on debt. We used debt to drive additional growth and sustain the unsustainable development pattern for a while longer. A lot of this debt was public debt, but we facilitated mechanisms for increases in private debt as well (for example, Fannie and Freddie early on and then subprime mortgages and securitization later). Here is a graph showing our public and private debt levels since the beginning of the suburban experiment. I have noted roughly the first and second life cycles of those initial investments."
pukxxer 7y ago
I am now homeless because of this development. I moved to the seattle area to be closer to my family (who all moved out here from the east coast). Making it easier for developers to do this sort of thing only adds to the problem. I've been homeless in seattle for 8 months now and have been working full time in the industry I went to school for. I sincerely regret coming to this part of the country. Never thought I would see gentrification as bad as it is here.
- darksaints 7y ago
  > I am now homeless because of this development. No, you aren't.
  - vkou 7y ago
    You are right. The reality is that the parent poster is homeless because of people like us, who moved to Seattle, to work for 5x the prevailing wage, and have pulled up the cost of housing across the board.
    - Analemma_ 7y ago
      No, that's still wrong. There is nothing ethically problematic about "accepting a job", and it's entirely possible to have a hot job market but not leave people homeless. The parent poster is homeless because Seattle isn't building enough housing to accommodate all the new residents, and that is what drives rents up. That, in turn, is driven by NIMBY opposition and bad policy.
      - techsupporter 7y ago
        I think both of you are right. The Venn diagram of "people who moved to Seattle to take a job paying 5x the prevailing wage" and "people who think Seattle was perfect and should never change from the state it was in the day after they arrived" seems, in my experience, to be almost completely overlapping. The voice of "build absolutely nothing anywhere near anybody" often originates from locals but is amplified by the people who newly-arrived and who can afford a $900,000 single-family residence in a "bucolic neighborhood" and now live in mortal terror that four-floors-and-corner-stores will be built nearby. And then they have kids so everything turns into "that will severely impact my family and my children" so the rest of us are monsters for proposing such a thing. Sorry for being hyperbolic; this raises my hackles a bit.
jetrink 7y ago
Why are developers expected to solve these problems? With more people living there, there will be a larger tax base to support services and infrastructure in the area. The city is the entity that should be building bridges and the residents (present and future) are the ones who should be funding it. By all means, the developers should pay market value for the land, but expecting them to fund bridge maintenance nearby just doesn't make sense to me.
- snowwrestler 7y ago
  This sort of quid pro quo on infrastructure funding is not uncommon and big developers are familiar with it as a concept. The city where I live made re-development of an old railyard contingent on funding a new bridge over the tracks that were still active. It worked out great for everyone; now there's a nice new neighborhood and fewer accidents on the new bridge, which is wider and straighter.
- alistairSH 7y ago
  While I understand your point, those new residents don't generate new taxes instantly. Development itself takes time - residents trickle in. And one years worth of taxes likely isn't enough to fund infrastructure. So, if there's no kick-in from the developer, it could be years or decades before funding is in place. I agree that it's not (directly) the developer's problem to solve. But, to the extend it might make their development faster or possible, they should have an interest in kicking in funds. And communities should rightly ask for that money.
  - jetrink 7y ago
    Isn't this the problem that municipal bonds are supposed to solve?
    - alistairSH 7y ago
      Sure, but that costs more than getting the developer to foot the bill.
lazyasciiart 7y ago
Just think, if Fort Lawton had been developed twenty years ago, perhaps the decisions about where to bother spending transit money would have been made differently. (It's not like anyone had any idea about that bridge having issues twenty years ago either - so it's a bit of a post-hoc explanation for all that NIMBY-ism)
mochris 7y ago
I live in Magnolia (Briarcliff), and the claim that this is about bridge capacity is nonsense. It's about poor people being in a wealthy neighborhood, nothing less and nothing more. It would added 200 households, who would live primarily in townhomes and apartments, into an area that has roughly 9,500 households, the majority of whom live in single family residences. This is not going to make a noticeable change to our commutes. I agree we need to invest in infrastructure for Magnolia, but that problem is orthogonal to this development.
techsupporter 7y ago
I don't mean to come across as argumentative, but as someone who's lived in not-Magnolia-Seattle for a long time, a lot of the points made by that neighborhood come across as intentionally contradictory. Magnolia residents have, for as long as I can remember, pushed for density to be somewhere else on the basis that "Magnolia's infrastructure just can't handle it" or some other variation on the theme of "density is great just not here why don't you try building in Ballard instead." To wit, the Magnolia Community Council, as early as the mid-2000s, was pushing against a western light rail extension (as in, west of 15th) because it would bring more people to the neighborhood. They've also argued against trying to make a Sounder stop in Ballard, just across the Locks, because people could walk there from upper Magnolia (or Metro might make good on its "threat," in some people's words, to run a commute route on Commodore Way) and, thus, increase the number of people living in Magnolia. The arguments have always been that more people can't possibly fit there so, well, how about Ballard?
- WalterBright 7y ago
  Converting parks to more housing isn't really a density issue, it's more like does Seattle want parks or not? Imagine converting Central Park in NYC to more housing.
  - techsupporter 7y ago
    The discussion is not converting Discovery Park to housing. That is a myth pushed by the Magnolia Community Council to raise people's hackles as "the Council is in the pocket of big developers to steal your parkland." The discussion is to convert the old Fort Lawton along Texas Way W to housing (and adding a portion of it as public land to Discovery Park).
- coryrc 7y ago
  Yes, why wouldn't residents of Magnolia want the same violent, unpoliced drug addicts now inhabiting the streets of Ballard and West Seattle in their neighborhood too? In other countries with dense development, those are often nice places, but in Seattle we don't lock up repeated criminals. https://www.myballard.com/2018/11/03/man-stabbed-after-chasing-tire-slashers-in-ballard/ https://www.myballard.com/2018/11/03/man-stabbed-after-chasi... https://q13fox.com/2017/10/13/west-seattle-mom-walking-infant-in-stroller-randomly-attacked-and-stabbed-repeatedly-by-homeless-woman/ https://q13fox.com/2017/10/13/west-seattle-mom-walking-infan... https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/homeless/from-homelessness-to-jail-and-back-king-county-tries-to-halt-cycle/ https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/homeless/from-home...
snowwrestler 7y ago
The idea that a U.S. city in 2019 would just let a bridge fall down and not replace it, is absurd--especially in the context of a new development. "This would lead many to assume" is doing a ton of work here to make this seem like a reasonable concern.
- jpwgarrison 7y ago
  Your optimism is nice, but unfounded. South park (South of Seattle) was left with one bridge for four years: https://www.historylink.org/File/10808 https://www.historylink.org/File/10808 In Michigan, they've resorted to making some bridges single lane after they were rated too old for two cars at a time. https://www.wxyz.com/news/getting-around/heavy-vehicles-using-crumbling-wayne-co-bridges-despite-weight-limits https://www.wxyz.com/news/getting-around/heavy-vehicles-usin... https://www.freep.com/in-depth/news/investigations/2019/05/14/interactive-bridges-michigan-roads/2305976002/ https://www.freep.com/in-depth/news/investigations/2019/05/1...
  - loeg 7y ago
    The north part of West Seattle also basically has the one bridge. And WA did have an I-5 bridge collapse a few years back, although IIRC it was collision-induced structural damage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-5_Skagit_River_Bridge_collapse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-5_Skagit_River_Bridge_collap...
    - illirik 7y ago
      I live in West Seattle, and there are technically two - there's also a drawbridge for pedestrians/cyclists/two lanes of traffic. Both are pretty new, and work well; the Magnolia situation, on the other hand, is a lot tougher. The residents of Magnolia are also known to really fear additional connectivity (especially public transit) in part due to an unfounded fear of crime. https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2018/07/02/28583329/magnolia-is-seattles-crime-infested-ghetto https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2018/07/02/28583329/magnoli... (title sarcastic)
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
stopnamingnuts 7y ago
I would add that overreach is a thing and it alienates many of us who are not fundamentally against greater density. Perfect example: the developer is planning a seven story structure to replace the current Albertsons property across from the pool. That's seven stories from the alley at the back of the inclined lot which means more like eight or nine from the sidewalk. And it will occupy the entire space, shoe-horning itself up against the relatively affordable three story apartment buildings on either side. At the first public meeting when asked why they were going so big their exact words were "because we can". So, yeah: even reasonable, progressive people get bent out of shape.
- JackFr 7y ago
  At the grocery store I pay for 8 apples. "Why are you taking 8 apples?" "Because I can." I can see why people would get bent out of shape.
- ikiris 7y ago
  why do you think this is a problem?
Gibbon1 7y ago
That's my point developers have absolutely no interest in chipping in to improve transportation infrastructure to support their developments. They are trying to skate by pirating off the already existing ones. Worse it sounds like in Seattle they're trying appropriate precious public space as well.
- Mountain_Skies 7y ago
  Does Seattle not have TIF bonds? The primary purpose of them is to pay for infrastructure upgrades needed for new development and then use the rise in property tax revenues on the new development to pay off the bonds.
  - ikiris 7y ago
    If only there were some way for people to band together to pay for infrastructure which helps all of them
killface 7y ago
Exactly. Magnolia provides a significant source of property tax revenue, yet is constantly ignored when it comes to infrastructure upgrades. It almost makes me want to move out.

GoodJokes 7y ago

More humanity in parks is a good thing. Parks are for people. Sorry, you can’t keep it for yourself. I agree with other commenters. This masked NIMBYism or you have been hoodwinked by the real NIMBYs. Same difference at this point.

Analemma_ 7y ago

This is NIMBYism trying to conceal itself with faux-progressivism ("but big developers! infrastructure!"). The more requirements you tack on to any kind of housing development, the more expensive it becomes to build housing, and so projects on the margin get killed and rents go ever-higher. That's not acceptable. If Magnolia needs new infrastructure, that should be handled by the city government, and funding for it should come from city-wide property taxes or municipal bonds. Tying infrastructure funding to individual housing projects is silly, and if I'm being cynically honest, I have a feeling it's a fig leaf to mask that the real goal is to just kill the project entirely.

bcrosby95 7y ago
One of the reasons why suburbs are so attractive is because other taxpayers subsidize their existence. New developments shouldn't get the same free ride regardless of density. Ideally what should happen is the city should plan the infrastructure, and the development should be forced to pay in their percentage of estimated load capacity into the building of it. But I don't know how realistic that is or isn't. Maybe it's more feasible to have a temporary special tax assessment on the property to help pay for their share of it.
- journalctl 7y ago
  I mean, it’s realistic enough considering we used to build infrastructure and buildings. Only relatively recently did this become an issue.
  - lotsofpulp 7y ago
    Is it possible that a larger portion of government expenses goes towards debt service such as debt for infrastructure built years ago and pension payments? This would leave fewer resources to invest in the future.
    - sharkmerry 7y ago
      I think thats a big part of it. Strong Towns blog aruges that suburbs are a growth ponzi scheme. https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2011/6/16/the-growth-ponzi-scheme-part-4.html https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2011/6/16/the-growth-pon... From part 4: talking about the 70s when infrastructure maintanence and replacement bills started coming due "The critical insight today is to understand how we reacted to the end of the first life cycle of suburban development, when those maintenance costs started to come due and cut into our growth-generated wealth. This time there was no spatial shift as seen in the other large, economic corrections. Instead, we made a choice to double down on the suburban experiment by taking on debt. We used debt to drive additional growth and sustain the unsustainable development pattern for a while longer. A lot of this debt was public debt, but we facilitated mechanisms for increases in private debt as well (for example, Fannie and Freddie early on and then subprime mortgages and securitization later). Here is a graph showing our public and private debt levels since the beginning of the suburban experiment. I have noted roughly the first and second life cycles of those initial investments."

pukxxer 7y ago

I am now homeless because of this development. I moved to the seattle area to be closer to my family (who all moved out here from the east coast). Making it easier for developers to do this sort of thing only adds to the problem. I've been homeless in seattle for 8 months now and have been working full time in the industry I went to school for. I sincerely regret coming to this part of the country. Never thought I would see gentrification as bad as it is here.

darksaints 7y ago
> I am now homeless because of this development. No, you aren't.
- vkou 7y ago
  You are right. The reality is that the parent poster is homeless because of people like us, who moved to Seattle, to work for 5x the prevailing wage, and have pulled up the cost of housing across the board.
  - Analemma_ 7y ago
    No, that's still wrong. There is nothing ethically problematic about "accepting a job", and it's entirely possible to have a hot job market but not leave people homeless. The parent poster is homeless because Seattle isn't building enough housing to accommodate all the new residents, and that is what drives rents up. That, in turn, is driven by NIMBY opposition and bad policy.
    - techsupporter 7y ago
      I think both of you are right. The Venn diagram of "people who moved to Seattle to take a job paying 5x the prevailing wage" and "people who think Seattle was perfect and should never change from the state it was in the day after they arrived" seems, in my experience, to be almost completely overlapping. The voice of "build absolutely nothing anywhere near anybody" often originates from locals but is amplified by the people who newly-arrived and who can afford a $900,000 single-family residence in a "bucolic neighborhood" and now live in mortal terror that four-floors-and-corner-stores will be built nearby. And then they have kids so everything turns into "that will severely impact my family and my children" so the rest of us are monsters for proposing such a thing. Sorry for being hyperbolic; this raises my hackles a bit.

jetrink 7y ago

Why are developers expected to solve these problems? With more people living there, there will be a larger tax base to support services and infrastructure in the area. The city is the entity that should be building bridges and the residents (present and future) are the ones who should be funding it. By all means, the developers should pay market value for the land, but expecting them to fund bridge maintenance nearby just doesn't make sense to me.

snowwrestler 7y ago
This sort of quid pro quo on infrastructure funding is not uncommon and big developers are familiar with it as a concept. The city where I live made re-development of an old railyard contingent on funding a new bridge over the tracks that were still active. It worked out great for everyone; now there's a nice new neighborhood and fewer accidents on the new bridge, which is wider and straighter.
alistairSH 7y ago
While I understand your point, those new residents don't generate new taxes instantly. Development itself takes time - residents trickle in. And one years worth of taxes likely isn't enough to fund infrastructure. So, if there's no kick-in from the developer, it could be years or decades before funding is in place. I agree that it's not (directly) the developer's problem to solve. But, to the extend it might make their development faster or possible, they should have an interest in kicking in funds. And communities should rightly ask for that money.
- jetrink 7y ago
  Isn't this the problem that municipal bonds are supposed to solve?
  - alistairSH 7y ago
    Sure, but that costs more than getting the developer to foot the bill.

lazyasciiart 7y ago

Just think, if Fort Lawton had been developed twenty years ago, perhaps the decisions about where to bother spending transit money would have been made differently. (It's not like anyone had any idea about that bridge having issues twenty years ago either - so it's a bit of a post-hoc explanation for all that NIMBY-ism)

mochris 7y ago

I live in Magnolia (Briarcliff), and the claim that this is about bridge capacity is nonsense. It's about poor people being in a wealthy neighborhood, nothing less and nothing more. It would added 200 households, who would live primarily in townhomes and apartments, into an area that has roughly 9,500 households, the majority of whom live in single family residences. This is not going to make a noticeable change to our commutes. I agree we need to invest in infrastructure for Magnolia, but that problem is orthogonal to this development.

techsupporter 7y ago

I don't mean to come across as argumentative, but as someone who's lived in not-Magnolia-Seattle for a long time, a lot of the points made by that neighborhood come across as intentionally contradictory. Magnolia residents have, for as long as I can remember, pushed for density to be somewhere else on the basis that "Magnolia's infrastructure just can't handle it" or some other variation on the theme of "density is great just not here why don't you try building in Ballard instead." To wit, the Magnolia Community Council, as early as the mid-2000s, was pushing against a western light rail extension (as in, west of 15th) because it would bring more people to the neighborhood. They've also argued against trying to make a Sounder stop in Ballard, just across the Locks, because people could walk there from upper Magnolia (or Metro might make good on its "threat," in some people's words, to run a commute route on Commodore Way) and, thus, increase the number of people living in Magnolia. The arguments have always been that more people can't possibly fit there so, well, how about Ballard?

WalterBright 7y ago
Converting parks to more housing isn't really a density issue, it's more like does Seattle want parks or not? Imagine converting Central Park in NYC to more housing.
- techsupporter 7y ago
  The discussion is not converting Discovery Park to housing. That is a myth pushed by the Magnolia Community Council to raise people's hackles as "the Council is in the pocket of big developers to steal your parkland." The discussion is to convert the old Fort Lawton along Texas Way W to housing (and adding a portion of it as public land to Discovery Park).
coryrc 7y ago
Yes, why wouldn't residents of Magnolia want the same violent, unpoliced drug addicts now inhabiting the streets of Ballard and West Seattle in their neighborhood too? In other countries with dense development, those are often nice places, but in Seattle we don't lock up repeated criminals. https://www.myballard.com/2018/11/03/man-stabbed-after-chasing-tire-slashers-in-ballard/ https://www.myballard.com/2018/11/03/man-stabbed-after-chasi... https://q13fox.com/2017/10/13/west-seattle-mom-walking-infant-in-stroller-randomly-attacked-and-stabbed-repeatedly-by-homeless-woman/ https://q13fox.com/2017/10/13/west-seattle-mom-walking-infan... https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/homeless/from-homelessness-to-jail-and-back-king-county-tries-to-halt-cycle/ https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/homeless/from-home...

snowwrestler 7y ago

The idea that a U.S. city in 2019 would just let a bridge fall down and not replace it, is absurd--especially in the context of a new development. "This would lead many to assume" is doing a ton of work here to make this seem like a reasonable concern.

jpwgarrison 7y ago
Your optimism is nice, but unfounded. South park (South of Seattle) was left with one bridge for four years: https://www.historylink.org/File/10808 https://www.historylink.org/File/10808 In Michigan, they've resorted to making some bridges single lane after they were rated too old for two cars at a time. https://www.wxyz.com/news/getting-around/heavy-vehicles-using-crumbling-wayne-co-bridges-despite-weight-limits https://www.wxyz.com/news/getting-around/heavy-vehicles-usin... https://www.freep.com/in-depth/news/investigations/2019/05/14/interactive-bridges-michigan-roads/2305976002/ https://www.freep.com/in-depth/news/investigations/2019/05/1...
- loeg 7y ago
  The north part of West Seattle also basically has the one bridge. And WA did have an I-5 bridge collapse a few years back, although IIRC it was collision-induced structural damage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-5_Skagit_River_Bridge_collapse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-5_Skagit_River_Bridge_collap...
  - illirik 7y ago
    I live in West Seattle, and there are technically two - there's also a drawbridge for pedestrians/cyclists/two lanes of traffic. Both are pretty new, and work well; the Magnolia situation, on the other hand, is a lot tougher. The residents of Magnolia are also known to really fear additional connectivity (especially public transit) in part due to an unfounded fear of crime. https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2018/07/02/28583329/magnolia-is-seattles-crime-infested-ghetto https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2018/07/02/28583329/magnoli... (title sarcastic)
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

stopnamingnuts 7y ago

I would add that overreach is a thing and it alienates many of us who are not fundamentally against greater density. Perfect example: the developer is planning a seven story structure to replace the current Albertsons property across from the pool. That's seven stories from the alley at the back of the inclined lot which means more like eight or nine from the sidewalk. And it will occupy the entire space, shoe-horning itself up against the relatively affordable three story apartment buildings on either side. At the first public meeting when asked why they were going so big their exact words were "because we can". So, yeah: even reasonable, progressive people get bent out of shape.

JackFr 7y ago
At the grocery store I pay for 8 apples. "Why are you taking 8 apples?" "Because I can." I can see why people would get bent out of shape.
ikiris 7y ago
why do you think this is a problem?

Gibbon1 7y ago

That's my point developers have absolutely no interest in chipping in to improve transportation infrastructure to support their developments. They are trying to skate by pirating off the already existing ones. Worse it sounds like in Seattle they're trying appropriate precious public space as well.

Mountain_Skies 7y ago
Does Seattle not have TIF bonds? The primary purpose of them is to pay for infrastructure upgrades needed for new development and then use the rise in property tax revenues on the new development to pay off the bonds.
- ikiris 7y ago
  If only there were some way for people to band together to pay for infrastructure which helps all of them

killface 7y ago

Exactly. Magnolia provides a significant source of property tax revenue, yet is constantly ignored when it comes to infrastructure upgrades. It almost makes me want to move out.