Comments on Shorter Pike-Pine Feature for the Attention-Deficient

he/she with the most money wins. if its so f-ing important, then people would rally and find enough money to buy the space. obv. the developers want it more. they paid for it. if it truly mattered, and it quite clearly doesn't matter, all those rich and famous people who soiled the cha cha and other so-called institutions, would pitch in to buy the property and keep it a haven for poser coke heads. do you think that will happen?

Call me a cynic, but I seriously wonder if this project will go through. If I'm not mistaken, they have another year (give or take a few months) before the businesses have to be out, and by that time we will have probably realizized that - as usual - we have overbuilt condos, and it won't be worth it to build these.

Granted, it's just delaying the execution for a few years, because real estate always bounces back here, but it will be interesting to see if this thing goes through.

For the record, I'm firmly on Erica's side in this arguement. I was one of of those homos who moved into the neighborhood in the Squid Row days, saw it grow into what it is, and loved living there. Unfortunately, my building, with it's good-sized apartments, swimming pool and REAL balconies, was demolished for a new attrocity with units that are half the size (and no pool).

So I bought a house. But not all people are as fortunate as I was in that situation.

The challenge to The Stranger, then, is to articulate the policy changes that will generate good density without generating bad density.

Do we need more small retail spaces? Should we downzone some commercial blocks to stay low-rise so they can have loud bars without whiny neighbors while upzoning more residential areas?

I remember well what Pike-Pine was like before it was trendy. I remember how nifty it was when hipster businesses started showing up. But I thought the funniest part of your article was when you followed the description of how that change occurred, up to 1995, and then followed it with the "death knell", the QFC, also in 1995. Essentially, the equilibrium of hipsterness was momentary, and it started to decline even before it had finished getting completely groovy.

This sequence of events is not unique to Pike/Pine; it has been repeated hundreds of times across the country. It's one of the ways cities work. And the people to "blame" for this tragedy of life are the hipsters, not the developers. The hipsters made the real estate expensive.

If you want to worry about something that can actually be controlled, worry about the new proposal from these very same mixed-use developers to unmix: they've petitioned the city to ditch the rules that require street-level retail. They claim that this results in too many empty storefronts, which is like the phenomenon you noted, the boredom of salon / architect / real estate "shops".

Of course, there is another explanation for the underutilized space: the rents are too friggin' high. The city should mandate a retail square-foot rental rate in these new developments to be LOWER than the old buildings around them, thus forcing them to take on weirder and more interesting tenants.

Hipsters make real estate expensive?!?

The Weekly has a blog? Who cares?

Seattlest says it best. Weekly, whatever.

Accusing the tone of the article of being a 180 is ridiculous. That said, this same exact thing affected the Olive Way corridor three years ago, and the only thing I remember being mentioned in the Stranger was in Kathleen Wilson's column, where she mentioned that Fallout Records somehow "deserved" to be closed, and that she could honestly find better music at Border's.

Obviously, different writers, different opinions, different times, etc. But don't be surprised if you get more of the "Ah, so NOW you're preparing the tombstone" comments when Capitol Hill has been going through this same exact thing for three years.

The Stranger and Pike/Pine just happen to be in the south-end of the grand scheme while in the midst of another Seattle mecca, now.

As for the snotty comments... well, when you use the phrase "The DEATH of Pike/Pine", that invites that kind of commentary, right? Does that mean that Olive Way "died" three years ago?

If so, say so.

Why doesn't someone replace the parking garage at Harvard & Pine (across from Bill's & Linda's) with a more attractive & useful development (with underground parking)?

Yes, hipsters make real estate expensive. More precisely, artists make real estate expensive. Artists have always sought out cheap places to live and turned them into ghettoes of fabulousness that then attract big, big dollars, because people with money want to live in vibrant places. Ever heard of Greenwich Village? This process is a hundred years old in America. In the Seattle version, the proximate sign that this is happening is hep coffeebars.

At a minimum, developers should be required to offer small retail spaces. Smaller retail space == small indie businesses. Large retail space == dry cleaners.

It’s all about the land use code. If you want to keep stuff that’s there, and the code allows for greater use, you must get it downzoned. That’s a hard leap for philosophical supporters of density to make.

Opponents of density have it easier: they only need to oppose upzones to keep things the same.

The detractors seem to think DENSITY=EXPENSIVE... as in "density requires new construction and new construction is expensive. Those costs have to be passed on to consumers. That is just how it is always done.". Merited or not, if that is the equation, then those who hold that view also hold the view that those who can't (or, what they must feel to be an almost traitorous betrayal of the American dream of home ownership) WON'T pay expensive costs do not have a place in a dense city.

Those folks never offer alternatives, but that is the fault of holding a conservative ideology. For them, a dense society is a society where everyone pays... not what they can afford, mind you, but they pay what everyone else is paying. The very idea that other people should "get away with" not paying what they are paying, is the very worst thing imaginable.

NEW density IS always expensive. Tired old buildings are cheap; new buildings are expensive, even if they're crappy.

It's really a double-edged sword, FNARF. Certainly, artists & hipsters migrating into depressed or low-rent neighborhoods DO act as a revitalizing catalyst, and yes it's been going on for a long time.

However, blaming them, I think is a bit strong in this context, since they're not directly responsible for their own displacement or for the increase in real-estate values that follow in their wake, which is really controlled by the developers who simply come along after the fact and take advantage of the ambience these artists and hipsters create, in order to use it as a lure or selling-point to the upwardly mobile, while at the same time effectively driving out the same elements responsible for creating said ambience in the first place.

The inevitable result is that the developers repackage the neighborhood by instilling an ersatz "artistic" ambience in the form of upscale watering holes and restaurants, chain clothing and furnishing stores, and boutique grocers, none of which of course have any relation to the original ambience that drew residents to the neighborhood in the first place.

But, of course, most of them wouldn't recognize artistic ambience outside of a Williams Sonoma catalogue anyway, so it's not like they're really going to miss the little corner gallery that only sold local works, or the tiny tavern where some rock star from their high school years once hung out before committing suicide or whatever.

Meanwhile, the real artists move on to another low-rent, under developed neighborhood and the process starts all over again.

Comte, I didn't BLAME the artists. But it is the artists who attract the hipsters, and the hipsters who raise the values. These evil developers wouldn't be coming in with their expensive condos if there wasn't a profit in it. The developers weren't there 20 years ago. The hipsters brought them.

It is a cycle, and it does go on. This is how cities work. If there are no more cheap, cruddy neighborhoods left in a city, the action will go elsewhere.

The problem is that the hipster paradigm is ripe for a change. Furniture and design have embraced retro-modernism, but the ideal for living spaces is still a pre-modern one of industrial lofts and so forth. Eventually the artists are going to figure out that that early-twentieth-century esthetic isn't available any more, and will move on to something as recent as lofts were in the sixties: strip malls, old supermarkets, dingbat apartments, that sort of thing.

"As for the snotty comments... well, when you use the phrase "The DEATH of Pike/Pine", that invites that kind of commentary, right? Does that mean that Olive Way "died" three years ago?"

Exactly.

Man o man, you people need a gym membership or something. Always trying to fan these fires that don't exist. Get a life. You'll feel better

Okay, I guess your use of the word @4, while admittedly done in a quote/unquote context, did sort of make it sound that way.

And truly, the developers come in wherever, whenever, as you say, the conditions for profit are right, hipster presense or not.

And in this particular neighborhood, I think it's pretty clear the developers have been there for quite some time. The Centenial, for example, where I lived from '87 - '91 on the NE corner of Olive & Belmont was one of the hotel-cum-apartment buildings built during the '62 World's Fair (it's doppleganger on the SE corner was recently torn down for - another condo), while many of the surrounding apartment buildings are even older. The Parc condos on Summit, between Pine & Olive went up in two phases, starting around 1989; The Portofino, on the SW corner of Pine & Summit went up shortly thereafter, and there's been almost continuous development in the neighborhood since then.

So, really, this is all just another phase in a long, ongoing pattern of densification for this area, that really cannot completely attributed to hipsters being there. The neighborhood's proximity to downtown, on major east-west arterials, close to major retail centers and the Broadway shopping corridor would have made this area a no-brainer for development in any case.

Industrial lofts, so long as they remain abundant, will never go out of style for conversion into artists' residences, not because of their "retro-chic", but for the very practical reason that the high ceilings, large window templates, and expansive floorplans are ideal for providing the open space and natural lighting many artists require for executing their work. Granted, if the supply becomes scarce (or more accurately if the supply of super-cheap lofts becomes scarce), artists will be forced by necessity to find alternative spaces, but even the ones you suggest are being converted for multi-unit housing just as quickly as old industrial spaces, so it's going to become even more of a challenge to find ideal, inexpensive artists' housing.

Not that they won't of course; artists are fairly resourceful in that regard. But, they may have to go a little further out from the core to find the kinds of spaces they need.

Well, that's what I meant: out from the core. An old barrel-roof Safeway out in the sticks somewhere has all the natural light you could possibly want, with those floor-to-ceiling windows in front. But that doesn't match the paradigm as it has decended from Parisian garrets to Soho lofts. Priced a Soho loft lately?

The problem is, hipsters, who are not actually artists or creative, but wish to emulate those who are, have requirements that far-out areas can't meet -- like cool bars and coffeehouses that don't have boring old farts cluttering up all the stools. I mean, you're never going to find a Bimbo's in the cruddier parts of Auburn (to Auburn's credit). Artists don't care, but hipsters do; that's why artists lead the way. When the hipsters follow, they bring the coffeehouses with them, and the cycle starts again.

But if you're going to cry for the hipster joints, spare a tear or two for the places they replaced in their turn. Remember, none of these beloved joints were there 25 years ago. Did anyone here besides me mourn for Shamek's button shop, driven out by hipsterism after 100 years?

But, of course it doesn't HAVE to be this way. NYC, which people keep touting as an example of long-term densification has plenty of OLD businesses mixed in with the housing development, which IS what keeps the neighborhoods vibrant, despite the influx of new residents.

Of course the developments surrounding these businesses are nearly as old themselves, so maybe that's what it takes: condos built to last, so that the retail anchors can have a chance to survive for just as long.

Erica, NIMBYism is simply people saying, "I don't want my neighborhood to change"

You can dress up your opposition all you want, but at the end of the day you are still saying, "not in my backyard"

All NIMBY's have some good points. You are no different or no more noble.

Comte: exactly. The buildings have to stick around long enough to become OLD buildings. That's the only thing "wrong" with these new ones; they're new. They're expensive, as are all new buildings. The retail spaces are poorly designed. Give 'em fifty years, when no one will give a shit what the retail level was built for, and they'll be able to make them fit.

Yeah, Erica, it really sounds like your rationalizing your position...that block on Pine isn't as bad as a parking lot, of course, but there is no way you can convince me that a dense, urban city should have a row of single-story storefronts in its very core. I've felt that way ever since I moved here. There should be hundreds of folks living on that street, above those storefronts, and that will add tremendously to the street life and the urban feel of the neighborhood. And how can anything that gets rid of Man Ray be all bad? That has got to be one of the worst gay bars I've ever set foot in.

Well, they're new AND not terribly well built by most standards. The real question is whether any of them will last long enough to become "old".

Those people interviewed in Erica's story who are complaining about the proposed new development -- how its massive and out of scale with the neighborhood, etc. -- they remind me exactly of the people who were freaking out over the re-zoning of Broadway that allowed for taller buildings. And wasn't the Stranger in favor of that re-zone?

I second the comment of Steve @ 3. This whole pro vs anti density debate gets oversimplified. Just look at the comment above @ 24 completely ignoring both the article and Erica's reiteration of the main points of the article in this post.

Since the stranger does argue more on the pro-density side they need to be clear about the kinds of regulations they think will make density work - and they need to articulate what won't work.

How do you protect the well utilized spaces while expediting the redevelopment of parking lots and failing/abandoned buildings? How do you decide, and who decides what deserves protection from development and what doesn't? Studying the regulations in a city like New York may be good starting point. Investigating these kinds of questions would be a lot more interesting than the usual "density is great" and "my favorite neighborhood is being killed" pieces. I hate articles that bemoan changes that are made out to seem inevitable.