Just the sort of people who could keep all those shops open.

There is discussion of redevelopment and zoning changes along Northgate Way. But that is separate from station area planning.

The proposed Northgate light-rail station would be located adjacent to the current Northgate Park and Ride between NE 103rd and NE 100th.

Ironic that a private land baron holds the nascent city ransom to his layers of wrested profit.....

Oh but I do mourn the loss of the town... I'm sorry, but I do... The crisp drunken mornings swilling home through those quiet sleeping neighborhood streets... crashingly tip-toeing past not 12-story generic apartments but small urban Craftsman homes, generationally snuggled and comfortable on their lots like mushrooms grown to size in basement trays.... Goodbye measured, neighbor-knowing life -- Hello SF North.

It is intevitable.

Repeat after me: you can suffer through five sets of construction noise and impacts as we upzone from 1-3 to 4-6 to 6-10 to 10-20 to 20-40 to 40-100 ...

Or you can just do it once and GET IT OVER.

I choose doing it ONCE.

Density is why cities rule. Lower emissions, lower energy use, more efficient.

These toadies have sold the soul of the neighborhoods and will turn N. Seattle into yet another blighted inner city.

That's what the design review process is for. What are your reasonable questions? All of the concerns I've seen above have nothing to do with Sisley, and have everything to do with neighbors not wanting to live in an city with, you know, buildings.

No wonder Bellevue Ave supports them.

Another benefit of more multifamilies is that they would give seniors* places to live in their own neighborhoods and frees up more precious single family craftsman homes.

*I know its against Stranger policy to mention or care about old people, its all about the hip young professionals.

Um, I don't think ANYONE in Roosevelt is talking about saving the existing houses - and the developers threat to leave em all boarded up if they don't get their upzone to 12-stories is patently obviously pure bullshit.

In case you hadn't noticed, lots and lots of new projects have been built under the existing 45' and 65' height limits in Roosevelt and other similar neighborhood commercial districts such as Eastlake and the University District, so there's money to be made (and even more so in the case of Sisley, who has owned his properties free and clear for decades and only improves them when DPD hits him with a Notice of Violation because they're falling apart to a degree that even I - as big a fan of older buildings as you'll likely find - think is pretty clearly intolerable).

The average (or is it median?) Seattle rent is $1,100 for a 1 bedroom. That's considered affordable for one person making $44,000 per year.

That woman isn't being classist so much as she's being an ignorant NIMBY bitch.

Furthermore, Sisley and his partners cannot afford to try to construct some shit-hole apartments. Given construction and financing costs (etc etc) there's no way they'll be renting 1 bedrooms for less than $1,000. (And if light rail comes, $1,000 will be the base rent for the studios...)

Further!-furthermore, it's not poor people in apartments that result in neighborhood blight. It's shitty apartment management that leads to neighborhood blight. Witness a local example of strong management turning around a real slum: http://www.komonews.com/news/30833544.html

What did it take? Evictions (strong management) and some changes to environmental design (strong manager pestering upper management, and totally awesome!).

people in Washington generally liked their small town lives intact. I'm from California and I aim to change that.

These NIMBY's are just trying to create their own mini monopoly -- they will own "housing near light rail" so of course they want others to have less of THAT.

Ir's called monopoly-rent-seeking conduct. Very classic capitalist economics.

North Seattle Liberals: Thy Face is Greed!

Once again, in this instance, no one, and I do mean NO ONE, is advocating for the preservation of the Sisley properties as-is (as it happens, I know a few residents of a Sisley house in a different area who are quite happy with him as a landlord, mostly because he doesn't raise their rent and leaves them alone, but that's an entirely different story).

@22,

Um, horsepucky. As it happens, I have an antique poster on my wall from 1917 of Belltown indicating that the Denny Regrade was targeted for big Manhattan-style growth even way back then.

That's always been the part of Seattle that was slated for high-rise residential development, but it's still taken close to 90 years for it to occur (though I'll leave it to you to go to the Seattle Displacement Coalition website to see how thoroughly that destroyed a large stock of unsubsidized low-income housing downtown).

And, by the way, even people in the Bay Area (let alone LA and the rest of California) are generally as opposed to the same kind of thoughtless high-rise upscale development for its own sake as I am, and I don't see your tenure there as having worked any miracles on that, so good luck with that here.

When the City adopted the Comprehensive Plan in 1994 (and did its 10-year revision thereof in 2004) they promised up and down that all of the growth proposed and more could be accommodated within the existing zoning. That said, many neighborhoods - including Roosevelt - adopted significant upzones in their neighborhood plans.

The City made a host of promises that it should keep, and developers bought their property with open eyes and the existing zoning restrictions need to live with the choices they made.

Do you by chance live in Maple Leaf?

Towers are not the answer for density everywhere. Towers are appropriate in certain dense areas, but not all. The best urban density for many neighborhood stops would resemble Paris or even Brooklyn, with 4-6 story buildings. To build towers in Sisleyville you would need to widen 65th and 15th to deal with the traffic. Roosevelt has always welcomed density and fought to have the light rail stop at the QFC site instead of by the freeway.

You can be pro-density and not want towers in your neighborhood, Will in Fremont.

Taller buildings might make economic sense in a place with less developable land (e.g. Belltown) and hence no competition for new apartment rentals, but Roosevelt has plenty of developable land and even some active proposals (The former Scarlet Tree site, the site SE of the QFC, etc.).

My conclusion: Sisley is just crazy.