The East Design Review Board agreed Wednesday night that the E Madison side of things look mostly solid. It is the part where Madison’s density seeps onto the single family home-lined Dewey Place East that’s the big problem.
In less a vote and more of an admission of the challenges in merging increased density into Madison Valley, the board Wednesday ruled to kick the 75-unit, mixed-use PCC grocery and apartment building destined for site where City People’s stands today back for a third round of early design review.
“You would think something as engineering-like as measuring walls wouldn’t be so elusive,” said one board member summing up the body’s uncertainty with the presentation from developer Velmeir and architects at Meng Strazzara.
The decision is a blow to the project’s timeline with City People’s already planned for an end of the year closure.
Just exactly how high the Dewey-facing concrete walls of the project’s backside would turn out to be became the turning point in the night’s discussion after the Save Madison Valley group’s long session during public comment. Save Madison Valley members made their collective case against the project complete with a dozen or so members lined up to speak, and consultant-produced graphics projected on the Seattle U meeting room’s big screen, a move that put the community group on par with the developers and architects presenting on the night. Consultant Peter Steinbrueck and foodie celebrity neighbor Thierry Rautureau, the Chef in the Hat, were also on hand to lend support.
After a more than two hour meeting and deliberation, the board agreed with the group’s contention that “native vines” — a mix of three types of evergreen, the developers said — wouldn’t be enough to mask what Save Madison Valley group members contended could end up being more than 70-foot high concrete walls facing their homes.
The board also sided with public comment that asked for more to be done to improve the E Madison streetscape while taking a swing at the Velmeir’s positioning of its plans for the streetfront as a “community gathering space.” “Let’s be honest. Call it a vestibule,” one board member said. The board, however, could do less about another major contention from Save Madison Valley and other community members who spoke Wednesday night about the site’s old trees. A revised report from the city’s arborist recategorized the canopy’s trees as “not exceptional,” clearing the way for them to be cleared from the street. But there was much grumbling from the public and the board about the recategorization — turns out, part of being designated an exceptional tree in Seattle includes whether said tree would survive the construction process. The review board said it wouldn’t be resolving that particular Catch-22. Sorting out vehicular access for both stocking the grocery’s shelves and for the grocery’s customers and building residents also needs to be finalized.
Not all of the public comment on the night was against the developer and the project. “This fits our community,” one area resident said. “We welcome you.”
Dianne Casper, one of the longtime owners of City People’s and its unusually large tract of E Madison land, also spoke about the decision to sell and her hope that she and her partners have put the property into the right hands. Recalling her surprise and disappointment when City People’s sold its 15th Ave E home only to see a Walgreens rise on the property, Casper said the company held out for the right partner despite interest from developers of “luxury condos, quite a few pharmacies…”
“This time we are leaving a legacy to be proud of,” she said.
The legacy will now be delayed a few more months. With the decision to call for another review, the design board has presented a challenge to the project developers that could call for some radical revisions to the plans for the large parking lot walls on the backside of the building. To solve the problems around the building’s massing and relation to the single-family homes below, some on the board suggested cutting down on the 150+ car lot levels planned below the mixed-use building and integrating apartments along Dewey.
“The Dewey transition,” architect and board member Curtis Bigelow said, “is not as sensitive as it needs to be.”
I’m generally very pro-density, and hell, I wish this thing was a lot taller honestly, but happy to see this pushed back. Covering the concrete parking lot with vines is kind of a joke. Reducing parking, and integrating street-level apartments along that side of the street would be a lot more inviting.
I agree. The football field sized garage’s great wall is not mitigated by some ivy. Density is good. Building a 2 story cement parking garage facing residences on a residential street, not so good.
I agree — the 45 foot tall green wall is lipstick on a pig. Why not reduce the size of the garage and add more housing? Or do a healthy set-back and preserve more tree canopy?
Once you build a garage it can never be converted to anything else. Live/work/retail space can easily be modified in the future as the market changes.
My big take-away last night is that you simply can’t put a two story parking garage at and above street-level in Seattle, especially in an area served by transit.
If they remove the garage, the same group will come back at the next design review and complain that the building doesn’t have enough parking, and that residents will take over their street parking.
If you look at their website, it’s clear they just don’t want more people moving into the neighborhood. They are just trying to get construction shelved by running out the clock.
Every suburban neighborhood has some group that campaigns against new development.
There is no clock to run out. What a bizarre idea. Also, we already have RPZ parking in Madison Valley. Plenty of residents are used to paying for an RPZ permit to park on the streets we live on. That wont change, with or without this building.
None of that is true, Brendan. Come to any SMV meeting or to EDG3 and see for yourself.
As someone who lives two blocks from the City People’s site, the whole premise of this “save madison valley” campaign infuriates me. What’s going to “save” Madison Valley is overriding this NIMBY obstructionism and getting some proper urban development going in this sleepy little faux-suburb so we can take advantage of our proximity to the urban core. It’s insane to have so much single-family housing blocking up development in the city center. Where do people think newcomers are going to live? They’re going to keep spilling out into remote suburbs and exacerbating sprawl, obviously.
As a start, all SFH zoning within walking distance of a major arterial like Madison or MLK should go away. My entire block of cute little Craftsmans should be torn down and replaced with sensible urban-density multistory rowhousing. We are squandering our land and perpetuating car-dependence by fossilizing these early-20th-century development patterns. “Save Madison Valley” is the problem, not the solution.
Mars,
I couldn’t agree more. I also live in the neighborhood and am so tired of these Save Madison Valley folks. They hide under this veil of caring about the neighborhood when all they care about is what affects them directly. The architect has tried so hard to appease these people, but they refuse to be appeased because they think they’re speaking for the community. If’s making many of us crazy. They feel like a mafia to be honest and they’re saving us from something none of us want to be saved from. We didn’t ask you to save us, so please be quiet and let the project proceed.
You misrepresent their motives. They’re reasonable people who live at various distances from the site. The DRB has been favorably impressed by their thorough and specific analysis of the project’s failure to satisfy the design guidelines. The project is proceeding.
I don’t know if it’s fair to refer to “Save Madison Valley” as a community group. They don’t have a direct lineage to any Madison Valley community organization (like the community council), and they don’t have any kind of democratic or participatory process for establishing their priorities.
We, people who live in Madison Valley, did NOT organize as a community and create a campaign to “save madison valley.” That’s not a common concern that we, people who live in Madison Valley, even remotely agree on.
With SMV, we have a very small group of home owners starting with a goal of blocking the development of this building, and then marketing themselves via a “community group” facade.
I think SMV is almost like an astroturfing organization–SMV is backed by something like a “special interest group.”
There’s definitely a campaign to make SMV’s very specific agenda sound more important to the Madison Valley community than it is. E.g., the vast majority of Madison Valley residents will never visit Dewey St, and so would never see the back side of this building on Madison.
To my knowledge, SMV hasn’t protested any of the other 3-4-story buildings that have gone up, or currently are going up on Madison.
I believe this is because 1) SMV does not exist to serve community needs with regards to development in Madison Valley, and 2) SMV doesn’t care about anything other than the City People’s property because their focus is merely to change the city zoning to benefit the core SMV founders (the small number of homeowners who bought properties close to City People’s, and who either didn’t pay attention to the zoning of that property, or all along have expected that they could force the city to change the zoning to suit their own interests).
The Design Review Board isn’t made up of Dewey homeowners, and the board found big problems with the design’s compliance with design guidelines. It’s a common tactic on the internet to engage in ad hominem attacks to try to sway opinion against a group with whom you disagree. Instead critique their actual platform rather than saying “they aren’t one of us” or “they have no ties to the 4 people who for years made up the abandoned community council.” Clearly valley residents weren’t terribly happy with the community council as more people than I’d seen at a neighborhood meeting in 30 years turned out to oust the council when it became clear that it didn’t represent neighborhood interests. I don’t live near Dewey and I find huge problems with this design, as do most of my neighbors. And more importantly, the Design Review Board agrees the design is not a good one and has sent it back for a redo.
Your post is erroneous in several ways. Not all SMV members are home owners. SMV is a group of volunteers and is in no way backed by a “special interest group”. This development will have impacts beyond just Dewey Pl. And the comment about SMV not being a valid community group because it’s not linked to another existing community group is laughable. If that were the test for validity, there would be no community groups anywhere.
Re. the development – fortunately the City has Design Guidelines and rules about what can be built. The Design Review Board TWICE unanimously agreed with the points brought up by SMV, and many in the community who wrote letters and spoke at the EDG meeting, saying that the development needs further revisions. You can visit the City website for this project (#3020338) to read all of the reports and letters submitted explaining how this development does not comply with the Design Review Guidelines.
Your focus on bashing those who are trying to educate the community and work with the existing process established by the City, rather than saying anything about the actual development makes me wonder if YOU are backed by a special interest group.
Anonymous Coward, your post is erroneous on many fronts.
SMV is not backed by any “special interest group” and not all members of SMV are home owners.
If you have ever looked at the trees behind City People’s from many vantage points in the neighborhood, what you have seen is what will be replaced by the proposed building. So it’s not just about the what people who visit Dewey Pl. will see as it will be seen from further afield.
As far as community groups go – since when does the formation of a new group depend on it being linked to an existing group?
Fortunately the Design Review Board has a set of guidelines and City rules to guide their decisions and they have TWICE unanimously agreed with the points made by SMV.