The Central District’s most important street sure is the subject of a lot of planning these days.
The 23rd Avenue complete street project has been meeting with stakeholders and the public to gather feedback on a big repaving and redesign project spanning the entirety of the Central District from Madison to Rainier. While that project is primarily focused on the street itself, the 23rd Ave Action Plan will focus on reassessing the area around each major commercial and cultural node along the street: Union, Cherry and Jackson.
In short, the 23rd Ave Action Plan is a project led by the city’s Department of Planning and Development to create guidelines and a community vision for the future of the CD’s most active areas. Rather than a broad update to the existing Central Area Action Plan (last updated in 1998), the 23rd Ave Action Plan aims to focus more specifically on these key areas.
The project hopes to create “a vision that respects the culture so that when that new development comes in it respects that vision,” said DPD’s Quanlin Hu. An outreach team with liaisons who speak all the major languages represented in the neighborhood have already started meeting with stakeholders, and the first big “community workshop and resource fair” is scheduled for Saturday morning at Garfield Community Center (will be from 9 a.m. until noon).
While the Action Plan is different than the complete streets project, which is led by the Department of Transportation, both teams have stated a desire to work together and build on each project’s work.
More on the plan at our sister site the Central District News.
