(Image: City People’s)
The epic five-year battle from a group of neighbors and slow growth advocates to stop a mixed-use apartment and grocery development in Madison Valley on the property home to the City People’s garden shop has ended in defeat at the city level.
The Seattle Hearing Examiner last week denied an appeal against permitting the project from the Save Madison Valley, overturning its previous decision siding with the neighborhood group that the development’s environmental review didn’t adequately address climate change.
The Tales from the Seattle Hearing Examiner account on Twitter was the first to report the latest twist in the long fight which could now move to the courts — though that fight would be much more expensive to mount.
CHS last reported in 2019 on the plans for the mixed-use development from Velmeir Companies along E Madison with a PCC grocery as its street-level anchor.
Breaking: the appeal against 2925 E Madison Street, the proposed Madison Valley PCC, has been fully DENIED. "Save Madison Valley" loses in this final decision at the City level, but could appeal to a higher court. pic.twitter.com/GP7pYA3e4r
— Tales from the Seattle Hearing Examiner (@HearingSeattle) June 18, 2021
That February, the Seattle Hearing Examiner initially ruled in favor of the developer that its plans for a six-story, mixed-use apartment building in the heart of Madison Valley were in line with the State Environmental Policy Act. Save Madison Valley asked the examiner to reverse design review approval and the city’s determination on the project’s environmental impact and require the development to undergo new rounds of costly, time consuming review. Two years later, that particular matter, at least, is now settled.
Given the stiff opposition from Save Madison Valley which brought in support from Seattle slow growth advocate Peter Steinbrueck and neighborhood celebrity business owners like “Chef in the Hat” Thierry Rautureau along the way and preceded the hearing examiner fight with a seemingly neverending design review process, Velmeir Companies is holding off on any announcements on a groundbreaking.
“We are of course pleased with the Hearing Examiner’s decision affirming the approval of our project,” CEO F. Geza de Gall tells CHS. “Given that there are further avenues of appeal available to the appellant it is difficult to discuss project status, other than to say Velmeir remains committed to seeing this project through to completion, regardless of any further appeal or delay.”
The Save Madison Valley group hasn’t released a statement on the latest setback against its efforts. Its Facebook group hasn’t posted publicly since late last year.
PCC, meanwhile, has said that it was still moving forward with plans to join the long-delayed mixed-use development in Madison Valley on the site formerly home to City People’s. The Seattle cooperative opened a new grocery at 23rd and Union in June of 2020 and has faced challenges over gentrification and labor issues in the Central District. Earlier this month, the company said it is delaying its downtown Seattle store citing a lack of customers and a challenge finding enough workers.
UPDATE: A PCC spokesperson says they are “still on track to open on this location.” “We don’t have any other updates as to timing,” the spokesperson said.
Through it all, the E Madison City People’s has soldiered on. CHS first reported on the rumblings of redevelopment in Madison Valley in March of 2016 as word spread that the neighborhood’s beloved garden shop was going to be displaced by a new mixed-use project. But this wasn’t your typical displacement. The longtime owners of City People’s and its unusually large tract of E Madison land said the decision to sell came with much more caution about picking a developer to work with after watching with surprise and disappointment when the garden store partners previously sold their 15th Ave E home only to see a Walgreens rise on the property.
Now, five years later, City People’s is still on E Madison with a lease until the new development breaks ground. When that will happen remains anybody’s guess.
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Love it! NIMBYs losing always makes my day. Awful Madison Valley NIMBYs especially so.
They know they can’t win, but they can delay delay delay.
Oh poor Madison Valley. They’re getting one new building in a decade — how can they possibly cope with all of the change? Clearly the end is nigh.
(Sarcasm).
Seriously, hurray! I am so tired of people who think they’re so special that they get to live in a neighborhood frozen in time forever, but of course feel free to partake of all of the goods and services available in all the other neighborhoods where the ret of us live and that are absorbing pretty much *all* of the growth.
Yay! I love and will miss City People’s… but I need groceries way more often than I need garden supplies. Plus density good, nimbys bad.
OK, but there are plenty of local places where you can buy groceries, and (if City People’s closes) exactly zero garden stores…the nearest would be Swanson’s, in north Ballard.
It didn’t feel like there were plenty of local places to buy groceries when I lived in Madison Valley, because they’re all located up a steep hill. Walking there was a serious chore, so I ended up driving all the time instead. It’s part of the reason I moved away.
How often do you need to visit a garden store? Once or twice a year, maybe? Most people visit the grocery store once or twice a week, or more! It makes sense that frequently-needed services should be located close by.
I am **loving** these responses of “I just really like having a garden store in the neighborhood.”
It’s akin to the way people like having a bookstore in their neighborhood, but then never patronize it.
First, the CP property is HUGE and Madison Valley is a core neighborhood.
How many different ways does it need to be explained that, in a large city with a housing crisis, using a large, undeveloped parcel for this purpose is **not defensible in any way**?
How many ways does this need to be explained?
Also, I realize many **actually do** like the idea of having a garden store in the neighborhood.
But let me ask you this!
How often are you there? When was the last time you were there? How often does one need to purchase shrubs and plants? Once a year in the spring? Perennial plantings, what?, once per half-decade?
THIS IS NOT A DEFENSIBLE USE OF THIS LARGE UNDEVELOPED PROPERTY AND THOSE OF YOU MAKING THE ARGUMENT THAT YOU “LIKE” HAVING A NURSERY 5 BLOCKS AWAY LIKELY HAVEN’T BEEN THERE IN SIX MONTHS+ AND YOUR YEARLY SPENDING AT SAID STORE IS PROBABLY LESS THAT $100.
How many ways can it be said that this is not an appropriate use for this large, undeveloped lot? And that attachment to some **abstract** affection for having a nursery down the street that you **largely don’t patronize** isn’t sufficient reason to disallow the project??
How many ways?
There’s a garden supply store right beyond the VA on Beacon Hill. There may still be one in Portage Bay. There’s also a City People’s near Bryant/Magnuson Pk
FYI – I use city people’s often. I have a vegetable garden and a small yard. I’ve purchased all of my blueberry bushes and pots there. I buy my seeds, vegetable starts each year and garden amendments there as well as landscape plants and hardware items like tomato cages, bamboo for fencing…. I’d have purchased the new raised beds I put in this spring here, if they’d had what I was looking for. Am I personally keeping them in business – of course not, but 1000’s of people who make purchases like I do, clearly do.
So don’t be an assuming jackass.
Howdy neighbor,
I shop at City People’s. I shopped at City People’s when they were on 15th Ave E. I don’t understand how pointing out that there are several other garden shops closer or as close than the Ballard garden center makes me assuming anything, much less, as you put it, a “jackass.”
I also don’t understand why you would jump to calling someone an epithet so quickly for a comment that wasn’t even directed at you.
Take care and best wishes to you.
The reply clearly wasn’t meant for you… sometimes this application threads things in unexpected ways and instead of calling out RWK it ended up as reply to you. You can’t see the threading before it’s published and you can’t edit it once it is – so there you go.
crud… and now I made my own mistake… Not RWK, PDR (sorry RWK)
I forgot that Central Co-op also carries a good selection of commonly-needed garden supplies and starts during peak garden season, and some stuff off-season.
While I won’t disagree that at one time this area was in need, now there’s a grocery store at both ends of the block right up here (about 6 or 7 blocks from City People’s…), plus two more 5 or 6 more blocks up the street…
I’d much rather have a garden center that I can walk to. The nearest equivalents are very far away – Sky… Swanson’s…. Molebaks – all a car drive for sure. Part of a great neighborhood is diversity in services.
There are new grocery stores and other businesses in nearby neighborhoods for you to patronize because the people who live there did their part to absorb the city’s massive growth, with implications for their own neighborhoods. Using that as an excuse to now continue to refuse to do your own part is the definition of hypocrisy.
Gee… like the area where I live… I don’t live in Madison Valley. I live exactly where we’ve been doing *more* than our fair share of absorbing the cities growth thank you. Mind your assumptions and who you call a hypocrite.
It’s so good to see this disgusting group of anti-development homeowners — whose only real concern is the “wrong” type of people moving into the neighborhood and the **gasp** awful possibility of slightly more traffic making their commute home to Madison Park or Washington Park, on average, what? 2 mins. longer — lose in the most final way possible, and lose in a way that will make future appeals much more expensive.
I’ve really marveled over the past few years hearing/reading about this group’s increasingly ridiculous objections.
Objections which, once addressed, are just met with newer, and even more over-the-top objections.
Remember when the line was that the non-Madison, side-street part of the project was a 500-foot, bare-concrete eyesore that will absolutely destroy the neighborhood?
Remember how that was addressed in the second iteration of the design, where townhomes (new neighbors!) were added…but the Save Madison Valley crew conveniently ignored the changes and just went on with their preferred narrative?
Remember when that ridiculous (and clearly insincere) objection got a little stale so then the crew at SMV floated the idea that the entire project was unsafe because it will cause flooding at the first rain, killing many of the inhabitants of the neighboring homes?
Lest those who weren’t paying attention think I am being hyperbolic here: yes, this was actually a thing the SMV crew **pretended** to actually care about. Pretended it key here: they are really a bunch of NIMBYs only concerned with, most often, the **theoretical possibility** of a **minor increase** in their transit times.
Is there way, aside from the ridicule they deserve, that we can sue the SMV crew of NIMBYs for all their neverending, disingenuous objections? There really should be.
Or, perhaps, after the project is complete, we could invite them into one of the nearby homes prior to the next rain and allow the inevitable, biblical-style flooding to take care of the ongoing problems this group of over-privileged, and over-entitled homeowners pose to the neighborhood?
In the mean time I am **so looking forward** to whatever completely ridiculous, utterly insincere objections this group will come up with next. Any guesses as to what it will be? A sudden, fortuitous discovery of an endemic species that only lives in the greenbelt behind City Peoples, maybe?
You do realize that someone did actually die, drown, in a basement down in that bowl from flooding right? Have you actually looked at the amount of mitigation that’s been done to prevent it from happening again? Have you been down in the valley when it rains hard? It can, even now after all of the projects to contain water, get a little crazy.
I’m not saying that every resident down there is going to be in imminent, life threatening danger from flooding, but your flippant representation of them as over wrought is unfair too. There are real concerns about the problem that deserve to at least be addressed and it’s not unreasonable to expect that a development that large, especially one that covers a good portion of ground that is now not paved could change the way water flows yet again. That bowl behind City People’s isn’t exactly all rich people either – it’s historically been a modest, working class area and many of them are still are. They’ve often struggled to pay for flood damage (water and even worse sewage), that was happening up to several times a year. The city has spent around 30-35 million dollars to pay lawsuits and put in more storm water controls and retention tanks/ponds and Madison Street can still look like a river at times… Give the people a break – their experience gives them a good reason to ask questions.
First of all, there are **minor** issues with flooding all over Seattle: we, after all, have a rainy season, and much of this city was — let us face this fact — poorly constructed.
I mean, look at so much of the housing stock in this city built in the pre-war period. It’s sh*t, to put a fine, turd-encrusted point on it. What is euphemistically referred to as a “quaint craftsman” in reality is a small, made-of-wood-but-half-rotten shack.
And this makes sense! Seattle wasn’t wealthy back then, so the housing stock reflected that!
So did the (lack of) decent engineering for flood control. Not to mention the fact that certain areas shouldn’t have had housing constructed there in the first place!
This gets me back to the “flooding will kill everyone in the adjacent properties if the PCC goes in and you will have blood on your hands” garbage argument these SMVers.
It’s so disingenuous, as the SMVers don’t care about some some woman (apparently) who died because of flooding (apparently) because the flood waters were so fast and so furious (apparently) that she (apparently) could not escape (apparently) from her (alleged) basement!
Apparently! Allegedly!
I’m unclear, outside a situation in which a person is paralyzed or otherwise immobilized, that one would not be able to escape the flooding of one’s basement by simply walking out. And if one is paralyzed or otherwise immobilized, and if one lives in an area of a neighborhood where the risk of flooding has been proven and is an ongoing issue, why would one be in such a position in one’s basement?
None of it makes sense. If someone died **it was a tragedy** but it **is not sufficient reason to justify chucking this project in the garbage can**.
That is obvious.
What isn’t obvious is **just how** and **even if** someone **actually died** as a result of flooding. Details are always sketchy around this **single** incident.
What else is obvious?
Here we get to a **real and obvious truth**, one we can see clearly as a blue sky on a summer’s day:
The **reality** that the **disgusting and unethical crew that is SMV** are **willing and eager** to use this (alleged) death-via-flooding as a means to achieve their own ends.
So flippant?
I’m not being flippant, so stop clutching your pearls at me.
You know what you can clutch your pearls at, though?
The **disgusting** way the SMV group is more than happy to leverage an (alleged) death to serve their own ends.
Oh and BTW, I don’t live down in the bowl, but I do own a ‘quaint craftsman’ up further on the hill. It’s been here more than 100 years, looks better, is better built, with higher quality construction materials and will last longer than anything new… New construction starts falling apart and looking shoddy so fast.
“It’s so disingenuous, as the SMVers don’t care about some some woman (apparently) who died because of flooding (apparently) because the flood waters were so fast and so furious (apparently) that she (apparently) could not escape (apparently) from her (alleged) basement!
Apparently! Allegedly!
I’m unclear, outside a situation in which a person is paralyzed or otherwise immobilized, that one would not be able to escape the flooding of one’s basement by simply walking out.”
You have no idea what SMVers care about, and some of them knew Kate Fleming.
“Kate Fleming, 41, was in her basement sound room tending to her digital recording equipment when a four-foot wall of water rushed down Dewey Place East. The water slammed her small house in Seattle’s Harrison neighborhood so hard that it smashed the north foundation and filled the basement, trapping Fleming inside.”
(Seattle PI, https://www.seattlepi.com/local/article/Flash-flood-killed-Madison-Valley-woman-1222545.php)
PDR – I’m as opposed to the NIMBY attitudes of SMV as you are (see my comment above). But yes, Kate Fleming really did die from drowning in her basement during a storm in the bowl below City People’s. There is no ambiguity about this. Of course, the city has since spent millions on the retention systems throughout the neighborhood to prevent this in the future. The PCC development would integrate in with those systems.
In short – you’re not helping your own cause by implying this episode didn’t really happen.
But I completely agree with you that folks using that as an appeal-to-emotion excuse to permanently block all development in the neighborhood, regardless of the facts behind the updated systems, is disgusting.
No one is doing anything of the kind.
‘whose only real concern is the “wrong” type of people moving into the neighborhood’
Honestly… do you really think a 4-story building in Madison Valley with a PCC on the ground floor is going to be affordable to the folks considered the “wrong type”? Like every other building being put up over a longtime small business in the area, it’ll be luxury housing. The wrong type of people were forced out decades ago to the periphery of the city, only people trying to move to MV are middle class singles and couples who want a short commute downtown.
The “wrong” type of people in this case are new-build apartment renters, who are usually childless young singles. NIMBYs can’t stand the idea that their neighborhood might have anything other than Leave it to Beaver type nuclear families living in single family homes.
“Remember when the line was that the non-Madison, side-street part of the project was a 500-foot, bare-concrete eyesore that will absolutely destroy the neighborhood?
Remember how that was addressed in the second iteration of the design, where townhomes (new neighbors!) were added…but the Save Madison Valley crew conveniently ignored the changes and just went on with their preferred narrative?”
Since the issue was the height, bulk and scale, a façade change would, obviously, not address it.
I’m just glad that City People’s, and their very knowledgeable/helpful employees, have survived until now…and hopefully a few more years.
I don’t live in Madison Valley but I’m envisioning very expensive apartments or condos that would appeal to high income earners. I don’t care for mixed use, unless it allows for lower income residents to live there. I shop at the Green Lake PCC from time to time, but I can’t afford to live in those new condos that replaced the old Vitamilk building. Also, incidentally, traffic is pretty bad there at rush hour. These new condo owners don’t want to get rid of their cars. I’d hoped they’d be riding the bus but that’s not happening.
Also, wow, there’s a really angry, self-righteous dude posting here. I don’t condone people who want to live in their houses. Nor do I feel multi-family dwellings should be banned. There should be a happy medium between the two. Whatever new housing goes up, it needs to include a sufficient number of affordable units that allow baristas, artists, caregivers, retail workers, etc to live in the city alongside their affluent neighbors. That doesn’t seem to be happening with new development at this time.
“They should have never had a leg to stand on…at all.”
If that’s your goal, start a campaign for better design. Seattle could certainly use it.
Design review doesn’t have to take a long time if a proposal is truly responsive to the site and the intent of the design guidelines.
I think it is fair to say that I was the architect/developer who began the turnaround of the Madison Valley area around 1979 when the area was in serious decay and red-lined by banks and insurance companies because of a strong minority population. I had the support of Bill Baillargeon, then head of Seattle Trust and Savings Bank and some wonderful partners, many of whom lived in the nearby Washington Park area where my family lived. Over about ten years we did ten projects to improve existing buildings and build new buildings. All the buildings were of modest scale, some had courtyards and all were intended to create a civil streetscape. Julia Lee’s Park was a part of the effort. Rovers Restaurant, which Thierry Ratureau turned into a success, was in one of the courtyards and Peter Steinbrueck’s father, Victor Steinbrueck, a great urban visionary, was a supporter of the effort. Thierry and Peter along with Save Madison Valley are correct in their assessment of the Velmeir project as being out of scale for the neighborhood, something that might have been prevented if the City of Seattle had not changed the Zoning Bylaw to allow much larger buildings. What is happening is an example of how good, modest change turns into unfortunate change when the bigger developers get involved.
If Save Madison Valley were really interested in the environment and climate change (and people’s wellbeing) they would advocate for replacing some street parking paved areas with trees, planting, & bioswales.
And they would advocate for more density in Seattle and Madison Valley to avoid forcing people and buildings and roads to spread into the surrounding countryside. That destroys much of the environment, demands more driving, and intensifies climate change.