By Ryan Packer

When Kaiser Permanente purchased Group Health in 2018, its flagship Capitol Hill campus came with a Major Institution Master Plan. Used with hospital and university campuses around the city, the plan guides the long-term vision for how a given campus will grow, and sets parameters around how employees to and from the campus will get to work. Any time a major update is planned for a campus, the plan must be updated. Shortly after taking ownership of the property, Kaiser Permanente announced that they were planning a $400 million campus overhaul, and at the same time announced the formation of a Standing Advisory Committee (SAC) to guide the campus through any updates to the master plan.

Now some members of that advisory committee are trying to push Kaiser to move forward on some past commitments that have been made around the Capitol Hill campus, particularly when it comes to the 1.5 acres of surface parking lots that sit on 16th and 17th Ave close to campus. Those lots actually sit outside the boundary of the area guided by the campus plan.

David Dahl is an architect who lives in the neighborhood, and sits on the Standing Advisory Committee. “It definitely doesn’t feel like it’s a priority for them to follow through on the agreements they’ve made,” he said of Kaiser Permanente. “They’ve shown they can reduce their drive alone rate…I would like to see some follow through.”

Dahl points to a nationwide focus for the healthcare provider on housing stability as it sits on land that could be utilized for housing. The latest annual report from Kaiser Permanente noted that it had achieved a 41% drive-alone rate at the Capitol Hill campus in 2019, before the pandemic. That met the city’s target for drive-alone rates on Capitol Hill.

Conversations around the future of those lots have been going on since at least 1974, when the Capitol Hill Community Council reached an agreement with Group Health, with a goal on paper of phasing out the existing surface parking lots.

“Group Health will continue to implement traffic reduction plans with the goal of phasing out present surface parking lots, especially the two large parking lots in the 300 block of 16th and 17th Avenues East. Toward that end, Group Health is continuing a program to reduce overall parking requirements by car-pooling, public transportation, regionalization of medical facilities, and other feasible and reasonable means,” the agreement read.

Kaiser Permanente’s master plan was adopted in 1988, making it among the oldest active institution master plans in the city. The timeline of the plan was only intended to extend through 1999, and included, in the last of four envisioned phases, a new parking garage structure to be constructed at the corner of 16th Ave E and E Thomas, with a skybridge connecting across Thomas.

But the issue of the new parking garage, both in the adopted master plan from 1988 and the agreement with a community council in 1974, is not directly tied to the issue of continuing to maintain surface parking lots in the neighborhood. The master plan calls for an evaluation of the lots after the third phase of development, before a proposed garage would be built. But that third phase never happened. As far as the master plan is concerned, it’s still 1995.

“[Group Health Cooperative] will, at that time and and with input from the community, reevaluate its continued need for those parking lots and will, if possible and appropriate in the light of such evaluation, revise its Master Plan to permit disposal of those off-campus parking spaces,” the 1988 plan read.

Kaiser Permanente has not been forthcoming about how it will address the lots. Employing tens of thousands across the country, Kaiser Permanente’s recent focus has centered on labor and a recently averted strike that is still sending ripples through its workforce with 60,000 expected to walk off the job this week in Northern California..

“Kaiser Permanente values the input and feedback of our community and the Standing Advisory Committee,” the company responded after CHS asked specific questions about the future of the surface parking lots. “We continue to abide by the development standards as outlined in the Major Institution Master Plan and will evaluate the services and facilities at Kaiser Permanente Capitol Hill Medical Center based on what best serves our members and community.” A spokesperson for the massive health care network did not answer a question about current utilization rates at either the surface parking lots or at its parking garage off Denny Way and 15th Ave E.

So far, the renovations to the Capitol Hill campus described to the advisory committee have been minor. Every yearly update since the change over ownership has noted that Kaiser Permanente has not taken any steps to proceed through the stages outlined in the master plan 33 years ago, so things sit in limbo. But if more major upgrades are proposed in the future, that could reopen the question of the surface parking lots that has been a topic of discussion for close to fifty years.

Rebecca Fox, another SAC member and retired urban planner, agrees with Dahl and others calling for a better plan for the lots. “They would be best used as not surface parking lots,” Fox said. “Kaiser has been saying it’s making excellent progress [around commute trip goals], which is great, and I would think that would lead to a re-evaluation of those lots”. Moving forward with a plan to convert the lots to other uses, she told me, would be an example of Kaiser Permanente being a “good community member”. “We need more housing on Capitol Hill,” she said.

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