It is time to start planning big around Capitol Hill Station and Cal Anderson Park again.
This week brings the first design review for a project that will add nearly 300 new apartment units across the street from the busy light rail facility and its collection of apartments and thousands of square feet of new retail space.
The new project from San Francisco-based developers Carmel Partners and Seattle-based Neiman Taber Architects will also create hundreds of new homes across from Cal Anderson Park, the centerpiece of Capitol Hill’s public spaces and core geography in the 2020 Black Lives Matter and anti-police protests. If Seattle is dying, somebody should let the developers know. Slowly but surely, new housing is rising on all sides of the popular park.
Design review: 112 10th Ave E
Design Review Early Design Guidance for an 8-story, 293-unit apartment building. Parking for 63 vehicles proposed. View Design Proposal (94 MB)
Review Phase
EDG–Early Design GuidanceProject Number
3039544 View Related RecordsPlanner
David Sachs
The planned development set for review this week pieces together a puzzle of $1 million-plus parcels to make space for a new eight-story, nearly 293-unit apartment complex on the block of E Denny between 10th and 11th Ave just north of Cal Anderson.
Densely packed and abutting areas of smaller apartment buildings and single family style homes now used as duplexes and triplexes, the design concepts describe a building squeezed full of apartments and amenity spaces but with no room for new retail or cafes. There will be space for parking for about 60 vehicles, however. More parking and plenty of new businesses will be just across the street at Capitol Hill Station.
The developers will ask the East Design Review Board to consider their prefered proposal that envisions a single, block-crossing building designed to bet set back enough for continuous “pedestrian amenities” to encircle the project and to push any leftover open space toward the project’s Cal Anderson facing side.
The preferred design would include a park-facing “entry courtyard” and “a planting strip between the street and the sidewalk the design not only accommodates the pedestrian zone, it also incorporates urban agriculture.” The building’s design “is eroded at the ground plane to incorporate open space” in hopes of making the building better connect to Cal Anderson across E Denny Way.
The designers will also be asking for support from the board for chopping down an “exceptional tree” that would block the design. The tree along 11th Ave E is “technically exceptional but highly unremarkable,” they write.
With a year or more of process still to go, the project is part of a small wave of large developments taking shape across the Hill. Nearby, a crop of new eight-story apartment buildings — and a seven-story throwback — is set to rise along two blocks of 11th Ave E in a burst of development activity that will create more than 200 new homes just north of Capitol Hill Station and only a little off Broadway.
At 15th and John, the project to redevelop the neighborhood’s Safeway property will top out at only five stories but spread out across the block with two new buildings including a 50,000-square-foot grocery, about market rate 400 apartment units, some new, smaller retail spaces, and an underground parking lot for about 350 cars.
Another center of new development activity is forming on E Olive Way with plans including a new eight-story mixed use project being readied for the All Season Cleaners property just below Broadway and a new seven-story mixed use building that will demolish the old Coldwell Banker Bain building and spread across three parcels off the curving street to make space for around 160 new apartment units above street level commercial spaces for shops or restaurants and a two-level underground parking garage.
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Make it taller
It’s great to have more folks to grow the neighborhood.
However, it’s sad to not have more retail space in new buildings. We need more mixed use.
We have a ton of empty retail space along Broadway. What we need is affordable commercial space (less than $20/SF), which would never be supplied in this building. In its absence, we should push the DRB to ensure the landscaping and hardscaping on this project is impeccable. Too many developments just create vegetation strips 3-feet wide with no railings or retaining walls, so they just become dumping grounds for animal waste. (No shame on dogs; I have one too!) But we need to hold the landscaping design to a higher standard.
Not just landscaping design but architectural part too. All new buildings look so similar and sad, like concrete boxes with windows. In this pace of demolishing the old buildings, capitol hill will be soon nothing but gloomy bedroom community.
affordable and quality design are incongruent
We need retail incubation! Defer the cost of rent for independently owned businesses to entice renters to move into and stay in buildings. Developers don’t make money on commercial spaces; they get rich from apartment renters. The city council should make itself useful and demand retail incubation for all neighborhood projects.
Which would drive up the costs of residential rents as developers seek income from sources other than the rent deferred retail spaces. Building buildings costs money and requires revenue on the backside to justify. Deferring or prohibiting revenue from parts of new development just means getting the revenue elsewhere in the project, not building, or lowering quality, etc. You really can’t have something for nothing.
The tree along 11th Ave E is “technically exceptional but highly unremarkable,”
Unremarkable why? Because its a tree? Self-contradictory attributes we manufacture so, it goes.
The gentrification of Capitol Hill is virtually stabbing Seattle in the back so yes, Seattle is becoming bloodless.
Let’s hope a single tree won’t be able to derail 293 units of housing
You all should be talking how ugly all these developments are instead. I was in the Torem Lake neighborhood in Kirkland. I was blown away by their urban mixed use developments. The sad part about it is that we are talking about the suburbs.
Instead of demanding high quality new urban spaces for residents and local small businesses, the sheep of Seattle for All do the bidding of developers. “Who cares what it looks like! We need housing!” Yes we do, but we also need to stop letting out-of-state developers mine the gold of Capitol Hill to enrich their shareholders by building hardiboard boxes with small windows and squat retail spaces. We need a higher bar. Those identifying as urbanists use to be focused on building vibrant cities. Now they are just shills for the development industry.
You should move to Berkeley, where virtually no new apartments are being built despite the desperate need. Check out the 35 year old N Berkeley BART station, surrounded by surface parking lots but no apartment blocks. NIMBYism at its worse, give me Seattle any time.
Bingo! And I would add that city officials (Council, DPD etc.) are complicit in allowing developers to do whatever they want to make more money, and to degrade our urban environment, especially on Capitol Hill.
No one is addressing the parking issue- the ratio of apartment units to parking spaces is awful. That means way more cars on the streets trying to find parking. Parking is already terrible on the hill. I avoid going on the hill now due to this issue. Seattle will never become a pedestrian only city
This project makes no mention of affordability. So, more housing for rich people. Why capitol hill? What does this project bring to capitol hill or the community here? More rich people. Why not plop this sucker down right in the middle of Magnolia, or Madison Park? Why not leave capitol hill alone for a second and retrofit some of the insane amount of empty office space downtown for mixed-use residential? Forget aestetics, affordability, livability, quality of life, girlsss this is alllll about the money honey. MORE HOMES FOR RICH PEOPLE NOW. Give us a view of the mountains or we’re gonna work from home in Peru, hunty!