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(Image: Cascade Public Media)
Last year, Cascade Public Media brought KCTS and Crosscut to their new home on Broadway.
The new headquarters for the Pacific Northwest PBS media group has faced problems familiar to other buildings in the neighborhood.
Plans filed with the city show Cascade’s security team is planning a $60,000 project to make the building safer after its first year on Broadway between Capitol Hill and First Hill.
The project will “install additional fencing and security grilles” to “mitigate trespassing, vandalism, and break-ins occurring at the facility.”
The work will include adding new fencing, new slide-up security grilles, and “replacing some existing fencing with taller fencing as allowed by zoning code” according to the early paperwork.
The efforts come a year after Cascade moved onto the 300 block of Broadway after acquiring the building for $23 million from Childhaven, a provider of therapeutic services for children who have experience trauma and neglect, according to the county.
At the time, the media nonprofit said the organization was preparing the building’s “several large gathering spaces” to host KCTS and Crosscut events with the “potential to enable new types of community engagement” for the organization.
“The thing this building offers is a chance for us to reimagine the ways in which we interact with the community,” president and CEO Rob Dunlop said at the time.
Other nearby property owners are facing similar security challenges. CHS reported here on issues around drug use and repeated break-ins at Community Roots Housing’s affordable apartment buildings on Broadway where city officials say they are looking at taking steps like closing down nearby alleys to curb disorder.
The trespassers can be extremely brazen. Monday, Seattle Police officers were called to the Tuscany Apartments over trespassers inside the unit where a 40-year-old man was shot and killed last week despite the area still being an active crime scene. There were no reported arrests.
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Capital Hill is cooked. The druggies are as bad as ever. It will never be what it was prior to the pandemic. It’s too entrenched and all the new “affordable housing” coming online will just further center it as junkie central.
affordable housing mostly serves working people – in Seattle housing prices are so high that to qualify one can make around $70,000 a year and qualify – not sure how you’re making the leap from affordable housing to open-air drug use but your assumption is just wrong.
Yep, depending on what you are looking for it’s time to get out of the general downtown area. Anything west of 23rd or south of denny. It might come back in the decades to come but it’s hard to put back society after it was dismantled.
You are deeply wrong. Just what an absurd and confidently wrong post.
What has been dismantled? Society itself? I live downtown, why would I need to leave? There isn’t even an empty apartment in my building, why is it full when society is dismantled? Why were so many people walking around and enjoying the weather, and market, and waterfront, and restaurants during the nice weather this weekend. Silliness.
This hyperbolic language is just such a silly game.The poster saying the Hill is cooked. Like it was some promenade where business didn’t even lock their doors at night. I moved to Seattle in 1999, and Broadway wasn’t a street with flowers growing and general frivolity to all hours of the night. I certainly do not feel any less safe now walking down it than I did then.
After enduring hell on my walk to work this morning, I can only agree with you. While it was difficult to see clearly through the slit in the helmet I had to wear to protect myself from the roving machete-gangs, and there were times when I was too busy adjusting the ghillie suit I used to hide from the maurading oil-pirates along the way to notice exactly what was happening, what I could see chilled me to the core. Feral children, still wearing their old, tattered school uniforms, hunting squirrels for breakfast; their teeth filed to points, hissing, having apparently lost their use of language. A mob of howling, half-naked, war-painted thugs flipped over a car, set it on fire, and used it to heat the great glass bowl in their communal crack-bong, from which they smoked their devil-weed powder. A barricade, clear across Pike Street, topped with broken bottles and a piece of the ornamental iron fence that used to surround the Poquitos’ parking lot, guarded by the brutal warriors serving of the Great Capitol Hill Warlord, he whose name cannot be spoken. After bribing the guards for safe passage using a bag of Bok-a-Bok chicken, I proceeded through a haunting scene of terror: a street full of zombies, laying in heaps, moaning. Nothing but undead, as far as the eye could see – woe, Fentanyl, you black goddess of the underworld! Come not for me, as I am pure of heart! A toll to the ferryman, running the cable-car stretching across the canyon which once was I-5, and I entered the Downtown Domain – whose horrors we all know intimately. Here, from my perch twenty stories up in the ruins of a great skyscraper, I look eastward across a scene of flames and devastation, nothing to be seen for miles but graffiti, bonfires, and pushy assholes trying to sell you their homemade CDs. How the mighty city has fallen!
10/10 Thunderdomes
LOL. Some of y’all need to accept that you’d be better off in the suburbs. My 13yo walks around the neighborhood all the time and has never felt unsafe. Just go! It’s fine! The Cheesecake Factory awaits.
I can’t comprehend how anyone can be so frightened of people who are clearly on the nod. They’re far more at risk of becoming victims than you are.
Every time I suggest they might be happier in Magnolia, that already resembles the neighborhood they desire, they act like it’s the wildest idea in the world compared to changing a neighborhood that exists and isn’t Magnolia, into Magnolia.
The hyperbole is nuts of course, but I always find it odd that hyperbole is met by the “if you don’t like seeing junkies kill themselves in the street, maybe move to the burbs?!”
Why can’t we have urban areas be pleasant and lacking in disorder as well? They do it other places and it’s great.
Because generally, the way any of you want to achieve that is garbage that involves numerous externalities you don’t care about and won’t see yourselves, all for the acutely local appearances alone, not anything else.
Spelling Capitol correctly might improve your chances of being accepted as an opinionated actual resident. Maybe check the masthead while you’re here?
Holy Hyperbole Batman
Can’t tell if you’re just a standard-issue Karen Nimby type, or just one of the many people from the suburbs (or even other states) who for whatever reason are obsessed with SeATtLe CrIMe but either way…you really have nothing better going on? Really?