the Spring District to make the full transition to a pedestrian-friendly neighborhood.
One key part of the vision for a high-density neighborhood where you don’t need a car is a planned light rail stop at the development. When the Sound Transit East Link Extension is completed—in 2023 on the current schedule—people could reach Microsoft’s campus from the Spring District in seven minutes and Seattle in about half an hour, Johnson says. (The limit on parking spaces at the development drops to 3 per 1,000 square feet after the light rail station opens, Johnson says, adding that the he expects the entire Spring District to have a ratio of 2 parking spaces per 1,000 feet when all is said and done. Further traffic impact studies will also be required before future development phases.)
Wright Runstad purchased the 36-acre property from Safeway in 2007 for $68 million, when it was still zoned industrial, and before the light rail decision had been made, Johnson says. The base land value of the property is currently $42.3 million, according to King County records.
The plan is to build out the site in three phases, but here, too, Wright Runstad says it has flexibility.
“With such a large area, we can build out block-by-block based on the market demand for apartments and office and fill it in,” he says. “But we also have the ability, if this region were to be lucky enough to have a company that needed a million square feet all at once (or 2 million or 3 million square feet), we can do it at the Spring District.”
As it drew up plans for an urban neighborhood in the suburbs, Wright Runstad studied successful redevelopments including Denver’s LoDo, South Lake Union in Seattle, and Portland’s Pearl District. All of these neighborhoods have something that the Spring District lacks—proximity to the metropolitan core.
I grew up in Portland frequenting the Pearl District, before anyone called it that, as it transformed, slowly, into the archetypical urban neighborhood that so many others want to emulate. People came to the neighborhood well ahead of the redevelopment. Artists found cheap, bohemian studio and living space in old warehouses. In the 1970s, Powell’s Books was established and grew to be an intellectual and cultural hub in the city. A few more shops opened; the greasy spoons got busier.
“It became the mildly eccentric and quirky home of individuals and businesses that valued its proximity to the downtown, without its formality or expense,” according to an official history of the neighborhood. This was well before the Whole Foods or the Portland Streetcar.
Formal development and planning began in the late 1980s and the neighborhood took off from there. (South Lake Union, by contrast, came up under the unique circumstances of a supremely wealthy landowner—Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s Vulcan Real Estate—that could quickly redevelop virtually the entire area without much concern for short-term market conditions.)
Johnson acknowledges that one of the biggest challenges for the Spring District is creating the culture and authenticity of an urban neighborhood out of whole cloth in the suburbs. But, he says, this kind of neighborhood is missing from the Eastside, presenting the opportunity for something new.
“You’ve got the transition from a former industrial, commercial area, into a mixed-use area, which is what we’re doing,” Johnson says.
The urban feel comes from various aspects of the design. Block size is one thing. Amenities and building materials are another.
“You want to have cool places to go eat, drink that you can walk to, shops that you’re not going to find in a mall somewhere, coffee, co-working spaces,” Johnson says, adding that attracting “the cool new restaurant or the brewery or the distillery” is a top priority.
When the enormous 60-year-old former Safeway distribution warehouse occupying the southern portion of the site was torn down last fall, crews salvaged huge beams of solid Douglas fir, garage doors and warehouse lights. These elements will be reused in the new construction. (Another warehouse, where Amazon Fresh operates and Microsoft parks its Connector shuttle busses, will remain until development of the Spring District advances.)
Each block is designed to have a distinct feel, Johnson says, as opposed to creating a “faux village” where everything is the same. While upper floors may get the sleek glass treatment common to high-end commercial developments, the ground floors will have smaller storefronts built of “grittier” materials such as concrete, reclaimed wood, and maybe those old garage doors.
From an environmental standpoint,
