A Seattle suburb remakes its center

Though the long economic slump has forced many communities to curb their aspirations, Bothell, Washington, has kept moving forward on a far-reaching reconfiguration of its downtown.

Like many suburbs, Bothell remains prosperous, but the 33,000-population community realizes that its future will depend at least partly on creating more walkable and sociable settings — the environments that a growing number of people, both young and older, are gravitating toward.

Bothell is pursuing a series of interconnected projects: A state highway, Rt. 522, is being relocated to improve traffic circulation and expand the walkable portion of downtown. A multi-way boulevard has been planned on part of what has been the five-lane Bothell- Everett Highway (State Rt. 527). And 15 buildings — mostly auto-oriented structures such as gas stations — have been demolished, making way for pedestrian-oriented development.

These projects, in a suburb about 20 miles northeast of Seattle, are intended to transform Bothell from an overwhelmingly auto-oriented community to a place that, although still largely dependent on cars, will have a diversified, walkable center.

How and why did Bothell (median household income $66,700) go about this?

• Local leaders had been wrestling for years with traffic that clogged Rt. 522 in the small downtown. They also realized that a potential market was waiting to be tapped. More than 25,000 people work in high-tech, biomedical, and telecommunications jobs in Bothell, most of them in business parks. Few are within easy walking distance of restaurants, stores, and other amenities. The community concluded that some of the workers might spend time and money in the downtown — might even live there — if downtown offered more attractions and housing options.

• Bob Stowe, as city manager of Mill Creek, a nearby suburb, presided over the development of the pedestrian-scale Mill Creek Town Center. In 2005, Stowe was hired as city manager of Bothell, and that year residents and businesspeople gathered to start charting a new vision. In 2006 the Bothell City Council commissioned Freedman Tung + Sasaki (FTS) of San Francisco to lead community roundtable discussions and produce a plan for downtown.

“The linchpin of the plan,” says Terrie Battuello, assistant city manager and director of economic development, “is the Crossroads Project, which decouples Rt. 522 from the historic Main Street. When completed, the community will have better access to, and views of, the river; an extended Main street; and inviting gateways into the city.”

• In 2007 the community vision helped Bothell win a highly competitive state Local Infrastructure Financing Tool (LIFT) grant. LIFT, which is Washington’s version of tax-increment financing, is providing the city up to $25 million from the state over 25 years — solidifying an essential part of the Crossroads funding. LIFT authorized Bothell to designate a “revenue development area” (RDA). Within that area, a portion of state sales and property taxes will be used to pay for the public infrastructure project.

• The city rounded up additional money from a variety of other sources — among them, savings set aside by the city. Under Stowe, a portion of the revenue collected during the boom years — from sources such as permit fees, real estate excise taxes, and sales taxes from construction — was reserved for future capital improvements. The city is in the process of securing state and federal grants and private funding for the rest of the boulevard work.

• The city resolved to extend the business district to achieve critical mass. “The traditional downtown was about two contiguous blocks of Main Street,” says Gregory Tung, a principal in the urban design firm. It wasn’t big enough to pull in large numbers of people. Extending Main Street to five blocks — and across Rt. 527, the new boulevard — would generate more presence, he explains.

Flexible Main Street

The rebuilt Main Street, designed by Seattle’s Cascade Design Collaborative, will be level with the sidewalks, so outdoor cafes can at times occupy some of the parking spaces — a flexible arrangement increasingly common in western US cities. (In some communities, such as on Castro Street in Mountain View, California, which FTS designed, the parking /café seating area is two steps down from the sidewalk. A level surface or two-step drop in a plaza area is safe, whereas a one-step drop is less noticeable and to be avoided, Tung says.)

On Main Street, Battuello says, “This creates three new gateway blocks. It establishes a whole new grid at the entrance to Bothell.”

• To overcome skepticism about the proposed boulevard, City of Bothell downtown project planner Dave Boyd traveled to Barcelona, Spain, where he witnessed wide multiway boulevards that feel easy to cross and are intensively used by pedestrians. This was a key to Rt. 527’s envisioned role in unifying the eastern “historic” and western “expansion” halves of downtown. The state Department of Transportation resisted turning Rt. 527’s roadway into a boulevard, but did the next best thing — transferring part of the road to the city, which is implementing the conversion.

As designed by FTS, civil engineers Perteet Inc., and landscape architects HBB, the boulevard will have four lanes for through traffic, plus a center turn lane. On each side of the five-lane thoroughfare there will be elm-lined medians with rain gardens. On the far side of each median there will be pavement — actually expanses of traffic-slowing pervious pavers three lanes wide; only its center lane will be for traffic movement. The other two lanes will be parallel on-street parking. The boulevard will, he says, “put all the retail on display for people driving by.”

• As part of the plan, a form-based code was adopted, encouraging buildings up to six stories high in the downtown core. This should give the broad outdoor space a sense of enclosure. Buildings will most likely have retail, restaurants, and other active uses in the ground floor and housing or work spaces in the floors above. Building height and coverage taper down toward the downtown’s edges.

• At the principal intersection where the boulevard will meet the relocated Rt. 522, the plan relents on its height goal; the minimum height at this juncture drops to two stories — which was all that officials felt they could realistically require of potential anchors such as a multiplex cinema or a supermarket. “You’re in the suburbs,” Tung says, and this suburb, unlike some first-ring suburbs, remains reliant on cars. Despite the height concession, the code requires that the buildings “behave in an urban way,” Tung says, “with storefront windows, an entrance on the boulevard, etc.”

Relocating Rt. 522

An ambitious component of Bothell’s plan is the moving of heavily traveled Rt. 522 one block southward, to improve traffic circulation and allow Main Street to be extended. Once the highway’s move is complete at the end of 2013, all of the enlarged downtown will be contiguous.

Fifteen buildings along Rt. 522 — welding shops and seven gas stations among them — have been demolished. “We’re stripping away several decades of more auto-centric development,” Battuello says. In all, 27 businesses and three families have been moved, aided by more than $1 million in relocation benefits. “We entered into negotiated agreements with the owners, without going to court,” she notes.

Stowe worked for three years with the school district, negotiating agreements on such things as the city’s acquisition of the disused Anderson School. In all, the city has acquired 25 acres that it intends to sell to developers.

It’s hoped that the downtown development will help generate 1 million square feet of retail, offices, and housing over the next 10 years. The first private venture to get started will be the conversion of the 80-year-old Art Deco school by the McMenamin brothers, Seattle area entrepreneurs known for their skill in installing brewpubs and hotels in historic buildings.

By 2013, the 5.4-acre property is expected to have a 70-room hotel, a pair of restaurants, a movie theater, and a spa, along with a revamped pool that Bothell residents will be entitled to use at no charge. “I think McMenamins is going to be key to recruiting more small businesses to Main Street, which, in my estimation, will be a really good thing,”the owner of a framing shop told the Everett Herald last year.

The boulevard, Main Street, and Rt. 522 projects will be further enhanced by construction of a 60,000 sq. ft. City Hall and civic campus and by expansion of the Park at Bothell Landing — the community’s chief outdoor gathering place. A team headed by Vulcan Real Estate, known for its work in Seattle’s South Lake Union district, is leading the development of the City Hall and of up to 200,000 sq. ft. of mixed-use space on the site of the existing 72-year-old City Hall. The public cost is estimated at $40 million and the private portion at about $50 million.

The city may finance City Hall through a tax-exempt lease/leaseback structure in which the city would continue to own the site but would allow the private developer to build on the excess land. The project is to be completed in 2013. Improvements to the riverside park are to begin in 2012.

Altogether, the city expects $150 million in public funds to be spent on the downtown makeover over a five-year period. The city intends to accomplish this without raising taxes or taking on debt. Stowe says economists have forecast that the downtown endeavors will generate $650 million of private development.

Evaluating the market

City spokeswoman Joy Johnston says Bothell is counting on a number of factors to make the projects successful. One is that Bothell is a major job center and hub for biotech, medical device, and high-tech companies, and is continuing to grow. Google recently announced plans to bring as may as 840 workers to Bothell. As of December 2010, apartment complexes in Bothell had “a vacancy rate of just 3.6 percent, proving the demand for additional units,” she says.

“Only 5 percent of Bothell’s population currently lives in the downtown area,” in part because there isn’t a wide enough variety of types of housing, Johnston says. “Gen Y home seekers [ages 20-34] are drawn to urban infill locations in culturally and ethnically diverse neighborhoods, looking to find communities that provide entertainment and recreational opportunities at a comfortable scale,” she says. “The burgeoning Gen Y population, as well as the creative class workforce that is prevalent in Bothell, desires the urban, walkable lifestyle that the revitalized downtown will offer.”

“We have a great jobs center but we needed more retail,” Dick Paylor of the Bothell Chamber of Commerce told the Herald. The expectation is that stores and restaurants will do well, especially when more housing is built downtown.

Another factor is a campus shared by the University of Washington Bothell and Cascadia Community College. The campus, about a 10-minute walk from downtown, has doubled its student body since 2006 and is anticipated to add another 4,000 students by 2015, reaching a total enrollment of 10,000.

Developers have begun making moves to acquire or build housing or mixed-use projects downtown. These are expected to include rental apartments, condominiums, and townhouses.