Groundbreaking at Lake Hills

Sometimes I have to remind myself of the original inspiration for this blog--the demise of our neighborhood Red Apple and an active search for what will replace it. Yesterday I attended the groundbreaking ceremony at Lake Hills Shopping Center for a new library, and to view drawings of what the City says may be a model for Newport Hills commercial center development in the future.


Lolo the Clown and kids from the neighborhood dig in. Nothing like a pile of dirt to bond the community!


City of Bellevue Mayor Grant Degginger, Bellevue Councilmembers Conrad Lee and Patsy Bonincontri and King County Councilmember Jane Hague get down and dirty with a host of other (dig)nitaries


Lake Hills Shopping Center today

Nick looking cool while I make him late for his driving class

A Meeting with the Mayor: Wanna Buy a $6.5million Red Apple?

FOR SALE: BGN Properties Inc. Stod's. Built in 1969. 1.72 acres/75,100 square feet. Appraised value: $1,180,000.00






FOR SALE:
Newport Hills Shopping Center plus two "line stores" and "DQ" drive-in. Rainier NW University LLC. Built in 1963. 5.24 acres/228,400 square feet. Appraised value: $6,543,900.00





A PROJECTED TWO-YEAR planning process got underway last Thursday night at a meeting at Newport Hills' Bank of America. Mayor Grant Degginger was in attendance, along with the City's Neighborhood Planner Cheryl Kuhns and Economic Development Director Bob Derrick as well as Bellevue City Council member Conrad Lee. In the audience were about 40 or 50 concerned neighbors and merchants. Newport Hills Community Club ran a great presentation, with special credit going to President Cheryl Nygaard and Vice President Julie Rossman for encouraging inclusiveness by asking for written questions from the audience and using a large aerial map of our neighborhood business area to keep our focus in mind.


In his opening remarks, Mayor Degginger cited the new Newport Heights Elementary as a "game-changer," It puts Newport Hills on the radar and gives us a central focus. The City of Bellevue, he said, will now facilitate the neighborhood's community-building efforts by involving the community in future development decisions.



Degginger goes on to say that Newport Hills is now at the "top of the list" of six or seven similar neighborhood business centers in desperate need of an overhaul, and "now is the happy time" for Newport Hills to achieve theirs. One model to watch is Lake Hills' neighborhood business center,pictured below, nearing the end of a lengthy planning process and the subject of a previous entry in Red Apple Elegy. The developer there is Cosmos, and the record of ups and downs the neighborhood has gone through with them is lengthy, and instructive.





A lot of questions were answered at last week's meeting and will be answered in the Newport Hills Community Club website blog. A lot more remain unanswered.

Chiefly, how will the city assist in this planning process? As voiced by the Economic Development Director it appears to be to lure developers with promises of density allowances. He says there are four serious proposals on the table, now that Stod's is on the market as well. All of these involved mixed use, four stories of residential above base retail and office.


This is what would pencil out for the developers. Is this something like The Renton Landing? (See photo, right) We don't really have any other visual model to go by. He pointed to developments in the Bellevue CBD (Central Business District) and proposed development in the Bel Red Corridor, both of which inhabit a much larger footprint.

The neighborhood's focus is much more on tenants: Trader Joe's, PCC, hardware store, etc. as well as programming: swapmeets, community events, farmers market and sustainable gardens. In short, a Main Street model. Even thriving Crossroads Mall is set up on a "Main Street" pattern.


At busy West Seattle Junction, a classic model for Main Street, there is only one floor of residences above a row of shops.


Step 1: The mayor's first suggestion was to come up with a neighborhood working group who could identify a shared vision to present to prospective developers. The city is more than ready to work with us at this time.


This means that in a couple of years we'll have the beginnings of a plan.

Third Places: Learning from the Neighbors

Caffe Lento, a wonderful addition to Lake Hills Shopping Center, has found room for itself between the vacuum repair clinic and the drycleaners. They wisely picked a sunny spot. Welcome! Wish you were here!

In many ways our neighbors to the north, Lake Hills Shopping Center on 156th in Bellevue (not to be confused with our nearer neighbors to the north, Lake Heights) is under the same pressures as the Newport Hills Shopping Center:

Same age
Competition with Crossroads, Factoria nearby
Failed supermarket

According to the sign posted at Lake Hills, the proposed land use plan for the neighborhood center includes:
90 residential units
44,800 square feet of office space
69,200 square feet of retail space
10,000 square feet library and additional underground parking provided for the commercial and residential uses

This sounds like a great mixed use development ideally suited to the neighborhood. It's sustainable, and provides a "third place" in the form of a library. In other words, people can choose to live near where they work, and have a "third place" which provides space separate from living and working spaces. In future entries I hope to offer more examples of mixed use and third spaces.

In Newport Hills, we're already ahead of the game in a couple of ways: there is already existing density in the form of apartments, condos and townhomes in the center that can support a center like that on offer at Lake Hills. The more density the easier it is to draw on a local customer base--people don't have to drive so far to shop.

Another distinct difference is the appearance of solidity that NH projects through its solid brick structures. All the different storefronts are unified with the use of this brick in the facade and planters.