City Center Design Review....... Feb 21, 2006

Feb 21, 2006 - City Center Design Review I agree that we should have our own nbhd design standards. In the meantime, we have more than 100 housing units (250 new residents) coming this year and several commercial/office spaces with very little design review. As long as the CBD continues to attract reinvestment dollars and attention then the southern end of the our nbhd will continue to get hit with long awaited investment. The southern end of the Lettered Streets nbhd has 5 arterials running through or around it's edge, it's gonna happen. If we have to wait until council "allows" us to update our nbhd plan then we continue to fall further behind - as we are now. I met with Fred Wagner, principal architect of about 90 of the proposed housing units, and I can tell you right now what the future of Old Town looks like.
The multi-family guidelines are so weak as to be ineffectual architecturally speaking; so, while the new contruction is gonna be neat, it's not the sort of thing the nbhd has been hoping for. I did go to the Planning Commission - I did not represent the nbhd nor can I anyway, but I want to be clear that I spoke only for myself - and asked them to think about extending the City Center Design Review bounds as I mentioned at the last board meeting (note: up Girard from the proposed review boundary on D St. to Broadway back down to Holly returning to G St. essentially doubling the amount of review area in the Lettered Streets). While I'm not sure any of them will move on it, I do think I raised attention to the issue. My worry, and this goes back to my meeting with Fred Wagner, is that the nbhd has one idea of how the nbhd should look while developers and architects have another. So, when I say that I 'know' what the southern end of the nbhd will look like in 50 years I base that on trends in the Puget Sound, the trends here, the trends in the CBD (also Barkley and the university campus). There is an emergent architectural style in the PNW and it's going to be built in our nbhd, which up to now has not happened. There are 5 projects on tap as I write. As for extending the bounds of the City Center Design Review, it's already partially covering the nbhd and noone seems to have a problem with it.
My question is this, then: if the City Center Design Review proposal is okay for Old Town and parts just north of there, and most of the southern portion of the nbhd is fairly contiguous in land usage (with small exceptions) then why not extend those bounds to include the entire area of congruent usage? For example, the upper end of Holly is outside the Design Review bounds but other than a few homes on Earl's side of the street does it feel different or have other uses on the North end after it crosses F St.? I don't feel a big change, a subtle change but not a big one. And as the three projects go in on Holly soon, then even that subtlety will be lost; so the street will "feel" the same just across the Design Review boundary but have no design review. The good news is, no one is currently proposing schlocky crap.......but?! it could happen and it could happen before we get a nbhd plan together that has codified design guidelines......you and I both know that's gonna take years. So...in the meantime, I'd like to have more review. Right now we have no review at all for commercial uses without housing. The attempt to run the dental studio through the multi-family review process only revealed the limitations of that process but did not constitute a real review. I am guessing that staff reviewed the dental studio to test the process. There is a proposal in front of the Planning Commission to use the Multi-family guidelines for commercial property reviews when the project is in a Res. Multi Zone - which is about 80 percent of our nbhd. Marilyn has done a bangup job of showing us that the Mutli-family Review process is very limited when used to look at commercial projects, or even mixed use projects. So, we have a minimal amount of review and my proposal to extend the bounds of the City Center Design Review area gives us a little more help, a little bit more protection from bad design. It's not perfect, and I don't think my proposal is an end all solution, but I think it's a positive step that will move us forward. Waiting for codified Design Review in the nbhd plan means we are standing still with a 20 year old "guiding document" while all around us development goes about its merry way. Getting some protections now while we work toward that codified design review process in our nbhd plan seems like a good thing for the nbhd. Here are some links for folks to get background: http://www.mrsc.org/subjects/planning/desrevguideandcode.aspx http://www.cob.org/documents/planning/publications/city_center_design_guidelines.pdf Please read all of the Bellingham PDF, but I would draw attention to page 7.
Michael McAuley