As Mayor Bruce Harrell evaluates alternatives to town’s stalled 2019 Fort Lawton redevelopment plan, there is a chance to each develop new inexperienced house and create reasonably priced housing. The town ought to seize this second to assist extra individuals sooner and improve Discovery Park for generations to come back.
When the U.S. army vacated most of Fort Lawton in 1972, Discovery Park was born. A 34-acre parcel stays, comprising the deserted remnants of the Fort Lawton Military Reserve Middle. This house is nestled between two essential biodiverse greenbelts: Discovery Park and Kiwanis Ravine. It’s additionally the place town’s 2019 plan proposes 238 items of reasonably priced housing.
Almost 5 years later, the challenge has not damaged floor, due to skyrocketing prices and a considerably flawed timeline. After a few extensions, the U.S. Division of Housing and City Growth has given town a Dec. 27 deadline to answer questions across the software. Correctly, the mayor has commissioned a serious reassessment of the Fort Lawton plan.
Nonetheless, with Seattle’s affordability and homelessness crises deepening every day, households want options now.
Redirecting cash from the Fort Lawton plan might home extra individuals in a shorter timespan. Simply take a look at the numbers. The town’s 2019 plan would offer only one.46 reasonably priced housing items per $1 million spent. In distinction, Lake Metropolis’s Tony Lee constructing, with 69 items, produced 3.05 affordable housing units per $1 million.
Certainly, the prices to construct at Fort Lawton are extraordinary. Since 2019, the plan’s finances has ballooned from $90 million to $162 million, with virtually three-quarters masking infrastructure alone. To make this parcel inhabitable, town would wish to spend $122 million simply on stormwater administration, roads, water, sewage and energy traces.
Some say merely constructing extra housing at Fort Lawton would decrease the hovering per-unit value. Nonetheless, this could solely drive up the challenge’s total value and require extra approvals from HUD, additional delaying an already protracted public course of.
Mates of Discovery Park proposes a greater path ahead. Our proposal integrates the complete 34-acre parcel into the park. We pledge to boost cash to responsibly demolish and reforest the Fort Lawton Military Reserve Middle. Naturalizing the land could be far less expensive than costly, ongoing infrastructure upkeep.
Discovery Park is the Emerald Metropolis’s crown jewel, a pure sanctuary that attracts greater than one million guests every year. A really regional park, it serves of us from all walks of life throughout Seattle. With our metropolis’s inhabitants projected to surpass 1 million by 2044, we should broaden equitable alternatives to attach with nature.
Extra inexperienced house at Discovery Park is healthier for everyone. Wildlife might extra simply journey between the park and neighboring Kiwanis Ravine. As an alternative of flooding close by homes, rainwater would percolate by way of the soil. Greater than 40 timber on the chopping block would even be preserved — the identical “distinctive and vital” timber the Metropolis Council voted to guard by passing the Urban Forest Protection Ordinance.
Reforesting outdated Fort Lawton can also be a once-in-a-generation alternative so as to add almost 21 new acres to Seattle’s declining tree cover, shifting us nearer to town’s aim of 30% citywide canopy cover by 2037. Timber present important cooling and provides individuals some respite from a quickly altering local weather — a future that features greater wildfires, longer smoke emergencies, elevated flooding and extra species extinction. Though Seattle has many choices for creating extra housing, alternatives to broaden our inexperienced areas are exceedingly uncommon.
The Discovery Park Grasp Plan contains this admonishment: “There have to be a deep dedication to the idea that there isn’t a extra beneficial use of this website than as open house.”
As town weighs the place to go subsequent, we hope the mayor will select a greater path for Discovery Park and Seattle’s individuals.
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