The director of the city’s Department of Planning and Development, Diane Sugimura, says DPD plans to inspect more high-rise residential buildings for defects like the ones that may have doomed the McGuire Apartments, the nine-year-old Belltown high-rise whose tenants were told they had to move last week because of building defects.
PubliCola spoke to Sugimura after a press meeting with Mayor Mike McGinn, who said he had asked DPD whether there were “other buildings at risk.” He added, “It’s a pretty unusual situation for a nine-year-old building to be torn down.”
Sugimura said DPD would pore through its database to find buildings with similar characteristics—namely, the type of construction, who did the inspection, and whether the building has been referred to DPD for “significant repairs” in the past. Sugimura did not know how long the process of reviewing the buildings in its database would take. “As you might guess, we don’t organize our database” based on building defects, she said. “At this point, there’s a fair amount of manual work” that’s needed before DPD can move forward with determining which high-rises need further inspection.
