In Reversal, Council Poised to Preserve Landmarked Drive-Through Walgreen’s

Joe Mabel, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

By Erica C. Barnett

Update on Tuesday, Jan. 10: The council voted to adopt Councilmember Lisa Herbold’s amendment, described in more detail below, to impose controls and incentives preventing any changes to the landmarked Walgreen’s building on Denny Way while removing the surface parking lot from the area subject to landmark protections. Herbold’s “compromise” plan also included a new amendment from Andrew Lewis that added the driveway and a few other small elements of the property to the part of the lot that won’t be subject to restrictions, increasing the non-protected part of the property to around 14,000 square feet.

Council members who voted for Herbold’s proposal cited various reasons for doing so. Lewis said he supported preserving the façade of the building (seen above) while allowing development; however, the protections the council imposed actually bar changes to the entire building unless the city’s landmarks board approves them.

Kshama Sawant railed against the council’s “Democrats” and housing developers in general, raising a straw-man argument about the fact that any potential housing on the site wouldn’t be affordable to low-income people, which no one suggested it would. And Sara Nelson, who voted against protecting the Walgreen’s just last week, justified her change of heart by saying that aligning the city’s housing goals with historic preservation would take a “long time” and would need to be done at some later date. Ultimately, the legislation passed unanimously, with Tammy Morales and Teresa Mosqueda voting against the initial Herbold amendment but supporting it once it was the only option on the table.

Original post follows:

In a reversal of a committee vote last week, the Seattle city council appears poised to preserve a drive-through Walgreen’s on the edge of South Lake Union, after Councilmember Tammy Morales (who previously opposed preservation) accepted as a “friendly amendment” a proposal by Councilmember Lisa Herbold to “protect” the one-story building and driveway, but not its parking lot. The legislation on the council’s agenda Tuesday afternoon would require Walgreen’s, or any subsequent owner, to obtain approval from the city’s landmarks board before making any visible changes to the building.

PubliCola has written extensively about the 1950 structure, which was originally a drive-through bank—a novel convenience at a time when American car culture was just ramping up. The building was one of many copies of a 1946 prototype created for Seattle-First National Bank, many of which are still standing in Seattle and across the region.

A lot of things have changed since the former bank building was landmarked in 2010. An explosion of jobs brought a need for new housing in Uptown and South Lake Union, and the council voted to upzone the area in 2017, allowing new apartment towers to serve the thousands of new people working in the burgeoning tech hub. The site where the Walgreen’s stands, for example, was rezoned to allow a 160-foot tower. Today, the building stands out as one of the only car-oriented, single-story businesses in the area.

How could it be that a parking lot that makes up less than half of the Walgreen’s site could yield more housing than the entire property? The answer is: It can’t, except on paper.

Morales, along with her colleague Andrew Lewis, appeared convinced Monday by a staff analysis that concluded a developer could actually fit more housing on the Walgreen’s block if the housing was squeezed onto the 12,000-square-foot parking lot—up to 310 units, or even more if the building included amenities like a school, which many downtown residents have been trying to site for years.

“Compared to what is possible if we completely remove the controls and incentives or if we leave the legislation as is, there are additional 30 to 60 units possible,” Morales said at the council’s weekly briefing.

“I really appreciate the the creativity of Councilmember Herbold in presenting all these incentives together to show the potential of what the maximum number of units could be,” Lewis added.

How could it be that a parking lot that makes up less than half of the Walgreen’s site could yield more housing than the entire property? The answer is: It can’t, except on paper.

Setting aside the unlikely possibility of a new school inside a skinny residential tower, getting to 310 units requires some creative math. To build that many units, a developer would have to qualify for every incentive available under city law, including one that allows a development to cover more of a lot if their building includes at least ten units of “family sized” housing with three bedrooms or more. In practice, apartment developers rarely build units that size, because they don’t pencil out—two-parent families who can afford to pay $5,000 to $12,000 a month (the going rate for the handful of available three-bedroom apartments in new buildings near South Lake Union) would usually be better off buying a place instead

Even in the analysis Herbold used to argue that a smaller building would have more apartments, a council staffer acknowledged that it “would be hard to fit [that many units] on the lot without building above the bank building”—that is, demolishing the Walgreen’s and putting up a new building in its place, perhaps preserving the façade. This alternative is basically the same as not preserving the building at all—except that it couldn’t happen without  the approval of the same landmarks board that requested protections for the building in the first place.

Another scenario would be a skinny tower on the site of the current parking lot, which, at just 11,700 square feet, would be among the smallest tower locations in the city. This would be unlikely to pencil out under any circumstances, because so much of the oddly-shaped site would be taken up by the building’s elevator shaft, but the presence of the SR 99 tunnel directly underneath the site would make building a tall, thin tower even more of an underground engineering challenge. For this scenario to pencil out, the building would almost certainly be limited (like many others in the area) to studio or micro-units, which rent for more per square foot than larger apartments—great for young tech migrants, but less ideal for producing a neighborhood with a diverse range of ages, incomes, and family types.

Even in the analysis Herbold used to argue that a smaller building would have more apartments, a council staffer acknowledged that it “would be hard to fit [that many units] on the lot without building above the bank building”—that is, demolishing the Walgreen’s and putting up a new building in its place, perhaps preserving the façade. This alternative is basically the same as not preserving the building at all—except that it couldn’t happen without the approval of the same landmarks board that requested protections for the building in the first place.

The other alternative—the one that preservationists like Historic Seattle and Herbold seem to actually support—is to allow Walgreen’s to sell off the development rights for the lot to another developer in the neighborhood, preserving the building and its drive-through lane in perpetuity while allowing development elsewhere.

The problem is that selling the development potential of the Walgreen’s site almost certainly wouldn’t lead to an equivalent number of new apartments. That’s because when property owners sell development rights, what they’re really selling is extra floor-area ratio (FAR), a measure of how much of a piece of land a building can occupy. The more FAR a developer has, the taller or wider the building, depending on the rules in that area. In the Uptown, where 160-foot building are already allowed everywhere, additional FAR will allow developers to build outward, eliminating amenities they would otherwise have to include, like open space, green streets, and setbacks between sidewalks and the building.

The council will vote on Herbold’s proposal tomorrow afternoon. So far, only Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda has publicly expressed reservations about the plan, saying she worried that Herbold’s proposal “would reduce the site to such [an extent] that it would not be feasible to build to build multifamily units on this site.”

10 thoughts on “In Reversal, Council Poised to Preserve Landmarked Drive-Through Walgreen’s”

  1. Terrific – problem solved and a piece of Seattle’s past remains. Would be great to include the original architect of the building!

  2. Zoning changes might make way for another wave of young upper income tech workers in move to Seattle, but it does absolutely nothing for affordable housing. After COVID and a building boom in the Sun Belt that has lured many construction workers (and companies) out of the NW, I’m wondering if the industry can even crank out 10,000 units this year? Because of environmental and political turmoil in California, it’s likely two rich Californians show up for every housing unit built in Seattle. Seattle is becoming a City of rich refugees… look at our neighbors to the North (Vancouver BC) to see how that’s going to turn out.

    Seattle is City of real estate winners and losers. The winners own property (houses mostly) that are worth more every year. The losers pay rent… that goes up every year. America is nation were the winners own their own homes… the losers rent and it’s the way it’s been for 400 years. The trouble with the Seattle Left is people (Hello Doug Trimm) spread false ideas that the rules of the game can be changed. That zoning laws can changed, rent control voted in, social housing can get built…. and this just not true. Read the article above again. What is the underlying theme there? It’s the people who own the City (the land), mostly single family homes, like the city pretty much the way it is and won’t do any radical changes. The home owners, the preservationists, the NIMBYs have political power… and lawyers after that. You can’t really fight them. Seattle will never have near enough affordable housing. Rent isn’t going down (ever). There’s nothing wrong with admitting defeat and renting an U-Haul and moving to someplace you can actually afford.

    1. Your analysis is spot on. The push for new units may soften prices for the moneyed tech crowd, but not creating affordable units for everyone else. Let’s be honest who the market is serving.

    2. So you’re saying it’s impossible that Seattle can ever be a place where poor people can live? I’m pretty sure reality refutes that. Or are you saying it’s impossible that Seattle can remain a place where poor people can live? That may be true, but I’m not at all convinced that the home owners will have all the political power forever, and will also choose to use it in such an ultimately self-defeating way.

      And if home owners here have all the political power, why do you think there are places a poor person (whose job is unlikely to be moveable) can afford somewhere else in the US? Or for that matter in the world? What makes Seattle (or any hot city in the US) unique in this regard? I hear rents are rising hugely in Cincinnati.

      1. “So you’re saying it’s impossible that Seattle can ever be a place where poor people can live?” Well, poor people can (and will) live in Seattle but they’ll suffer high housing costs. For a senior with no other support than a social security check, the only place you can afford to live is a tent by the freeway. There’s an 8 to 10 year wait for low income housing…. so good luck with that. Low income wage earners will suffer…. or leave. As far the lower wage public servant jobs, like cops and teachers, maybe some folks might hang on in Seattle, but right now it possible to land a teaching job in Nebraska and buy a house. That’s not possible in Seattle. At some point people have to do what’s financially good for them.

        Real citizenship, being a stakeholder, a real member of a community with a voice, has always depended on one thing in the USA. Property ownership. All those tents in Greater Seattle just prove this fact– the homeless are just landless peasants. The history of the USA is one of un-landed people migrating, looking for the better life….a life of home ownership. We’re talking about 500 years of colonization and re-colonization…. Seattle is currently being re-colonized by rich people…. and the non-rich natives are getting pushed out. That’s just the way it goes. Ask the American Indians…. you’re not getting the City back. If you can’t afford to live in Seattle, you have to cut your losses and move on.

        There are housing shortages all over the USA, but it’s not near as dire as California or Seattle. It’s politically possible to build trailer parks in Northern Kentucky, so it I wouldn’t be too worried about housing in Cincinnati. Seattle just has no room to build…. and even less political will do so. Affordable housing? It’s all just talk. Crunch the housing numbers in Seattle, L.A., NYC or San Francisco… and you’ll find Cities for the rich.

  3. “A lot of things have changed since the former bank building was landmarked in 2010. An explosion of jobs brought a need for new housing in Uptown and South Lake Union, and the council voted to upzone the area in 2017, allowing new apartment towers to serve the thousands of new people working in the burgeoning tech hub. The site where the Walgreen’s stands, for example, was rezoned to allow a 160-foot tower.”

    If the building is indeed a landmark, why does any of this matter? The whole point of landmark status is to preserve architectural and cultural history within a city despite these very factors. Have a lot of things changed? Maybe. Does that change the nature of this building or its designation? No.

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