Activating residential neighborhoods one poppyseed bagel at a time.
By Josh Feit
The line stretched 25 people deep along the sidewalk on a recent Friday on Capitol Hill. I wasn’t waiting to get into a club. Nor was I anywhere near the thumping Pike-Pine corridor. I was a mile away in an NR3 zone, a city zoning designation that not only forbids apartment buildings (while requiring all the surrounding single-family homes to be built on roomy 5,000-square-foot lots), but also prohibits retail businesses.
Mt. Bagel, where I was eagerly queueing up to get a bag of six fresh poppyseed bagels, is on the corner of 26th Ave. E. and E. Valley St., tucked up against the Arboretum, far afield from any commercial action.
“How did you folks pull this off?” I asked the woman working the cash register.
“It used to be a neighborhood grocery store,” she said. “I guess they never changed the zoning, and we got grandfathered in.” Then, perhaps worrying that I didn’t approve of such mischief, she added, “The neighbors love it!” King County records show that the two-story, three-bedroom, 2,000 square foot building was built in 1910 and sold for $91,000 in 1985 to its current owners; Seattle’s Department of Construction & Inspections notes that “it was built originally as a mixed-use building” meaning apartments on the top floor and commercial on the bottom.
“Of course the neighbors love it,” I said. “And there should be more of it.” Far from creating an unwelcome disturbance on an otherwise serene street, lines around the block constitute a political win for any city.
If we’ve learned anything from the pandemic, it’s that the traditional notion of concentric-circle cities where commercial action is relegated to downtown cores—and eased out of existence the further you move from the center—is an outdated and awkward contemporary city planning conceit. Twenty-first century approaches to zoning need to be altered to prioritize commerce in neighborhoods across the city. Similarly, as I’ve argued in this column many times: density should be shared across the city as well.
The fact that Mt. Bagel was a corner grocery in bygone days hints at an era before cities were reconfigured for the automobile; a time when outer-tier neighborhoods prioritized community needs as opposed to isolation.
Seattle needs to shift away from its carbon-heavy, suburbanized model and create networks of neighborhoods with dense housing that have immediate access to mass transit, parks, schools, and commercial spaces.
Seattle should take advantage of the public’s appetite for post-pandemic urban experimentation by redistributing density and commerce throughout the city’s neighborhoods, including in our neighborhood residential zones. Re-activating spaces in residential zones that are already zoned for business is a logical and easy first step. Seattle’s Department of Construction & Inspections doesn’t have a catalog of spaces—like Mt. Bagel—that would fit the bill. But it would be a promising pursuit for the city to locate these spaces and start a program to promote reactivation. For example, Spokane has identified 95 such spaces.
In fact, Spokane’s planning department has an official initiative to allow property owners to convert any former commercial space, including spaces located in residential-only zones, back into commercial use. The city, which is about a third the size of Seattle, established its “Activate Existing Neighborhood Commercial Structures” policy well before the pandemic, back in 2017.
“In the past, Spokane enjoyed numerous small retail and commercial stores peppered throughout the neighborhoods, selling the small sundries and supplies needed by nearby residents,” said Kevin Freibott, a senior city planner for the city of Spokane. Freibott noted that “the presence of corner shops and small neighborhood retail in traditionally residential-only areas, can help activate a neighborhood, provide for greater use of pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure, and create a sense of place and community that can be missing in more homogenous neighborhoods.”
Of course, not all of Spokane’s 95 properties were ripe for redevelopment, Freibott said. Meanwhile, and unfortunately, the city has not reached out directly to any of the eligible property owners to see if they’re interested in converting their property to non-residential use. So far, the program has very few examples—just three—of commercial reactivation. However, cool examples of conversions on quiet residential intersections include one vacant residence that was converted into a coffee and fresh baked pastry shop called The Meeting House (it was a corner grocery in 1925), and a vacant house that was converted to a bakery and brewery called the Grain Shed (it was originally a small shop.)
As our affordable housing crisis (a cry for more housing) combines with the climate crisis (a cry for sustainable land use policies), Seattle needs to shift away from its carbon-heavy, suburbanized zoning model which severely segregates housing types and cordons off commercial use. Instead, we need to create intertwined networks of neighborhoods with dense housing that have immediate access to mass transit, parks, schools, and commercial spaces. Re-introducing commercial occupants into the swaths of Seattle’s developable land that’s currently off limits to neighborhood shops could be a popular first step toward meeting this urgent goal.
As the line of people stretching down 26th Ave. E. upset the placid morning with a giddy jolt of human activity, it became clear that Seattle is ready to embrace this change. Let the full-scale invasion of corner stores begin.
Josh@PubliCola.com
I live a block away from Mount Bagel. Love the shop and that they are here but I’ll add that this article doesn’t point out that they open at 9AM and sell out by 10AM basically every day. They are of negligible inconvenience to anyone here.
I just love the confirmation bias. Is everyone here so dogmatic they actually believe that folks in a very upscale SFH community loving having a bougie bagel shop on their block translates into a love for building some mixed income apartments and bodegas? Seriously?
Occam’s razor stipulation. In an well off SFH neighborhood, the folks living there would love to have a couple of upscale shops mixed in. Bagels. A “Green Market”. A “La Pasta” like in Wedgwood. Doesn’t mean they want the rest of your grab bag, and in fact would actively oppose the rest of your grab bag. Pretty obvious.
This article approaches “Billy Madison, ‘we are all dumber for having read this'” levels.
We’re supposed to believe that “The neighbors love it!” based solely on the opinion of the cashier at the store – and what else are they going to say?
Nowhere is there any mention of sampling neighborhood residents to ask what they actually think. And even if the neighborhood does love it, that only establishes that they love having a bagel shop on the corner… not a ‘fill-in-the-blank’ shop.
Perhaps there’s an assumption that the dozens of people lined up are ‘neighbors’ – but that’s a stretch. They could just as easily be ‘outsiders’ who piss off the neighbors by taking up all of ‘their’ parking.
Every corner lot citywide should be rezoned to allow apartments and/or businesses. This would make inroads into the SFR areas, create business opportunities, help with affordable housing and create walking communities. Such an easy fix but sadly it will not happen.
I live near the much-beloved Sunset Hill Green Market, located on the corner of 64th and 32nd Ave NW way out in the western edge of Ballard. It is an absolutely *amazing* neighborhood amenity: a great selection of all the things you might need in a pinch, a wine section that punches above its weight, and ridiculously lovely staff who know my family by name. Every neighborhood deserves businesses like this.
I warmly invite folks talking sh*t about neighborhood retail to decamp to the suburbs where they’ll be more comfortable, the rest of us can enjoy living in our 15-minute city.
“Seattle needs to […] create networks of neighborhoods”
Huh. I have heard Seattle referred to as a city of neighborhoods but it’s really a collection of car-dependent suburbs…Staten Island without Manhattan. The comments above make it pretty clear the residents don’t want to live in a city. They’re content to drive to everything, rather than see or experience life outside their car or full-electronic suburban home.
@Seattle Lurker: “neighborhoods,” “suburbs,” call it whatever you want, but it isn’t a bad thing that Seattle residents love where they live and want to be intentional about changes. Seattle would be so lucky to be as demographically and culturally diverse as suburbs like Bellevue or Renton TBH.
A lot of us Seattleites live where we live (and have lived for years if not decades) – if you don’t like it, nothing is stopping you from moving to Capitol Hill, the U-District, Lower Queen Anne, South Lake Union, or even Manhattan itself.
PS – I bet most Staten Island/Brooklyn/Bronx/Queens residents would give you a sound verbal (and possibly physical) pummeling if you said they weren’t New Yorkers to their faces – so on behalf of the supermajority of Seattle residents who don’t live in the high-density neighborhoods that meet with your approval please do feel free to take your smug urbanism and stick it where the sun doesn’t shine.
The bagel shop is not a corner store. It is a boutique business serving fetishists, or those whose time and income permits them to stand in line 25 deep for a bagel.
We had a corner store, in the business district proper. It stocked all that one might need, in a pinch. And beer. Within walking distance of the neighborhoods on both sides of East Madison. The owner(s) of the building engaged new property management–many mouths feed at that trough–and useful ground floor retail was shown the exit. That store and those people I miss.
I’d recommend interviewing the neighbors of Volunteer Park Cafe to find out how awesome it is living next to a commercial establishment in a residential zone. Maybe this bagel shop is able to pull it off, but most businesses will cause too much of a disturbance to be situated in a residential zone. We have areas zoned for mixed use – if you want a business below or next door to you – go live there!
Hey, did miss something here? Did Josh start a bagel shop? I know he didn’t, truth be told, but I’m not sure why he doesn’t. Maybe it’s time to make the world you want to live in, Mr. Feit, and not just write about it on the interwebs? Go buy a house in Spokane if you love bagels…. when you own property in a community, it changes everything… nothing like having skin in the game.
Coincidentally, I met a Mt. Bagel employee in a restaurant near the Alaska Junction; she was a server; many folks work two jobs to make rent. We discussed the Mt. Bagel zoning and noted the many former streetcar lines in Ballard with mixed use zoning.
Having lived next to a bodega for over ten years south of Seattle, I want nothing to do with them. The prices are simply too high and the quality too low. We need real stores in residential areas, not overglorified 7-11s.
lol, what part of NYC are you from? Bodega? Bwahahahaha! I lived in Seattle for 45 years and never heard the word until I moved to Nu Yawk. I think that since these “bodega’s” or, as we call them here, “convenience stores,” are owned by mostly non-white and immigrant families, I think I have good grounds for calling you out on your biases, if not overt xenophobia or racisim.
This one has been around for decades and has had several different owners. IIRC it was an Aldi’s at one point in time. Nice attempt at projection though.
I concur Josh! Got a link to Mt. Bagel?
Everybody loves a neighborhood bagel store; but a cannabis shop, gas station, or boozy establishment – not so much.
Yep – a bagel shop by the Arboritum ‘that the neighbors love’ (how many neighbors were interviewed????) is one thing – but one that sells mostly beer, cigarettes, and Lotto tickets is ‘blight,’ and doing anything to improve a ‘marginalized neighborhood’ is ‘gentrification.’