Mayor Jenny Durkan announced today that the city will sell the “Mercer Megablock” property—three parcels in South Lake Union totaling just under three acres—to Alexandria Real Estate for a total of $143 million. (I was first to report that the city had chosen Alexandria as the buyer last month.) The sale of the property, one of the largest undeveloped properties in South Lake Union, will net $78 million for various affordable housing uses (including both low-income and middle-income housing); pay back several loans the city took out against the future sale of the property; and provide $5 million for unspecified homelessness-related programs—including, perhaps, the restructure of the city and county’s homelessness response systems into one regional agency.
The $143 million price tag includes a $38 million “discount” in exchange for Alexandria’s guarantee to provide affordable housing; the price without affordable housing would have been just over $171 million. “It’s a new benchmark number in terms of price for square foot” on the portion of the property Alexandria plans to develop, Steven Shain, from the city budget office, told reporters during a briefing on the plan last week. “I think we did a great job negotiating. … I don’t want to characterize in the press that they’re overpaying [but] they are going way above to make sure that they won this project.”
During last week’s briefing, Mayor Jenny Durkan called the deal “one of the most consequential property deals the city of Seattle has ever done. … I think it will be one of those things that people look back and say, that really was a generational opportunity for the city of Seattle and they were able to seize it and make our city better because of it.”
Here’s a detailed look at what the project will look like and where the money from the sale will go.
What will be included on site:
The project will primarily be a life-sciences campus like the ones Alexandria has already developed in cities like San Francisco, San Diego, and in South Lake Union—”creating … hundreds of new jobs, if not thousands of new jobs, that will lead to our ability to be the city that cures cancer and other things like that,” Durkan said.
In addition to commercial space, the project will include a community center of up to 30,000 square feet, according to Shain, at no rent to the city, and will a single, large building (up to 12 stories tall) combining 175 units of low-income housing—the minimum number the city asked for in its original request for proposals—with about 38 moderate-income units built under the city’s Multifamily Tax Exemption (MFTE) program, which grants developers a property tax break if they keep units affordable to moderate-income households for 12 years. (City officials who briefed reporters on the plan last week said the developer could build as many as 190 units in addition to the affordable ones, but has not committed to a specific number, which will determine the exact number of MFTE units).
The affordable units, according to Shain , would be distributed throughout the same building as the market-rate apartments—”there wouldn’t be two separate doors”—and would be available to people making less than 60 percent of the Seattle area median income, or about $45,600 for a single person. The new units would mostly be studios and one-bedrooms, not the family-sized units that are most lacking in Seattle, particularly in the downtown core.
Alexandria would also be responsible for building two blocks of protected bike lane on Mercer St. and to open a pedestrian path through the campus on the block between Mercer and Roy. The company has agreed to pay for pay for environmental remediation on the site, which has been the site of a dry cleaner and a gas station, among other things; Shain said the cost would probably be a “significant eight-figure number.” Continue reading “Mercer Megablock Sells to Real Estate Equity Firm for $143 Million”