Spring District/Bel-Red Development News and Photos

I think the city is trying to make the Sturtavent Creek into something resembling a natural area or park. I know they bought some under utilized industrial land a few years ago for that purpose. But I'm not aware of any more formal park or plaza space.

Would like to see higher density than that but I'll take 80 townhouses over underutilized light industrial land anyday.

Big1 and Northup Way Mixed Use (Holland Partner Group) are both under construction. That's a combined ~575 units. I think SummerHill Bel-red is close to starting as well, which is another 250. 825 units isn't enough to completely re-shape the neighborhood but it's definitely going to make a dent. The additional road work the city is requiring in there is really onerous and it has kept a lot of developers out. Hard to get excited about losing land and spending potentially millions in street improvements that the city doesn't want to pay for.

I don't think the Pine Forest owner had any development experience so my guess is they're offering the parcels behind the scenes with brokers shopping them around. They have a revenue-producing building there now so not a huge rush to sell. It's just a matter of time though.

That's literally all I wanted for Battery St. where the tunnel used to be. Just put a nice 10' wide planting strip with some big trees on each side of the street and have a 20' drive aisle in the middle, add in some loading zones here and there. Nope. 40' of pavement with parking on both sides and no landscape at all. Disappointing performance from SDOT/WSDOT as usual.

It's Pulte homes. They're hardly known for great design.

RainCitySubie said:

Do any of the Facebook buildings have plans for 1st floor retail?

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Nope. They're often criticized for this in their CA offices because they do so much private dining in their buildings but in this case I think you're absolutely right about the brewery. Totally captured market.

And light metal framing, which is unusual. Give it 5 years and it will be totally transformed.

With all this going on in the Spring District, I have to imagine the Pine Forest properties will get the residential blocks going soon. They have two or three buildings of residential in their plans. With like 5,000 Facebook employees across the street I can't imagine they would have any trouble finding a residential development partner.

nichansen01 said:

are there no more apartments planned for the spring district itself? all offices from now on?

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Unfortunately, yes. There's one more block for a hotel but the rest is offices.

The real winners here are whoever owns the SummerHill group. They bought the property in March for $12.3m, after probably putting in $2m in design and permitting costs over about 18 months, and sold it for $17.9m. I'm no math whiz but that seems like a pretty good margin.

apardoe said:

And the old Bellevue commercial landowners are complaining on NextDoor about the council breaking their promises by letting downtown grow east of 405.

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Ha, the city rezoned this part of the city like 10 years ago and nothing started happening until 2-3 years ago. There are a lot of cheaper old commercial spaces over there so I'm sympathetic to them not wanting to be priced out but it's not like this is unexpected.

Koz is not known for their exciting designs but you can be sure it will be an efficient floor plan.