Spring District/Bel-Red Development News and Photos

I disagree that this is a planning failure. The big complaints that I'm seeing, and which I agree with, are mostly a function of consolidated ownership. The designs in the neighborhood are fine. They're not extraordinary, but they're fine. If Wright Rundstad had parceled this out and sold all the land--which is exactly what they did for the first 5 years--we would have a very different neighborhood. But market conditions changed, Shorenstein came is as an endlessly monied partner, and Meta showed up and said "we'll take all of it". That's not a planning problem or a political problem, it's a consequence of all the land being controlled by one owner and there's nothing any city government can do about that. And, lest we forget, Sound Transit is going to serve this area and many people will get there using the light rail. They also facilitated a great connection to the Eastrail, which in a couple years will be a seamless connection throughout most of the eastside. So yeah, it's a boring office park, but it's far from a planning failure.

I don't remember hearing about this project but it's quite big. It backs up onto the YMCA property and it isn't actually as lush as this rendering would have one believe.

Another big master planned development coming for Spring District. The article notes that the Wright family is involved, along with a couple of other parties. They're proposing 10 buildings in a mix of office/lab in about 240k SF, and mixed use residential with about 930 units. I included a screen grab of the giant block, for additional context.

The map provided in the article is not the correct site. It's actually the current Safeway bottling plant site.
Per the press release "The buyer was Alco Spring District LLC, associated with Alco.... Alco often holds properties for developers, including but not exclusively SRM Development, then sells them back after permits are obtained."
Let's hope this is true and SRM shows up with a big residential plan. Whatever they do, Safeway will need to move their operations somewhere else so I'm sure whatever happens is a couple years away. Still, progress!