For the past year, I have been meeting with a group, mostly architects and planners led by John Savo at the Seattle architecture firm NBBJ, mulling ideas about what to do about our ailing downtown Seattle. Time to float a few of the better ideas.
We began with the simple idea of getting all the buses off Third Avenue, which has gradually become a major busway and a blightway. Third Avenue is a flat avenue tying together Pioneer Square at the south end and Seattle Center at the north terminus. It’s wide and at the center of our downtown. It is lined with some fine historic buildings like the Seattle Tower that could be converted into housing and other active uses.
Metro Transit stubbornly needs this important bus corridor, key to its county-wide system of buses, and Metro is an immovable political juggernaut. Our first thought was to create a northwest couplet on Second and Fourth Avenues, already each one-way. But spreading the bus blight to other downtown north-south streets would also be stoutly resisted.
Then along came a solution, suggested by Salone Habibuddin, the new director of Real Estate Development for the UW including the Metro Tract, and this configuration seems more plausible. Turn Third Avenue (now a four-lane busway) into a two-lane busway, widen the sidewalks and let some other vehicles use Third, and then turn either Second or Fourth Avenues into the other part of the couplet — two bus lanes in the opposite direction. (The lane not taken is converted into a greenway.) That half-loaf compromise might bring along Metro.
Another solution we discussed was intercepting the downtown buses at a north and south terminal, and having a shuttle (likely free) that could take people to downtown destinations. This idea, which may ripen as traffic intensifies, ran into a Metro dogma that people don’t like transfers and would flee the buses.
Still another idea is to piecemeal Third Avenue, sending the loud and stinky buses around certain sections. There are two promising areas. One is the area just south of Seattle Center, creating a grand entrance through the Science Center and extending the greenery of the Center a few blocks south on Third Avenue, making that part of Third Avenue bus-free.
The other area of opportunity is at the south end Third Avenue around the Government Center, where there is a developer, Greg Smith of Urban Visions. King County properties are in play (the ugly admin building is empty, and the rundown King County Jail should be moved). Add to those the the embarrassing, since-2005 hole in the ground at Third and Cherry, the Bosa site.
At the heart of downtown is the Metropolitan Tract, original site of the University of Washington, which is now looking (yet again) at how to improve its aging buildings such as the Financial Center, built in 1972, and at opportunities for expansion (such as the post office facility along Third Ave., across from Benaroya Hall). The idea would be to expand the UW footprint downtown. There used to be a branch of the University Book Store in the Tract, and the UW Press used to occupy the Skinner Building before moving to Safeco Tower in the University District.
Re-Universitizing the Metropolitan Tract would be attractive for people living and getting to downtown, and many universities such as Portland State and Arizona State realize the advantages of locating downtown for extension classes, health clinics, cultural offerings, faculty housing, and industry incubators. Think of major cities (Toronto, Chicago, Boston, New York, Montreal, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Atlanta, London, Nashville, Los Angeles) that have thriving university centers as part of the downtown urban texture.
Downtown badly needs a boost for culture, shopping, visitors, and residents, and this 10-acre site, wholly controlled by the University of Washington, would seem to be a natural stimulant.
My third idea is thinking of downtown as several separate neighborhoods, each distinctively different and having a unique character. There is Seattle Center and residential Belltown, the cultural district (SAM, Benaroya, ACT, the Paramount and 5th Ave. Theatre), the Market/Waterfront, Pioneer Square, The University Tract, 5th Avenue shops, the handsome old financial center on Second Ave, Amazonia, the Chinatown International District, the stadiums.
Major cities develop distinct neighborhoods like Greenwich Village and Georgetown and Bloomsbury that are desirable in themselves and attractions for downtown exploring. Planners naturally think of connecting these areas by green and walkable streets, but I would suggest developing their distinctive flavors first (by decentralizing?) and letting the streetscape and transit take care of the connections.
In short, de-bus Third Avenue, universitize the University Tract, and develop individual character for downtown neighborhoods. Would it were so easy! Downtown has become a dumping ground, lacks leading developers like Unico and Jon Runstad, the city is averse to planning, and spending money on downtown is politically demagnetized.
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They should build a bus tunnel under Third Avenue to get them off that arterial. Oh wait . . . nevermind.
Haven’t been “downtown” for several years.
The issue is homelessness and drugs.
Third Avenue is their home.
Re-routing buses? The homeless, druggers, and dope dealers will also reroute.
Downtown Seattle is not a welcoming environment for our family and rerouting the buses won’t make it so.
You live in Edmonds and do not take busses. The current system works fairly well except for the new info signs at bus stops that are difficult to read unless you are right under them and often have inaccurate information.
The major problems on 3rd Ave have always been drug use/dealing, and homelessness/mental illness. The city & county have failed to address these properly.
The South Lake Union Streetcar and Waterfront LIDs were imposed and have done nothing for property values. They have caused financial distress for residents and businesses (triple net leases) including not for profits.
100,000+ people live downtown now – why not ask us what we think?
Seems the problem largely lays with two, somewhat intractable governments: Metro and UW. What kind of pressure can we put on the King County Council and KC Executive, which control Metro, to get them to make changes? It seems KC has a couple of areas in Seattle’s downtown corridor that cause so many problems. And yet the KC Council constantly get free passes to re-election.
Naysayers have rushed to comment. What about others? I need time to get a map — or make one, perhaps sketch one, and do some thinking or at least some speculating about these ideas. It seems to me that rather than rejecting these suggestions out of hand, considering their possibilities is in order now. What about some imagination? Or is that old-fashioned now? That’s an honest question, not a cynical one.
It is plain to see that turning Third Avenue into a bus corridor was a disastrous choice, which needs to be undone. Increasing the presence of the UW downtown sounds like a good idea. But the third proposal, “developing individual character for downtown neighborhoods,” is completely unclear to me. How is that supposed to happen? How is action from above by the city rather than from below by the people who live and work in the respective neighborhoods supposed to develop their individual characters?
The Third Avenue considerations echo pieces of what the Downtown Seattle Association produced in 2019: https://cdn.downtownseattle.org/files/advocacy/dsa-third-avenue-vision-booklet.pdf
ULI produced a subsequent report in 2024: https://ulidigitalmarketing.blob.core.windows.net/ulidcnc/sites/12/2024/04/ULI-Third-Avenue-Forum-Report.pdf
These are some good ideas — we need to make good neighborhoods in their own right to perpetuate…good neighborhoods, and reduce the unsavory activities outside. Removal of blight alone does not make a vibrant place.
On the micro-hood idea, yes, but it’s got to be authentic, not some dreamed up messaging pitch. Belltown and Pioneer Square have enough history and identity, but the other parts of downtown need some softening down to human scale — the skyscraper canyons that are ghost towns by 5pm create so much opportunity for antisocial behavior.
I won’t support a single “cool new idea” until we act to enforce laws and hold criminals accountable. Until then, anything we do is merely dehydrating into the wind, as they say.
My kids are afraid to go to downtown Seattle not because of busses. They afraid of filthy mentally sick people who yell, urinate and defecate in the middle of the street. Go ask people who actually live there what they like and don’t like.
The original transit tunnel was for buses and the City was promised that there would be no more buses on Third Ave. That didn’t last long. Metro needs a large Transit Police force and fully enforce a code of conduct, start there.
The city needs to decide which public transportation system they want to invest in: the Streetcar or Monorail. Once they make a decision then expand upon it. Have it connect South Lake Union, Seattle Center, Westlake Center, the Waterfront and the Stadium District. The city has invested heavily in all and all receive large number of visitors so it makes sense for those areas to be connected. A light rail station should also be at South Lake Union considering the biotech community there.
Downtown could also use a Times Square type of hub. Something to serve as an entertainment location and tourist destination. Seattle has several locations that can make that claim but were one able to stand out would be a huge step towards revitalizing downtown.
There are a lot of negative comments here about the state of downtown and I agree with most of them, but I am encouraged by the idea of citizens trying to image a better downtown. It reminds me of the Seattle Weekly’s “Gang of Five” architects in the 1980s, also led by David Brewster.
Healthy, beautiful cities do not happen by accident. They are the result of talented people with imaginations defining compelling visions for a city, and then working/fighting consistently for decades to make those visions real. Great cities have strong urban planning departments to do this. The City of Seattle has never had a strong planning department or urban design visions, so the work is left to us citizens to create the visions and force resistant public bureaucracies to implement them.
Brewster replies:
Many commenters say that until the streets are safe downtown, nothing else will work. The urbanists reply, unconvincingly, that throngs of people on the street will supress crime and homeless, citing Jane Jacobs’ “eyes on the street.” I agree with Chris Kirk that the city “has never had a strong planning department,” so maybe the next mayor could start with that step. A strong planner would cut through many of these blockages and rally public support behind some visionary planning. But the city hall politicians, and allied developers, don’t want plans that restrict their options; they want “deals.” Another problem is that downtown has been demonized as taking money away from neighborhoods and the zone of rich folks, scaring politicians off from downtown plans.
Maybe Seattle has become plan-averse, unlike in the early days of dreaming big for the Metropolitan Tract (as a West Coast Rockefeller Center), the Bogue Plan, and the Olmsteds plan?
Toilets. Downtown needs public restrooms. Seems like low to mid hanging fruit for downtown’s rejuvenation.
Are cities anywhere around here engaged in big remakes? I’m guessing the waterfront was Seattle’s last gasp on that front, and that visionary planning doesn’t really have a place in cities these days. Some of the reasons you can see in the waterfront, bloated by all the interests that had to be served. There’s the grip that real estate developers have on city hall, which isn’t necessarily inimical to big plans but pulls the focus way off. There’s the general decline of the city as an industrial / commercial / retail center. Plans need to be more band-aid level.
I think the long term leadership and vision that we used to see from *local* business owners, church communities and other civic institutions is gone. The current business thinking looks at past data and deals, what made for the best “ROI” and is shy to think expansively or creatively. Once again, business analysts have ruined the world.