As Mayor Bruce Harrell evaluates differents to town’s stalled 2019 Fort Lawton redevelopment plan, there is a chance to each develop new inexperienced house and create inexpensive housing. Town ought to seize this second to assist extra folks sooner and improve Discovery Park for generations to return.
When the U.S. army vacated most of Fort Lawton in 1972, Discovery Park was born. A 34-acre parcel stays, comprising the deserted remnants of the Fort Lawton Military Reserve Heart. This house is nestled between two essential biodiverse greenbelts: Discovery Park and Kiwanis Ravine. It’s additionally the place town’s 2019 plan proposes 238 models of inexpensive housing.
Practically 5 years later, the mission has not damaged floor, due to skyrocketing prices and a considerably flawed timeline. After a few extensions, the U.S. Division of Housing and City Growth has given town a Dec. 27 deadline to answer questions across the software. Properly, the mayor has commissioned a significant reassessment of the Fort Lawton plan.
Nonetheless, with Seattle’s affordability and homelessness crises deepening every day, households want options now.
Redirecting cash from the Fort Lawton plan might home extra folks in a shorter timespan. Simply have a look at the numbers. Town’s 2019 plan would supply just one.46 inexpensive housing models per $1 million spent. In distinction, Lake Metropolis’s Tony Lee constructing, with 69 models, produced 3.05 inexpensive housing models per $1 million.
Certainly, the prices to construct at Fort Lawton are extraordinary. Since 2019, the plan’s finances has ballooned from $90 million to $162 million, with nearly three-quarters overlaying infrastructure alone. To make this parcel inhabitable, town would want to spend $122 million simply on stormwater administration, roads, water, sewage and energy strains.
Some say merely constructing extra housing at Fort Lawton would decrease the hovering per-unit price. Nonetheless, this might solely drive up the mission’s total price and require further approvals from HUD, additional delaying an already protracted public course of.
Pals of Discovery Park proposes a greater path ahead. Our proposal integrates the complete 34-acre parcel into the park. We pledge to lift cash to responsibly demolish and reforest the Fort Lawton Military Reserve Heart. Naturalizing the land could be far less expensive than costly, ongoing infrastructure upkeep.
Discovery Park is the Emerald Metropolis’s crown jewel, a pure sanctuary that pulls greater than 1,000,000 guests annually. A very regional park, it serves people from all walks of life throughout Seattle. With our metropolis’s inhabitants projected to surpass 1 million by 2044, we should develop equitable alternatives to attach with nature.
Extra inexperienced house at Discovery Park is best for everyone. Wildlife might extra simply journey between the park and neighboring Kiwanis Ravine. As a substitute of flooding close by homes, rainwater would percolate by means of the soil. Greater than 40 timber on the chopping block would even be preserved — the identical “distinctive and important” timber the Metropolis Council voted to guard by passing the City Forest Safety Ordinance.
Reforesting previous Fort Lawton can be a once-in-a-generation alternative so as to add almost 21 new acres to Seattle’s declining tree cover, transferring us nearer to town’s aim of 30% citywide cover cowl by 2037. Bushes present important cooling and provides folks some respite from a quickly altering local weather — a future that features greater wildfires, longer smoke emergencies, elevated flooding and extra species extinction. Though Seattle has many choices for creating extra housing, alternatives to develop our inexperienced areas are exceedingly uncommon.
The Discovery Park Grasp Plan contains this admonishment: “There should be a deep dedication to the idea that there isn’t any extra helpful use of this website than as open house.”
As town weighs the place to go subsequent, we hope the mayor will select a greater path for Discovery Park and Seattle’s folks.
