Even if you haven't been to Vancouver lately, you may have seen it in countless 1990s movies and TV shows, many of them fictionally set in Seattle. It's remained a thoroughly walkable central city, with several sub-districts. If it's not quite a 24/7 city, it's at least an 18/6 city.
In the commercial core, stately old buildings (the Bay department store, Hotel Vancouver) alternate with modern, postmodern and neomodern monuments-and with cheap hotels, working-class bars and strip clubs. One of downtown's busiest streets, Granville, was long ago dedicated for the exclusive use of buses and pedestrians.
Just beyond the commercial core in one direction lies the residential West End. Pre-World War II brick apartments sit alongside tall, thin, gleaming condo towers. These residents are served by neighborhood schools and churches, as well as stores and restaurants.
Old streetcar-fed retail streets have seamlessly become modern bus-fed retail streets, where hundreds of big and small merchants sell both the necessities and the luxuries. By day, joggers and strollers intermingle with shoppers and tourists. By night, the clienteles of fine restaurants and rowdy sports bars share the sidewalks with quasi-legal pot purveyors and legal streetwalkers.
To the south, the stoic old warehouses around Yale Street are becoming offices, residences, and, yes, neighborhood shops.
To the east, around and beyond a huge bustling Chinatown, there's still a lot of affordable (albeit often rundown) rental housing. But that's not what causes Seattle city planners to drool.
No, Seattle planners look north and see thousands of affluent, high-spending residents living in town instead of commuting from the 'burbs.
Can greater downtown Seattle become more like greater downtown Vancouver? Mayor Greg Nickels and city Councilmember Peter Steinbrueck would like to make it so, though they differ in how it's to be done.
Nickels wants to amend the current limits on building heights in many corners of Seattle, including Broadway and Belltown, and to plough the increased tax revenues from these taller, thinner new buildings into schools and other amenities to attract more downtown residents.
That wouldn't be enough, according to Vancouver civic planners Larry Beasley and Ray Spaxman, hired as consultants by the Seattle City Council at Steinbrueck's recommendation. At a council hearing in early August, Beasley and Spaxman said a vibrant urban core needs more than just a few giveaways to developers.
They're right, of course.
Infinite big and small details go into the care and feeding of a prosperous live-work downtown. There's transportation (even before Vancouver had its SkyTrain light rail, it had taken private cars off of Granville). There's neighborhood infrastructure (Vancouver's West End has always had supermarkets and variety stores, not just trendy bars). There's plain ol' geography (Seattle's hills, not to mention the freeway bisecting central downtown from First Hill and Capitol Hill, help to make the pedestrian lifestyle more problematic).
But there's one huge thing Vancouver's got that Seattle hasn't-a national government run by sane people. People who aren't whored out to the highway and construction lobbies. People who give a darn about preserving urban vitality and limiting suburban sprawl. People who believe in public transportation, in affordable health care, and in quality of life.
Seattle's as likely to get that as it is to get legal pot and streetwalkers.
Clark Humphrey's column appears in the first issue of each month. He can be reached at editor@capitolhilltimes.com.
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