Transit or Greenways? Have we got Our Priorities Backwards?

If you take too long to do something, the world can pass you by. That is what’s happening on the Eastside, where complete light rail service between Redmond and Seattle will probably not start until two years from now. Also, the area has the highest work-from-home rate in the United States, which undercuts demand for housing in transit-oriented development (“TOD”) and revitalization of the surrounding commercial areas.

In similar places in the U.S., demand for TOD has fallen by half since the pandemic. Meanwhile, cities that created new greenways (GOD) are seeing that huge numbers of people want to live and work nearby. Ironically, Seattle was a pioneer in greenway-oriented development 120 years ago, creating beloved, leafy neighborhoods such as Montlake, Ravenna, Mount Baker, and Madrona. It’s time to re-learn some lessons about where and how people want to live.

The New Transit Barrio

Cities pursue transit-related development for three basic reasons. The first is to relieve roadway congestion, the second is environmental (such as encouraging transit use), and the third is to keep new housing away from single-family neighborhoods. The problem with TOD is that the tradeoff for a shorter commute often means living in awful surroundings, such as along Aurora Blvd. With people going into work less often, there’s less reason to make that sacrifice of amenities.

Recently I took the light rail train north from downtown Seattle to Mountlake Terrace to see what the new apartments there are like. I found three big new buildings in a hollow next to the freeway, each about the length of one and a half downtown city blocks.  To get there I walked about ten minutes south from the station along a new road. I found myself in an enclave cut off from surrounding neighborhoods. True, these buildings have ground floor retail space lining a “walkable” main street with ground floor shops, but the only tenants there were a Montessori school and a pizza parlor. The other store spaces are likely to stay empty because the area is cut off from its surroundings and nearby residents are unlikely to go there. 

The Experience Elsewhere

Cities are not only counting on transit-oriented development to provide more housing, but to revitalize old commercial corridors like Aurora and International Blvd. in Tukwila.  The question is why, other than the savings in commute time, anyone would want to live there.  These corridors were built for the automobile. The shopping along them is in strip malls, mostly fast-food stores with drive-throughs and big supermarkets surrounded by acres of parking. There’s usually not a park or green space in sight. When there are bikeways, like the conversion of an old interurban line in Shoreline between 175th and 185th, these are barren affairs right next to the roadways. WSDOT has stepped in some places with “beautification,” but more often than not this consists of landscaped medians along with five or more travel and turn lanes.

The planning assumption for TOD seems to be that large masses of people will want to live near the stops for light rail and bus rapid transit and that the number of people living in these areas will put more people on the street and in neighborhood coffee shops. Take, for example, this quote from a 2018 consultant’s report on the market demand for housing in Wilburton, the station area immediately east of I-405 near downtown Bellevue: “The addition of East Link light rail, with one stop in the station area and three more within a 10-minute walk shed, will support the transformation of the study area into an urban walkable environment.”

But even if a supermarket is a ten-minute walk away, you will probably drive there, since the experience of walking there is unpleasant. Next, think about Seattle’s Interbay area and what it would be like to walk to the Whole Foods on 15th Ave. W. Biking there would be even more unpleasant.

In Bel-Red and Overlake, it’s been the ability to bike, walk, or drive to nearby employers like Microsoft and Amazon that has driven apartment construction. The presence of those big-name companies also makes it possible to get institutional financing, regardless of the quality of the surroundings or the presence of light rail. Since 2014, there have been about 5,050 units built in this area, but all but about 650 of those units opened before 2022, and 3,885 of those units are located within a ten-minute walk of the Microsoft campus. 

The one project that recently opened near a light rail station is now advertising eight weeks of discounted rent, a sign of soft demand. Notably, neither “walking” nor “biking” appears on its website, and there are no photos of its surroundings. The one park in the area is a 17-minute walk away.

In Search of What’s Working

The big problem nationwide is that there are dozens, if not hundreds, of urban plans for transforming commercial corridors like Aurora, Bel Red, and Overlake into mixed-use places to live, work, and shop, but that only a handful of those plans have been realized.  One issue is that while states mandate planning for new housing, there’s usually little “tooth” in such mandates to ensure these plans are effective and transformative.

To find out what is working and where, urban designer Greg Tung and I looked at three areas nationwide where there has been strong intent to create real change. Each of us has about 45 years of experience in urban revitalization. Greg was responsible for the master plan that remade downtown Bothell and I engineered the turnaround of Kenmore Village, a town center project in the neighboring city to the west.

One place we looked at closely is Tysons, VA, a place profiled in Joel Garreaus’s 1991 book, Edge Cities, about suburban mixed-use centers that had become alternatives to traditional center city downtown. Tysons Corner has the largest mall in the Washington, DC area, and during the 1980s to early 2000s it boomed with shopping centers, office towers, and hotels.  By the mid 2000s, however, the handwriting was on the wall: young professionals wanted to live and work in the city and corporations were following them there. 

A group of concerned commercial property owners in Tysons banded together and lobbied for the construction of four stations on a new Metro line running through the area.  Those opened in 2014 and for a time their strategy worked, with thousands of new apartments opening each year. 

That strategy worked until Covid, when everyone was going into work each day and traffic in the DC area was worse than ever. Like Bellevue and Redmond, many people in this area of DC work in tech and finance, and continued to work from home after Covid.  In the last three years,  average annual residential absorption in Tysons has fallen by half.  Transit wasn’t enough to get them to move to an overwhelming commercial area. There is a plan to add parks and trails to the area, but very little of that plan has been realized.  

Meanwhile, Atlanta has been kind of an LA-in-the-making for the last 40 years, and yet it has recently begun to lure people with greenway-oriented development. In 1999 an architectural student proposed turning an old rail line that circles the city, called the “Beltline,” into a 22-mile long circuit with trails and transit and that idea was so popular that within six years the region incorporated an entity with taxing powers to carry it out.  In the last 15 years that authority has created trails along all but six miles of the Beltline, and those remaining miles should be done by the Olympics in 2030. 

One of the major brokerage houses in Atlanta calls the Beltline conversion the most transformative action in the last 50 years.  The project has attracted $8.5 billion of new development, most of that residential. Prestigious employers like Nike, Microsoft, and McKinsey have moved their offices near the Beltline, even though there is no MARTA stop nearby.  Interestingly, there is still no transit along the Beltline, and its success as a place to walk and bike has increased opposition to building that transit because people are not sure they will use it and they don’t want to lose the green in the greenway.

The same kind of greenway-oriented development is happening in Emeryville, CA, an old industrial city wedged in between Oakland and Berkeley.  There the city government has turned an old north-south rail spur into the “Emeryville Greenway,” and the walk score for the whole city ranks it a “walker’s paradise” with almost every errand doable on foot.  

Importantly in Emeryville that greenway has not only stimulated the conversion of larger old warehouses into bio tech labs but fostered the redevelopment of small lots on the side streets into owner-occupied townhouses.  Those smaller projects are not big enough to have their own internal amenities, so proximity to the greenway is a key marketing feature, especially the ability to bike safely to one of the East Bay’s top grocery stores, the Berkeley Bowl.

Emeryville does not have a BART station.  Instead, commercial property owners have banded together and created a local improvement district that provides frequent shuttle service to the nearest station in Oakland.  The city has been aggressive about creating new parks and that, together with a robust market for bio tech space, has made this an interesting and vital place both to live and work.  Today Emeryville is one of the few cities in California meeting its targets for new housing. 

Avoiding Fortress-Like Development In Eastside Commercial Corridors

The challenge in Puget Sound is that most of these commercial corridors are not very livable. When they do develop there, developers are creating inward-focused, fortress-like developments. Even if people do take transit to work, they are likely to drive to where they dine out or work out.  That lack of livability is an even bigger issue when people are spending so many days a week at home.

The main problem is a lack of special-area planning that knits individual developments together with local neighborhood “main streets” and greenways through these areas. Greenways provide an alternative to walking or biking along busy, noisy, and ugly arterials.  The Springs District in East Bellevue is inwardly focused, and when the large Coca Cola bottling plant across 124th develops, it, too, will probably be fortress-like.  Farther east on the former Group Health site in Overlake, the new Esterra Park project is similarly detached from its surroundings. 

And yet both Bel Red and Overlake could be interesting places to live, for there is already a plethora of activities in this area.  My survey this last spring counted 11 religious and cultural centers there, 12 chess, STEM, and other private schools, and 38 gyms, yoga studios, and martial arts centers.  

Most of those activities are in strip centers, old warehouses, and incubator office parks, and you would be the profound exception if you walked or biked to one of them. Without more place-making, especially greenways and green spaces, this is likely to become an area where people may take the train to work at Microsoft or in downtown Bellevue, and then drive out to shop, work out, or dine out when they do get home. 

Rebuilding for How We Live Today

We need redevelopment that reflects how we live and work today, not 50 years ago, for our old approaches to planning, including transit-oriented development, assume that we separate our days between home and work, and for many people on many days, that is no longer true. One third of the workforce in Bellevue doesn’t regularly go to work, and their days may include an early-morning Zoom call, biking the kids to school, working from the neighborhood coffee house, working out in mid-afternoon, getting take-out, and working from mid-evening on, with all of these activities within a mile of one another.  

We need green walkable and bikeable connections that allow people to do all of their errands without a car – just as they are now doing along the Atlanta Beltline and the Emeryville Greenway. 

Resurrecting 120-Year-Old Principles

Fortunately, we have models for this here in Puget Sound, not only in Ballard and at University Village along the Burke Gilman Trail, but in the greenways, parks, and neighborhoods envisioned 120 years ago in the Olmsted Brothers “Comprehensive Plan for Parks and Parkways.”  That plan created some of this region’s most beloved places, including Lake Washington, Interlaken, and Ravenna Blvds; the Arboretum, Green Lake and Seward Park; and neighborhoods such as Madrona, Madison Valley, and Montlake.   One of the best things we can say about these green spaces is that teens go there.

Three fundamental principles made this plan great.  The first was respect for native topography and woodlands, the second was creating landscaped corridors of green that allowed people to move through the city under a canopy of green, and the third was routing the greenways so that many homes as possible would be within a half-mile walk.

Imagine if we had a plan like this today to refit places like Bel Red and Overlake, not only to create walkable and bikeable routes, but to bring back the green that was once here in the native rain forest.  Yes, there would still be a lot of ugliness, but there would also be places for people to get away from the car and out of their cars.

This will require several changes in our city planning.  The first is for cities to start thinking like master developers who not only want to redevelop the big sites but the small ones as well, and for that they will need shared amenities.  The second change is to not only plan those amenities, but finance and build them as well.  Cities will say they do not have the money to do that, but there are creative ways to finance these improvements, especially in a region as prosperous as ours.  

The major impediment is not a lack of vision but taking action to create great places. For that we need to be a lot more like Atlanta and Emeryville.