Is Seattle Going to Hell in a Handbasket?

It was a talent Norm Rice always had, the ability to talk like he had his head in a bucket of water. He could do a mean John F. Kennedy imitation. And the clincher, for the mayor of a city that fairly struts its environmental conscience, was when he told how the Seattle Mariners pick up trash tossed onto the field by New York fans and sort it for recycling. * Rice was named America’s funniest mayor in an HBO-sponsored contest last year. It was one of a season of dubious and substantial achievements for a city grown almost impatient with acclaim: a ranking as America’s most honest city, where nine out of 10 dropped wallets were returned; the first-ever Grammy Awards for two Seattle grunge rock bands; the lowest crime rates since 1984; a booming downtown back from the dead. Seattle swept into the new year, in the words of the Seattle Weekly, “twisting the tail of the cyberage.” * Seattle--the city that brought the world Starbucks coffee, youthful high-tech millionaires and a new pop culture of slacker angst--has been the 1990s ideal of urban America, a city of foggy inland waterways and postmodern coffee houses that became a magnet of cool for a nation that ran out of continent in its search for engaging new places. * So why is it that so many in Seattle are so worried? And why is the city, whose “Jetsons”-like Space Needle came to symbolize the reach of America’s Pacific shore into the 21st Century, having such a hard time projecting itself into the next millennium? There is a growing sense here, in a place already ranked as one of America’s most livable cities, that the whirling top of the ‘90s is about to spin smack into the realities of urban sprawl and creeping environmental decay. And nobody can quite figure out the best way to slow down. Indeed, the only thing Seattle agrees on, like a passenger in a doomed car, is that the accident is about to happen.

The air is still as clean as it looks--there was only one “unhealthful” day declared in the last five years. And the city is tied with Oakland for the best recycling program in the country, having increased its total recycled products by 496% over the last two decades. But other indicators of urban health are on the slide. Seattle’s traffic is the seventh worst in the nation--and approaching gridlock fast. It compares poorly with other cities in the quality of its drinking water, parks acreage and hazardous waste sites. In an environmental quality survey of 75 metropolitan areas by the World Resources Institute two years ago, Seattle ranked 65th.

The disquieting reality is that Seattle is in danger of becoming what in all the world it most loathes: Los Angeles.

With suburbs spreading out among the high-tech business campuses east of the city all the way to the Cascade Mountains, the Puget Sound region has seen its population grow 38% over the past 20 years, eating up 84% more of the undeveloped land and sending 135% more cars out onto the roads. The Greater Seattle region’s population is projected to grow again by half over the next two decades. “We need to make one fact absolutely clear,” declares Rice, one of the few black mayors of a mostly white city and a candidate for governor. “The lifestyles we are leading are simply not sustainable.”

The solutions Seattle finds to these problems--if it finds them--matter greatly. The challenge the city has set for itself--build an environmentally sustainable place to live that maintains the splendor of the outlying forests and farmlands while inviting explosive growth and a high-technology center for the next century--speaks to the success, or failure, of America’s promise on its last urban frontier. There is fear that if Seattle can’t do it, no one can.

“Seattle, perhaps more than any other metropolitan area in the U.S., has more control over how it all turns out,” says David Harrison, research consultant for the University of Washington’s Northwest Policy Center. “There are characteristics of Seattle in the ‘90s that give it a chance to figure it all out. It will make it all the more tragic if we don’t.”

At the vanishing point between its own progressive vision and the realities of a tax revolt over the last five years that has pulled the carpet out from under nearly all its grand plans--from a vast inner-city park to a simple levy to keep the schools running--Seattle is left with a Kingdome-size case of self-doubt. Even the Seahawks want to pack their bags for Los Angeles.

“There tends to be a gap between Seattle the idea and Seattle the reality,” says Alan Thein Durning, founder of Northwest Environment Watch. “In thinking about Seattle as a place in the mental geography of North America, it’s a rainy city full of virtuous people who sail all summer and ski all winter. In reality, of course, it’s a city like any other, full of traffic jams and pollution and crime. If I were a disinterested observer, I’d probably have to give an unoptimistic prediction. But I’m not. I’m Seattle-born, I have Seattle-born children, and I believe this is the greenest part of the richest society in history, and we’re going to turn things around.”

To realize that transformation, seattle is embarking on one of the most ambitious urban renewal efforts in the nation, a $4.7-billion package that includes a mass transit system, greenbelts, a new baseball stadium, symphony hall, library and other public projects. The metamorphosis is designed to ensure the city’s place over upstart Portland as the premier metropolis of the Pacific Northwest. But for that to work, the city that has always wanted mostly to be left alone will have to embrace the demon it fears most: large-scale, high-density growth--the kind most people moved to Seattle to get away from.

Rice has opened the city’s arms to dense construction in the heart of existing neighborhoods and established an urban growth boundary outside of which the area’s farms, forests and hills would be shielded from development. The key to Rice’s vision, adopted as part of a major new comprehensive plan by the City Council in 1994 and refined last year, is the urban village, a concept that would transform some of Seattle’s thriving old neighborhoods into commercial and recreational cores linked by greenbelts and clusters of cafes, shops and businesses along wide sidewalks--areas so intimate that residents would be able to walk to most destinations.

As envisioned, three-fourths of the city’s projected growth would occur in these evolving urban villages instead of creeping out along the woodsy fringe. Dense new clusters of mid-rise condos, small single-family units and tightly packed row houses would be dropped into the middle of existing neighborhoods. (Density in some designated urban villages would grow by 50% or more.) A quarter of all the new homes would be affordable to low- and moderate-income families in an effort to slow the suburban seep of blue-collar workers from the rapidly gentrifying central city. The nightmare commutes up I-5 to Boeing and to Microsoft and its high-tech spinoffs in the eastside suburbs would be eased by an aggressive program to champion clean new industries and other employment development in the central city--and not just in the crumbling warehouses around the port.

What Seattle says it wants is “sustainability,” though few are able to say exactly what that means. The idea is to build a city that doesn’t end up consuming its soul in order to grow. Environmental consciousness has always been a part of the Northwest municipal ethos; the lesson of the ‘90s has been that clean mountain vistas won’t save a city whose work force has to commute out of town every day, whose neighborhoods are increasingly Balkanized between well-paid professionals and the desperately poor. A major test of the city’s political will is a pending proposal to build a biopharmaceutical headquarters on prime harbor-view property downtown, a site the old Seattle--big on environment, short on sustainability--would likely have planted over as a park.

Seattle’s move to transform itself from a city with a downtown and residential districts to a community of urban villages has been long in coming. The hills and gullies that make it a test of ingenuity to drive from one end of town to the other have, over the years, given birth to a dozen or more independent neighborhoods, most with activist community councils and each with a distinctive flair, ranging from the elegant old homes of Queen Anne to funky Fremont, which not long ago erected a statue of Lenin at the entrance to its commercial district. Playing on this theme, the city has moved to decentralize, opening nearly a dozen neighborhood city halls and diverting the control of many municipal services to district offices. Now, city officials believe the best way to ease the transformation toward true urban villages is by getting the neighborhoods to plan for the transition themselves. A key element of the urban village plan is a $2-million grant to allow local neighborhood councils to hire their own consultants and write their own plans for accommodating growth.

Still, it’s a hard sell, even in a city that likes to think of itself as progressive. Growth inside the city could mean more traffic on already congested neighborhood streets. The payoff is that more of the rest of the region would be left alone--city streets would be busier, but the freeways would get a break. Seattleites would live cheek-by-jowl in a pleasant urban environment of parks, neighborhood groceries and cafes. In exchange, the plan offers the possibility of an untouched landscape of wilderness and farmlands outside the city to which they can escape on weekends.

For Rice, it’s all an exquisite political gamble. What happens if the suburban jurisdictions outside the city don’t hold up their end of the bargain, don’t turn away the land developers eager to pave the forest floor with cul-de-sacs and retail malls? At a time when Seattle’s suburbs already are demanding relief from the state’s 1990 Growth Management Act that mandated urban growth boundaries--what if, indeed.

Rice prescribes a heavy dose of collective responsibility and hopes the region will swallow it. “When we were putting our growth plan together, I said, ‘What is it that I like about this region?’ It’s the mountains, the clean water, those are the kinds of things that are really important. And if I want to still have those things, then I’m going to have to step up and say, ‘What’s my part?’ My part is to prevent the sprawl.”

The problem is getting the rest of the city to see what he sees. “Can you sell people on a vision? The only way to show them that it works is to show them how bad it can get, and no elected official would ever use that as a strategy.”

The battle over the 1994 comprehensive plan was bruising, and there were casualties. Then-City Council President Jim Street, the plan’s main proponent on the council, decided not to run again; planning director Gary Lawrence, architect of the urban village concept, resigned. And the plan, compromised in the political fight, likely won’t be sufficient to truly stop sprawl, Lawrence contends.

“If you look at existing trends ... it is reasonable to project a future that most people would say they don’t prefer,” he says. “Why don’t we choose to intervene? I’d be a very rich fellow if I knew the answer to that.”

The strongest opposition stews in West Seattle--a large blue-collar neighborhood that would get 4,800 new residents in four villages, some of them targeted at families with incomes as low as $10,000 a year. The neighborhood pushed a bill through the state Legislature to secede from Seattle, but it was vetoed by Gov. Mike Lowry. Then West Seattle leaders, backed by other neighborhoods, challenged the concept in administrative hearings that are still pending.

“I started realizing this was a plan to destroy our city, rather than help it,” West Seattle activist Charles Chong says, adding that the city would slash lot sizes and reduce off-street parking without improving the bus system, which is lauded for getting people from the suburbs to downtown but dismal in serving the neighborhoods during off-peak hours.

In Lawrence’s view, the debate reflects an unwillingness on the part of Seattleites to accept responsibility for fouling their own nest. The problem, he said, is always blamed on equity-rich Californians towing U-Hauls to the Northwest. “The question is whether we can admit it’s not those Californians moving in here who have created the traffic congestion. It’s us--through more affluence, more women in the work force and kids getting cars at the age of 16.”

“We’ve struggled and struggled about whether we even believe in planning,” says Street, who arrives for an interview pedaling his bike through the alleyways of downtown’s Pike Place Market. “And even today, I would say the majority of the City Council is at best skeptical. The average Seattleite is not happy with growth. But they’re also not happy with suburban sprawl. The fact is that regional transportation is bad and will get worse, and there really is very little, if anything, that we can do about it. There will be chaos on the highways.”

But Street is not that worried, and that is perhaps what distinguishes the Seattle mind-set. The freeway drivers, this attitude holds, deserve their own mess.

“Personally I don’t measure the quality of life of the region by the quality of the freeways,” Street says. “In fact, I kind of personally get some pleasure out of the constraints on the freeways. Because it’s going to make city living, as opposed to suburban living, more attractive.”

Making city living good is the cornerstone of seattle’s hopes for saving itself. And on no effort has more been staked than the proposed Seattle Commons, whose original plan called for an urban village and 60-acre park to be fashioned out of the car and furniture repair shops and other small businesses that populate Lake Union’s south shores.

It would be, in the eyes of more than 20,000 civic leaders and other residents who have signed on in support, Seattle’s answer to New York’s Central Park and San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park--a swath of green that would form the backdrop for a model urban village of 10,000 homes and 16,000 jobs. Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen kicked in a $20-million donation with a provision that city taxpayers come up with the rest of the money--now about $50 million--by June. “The Commons, in my mind, is the greatest urban opportunity that I’ve seen in Seattle for a long time,” Rice says. “If cities are to survive, we must recapture within our boundaries the open space, the idea that there can be quality life experiences for our residents, and they don’t always have to go to the end of the urban growth boundary to find it.” But opponents see urban engineers moving in to bulldoze a thriving neighborhood to fulfill a vision far beyond the grasp of a city that already is overcommitted.

“The notion that you can walk into a 500-acre area and transform it, I think that is incredibly grandiose, and harks back to a failed school of urban planning that we left behind in the ‘50s and ‘60s,” says musician Matthew Fox, a leading Commons opponent.

By a 10,000-vote margin, taxpayers seemed to agree. Both the Commons project and an accompanying plan for a $240.8-million retractable-roof baseball stadium went down to defeat at the polls last September, much as an ambitious $6.7-billion light rail project failed earlier in the year. Taxpayers stunned city officials again in February, rejecting not only a ballot measure to put new computers in the schools, but also the school district’s bread-and-butter basic operating tax. (The levy passed a month later on a second try.)

But Seattle officials refused to take no for an answer. The state Legislature and King County stepped in and authorized funding for a $320-million baseball stadium, $208.6 million of it raised through local taxes. And the city hopes to return to the ballot in May with a leaner 42-acre version of the Commons. A cheaper rail and bus transit measure is likely to be put before voters next fall totaling $3.7 billion. Assessments for a new library and repairs to the Seattle Kingdome totaling up to $250 million aren’t far behind. Is it any wonder that when Seahawks owner Ken Behring threatened to leave if he didn’t get a new football stadium, the response was a collective sigh of municipal despair?

Of the 1.5 million people in the Seattle metropolitan area, 350,000 came during the last two decades. Another 325,000 are expected to arrive by the year 2010. Some of the new immigrants might have believed the old song--a big lie, it turned out--about the bluest skies you’ve ever seen being in Seattle. A lot of them probably expected more. Seattle, for them, was going to be a place where you could open a corner espresso stand and turn it into an international coffee giant; where ideas rejected elsewhere were courted; where the offices emptied at noon on Fridays and the population headed for the hills, and where basic civility governed the discourse of the streets. Those already here have seen that very civility come under siege.

“One of the ultimate judges of quality of life,” says Charles R. Cross, editor of Seattle’s rock music semimonthly, the Rocket, “is if you’re in a parking space and need to pull out, is there a soul who will let you into traffic?”

This speaks less about traffic etiquette than it does about a fundamental sense among Seattleites that they are about to be taken over: by 0immigrants (Californians are feared the most) who don’t share the region’s fine-honed sense of environmental stewardship and sneer at the ubiquitous “pack it in, pack it out” signs on the edge of the wilderness. Most often, their loathing crystallizes around aggressive drivers in expensive cars.

“Many of the most respected people in the Seattle music scene are some of the poorest musicians ... they’re the ones who are judged to have done the most creative work. That’s the antithesis of L.A., where you’re judged by how much money you make, how much power you have, what kind of car you drive,” Cross says. “Here, the ultimate car to drive is the Volvo 240 wagon. If you drive a Land Rover, you’re not going to impress anybody.”

There is a similar sense of simplicity-as-religion in the passion for an-adromous fish, often served up fresh, filleted and wrapped in paper at the Pike Place Market, but just as often the subject of intense ecological warfare. There is an abiding belief that, as the salmon go, so goes the Northwest.

Much of Seattle’s urban growth debate has been fueled by whether these fish would be able to return to their home streams to spawn, even in the heart of the city. As far back as 1979, the north Seattle neighborhoods of Greenwood and Broadview lobbied the city for changes to restore salmon to Pipers Creek, a once-trickling stream that had become a channel for storm runoff. Neighborhood activists launched a campaign to teach residents what happened when they washed their cars or over-fertilized lawns near storm drains, and had students raise salmon fry to place at the top of the creek. In 1987, the first native chum salmon returned to Pipers Creek to spawn, and several other creeks have since been restored elsewhere in the city.

“Our motto is we all live downstream,” says Rich Gustav, head of the city office overseeing the salmon restoration programs. “Seeing salmon return to the heart of a built-up city like Seattle says that we still have a quality environment here.”

The city’s environment for leading-edge technologies is equally nurturing. When then-Caltech biologist Leroy Hood found himself running into a wall of can’t-be-done in Los Angeles while exploring integrating the science of biotechnology with education applications, Seattle saw Hood differently. The University of Washington in Seattle envisioned an opportunity to become a leader in biotechnology, the city a clean new industry that could be linked with the existing Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and meet goals for new jobs downtown.

Hood, whose work in developing automation tools for complex biological analysis could transform genetic research, was interested in opening a research department that would refine a technology that already appears to have applications for rheumatoid arthritis and AIDS. Microsoft’s Gates heard Hood give some guest lectures and invited him to dinner. It ended with Gates donating $12 million to set up a department of molecular biotechnology at the university headed by Hood. “We had outreach programs in L.A., but the idea of catalyzing a systemic change is just overwhelming,” says Hood. “It’s so big. Seattle has problems. It’s just that the problems seem more tractable. “

The emerging cyberculture’s imprint on Seattle became even more distinct late last year with the election of Microsoft millionaire Tina Podlodowski to the City Council. Podlodowski left her job as head of Microsoft’s worldwide education program to work for the Seattle Commons and run for the council. Now she sees it as her mission to bring tough corporate accountability to city government, as well as new civic opportunities through technology. She has encouraged the city’s transition from a bedroom community of the Boeing Corp.--and the waves of commuters bound every morning for the plant in Everett--to a mecca for small, especially high-tech, businesses in the city center.

“As a government, it means thinking about where the jobs are going to come from,” she says. “I don’t think it’s viable to just think about mega-companies coming in. It’s how well do you diversify your economy so you’re bringing in jobs in the tens, the hundreds and the thousands.”

The city’s responsibility, Podlodowski says, is to ensure that central Seattle remains a place where the brightest of the new technocrats will feel at home, even if it is more urban than they expected when they came here. “As we become more and more high-tech, what will keep people in a city is an area that’s very high touch,” she says. “Because it’s the people relationships that keep people in a city. It’s people that create the heart.”

“It’s not that Seattle is free of any of the exigencies of urban life,” says Rob Glaser, who left Microsoft to open his own software company in the heart of downtown Seattle. “But there’s more of a sense that it’s a community that tries to solve its problems. And its problems are of a scale where they don’t seem irresolvable.”

The transformation from prognostications of doom to the politics of possibility is most evident in Seattle’s arts community. The city’s fabled music scene is still heavy on the gloom of grunge, but this year it has been the wacky Presidents of the United States of America--singing songs about kitties and peaches--that have captured the national spotlight.

The good cheer is evident in cultural circles all over town. Already boasting the nation’s largest per-capita allocation of theaters, Seattle this year will see the completion of expansion of the Frye Art Museum, groundbreaking on a $109-million home for the Seattle Symphony and a $14.3-million expansion of the University of Washington’s Henry Art Gallery. The nationally known Seattle Repertory Theater is beginning work on a new 284-seat auditorium at a cost of $8.7 million.

Nevertheless, Seattle waits, a little wistfully, for the global gaze to pass--a “Garbo-city,” as Seattle writer Fred Moody explains it, “preferring to be respected, but also left alone.” Fat chance. Harrison, of the Northwest Policy Center, has accused Seattle of “ignoring its middle-aged spread and trying to shape the future as if a perpetual re-creation of the past were possible.” But even Harrison admits to sharing a profound wish for just such a future.

“Every minute of every day in our region, a woman is giving birth to a baby,” he announced at a recent regional seminar on accommodating the population boom. “My solution to regional growth is to find that woman, and stop her.”

For most who come to Seattle, the new reality is that the city they find won’t be the one they were looking for.

“The Ganges was probably once a great place to live,” says ex-City Council President Street. “It’s not so attractive anymore, now that everybody moved there. Nobody’s figured out a way to sort of freeze time.”

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styling by Cindy Whitehead