Zoning is all about stability. Nobody will pay big bucks for a McMansion if they think the zoning changes will suddenly allow condos to be built next door. Companies won’t invest in a factory (or any business) if they don’t have faith in local government to maintain zoning.

Back to the point with respect to transit; the choices presented in the DIES are either the D2/D3 alignments which wander through the core of Bel-Red (light industrial) or D5 which more closely follows existing transportation corridors. D5 is the clear winner (according to ST) on cost effectiveness and efficiency. The only reasons advanced for D2/D3 are based on the social engineering promoting redevelopment based mostly on factually incorrect stereotypes.

The financial support advocating for D2/3 is from companies which will receive windfall profits from this growth. Follow the money. Eastside tax payers voted for this latest measure on the good faith that light rail would improve transportation problems faced by the eastside; not that it would be the key impetuous to more growth in areas where large tracts of land can be had relatively cheap compared to the existing retail zoning.

You see, in those days a good blue-collar job meant making things like cars or airliners. The “gritty blue-collar underside” the city depended on was literally gritty, because that was where iron ore became steel and steel became castings and castings were machined into parts. The only blue-collar workers in all of this who had any interest in putting effervescent fluids into bottles were brewers.

I’m just indulging you here because I delivered mail out there for nine months in 1968 and you’ve sparked some wacky memories. This was mainly rural with a big cement plant and some contractor’s single-story sprawl, and there was a dog who chased my truck every day. After about a month another carrier asked if I’d noticed the dog only had three legs. Well, sure enough, he only had three legs but he could run like a dog with four. Kinda like some of your arguments, now that I think of it.

Another “industry” out there was some kind of a scam involving an old farmhouse, a fake windmill about 15 feet high, housewives, some kind of cosmetics, prizes, and a genuine “Professor”. I never did figure that one out, but it always amazed me that anyone could be dazzled in a landscape filled with cement trucks on dirt roads.

Anyway, you’re just cracking me up with your ideas that industry located in Bellevue and then a might city grew. Something you don’t understand though- if 20% of the jobs are in the corridor, it means that many many low-paid jobs are clustered there. The most likely reason for this is that the corridor is protected by zoning from “highest and best use” market pressures. If low-paid workers are replaced by more and better-paid residents, the City of Bellevue will benefit, and less “subsidy” will be paid.

So, SC you’re memory seems to be failing you. There has been and still are things made in Bellevue, the businesses don’t move every seven years and it is still a significant number of jobs. And you might want to actual know something about Circuit Services before you categorize them as “fly-by-night assembly”.

As for the area being a “major” source of employment, pull-eeze. Overlake Hospital undoubtedly has three times the payroll, five times the customers, and ten times the gross revenues of the Bel-Red area under discussion.

And, “traditional blue-collar employment”? Earth to Bernie- Bellevue never had any. Oh, sure, McDonough used to fix gas motors, and Norm and his brother cut hair, but in general, blue-collar employment in Bellevue was high-school kids picking blueberries in the summer. Damn, I’m so old that when I was in school there, we would have considered it extremely low class to actually win a football game against Renton. It just wasn’t done.

Bellevue very cleverly used zoning to force high-rise development where they wanted it, but don’t get confused about who was subsidized and who paid. For almost half a century, low-rise sprawl development in the Bel-Red Corridor has been protected against market level rents by zoning restrictions, and the other taxpayers in Bellevue have paid higher taxes as a result. The big change that is coming is not the beginning of a subsidy, but the ending of a subsidy. And I would say, it’s about time.

These are, in short, sprawl-dependent businesses that migrate on a seven-year cycle to sprawly areas. Am I concerned if the value of the land use rises and these sprawl industries can no longer pay a fair rent? NO! Considering that the area has already experienced all the downsides of sprawl for the past 40 years, I think it’s a good thing.

Oh gracious me! What will people do if they can’t get their muffler fixed on the Bel-Red Road? Well, I suppose they will go somewhere else. There used to be a big cement plant out there which I kinda doubt is still there, but we still seem to have plenty of cement. There used to be a big candy company on Westlake that’s gone now, but Seattle still has plenty of candy.

If the sprawl-development on Bel-Red led to anything productive, it would have done so by now. In reality, the only thing it’s led to is a desire by Bellevue to replace it with a higher use. That’s a feature, not a bug.

I’m OK with change. I’d like to see the city advocate for more light industry; green collar jobs, high tech manufacturing, heavy maintenance facility for light rail and buses, etc. What I’m against is footing the bill for large scale development. If the developers were fronting the quarter billion dollars extra it’s going to cost for the D2 D3 options I’d be a little more receptive to it.

Also, it’s nice that your high power clients were flying in from across the country, honey; destroying the ozone layer and belching CO2 into the air just so they could take the elevator to your office so you could pay for your new HO set.

Nobody really knows what the total cost and ridership would end up being for East Link but the DEIS and the 2007 PSRC study are the play book sound transit is reading from. There could be huge differences in cost and ridership for both projects but here’s a few key differences. The PRSR study is titled “BNSF Corridor Preservation”. Preserving an existing asset is completely different than creating something entirely new. If ESR fails as viable passenger service we’re left with a regional trail system which would have been built anyway. The bike path is about a quarter of the budget. We’re left with tracks that are repaired and continued affirmation that this is a rail corridor now and can be put back into service at any time in the future. If the rails are pulled up it’s going to double the cost of the conversion to trail and once those rails are gone, rail bank or no, they’re never coming back. The political fight would be akin to restoring rails on the Burke Gilman or East Lake Sammamish.

So, for an increment investment of around $100-150M (the amount over and above tearing up the rails and building the bike path) the Port of Seattle would be left with usable short line freight RR and the region would still have it’s bike path and the option to revisit commuter rail in the future.

As for the idea that there is “light manufacturing” that will be displaced, get a grip. What was the last product you bought that was labeled “Made in Bellevue”? Thats right- blueberries. (For the benefit of younger readers, a blueberry is not some kind of telephone, it is a fruit you eat.) And no, the Safeway plant was not a manufacturing facility- they might have made some corn syrup into soda pop, but mainly they unloaded freight cars onto trucks.

I was out there a few years ago and, as for most of my life, the area remained a mish-mash of failing and failed one and two-story sprawl development, with some “anchor” retail like Trader Joe’s and increasing amounts of white-collar offices. As a manufacturing district, which it never was, it’s a slum, as a gentrifying area it’s up-and-coming, which is as it should be, considering the location.

TOD in the Bel-Red Corridor is, in short, an idea whose time has come.

The same thing was true of haberdasheries, bookstores, bars, etc. And conversely, Sam Meyer’s Agency representing singers and dancers didn’t need or want a streetfront, they did just fine at the 22nd or 36th story of the building they were in. Our own clients flew in from Milwaukee and Chicago to buy national ad campaigns, they didn’t come in off the street because they liked our display or location.

Skyscrapers provide huge numbers of customers for streetlevel businesses selling sandwiches, shirts, and liquor by the drink. The Top of the Mark does nothing to change this basic equation.