Monday’s Times highlights Bellevue’s plans for the Bel-Red corridor and how it’s threatened by budget problems:
An ambitious plan to turn Bellevue’s Bel-Red neighborhood into a bustling, urban center with a downtown Kirkland-style heart has run into an obstacle — a $100 million shortfall in the city’s capital budget…
Despite the decline in sales and business-and-occupation taxes that pay for the capital budget, the city says it is still committed to transforming the Bel-Red neighborhood, an industrial district centered on Bel-Red Road, which serves as a corridor between downtown and Redmond.
This is another example showing that, differences about Link alignments aside, Bellevue is a leader in trying to accommodate population growth somewhere other than the exurban fringe.
Also, note that investing in new, dense development will ultimately improve the city’s fiscal position by broadening the long-term tax base.
Am I the only one that likes all those industrial types there? I like not having to drive to the boonies to get my car fixed or buy my motorcycle.
I know dense residential is a better use especially with link but it will be a loss…
Mind you – they are picking the low hanging fruit in targeting an industrial/commercial strip for added density. Its entirely different from the conditions in the Rainier valley where a very large portion of the land use with 1/4-1/2 mile of the transit stops are single family residential. The equivalent would be seattle upzoning SoDo, which would be politically expedient and popular with landowners but bad for industry and what few blue collar employers seattle has left
Until I was ten in 1955, we lived on the north side of Chicago, about a mile west of Lake Michigan and half a mile south of the city line at Howard Street. We lived in an old two-story house with a large back yard, with similar homes on each side and across the street.
The neighborhood, called Rogers Park, featured a mix of single-family homes and three-story brick apartment buildings, as well as busy commercial areas.
Two blocks west was the Clark Street streetcar line. Half a mile east was the “El”- previous incarnation of the BART. Along those same tracks ran the Chicago and North Shore interurban. Google “Electroliner.”
A block past Clark, the Milwaukee Road carried steam-powered commuter trains and diesel streamliners called “The 400 Limited.”
My point is: when did single family homes and public transit become incompatible? What did the Chicago of fifty years ago know about architecture and land use that we’ve forgotten?
Mark Dublin
Larger houses, more car ownership, more cul-de-sacs.
Yes, if you look at the streetcar suburbs on Rainier Avenue, North 80th Street, Roxbury Street and other places, the lots are around half the size of newer developments with 2-car garages. Even through the 1950s houses were built the size of current apartments.
On a side note, someone told me there is a working TVM at the Bellevue Transit Center and I was wonderng if anyone could verify it for me? Thanks!