Suburban Like Me
THE VIEW FROM TERRY QUICK’S front door is not what it used to be. Once he saw fir trees, hummingbirds, and an occasional bald eagle. Now he gets an eyeful of a four-story apartment building, completed in 2004 after Snohomish County rezoned his low-rise neighborhood just outside the Lynnwood city limits for high-density, mixed-use redevelopment. The new zoning allows up to 50 housing units per acre—as many as in Seattle’s densest neighborhoods. Where ranch houses laze under tall trees, eight-story buildings may now legally rise.
The reactions of those who live the suburban life in these would-be urban villages range from gloom to anxiety to screaming terror. Quick, and it seems everyone else in South Snohomish County, worries about suburban decay—about noise, light pollution, and the loss of trees and green spaces, not to mention eight-story buildings erupting in their backyards. Some have gone so far as to suggest that Snohomish County change its logo, which shows three trees, to three stumps. County officials insist that the long-range vision is worth the upheaval: If we replace far-flung subdivisions with compact development that gets people out of their cars and onto transit, the population explosion can be accommodated without horrific traffic jams or the wholesale loss of open space. Smart-growth advocates argue that allowing suburban depredations to continue would degrade the environment, worsen traffic, kill inner cities, and deaden our souls. They say that sprawl must be eradicated, and Terry Quick and his neighbors are sprawl.
I should say at the outset that I, too, am sprawl. I grew up in suburbs, and I now live just a few miles from Terry Quick in a neighborhood not unlike his. Sub-urbanity has bookended my life; in between I lived in cities, and that has informed the writing I’ve done about architecture and the built environment. Until now, I’ve taken as gospel that mixed-use, pedestrian-scaled human habitats should be our ideal. And those are what county and municipal governments propose to create: As the region grows and Snohomish County’s population swells (it’s expected to reach nearly a million by 2025), close-in suburbs like Lynnwood, Edmonds, and Mountlake Terrace must comply with the state Growth Management Act and grow up, not out.
Newberry Square, the complex now looming beside Quick’s house, has brought some welcome urban amenities to this unassuming landscape of subdivisions, strip malls, fast food, and Wal-Mart: an organic butcher, a high-end pet-supply store, a sleek café with free Wi-Fi. Newberry Square broadcasts its aspirations, or pretensions, in the names of its various apartment models: the Fremont, the Leschi, the Madison Park. It charges rents to match, starting at $820 for a studio. On the other side of the freeway, Newberry’s developer, Sundquist Homes, markets its DiModa subdivision as “urban style, suburban price”—starting in the mid-$300,000s. This is an urbanism that’s at least as much about style as substance—but fine, though I’m not interested in hip condos, I do like handmade sausage.
Still, after seeing the real anguish of people like Quick—and experiencing a little density angst of my own—I’ve begun to doubt the “can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs” avidity with which these suburban renewal projects are being pursued. And to wonder whom, exactly, they will benefit. Even as housing prices rise for newcomers, the area’s home-owning middle class shudders at the specter of sinking property values. Quick says prices for single-family houses have already started eroding on his block, now that the likeliest buyers are developers who only want the land beneath them. “You’d never want to buy this as a private residence now,” he says, pointing to the house across the street from his, over which the apartment complex looms 60 feet. “And the builders won’t pay what the property is worth.” County tax rolls show that property values in the subdivision have generally risen over the past three years. But the way Quick sees it, developers have the neighborhood over a barrel. “They’ve been paying, on average, $17 a square foot for land,” he says. “A $550,000 house becomes a $250,000 house.” Last year Quick convinced most of his neighbors to band together to sell their property as a package, rather than waiting to be picked off one by one. Their hope—as yet unrealized—is that a large builder with deep pockets will pay top dollar for the chance to raze and master plan the entire subdivision. But already, the first dominos are threatening to fall: Applications to build infill on two parcels are on file with the County. If these projects go forward, Quick’s plan could be doomed.
You can rail about cultureless wastelands, but that fails to describe what’s really going on in Lynnwood, Renton, even Bellevue.
When I was a kid, if someone had built a condo tower in our cookie-cutter development, I would have cheered out of sheer spite. I grew up in deepest, darkest suburbia: Kirkland and Bellevue in the 1970s and ‘80s, before the arrival of such neo-urban amenities as pedestrian corridors, transit centers, and street-oriented boutiques. My parents, scrabbling for a foothold in the middle class, found affordable housing and decent schools there. Sometimes, on dull Sundays before I could drive, my mom would convince me to walk the two miles to Bellevue Square with her. We’d edge along gravel shoulders with traffic whizzing by, get an Orange Julius, and then trudge home. In my high school years I was drawn into the orbit of the city, slipping away to spend weekend nights at two of Seattle’s first punk clubs, the Monastery and Metropolis. It was exhilarating, though there was always the risk of missing the 12:50am bus home and getting stuck in Pioneer Square all night.
Published: May 2008
