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Combined-use sector aimed at revitalizing downtown Renton
Transit access touted as key to success of Metropolitan Place
Tuesday, July 25, 2000
By CHRIS McGANN
Renton officials want to invigorate the city's downtown core.
King County leaders want to contain suburban sprawl and stimulate growth in urban centers.
Almost everyone involved with regional transportation issues is trying to entice people into public-transit seats.
This week, construction begins on a project that may help satisfy all these civic desires.
Metropolitan Place, which is being built at South Second Street and Burnett Avenue South in Renton, is the first of several combined-use projects planned in King County.
The new privately-owned building will stack some of the components of the county's six-year Transit Development Plan like a concrete-and-brick layer cake -- a 150-space park and ride built under downtown retail spaces below 90 mixed-income apartments. It's all across the street from a transit hub.
"Transit Oriented Development," as the county calls Metropolitan Place and similar projects, is a key component of King County Executive Ron Sims' Smart Growth Initiatives, designed to stimulate the economy while protecting rural areas.
"Smart-growth" initiatives such as Metropolitan Place are aimed at limiting sprawl and creating vibrant urban centers where people can live, work and get around without without relying on single-occupancy vehicles, said Elaine Kraft, Sims' spokeswoman.
"It's really going to give Renton a new life," Kraft said. "Projects like this are at the core of the county's comprehensive plan, which helps keep growth in the urban areas so they can keep the rural areas rural."
Ron Posthuma of the King County Department of Transportation said the county has agreed to a 30-year lease on the parking for $26,000 per space.
"It's great to get 90 units of housing across the street" from the transit station, Posthuma said. "We are building a market for transit and we are also getting two additional bays for the transit center in the deal."
The transit center at the site is being expanded beginning next month and Metro needs the extra space for buses, Posthuma said.
Posthuma said the decision by the developer, Don Dally, to buy bus passes for the 90-unit project as well as for 168 other units in the area that he owns or is in the process of building also helped seal the deal.
Dally said combining transit, affordable housing and business opportunities into one project is simply good land use.
"Everyone is getting something out of this," Dally said.
"Metro is getting a park and ride, the county is getting affordable housing and I am getting a building."
Dally said other developers are likely to use the $12 million Renton project as a model because it makes good business sense.
All the apartments in his nearby 110-unit building filled in only four months, faster than any project Dally has been involved with, he said.
Dally expects Metropolitan Place to be equally popular.
"I'm betting on it," he said.
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER
P-I reporter Chris McGann can be reached at 206-448-8346 or chrismcgann@seattle-pi.com
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