If the Seattle Housing Authority stays on course, the redevelopment it's planning for First Hill's low-income Yesler Terrace public housing will not only include a half-dozen commercial office buildings of seven to 14 stories, but housing units packed as densely as Chicago or Manhattan.
John Fox of the Seattle Displacement Coalition named the cities as comparisons at a Jan. 15 planning meeting of the Yesler Terrace Citizen Review Committee, which is working to develop site concepts for a mixed-income development that's expected to replace the site's World War II-era housing starting in 2011.
At the meeting, the housing authority presented Fox and the advisory committee's 23 other members with a rough sketch showing how 4,000 units might fit on the 28-acre site, where the agency plans 3,000 to 5,000 units in place of today's 561. The sketch showed a mix of residential and office buildings. They would include 561 low-income replacement units for those making less than 30 percent of area median income, 1,240 units for those at 50 to 80 percent of median, and 2,200 units of market-rate condos to be sold by private developers, who would buy the land from the housing authority.
Office developers would do the same, providing an estimated $120 million to $220 million in private cash that the agency is counting on to build its new low-income units on the site. Unlike its previous mixed-income redevelopments at NewHolly, High Point and Rainier Vista, the agency doesn't expect to have any federal HOPE VI grant money for this project and says it can't afford the nearly $100 million it would cost to simply fix failing plumbing and infrastructure at the site, which overlooks downtown and Elliott Bay.
"This is very dense," Fox said of the sketch. SHA "will effectively be expanding downtown onto First Hill and [into] the Central Area."