Belltown and Brooklyn: How Seattle misses having kids in an urban center
Children change the character of a place for the better, but downtown Seattle lacks an essential ingredient for serving families with children: schools.
Bob Royer
Bob Royer
Dan Janzen
I always assumed that when my daughter, Amy, and her husband, Dan, were expecting a child, they would come back to Seattle. Amy had grown up in Seattle and met Dan, from Indianapolis, while they both worked in San Francisco. They married there and moved to Manhattan when Amy got the chance to open the New York office of her company.
They had this very cool but costly apartment on the Upper West Side with a tiny garden behind it not far from the Central Park Reservoir and the beautifully refurbished north side of the park.
The Seattle assumption was not really an assumption at all. It didn’t come from a set of facts somehow differently interpreted. It was just what I wanted. True, she had friends from high school in the Puget Sound area who had or were having babies, but she hadn’t lived in Seattle for nearly 15 years. So, as she sipped her grapefruit juice and absently rubbed her tummy in a bar we’d stopped at after a walk, I asked her if she had ever considered coming back to Seattle.
“Yes, we have, Daddy. We’re moving to Brooklyn.”
So, that’s how I got to know Park Slope, the Brooklyn neighborhood they moved to, and how I learned to appreciate their decision to locate there. Park Slope is jam-packed with kids, enjoys good public schools, has excellent public transportation and the support of lots of other mommies and daddies with similar demographic tags as Dan and Amy. Some New York City planners include other nearby neighborhoods in their definition of Park Slope, making it home to 40-70,000 people.
Park Slope enjoys all the playground, sports, and educational infrastructure to support families with young children, including fairly sizeable sidewalks. They need them. One day in 2006, when I had Lulu, my second grandchild, out in the stroller for the first time, I counted 12 strollers on 7th Avenue, the main shopping street in their section of the Slope, between Sixth and Seventh Streets. You had to be vigilant when approaching a curb cut.
Recently, walking back home in Seattle with the dry cleaning over my shoulder, I passed one, then two, then three strollers on the west side of First Avenue in the one block between Blanchard and Bell streets. You just don’t see three strollers on the same block in Belltown, Seattle’s hipster, restaurant and party scene neighborhood.
In Belltown, bottles and to-go food cartons fill up the garbage cans, not Pampers. I slowed as I walked by each stroller, adopting a casual air and checking the convoy to confirm the presence of a real kid and not a dog, old shoes, or garbage bags filled with clothing.
The sight of those strollers and the enthusiastic “yeh, we do!” that followed my question of whether all of them actually lived downtown, made me start to think about how well downtown Seattle welcomes its children. And, for that matter, how many of them are there to welcome? It turns out, there are quite a few.
The Downtown Seattle Association reports 2010 census data showing that there are 858 children under 5 years old living in downtown — that’s almost double the number living downtown in 1990. A third of those under fives live in the Pioneer Square zip code. All in all, the 2010 census reports there are more than 3,000 people under the age of 18 living in what the DSA calls downtown.
The DSA figures that downtown is made up of several distinct communities including Sodo, the International District, Pioneer Square, First Hill, the west side of Capitol Hill, the West Edge, Central Core, the Waterfront, Belltown (the Denny Regrade by my reckoning), Lower Queen Anne (according to DSA, the Uptown District), South Lake Union, and the Denny Triangle.
Perhaps the most intriguing stat from this somewhat arbitrary geography is that it has a large population of 25-34 year olds — a third of the 60,000 or so people living in the downtown defined by the DSA. We know what people of that age do when they get bored, so it is possible that we may well have a period of time in which there are even more babies born to downtown residents. The question then becomes whether we have an interest in helping those kids grow up in our downtown.
The census tells us that when the under-5 crowd starts going to school, many of their parents move out of Seattle downtown. Just 105 kids attend elementary school from homes in the downtown at a handful of schools on the periphery of the neighborhood.
If we chose to truly welcome those kids, we have many, though not all the tools to retain them. In Seattle Center, South Lake Union Park, and the Waterfront/Sculpture Park complex, the north and west of the downtown have great supporting park space. Last time the grandchildren were here, it was a five-minute walk from our condo to a lovely little rocky beach on Elliott Bay and maybe 15 minutes to the Seattle Center. Hell, we’re just 5 minutes from the Gum Wall! But the southern and eastern part of the downtown lack good supportive open spaces for children though the new waterfront will make a significant difference, particularly for Pioneer Square.
What we don’t have are schools. With the exception of the Seattle Center School, an arts emphasis high school with 300 students, and the private Morningside Academy, serving 70 elementary and middle school students, we have nothing serving young children in the downtown, just a handful of daycare operations. It would be a good idea to begin considering ways to harvest the young children of the downtown and apply them to the downtown’s future.
Children change the character of places for the better. Children soften the urban setting and broaden the economic life of urban places. Children who stay in the city tend to help turn renters into owners, further contributing to stability. Children improve the safety of urban places making us more vigilant. What makes us feel safer – a cop on every corner, or sidewalks crowded by strollers?
The Downtown Seattle Association has made retention and support of children in the downtown a priority in its recent strategic plan. The organization is working on the possibility of an elementary school and on the creation of play spaces for young people in future park and street improvements and is seeking volunteers.
Park Slope’s journey begins with Brooklyn’s independent development from New York before it merged with the city and became one of its five boroughs. Brooklyn created many of its own cultural institutions — art museum, library, etc., but the development of its fine parks system was particularly significant.
Twenty years before the Civil War, it was home to a most curious park, a mixed use kind of thing that doubled as a cemetery. It was such a nice one that it was soon attracting 500,000 visitors a year — more than went to Niagara Falls at the time — for picnics and outings. Even with all the fuss, the residents never seemed to complain.
The success of Green-Wood Cemetery and the fact that New York’s Central Park was under construction convinced the highly competitive Brooklyn Parks Commission to aggressively acquire nearly a square mile of farm land on which Henry Litchfield, a lawyer, real estate, and railroad man, had built an extraordinary home at Brooklyn’s highest point. This would become the next great project of Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux and be named Prospect Park.
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Comments:
Posted Tue, Dec 27, 2:14 p.m. Inappropriate
Bob, the dirty little secret is, most Seattlites don't like kids and don't want them around, sloganeering to the contrary...
Posted Tue, Dec 27, 4:13 p.m. Inappropriate
If I can speak for Downtown and nearby residents in general: It's not that we dislike kids, it's simply that we don't mind the fact that they aren't around. We're Downtown because we like urbanity and/or proximity to work etc.
That said, putting a school or two close to the core makes sense. If the Seattle Center vision of a below-grade garage at the stadium site comes to pass, the double block with the current garage would make a good spot for K-12. Or it could be a vertical format on a normal block, with open space on the roof. A school directly in the core might make sense as well, with parents dropping their kids off on the way to work, whether by transit, car, or foot -- again, a vertical format with a small open space on top....just a guess, but this could done on even 1/4 of a block and fit a couple hundred students, or it could be a half-block.
That's a low-intensity use for expensive land zoned highrise. A quarter of one small block (two lots, not three) alone might be north of $5,000,000. But we could probably recover some of the expense by selling development rights for a sizeable percentage of that, letting the buyer build something taller or larger on another site.
Posted Tue, Dec 27, 4:40 p.m. Inappropriate
I agree that lack of schools is probably a big reason there aren't more children in downtown -- certainly as we're thinking of moving, we ruled out downtown for that reason.
However, the comparison to Park Slope makes no sense to me. The local parallel to Brooklyn isn't downtown (that would be the local Manhattan), it's the many Seattle neighborhoods with intermixed residential and commercial space, and no high-rises: Capitol Hill, Ballard, Greenwood, West Seattle, etc. And most of those neighborhoods have good schools and, as far as I know, a fair number of families.
Posted Wed, Dec 28, 4:54 a.m. Inappropriate
I agree that Brooklyn = Capitol Hill, not Seattle's downtown areas.
The first and last time I had my kid downtown, in a stroller, some homeless panhandler in direst need of bathing came right up to us and started to fawn over the baby while talking to me, trying to touch the child and God knows what he thought he was doing. Fortunately I had a rain top on the stroller and he couldn't get in, and he fortunately had enough social skills present to understand the look on my face was a serious threat and he moved off.
Not that there aren't people with mental health issues on the street in other parts of town, but downtown just feels super dangerous by day and by night when it comes to children. I have several friends who moved out of Belltown to raise families elsewhere for this reason.
Making downtown kid-friendly is not rocket science. Address the mental health issues and homelessness on the street, and clean up the drug dealing and using and occasional shootings in Belltown and in the Wig Store District, and right there you're half way there. But this would take money and human resources, two things that will never materialize.
Posted Wed, Dec 28, 9:25 a.m. Inappropriate
Bob,
Thanks for this informative and intelligent article. I'm fascinated by the changing age demographics in urban areas. One interesting development is that places like Seattle and the denser parts of Bellevue are bucking the state and national trend toward fewer children. (More on that here: http://daily.sightline.org/2011/05/03/children-in-the-northwest; and here: http://daily.sightline.org/2011/06/09/crosscuts-flawed-take-on-families-in-seattle.)
I wholeheartedly agree that cities, particularly Seattle, can support families with more kid-friendly spaces and -- above all -- better schools. Yet there's considerable evidence that Seattle is making a lot of the right moves: the new places you list in Belltown are good examples, plus the South Lake Union Park, the re-vamped libraries, etc.
I'd be curious to learn if anyone's tried to estimate the daytime population of kids downtown. There are quite a few flourishing daycares and preschools in the densest parts of the city (including the one that my son attends). They don't have the green space I'd like, but they sure do offer a heck of a lot of advantages like easy field trips to the holiday carousel, Soundbridge at Benaroya Hall, Pike Place Market, storytime at the downtown library's awesome children's area, the aquarium, and on and on. (Plus, the downtown location makes it super easy for parents who work downtown to pop by for 5 or 10 minutes.)
Anyhow, my guess is that there are a lot more young children downtown on any given day than the residential numbers would indicate.
-- Eric de Place
Posted Wed, Dec 28, 11:17 a.m. Inappropriate
Schools for downtown, always an interesting discussion.
Vancouver, BC is ahead of us on this game. I know they have at least one elementary school in downtown (maybe more by now).
The Seattle School district, despite its troubles, is growing and growing fast. You are not going to find this kind of growth in an urban district in almost any other district in the country. So, at one level, it's a nice problem. At another level, we are now maxing out our capacity (even as we closed schools just a scant 2-3 years ago, bad forecasting, no?).
Seattle Schools owns Memorial Stadium and about 7 acres around it. The City and the district have some sort of preliminary deal for the City to take some of it and, in return, the district gets a parking garage where yes, a school could be built. A K-12 would be good to cover all bases but the district hasn't shown itself to be very friendly to that type of school.
Unfortunately, with all the pressing capacity management issues the district has, it's unlikely that a school downtown is their biggest concern. It's something to keep on the drawing board but it's way down the list of things to do.
Posted Wed, Dec 28, 9 p.m. Inappropriate
Since the word "new" was used to imply a positive outcome of "walkability" that kids & adults need,
I'll add that ALL downtown neighborhoods face sharp increases in traffic volume, speed hazards & congestion/gridlock with the DBT/MercerWest/LaskanWay Lack of sensible engineering.
I'm so afraid for your people who aren't terrified about the prospect of voids forming beneath foundations...you pro-DBT tunnel people are nuts or severely ignorant, misinformed wrongly, whatever.
More traffic (including freight truck) will traverse a 'widened' steep Mercer Place hill pass homes, apartments and the commercial district which has too much traffic now. Denny Way gets the spillover from Mercer plus the traffic Battery tunnel once took off the streets. 1st Ave gets more thru-traffic. Alaskan Way will NOT function as proposed. Rail is necessary.
Your leaders, people, are nuts, reckless lousy, poorly done DOT ideas that flop half the time, catastrophic often. This is Wsdot's worst season of highway plans & planners since the AWV was designed poorly but didn't pose near as much a risk as does your idiotic dbt.
Posted Wed, Dec 28, 9:33 p.m. Inappropriate
Last summer we stopped in Portland for lunch on our way south for a road trip. We hadn't been there in years and we easily found our way to the shiny new Pearl District. And of course being Portland we easily found our way to a new park in the middle of the new Pearl. This park was a full city block surrounded by new residential buildings. The park consisted of grass, trees a plaza area and a sprawling interactive fountain. The park was full of people. Full of kids and their parents and friends. There was no trash no drug dealing. The sound of kids playing in the fountain echoed of the buildings. It was a wonderful place to be and we didn't want to leave. And being Portland there was another park just three blocks away. Their green spaces are not hidden in courtyards or roof tops, as some in Seattle would suggest. Their green spaces are on the ground in the middle of the city and these green spaces- playgrounds, are everywhere. How does Portland do it? And Why can't Seattle. If we want more families and children living downtown...Belltown,So Lake Union etc. there must be more places for people to play. Yes, Seattle has many great parks but in our urban center where we need them the most we are sorely lacking.
Posted Thu, Dec 29, 4:42 p.m. Inappropriate
Great article. I do a lot of business in both Belltown and Capitol Hill. It's amazing how the Pike/Pine part of the hill has developed over the last couple of decades, while Belltown seems to have devolved in many ways, even though probably more money has been spent developing Belltown.
In Pike/Pine there is a new park with kids playground, ballfield and tennis courts, with several other parks and playgrounds around the hill. This has led to a bunch of kids being in an area that used to be mainly auto garages and warehouses. On top of that, in Pike/Pine alone there are two private highschools, a public highschool within walking distance, a community college and private university, several grocery stores, and a couple of nearby elementary schools.
The main differences between downtown and Cap Hill though are the developers - on Cap Hill you have many independent, community minded developers, while Downtown you have mainly large, corporate developers who seem to care nothing about the community, but only about building the largest building they can sell for the highest profit. Until Belltown gets developers who are interested in building a community (which would double their rents), the neighborhood is doomed to devolve even further.
Posted Fri, Jan 6, 2:27 p.m. Inappropriate
I think Mr. Royer makes too fine of a point. What makes Seattle unfriendly to families is not just the downtown environment but the entire City and its largely child-less by choice population. Most neighborhoods have a few "family friendly" restaurants but by and large we have a populace that does not have kids, had kids at one time and now does not want to see, be around or even hear their voices, or variations thereof. Our urban parks are ignored and neglected (except of course the ones for dogs) and our public schools - let's not even start on what an embarrasment they are to our "intellectually rich" region. Does anyone question why families flee the City limits in droves?
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