Thursday, September 26, 2019

Early Design Guidance (EDG) 


The West Design Review Board will meet on Wednesday, October 2, 2019 at 8:00pm at
the Queen Anne Community Center, 1901 1st Ave W, in Room 1. 

This is the first of two design review meetings. At this initial meeting, the Board will listen to a presentation by the Safeway Project team regarding their proposed development, hear public comments, and make recommendations.

The focus is on the buildings' massing, materials, and other design elements such as architectural context, street level interaction, and open space per the city-wide guidelines and the Upper Queen Anne guidelines (developed by our community).

Environmental issues such as parking and traffic are not addressed by the design review process.

Here are links to the City's design review process and the Upper Queen Anne Guidelines:


Here's the link to the Safeway Project Team's proposal (Project No. 3033807) as submitted to the City:

While this is a lot of information to absorb, we feel it's important to learn as much as you can about the design review process and the team's proposal so that you can make your comments relevant to the design guidelines and as succinct as possible. You may consider focusing on one or two aspects of the design you consider to be most critical. The time allotted to public comments is likely to be only 20 minutes.

You may also submit more detailed written comments through Tuesday, October 1st to PRC@seattle.gov. You may want to bring brief and easily read written comments to the meeting as well in case it's possible to hand a copy off to the Design Review Board before the meeting begins.

Should you have any questions or want further information, you can contact Joseph Hurley, the Design Review Planner for this project, at 206-684-8278 or at joseph.hurley@seattle.gov






Tuesday, September 3, 2019

SAFEWAY PROJECT COMMUNITY MEETINGS

The Safeway Redevelopment Project is moving ahead. Maria Barrientos and her team will be presenting their latest design drafts to the community on two dates with the hope that you can make it to one of these meetings:

*Thursday, September 5th before the Queen Anne Community Council's Land Use Review Committee (LURC). The meeting is at 7:00pm in the dining room of the Queen Anne Manor, 100 Crockett St.

*Tuesday, September 10th at 6:00pm at the Queen Anne Community Center, 1901 1st Ave W

Maria has written:

We have been spending the last 3 months working on the design of this project.

There have been so many items to coordinate such as: working with SDCI and SDOT on transportation access, truck entries and loading, grade related access to work out, the size of the store and how the business works inside that affects the design with locations of elevators, loading docks, exit stairs, etc.,  then we spent 2 months on working out the massing for the upper floors.  We looked at over a dozen ways to get the massing to work for us and for the neighborhood and the visual impacts at the edges.

One thing I can say is that we are allowed to build an FAR of 5.75, which translates to 455,000 square feet of building area and 400,000 square feet of residential units.  With the proposed setbacks we are contemplating, we are ending up with 250,000 square feet of residential units.  I know that still sounds like a lot, but it is far below what we could build.   We are also working on our draft EDG package to send to the city next month.  We now have enough meaningful information to come back and share with all of you our progress and get your feedback on the design evolution.

Warning: we are just in schematic design and there are many unresolved design issues.  This is a work in progress, so don’t expect the design to be totally flushed out.

We hope we can have a Design Review Board Meeting to review the Early Design Guidance package and receive confirmation on our preferred scheme sometime in late September or early October.  It is not yet scheduled.

We plan to have our plans advanced enough to submit a Master Use Permit in late December, so there remains time to provide input.

Please save the date in your calendar for one of these dates (or both).
As always, if you have feedback, question, etc. please do not hesitate to contact me direct.  Best is my email at maria@barrientosryan.com