Neighborhood-plan survey: More than 1000 from West Seattle!

| Neighborhoods | West Seattle news

After extending the deadline for the once-in-a-decade survey to help update neighborhood plans around the city, the Seattle Planning Commission has posted that final tally of how many surveys it received per neighborhood. Yes, technically, Ballard/Crown Hill finished first, BUT as noted before, that area has just one plan, while West Seattle is broken into five neighborhood-plan areas, so if you add them up — Admiral, Delridge, Highland Park/Westwood, Morgan Junction, West Seattle Junction — the peninsula finished first, with 1,076 total. Watch for word of followups this fall, including meetings to discuss how the survey information (and input from last month’s meeting at Youngstown Arts Center) will be used to update those plans. Never seen your (or the nearest) neighborhood plan? You can find the plans for those five areas — developed a decade ago — in the right sidebar here.

Eilis Flynn August 25, 2009 (8:16 am)

Hard to believe that Crown Hill & Ballard don’t have neighborhoods like West Seattle!

WSB August 25, 2009 (8:23 am)

Since online news wasn’t archived – or even published – as prolifically a decade ago, there’s not as much of a record available regarding how decisions were made about which neighborhoods got planned, how they were defined, etc. – some of the folks who were involved have left comments here and there answering questions in some of the threads over the past month, but it would be fascinating to be able to read in-depth about what happened … assuming, of course, there was a lot of coverage in the first place.
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I do remember the uproar over the term “urban village” and what it represented and being involved in some of the TV coverage at the time … there was a loud “no urban villages” movement here in WS. Hmm, looks like that dated back years before the plans themselves, just found this:
http://www.seattlepi.com/archives/1994/9406150024.asp
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TR

Donn August 25, 2009 (8:35 am)

However Ballard has a population of about 18,000 people versus over 60,000 for West Seattle. So their responses still beat us 3:1.

lashanna August 25, 2009 (8:47 am)

i was a little sad that south park wasn’t included in the survey- we’re not that far!!

WSB August 25, 2009 (9:06 am)

Donn – per our counterparts at http://myballard.com their coverage area (Ballard/Crown Hill) has about 30K people. Still, certainly they can have the per-capita title if you want to break it out that way :) However, in that case, we’ll give the “most meeting attendees” title to West Seattleites – we had more than 100 at the in-person meeting, while Ballard/Crown Hill had 15 according to this neighborhood assoc site:
http://www.crownhillneighbors.com/wp_preview/?p=600
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TR

jsrekd August 25, 2009 (10:12 am)

I wonder if Cindi Barker has any of that background information from when we started MoCA. (Then known as MOBS (Morgan Association for a Better Seattle)!

My neighbors and I started that group in the mid 90’s during the Urban Village heyday – and sure enough, what Charlie Chong warned us about happened…density, too much (in my opinion) multi-family housing, and no infrastructure to handle it….

kstineback August 25, 2009 (2:41 pm)

Really? I would argue that Morgan has received a great amount of infrastructure improvement through planning – lots of new parks especially (Morgan Park near the Junction is a great example) as well as sidewalk improvements in areas. As a result I think we now have a more thriving biz district because of the increased density. Not that there isn’t work to do, there is, but we are so much better off than a lot of other neighborhoods…

jsrekd August 25, 2009 (3:07 pm)

I like the green space, but what sidewalk improvements? And, having lived here for 25 years now, husband for 50+, it’s a LOT harder to get in and out of my neighborhood (just southeast of the Thriftway) – can’t turn left anywhere if I’m not at a streetlight. Sure I have a few more options for dinner & coffee – but it’s harder to drive my car for groceries/prescriptions. And, yes, gotta’ take my car, two teenagers and a 9 yr old to feed.

kstineback August 26, 2009 (9:40 am)

@jsrekd
i hear you, traffic is a nightmare, especially on california at rush hour, where i take my life in my own hands on my bike every day. i think we as a society are approaching a tipping point with the automobile. our entire lives and land use patterns are structured around the single occupancy vehicle and you know what, it is not sustainable. it just isn’t. people are going to continue to move to seattle (so many of us have come here from other places) and people are going to continue to have babies, this is the American dream right? and traffic is going to get worse and worse until we begin to change the way we 1) make personal decisions and 2) invest as a city in transit infrastructure. i don’t have a silver bullet here, but i don’t think that density is the evil here, i think the lack of transit options to support it is.

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