A Brief Winthrop Update

15 comments

• D Douglas Tooley October 15, 2008

  That 35th and Pacific replacement deal got some attention when it first came up, a year ago – what actually motivated me to get involved in Tacoma issues, though I’ve been thinking about it for some time.

  On the surface, it all sounds great. However, in the fine print it may well be as questionable as a credit debt swap between Goldman Sachs and AIG.

  Low income housing supporters have been able to pretty much quash any realistic and constructive look at this deal, and, FWIW, they are getting had just as bad as the single family neighbors of the 34th and Pacific Mixed Use Center.

  More should be said about this deal, and the very poor design it created, than can be done in a comment, but suffice it to say the best solution for this site is affordable senior housing – perhaps with a multicultural design theme – asian and or hispanic???

• T Thorax O'Tool October 15, 2008

  I am glad to see Prium isn’t just sitting on their thumbs…. or at least so they say. Don’t wanna sound like a negative nancy, but given the economy, the delays on the Foss Hotel, the indefinite hiatus of Jay Hts and the utter crawl to complete Chelsea Hts, I will believe that second tower when I see excavation equipment.

  I think however, the Low income supporters as well as the City (in general) have been very wrong about how to do the housing in the first place.
  I grew up in low income housing (when we weren’t homeless) and let me tell you, there is a HUGE stigma. Low income housing (cough, Salishan, cough cough Lincoln Heights) looks run down, no matter haw many coats of paint you put on it. They’re also clustered together into mini-ghettos.
  The Winthrop, as low income housing “works” for two reasons. 1) The building fits in seamlessly with it’s neighbors. It isn’t “obviously” a low income building. 2) It helps vary the demographic. It helps keep downtown from being overrun by the wealthier among us… like Bellevue or most parts of downtown Seattle.

  Any new low-income housing built to replace the Winthrop needs to be
  1) Somewhat close to downtown… the lot on 35th & Pac ave isn’t too bad
  2) The housing will need to blend seamlessly with it’s neighborhood. Ideally, you shouldn’t be able to identify low income housing by sight. This is not only good for the poor who need the housing, but also the neighbors. I think in that parcel of land, something like townhome city on Yakima (or by the mall) will be ideal. There are no big apartment/condo complexes in that area so something BIG will again be obvious. Look at the Senior Housing Assistance Group over by Wright park. SHAG fits in because most housing in that area is dense multi-family. Whereas Gibson House stick out like a sore thumb.
  3) Mix it up. In that low income area, there needs to be some lower middle and middle income housing as well. Again, we need to make the low income housing as non-obvious as possible. I can’t stress enough what a slap in the face the current housing situation is to the poor. Been there, hated it.
  And when people hate where they live, they usually don’t care enough to take care of it, hence the downward spiral.

  Whether we like it or not, the Puget Sound area is primed to be the next California. The prices in King County are a reminder of that. We need to get our asses in gear now and make a meaningful and aesthetic effort to provide housing affordable to people who don’t make insane levels of cash.
  You need to earn $60K to service a $200K mortgage properly. How many people make that? Not many considering Tacoma’s median income is like $39K.
  The world already punishes the poor far too much, even in this country. Is it so wrong that they have a chance to live in an area that isn’t ghetto?

• J Jesse October 15, 2008

  Low income housing isn’t really what it used to be in a lot of cities. I remember Portland demolishing the old (and crime ridden) Columbia Heights(was that the name?) in North Portland and building new low income housing. You would never know it’s a low income neighborhood.

• D Douglas Tooley October 17, 2008

  Great points from Thorax.

  Though the Winthrop looks great, take a look at the design documents for the 35th and Pacific project – what the ‘city’ ‘got’ in exchange for a subsidized price.

  HUD requires replacement housing, but that requirement is as strict as a credit debt swap on Wall Street. The 35th and Pacific site fills that requirement – it is a done deal.

  However Prium remains almost complete control over what actually to build on the site. Neighbors in the area are told that it will be median income housing -which is really just a scam to pump public dollars in to propping up unrealistic land prices for what should be affordable from the private sector, at 39k a year….

  But again, as it is written Prium can do whatever they want – no design requirement and essentially no limits on what sort of housing they build.

  Salishan just might be working. However this particular location may not be a great one for kids of any age, being within a block of both the drunk tank and the methadone clinic.

  Probably the best solution at this point is to build senior housing in the area – this is a deserving segment that won’t immediately blight the area, plus it will give some support to the commercial and public medical services in the area.

  The original design should also be just dumped in the trash can – as perhaps should be the career of the City attorney who managed this ‘contract’.

• B Bob October 17, 2008

  DT@5 – why do you assume that someone from the city attorney’s office “managed” or is responsible for the terms of this contract?

  I’ve spoken to a government and private sector lawyers and, for better or worse, the government ones are just like private sector ones. In negotiating a contract, clients come in, and tell the lawyer what they want. The lawyer tells them what the law allows them to do, and, if the client asks, will point out some of the policy issues (like, “this deal is stupid.”) but, just like private sector clients have the final authority to make bad deals, so do the staff and, ultimately, the council for local governments.

  If a contract is clearly illegal, a government lawyer will not send it to the approving authority. If it’s legal, but just a bad deal, the lawyer has no right to not do what their clients want them to do.

  The better question in this case is, “why do governments bend over (backwards?) for developers without making sure the public’s interests are protected?”

• R rich October 17, 2008

  Ok, seriously, the Winthrop in the hands of Prium or should I say, Never finish a thing Prium……………..get real, Tacoma heading down………..good luck on T-town in the next decade…….what a bunch of fricken loosers we have here for a government with no vision……and a bunch of low life developers that wouldn’t know developement if it hit them in the *ss……….a bunch of rookies……….I wonder why we can’t attrack any REAL developers from outside Tacoma……hmmm…….

• C Christine October 19, 2008

  All very interesting. Having been through the Winthrop, including the uninhabited penthouse, I am excited about the prospect of returning it to what it once was. As for the low-income persons inside, I think they do need to be moved from that site for a few reasons.

  1. Although token updates have happened, it is not a very accessible building. Forget about getting people out in a timely manner

  2. Moving everyone would be a fantastic “weed and seed”. It has done wonders for Salishan. Still some bad apples over there, but mostly nice, regular folks living everyday lives.

  3. The building is shabby and depressing inside. Surroundings have a lot of influence on mood and actions. The inside of the Winthrop looks like a dingy dump.

  4. The potential of the Winthrop is enough to make one cry! We do need more hotel space downtown but we don’t need another Courtyard type building.

  Also, I’m not worried about the 35th and Pacific location’s proximity to Crisis Triage and the methadone clinic. I work near there and it’s not as bad as one may think. 35th and Pacific is right on bus #1 route and as for architecture/design concerns…Oscar’s tower is ugly, yet fills a need and is full of people. Design can always be tweaked, right?

• L laura Hanan October 20, 2008

  “The Winthrop, as low income housing “works” for two reasons. 1) The building fits in seamlessly with it’s neighbors. It isn’t “obviously” a low income building. 2) It helps vary the demographic. It helps keep downtown from being overrun by the wealthier among us… like Bellevue or most parts of downtown Seattle.”

  Are you serious? The Winthrop “works”? The Winthrop is a blighted eyesore that has not helped the poor but been a magnet for crime and drug dealers.

  What you call varying the demographic is a dense and unbalanced concentration in a two block area of more than 200 units of low income housing.

  What economic/social model are you basing the ridiculous and unfounded statement that the Winthrop Hotel is “keeping downtown from being overrun by the wealthier among us?

  I guess that would include my family, who are far from wealthy. We renovated a 100 year old building downtown and got it on the historic register, which helped anchor my block of Pacific Ave. and got other restaurants to invest/open businesses.

  I guess me and the normal folks finally comfortable enough to walk Pacific Ave. at night and patronize these new businesses in stead of the bums and drug dealers that I used to have to chase away from my front door are the “wealthy” trying to “overrun downtown.”

• J Jesse October 20, 2008

  I agree with Laura. Don’t you want to attract those with money into your downtown? I mean, are the poor, druggies, bums going to support all those businesses we always talk about and want? The answer is no. As well, those with the money to spend to sustain all this growth we crave will not come downtown to wade through the low-lifes. Cleaning up downtown and making it interesting, beautiful, and dense requires the huge amount of shelters to be (at least) minimized from how many there are there now… There’s a lot of them.

• 6 6ther October 20, 2008

  It’s interesting to read the original article and the comments from two years ago when Prium announced their big plans for this project. There was a lot of skepticism vs. optimism on whether Prium could, and would get the job done (Let alone whether it would look good).
  Two years later and what? Prium’s still doing a whole of talking with no real results. They would probably blame the market, blame wall street, blame the city of Tacoma… what ever. But the real proof is in the fact that Prium doesn’t finish what they start when they say they will, they don’t pay fees to the people that help fill their space and people are starting to notice. You can’t go on forever gettin’ fat and losing friends.

• T Thorax O'Tool October 21, 2008

  Please notice I used quote marks around the word works, I did that mainly because the Winthrop is far better than the old Salishan (and the part that isn’t torn down) and better than Lincoln Heights.
  The Winthrop is certainly not an ideal setup for low income housing, but is is better than some other examples in town. As of the moment, we do not have a single example in this city of what to do right when it comes to the poor. The Winthrop is just a less bad than most example.
  Indeed, the concentration of low income in that specific area is a bit higher than it ought to be, again having a diversity would balance out the neighborhood.

  This is not about attracting bums and druggies. Take a walk in downtown Seattle at night, even in vibrant areas (Pike Place, Pioneer Square, etc). There are far more homeless and druggies there than I have ever seen in Tacoma. The bums, drunks and other undesirables are a byproduct of urban life. There have been the less fortunate since biblical times and before. They aren’t going away.
  I’m saying we need to work out a solution to the best of our abilities and the best of our resources to provide the most benefit to the most people rather than just shoving them off into another part of town… out of sight, out of mind I guess.
  If we want to make downtown (and all of town) cleaner and improve quality of life, a proper and thoughtfully planned approach to housing the poor will go a long, long way.

  All this is about providing a healthy mix of peoples and levels of lifestyles. A too dense cluster of the poor results in a Harlem. A too dense cluster of the wealthy results in yuppie wastelands, areas far too expensive for us mere mortals to tread.
  There is nothing wrong with having more well-to-do people living downtown.
  There is everything wrong with having only the well-to-do able to afford living in downtown.

  My point is, keep the mixture of people in a downtown healthy. Too many rich people is just as bad as too many poor people.

• D Douglas Tooley October 24, 2008

  Bob@6-

  You may well be right about the City Lawyers, and I should look into it further.

  However, it is not without experience in Washington that I jump to this conclusion. Land use law is a major source of power for the profession and they definitely use it as much as they can get away with.

  I have read the development and option agreements that were drafted for the City and I don’t see that the City’s interests were protected.

  I do think the legal profession has some degree of responsibility, of stewardship, in such deals. Hopefully we’ll get the chance to figure out exactly what those responsibilities are.

  As it stands, no one is responsible for anything on this deal, and, in my opinion, responsbility is the responsibility of the legal profession.

• D Douglas Tooley October 24, 2008

  Christine@8-

  Personally I think the best solution for the area is senior housing, perhaps a slightly poorer version of the Hawthorne Condos set back from the ridge, in the ravine.

  I’m certainly not able to make a risk assessment of the drunk tank or the methadone clinic, but it definitely strikes me as two big risk factors for young or older children – perhaps adding to the potential for the previous problems at Salishan.

  Lastly, it might also be good to see some culturally sensitive senior programs housed in the area – senior services with some asian and hispanic language ability.

• R Rebecca October 24, 2008

  The last thing the 35th and Pacific area needs is more low-income housing. It is my hope that the area is included in the growth plan of the downtown area, and not just as a catch-all for the displaced socially/economically disadvantaged. As the UW campus expands, more residential space will be needed. This is a very convenient location for that need. I’m thinking more along the lines of a mixed-income building like what HRG manages. That’s just one example. They have a very nice building that blends nicely into the Fremont district and it was built with sustainable materials. They have subsidized units for different income levels. This can be a win-win thing if it’s done right.

• L laura Hanan October 26, 2008

  The city should have had some type of performance clause included in the Prium deal.

  Prium’s missing momentum on the Winthrop project has unfortunately fed into the current economic doldrums that the country is experiencing. It also gives Prium an excuse to continue to do nothing – all of which have a negative effect on the Theater District, keeping Russell in Tacoma, and future economic (business/retail) investment downtown.

  The simple act of repairing the Old City Hall clock would be a significant gesture to breathe life into an area that is somewhat frozen in time.