On The Edge Of Opportunity

Imagine you could buy a three-bedroom house with a yard — not just a condo! — priced in the mid-$300,000s, only a 15-minute drive from downtown Seattle (on a good day), in a community with a new bike trail, ethnic eateries, 28 parks (including a saltwater beach), a cozy neighborhood cinema featuring $3 movies, a growing arts scene, a supermarket specializing in fresh seafood, organic produce, Asian ingredients and live music on Friday nights, and a highly regarded school district where each student gets a laptop and chance to take instrumental music starting in fifth grade.

Think Shoreline.

Shoreline? Dowdy Shoreline? That stretch of car dealerships, casinos and strip malls lining Aurora Avenue just north of Seattle? That sprawl of cul-de-sacs and ramblers prone to power outages and flooding? The place where your parents' friends used to live?

Look again. Like a boomer edging back into the scene after several stagnant decades, this first-ring bedroom town is in the midst of a major makeover.

No longer content to be a cookie-cutter suburb, Shoreline just might transform itself into the new "it" place to live, work and play. Trendy restaurants, little shops to walk to, joints to hear jazz. They're planning a new city hall and civic center next to a Grease Monkey outlet, talking about a farmers market, dreaming of a bike race ("Tour de Shoreline"?) on the new Interurban Trail.

Many of its single-family homes are expected to go on the market within the decade as an older generation moves on, and developers talk about putting up as many as 1,500 new apartments and condos during the same span.

Will Shoreline evolve? Can it become cosmopolitan while still remaining friendly? Grow urban charm and eco-vigor in a landscape built around cars?

Why not? If back-shop Burien can remake itself into an artists' enclave, and the once seedy Alderwood mall can morph into a quasi-European plaza, surely Shoreline can create a There there. After all, Ballard did it.

"Shoreline's not hot like Ballard, but there is a buzz," says Tom Boydell, Shoreline's economic-development manager. "It's a place on the edge of opportunity. There's a lot of wealth up here, a lot of diversity, terrific leaders, great businesses, great schools, proximity to I-5, Highway 99 and downtown Seattle. And yet, at the same time, it's got vulnerabilities. So the city's got some work to do."

How, exactly, to create a There there? What makes a community cool? How to breathe new life into crumbling pavement?

Using Shoreline as an unscientific case study, we posed those questions to developers, visionaries and plain folks.

Naturally, when it comes to Change, people debate whether more density is good, bad or inevitable; how much, how fast, what quality; the merits and morals of parking; whether new development will build or destroy a community, sink real-estate values or price them out of the neighborhood.

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source: seattletimes.nwsource.com