Mukilteo Speedway and Lincoln Way, a potential future neighborhood center
Under current unincorporated county zoning, instead of denser development being centrally located, denser development is spread out over a larger area. This leads to the current situation, with apartment buildings and other multifamily structures in otherwise single-family neighborhoods. At the same time, underutilized strip malls and commercial lands are not being redeveloped.
Spreading out density too widely leads to a dense yet unwalkable neighborhood, causing more traffic problems which public transportation cannot effectively serve. It also does not contribute to the placemaking effects found in denser neighborhood centers. Instead, denser development should be focused in centralized and walkable areas with adequate transit access and human-scaled design, not in the middle of single-family neighborhoods.
Mukilteo Speedway Center
At the southern end of Fairmount and the eastern end of Lake Serene is Mukilteo Speedway Center, a strip mall. In the past, it included several businesses including Olson’s Food Emporium as the anchor tenant. Since the mid-2000s, the strip mall has slowly emptied to the point where most of the retail space is empty. Sometimes, there are one or two homeless people sleeping in one of the alcoves. To the west, a former auto junkyard remains abandoned and graffitied. This area is a place to be redeveloped to a neighborhood center, but it has to be done correctly.
Bad Density: Urban Center Apartments Building C, Unincorporated North Lynnwood
While the county has zoned much of the area as an Urban Center (UC), this won’t create a walkable and pedestrian-oriented urban center which the zoning suggests would happen. For example, several of the new apartments around Ash Way Park & Ride in North Lynnwood were built under UC zoning and are poorly designed. The worst example is the unimaginatively-named Urban Center Apartments, which includes bare concrete parking podium walls facing Ash Way. The fact that this was allowed under UC zoning shows that the county’s zoning codes are far from enough to facilitate a viable neighborhood center.
Good Density: Village Center, a New Urbanist development
This area can be redeveloped into a neighborhood center (given the provisional name of “South Gateway”) by way of annexation and zoning changes by Mukilteo, combined with zoning and land use concepts based on New Urbanism. New Urbanism is a concept which includes creating livable neighborhoods by way of pedestrian- and transit-oriented designs and layouts. (To avoid the confusion of similar terms, New Urbanism is a concept related to but not the same as urbanism.)
Bella Terra, an apartment complex in Village Center
Examples of New Urbanism in the Seattle area include Mukilteo’s Village Center, Mill Creek Town Center, and Issaquah Highlands. These places accommodate single-family and multifamily housing, retail, offices, and greenspace in a layout which promotes desirability, livability and walkability. In the proposed zoning map (see the Zoning section), this area has been given a special “South Gateway” zoning designation which would be refined in the future.