Olympia will hold a virtual meeting and two in-person events this month on the recently-concluded market analysis of its neighborhood centers strategy.
The virtual meeting will be held on Wednesday, July 13, from 6-8 p.m. In-person events are on Saturday, July 16, at Roosevelt Elementary School, 1417 San Francisco Avenue NE, from 10 a.m. to noon, and at West Olympia Food Co-op, 921 Rogers St. NW, at 2-4 p.m.
For 20 years now, the city has sought to develop Neighborhood Centers it describes on its Engage Olympia website as "small walk, bike, and transit-friendly business clusters within residential neighborhoods that serve the day-to-day retail and service needs of local residents.”
"Despite long-held goals to encourage them, neighborhood centers have not developed as envisioned," the website adds.
The website further stated that in January this year, the city hired a consulting team of MAKERS Architecture and Urban Design and Leland Consulting Group to understand better the barriers affecting neighborhood centers and identify strategies for addressing these hurdles.
Olympia's Comprehensive Plan identified 17 locations for neighborhood centers. The consulting team evaluated 12 locations that could potentially help develop the centers, namely:
"The consultants spent the first half of 2022 evaluating each of the neighborhood centers, talking to stakeholders, and conducting market analysis," the website stated. It added, "the next phase of the project is to share findings from these efforts and get community input."
As part of its plan to create a path to implement the community goal, the Olympia Planning Commission in 2014 conducted a community-wide online survey and stakeholder interviews.
The city received 668 responses. The respondents shared input about the preferred businesses they wanted to see in the neighborhood centers:
In the same survey, the respondents also wanted to see amenities in the centers, including:
To join the meeting on Wednesday, register at https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0rce2prTMiHtZkzUNruzxtSloXZEtVeaSe
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DStusser
What? No neighborhood center being considered for the Swantown Inn? The neighbors have made their interests in this known. Why did the consultants ignore them?
Tuesday, July 12, 2022 Report this
SandiToeze
Looks like another "study" by someone who has neither even seen the area nor looked at an aerial map of the area. Fones Rd and 18th Ave is not an area conveniently conducive to commercial use. High-density residential, congested streets, a round-about in the middle of it, and large wetland areas which consume much of the nearby open space don't add up to a place to which commercial use should be invited. Besides, it's all quite close to Pacific Ave commercial uses already, and on a bus line. Perhaps when they tossed their stick pins at that map, this one went awry.
Tuesday, July 12, 2022 Report this
jhender
So let me get this straight; the city can afford this study but it can't afford to install new traffic calming infrastructure (speed bumps). It strains credulity to think that the city believes it can increase "walkability" by creating neighborhood centers while neglecting the obvious fact that pedestrians and cyclists are in danger of being mowed down by speeding drivers.
Friday, July 15, 2022 Report this