EVERETT — Everett Community College and Washington State University’s separate pursuits to expand their campus footprints intensify concerns about college growth for residents in the Delta and Northwest neighborhoods. Annoyances with parking, traffic and sharing space often come up at neighborhood meetings, and
residents worry that more growth will alter the everyday feel of their neighborhoods.
The colleges emphasize that any expansions will include neighborhood input, and that they are trying to take steps to mitigate any negative impacts.
WSU has a building at College Plaza on Broadway and it plans to acquire more land in the Baker Heights section of the Delta neighborhood. The property currently is the site of low-income housing owned by the Everett Housing Authority that due to its age cannot be rehabilitated. If WSU gets funding approved by the state Legislature, the school would purchase roughly 75 percent of the approximately 15-acre property that also includes the southern part of Wiggums Hollow Park.
WSU Everett Chancellor Paul Pitre said if the purchase funding is approved, the university would then start to develop a master plan for its development and consult with the neighborhoods as part of that process. “I think being a good community partner also means that we are always cognizant of the needs of the community and how we might be able to help,” he said.
Pitre said that WSU is strongly considering adding programs in business and criminal justice, with computer science and applied mathematics as other possibilities. WSU’s current and potential future programs are meant to fit with the area’s industries and employment opportunities, he said.
Molly Deardorff is vice chair of the Delta Neighborhood Association and has lived in the area for 10 years. “There were several plans that the Everett Housing Authority put forth,” she said, “and I believe there was a strong preference in the neighborhood for a hybrid with some housing and some college-related buildings.”
Deardorff said a concern she’s heard voiced at the neighborhood association meetings is that the relocation and development impacts will lead to less community diversity. “We’re a diverse neighborhood and there’s several languages that are spoken in the neighborhood and we think that’s awesome,” she said. “I think people are worried that that diversity will go away, that we’ll become gentrified and people won’t have a place to live because they can’t afford to live here anymore.”
Since the current housing on the property can’t be fixed, the housing authority has already started relocating people. Samantha Reed lives across the street from the complex slated for demolition and said she has noticed a different feel in the neighborhood. “In the summertime there would be a lot of people playing in the park right there and I noticed this last summer that there were a lot fewer people because they just literally weren’t there,” she said. “They had been moved elsewhere.”
EvCC Expansion Plans
EvCC plans to construct a new Learning Resource Center (LRC) on the College Plaza property on the eastside of Broadway. The center would be across the street from the main campus and house the school’s library, tutoring and writing centers, media services and e-learning department.
Pat Sisneros, vice president of college services at EvCC, said the initial design concept is for a three-story building with approximately 70,000 square feet of space.
Sisneros said the school currently has design money, but funding from the state Legislature for construction likely won’t take place until the next state biennial budget covering the years 2021-23. He said the project’s been on the capital list for about 10 years now and that the resource center is necessary. “Our library is vastly undersized, you could argue it’s about 50 percent of what it should be,” Sisneros said.
Traffic and Safety Concerns
Many residents say that the current traffic situation around the neighborhoods is a problem. People in both the Northwest and Delta neighborhoods complain that people cutting through the side streets often drive fast and in unsafe manners. They also worry about these driving behaviors in the neighborhoods’ elementary school zones.
Misha Hann lives within a block of Whittier Elementary School, which sits right next to EvCC. Hann said that she has almost been hit by a car several times while walking her daughter to school in the morning. “I don’t want something to change because of a tragedy, I want to see the infrastructure put in place so that a tragedy doesn’t happen,” she said.
Reed, from the Delta Neighborhood, is the mother of twin boys in elementary school, and worries about the location of the proposed WSU expansion. “Having a university right in the middle of your neighborhood is more traffic, it just makes it more urban and less residential,” she said.
Kari Quaas, chair of the Northwest Neighborhood Association, said that the northbound evening traffic on Broadway creates a couple of problems. “It makes it unsafe for students to cross the street and it makes it almost impossible for people to get out of our neighborhood,” she said.
Jeff Hardy lives near the hospital and said that the traffic issue is bigger than just college students; since Broadway is a commuter route it is bumper to bumper with traffic from 3 - 5 p.m.
“They’re going to have to do something about the traffic to really make this work,” Hardy said.
City planning director Allan Giffen said the city’s master planning efforts for north Broadway will help improve public transit along the corridor, and that before either of the colleges can expand, they would have to determine the impacts it would have on travel conditions. “We require a transportation analysis that considers what types of traffic volumes would be generated by a big land-use change like that,” he said. “That would be something both of the colleges
would have to analyze with their own transportation consultants, and our own traffic engineers and transit departments would be working with the college to hear what the public concerns are.”
Parking Issues
People in the Northwest Neighborhood also experience problems with parking due to students using the streets in front of their houses. Residents say that it can be difficult to find room for their own vehicles. Several said they have had their driveways blocked multiple times.
Jenny Gialenes lives between the community college and the hospital. Gialenes said that her daughter commutes to a different college and while she can appreciate college students’ needs, the parking conflicts in the neighborhood can get tiresome. “When we’re quibbling about things, like ‘don’t park in my front yard,’ then it makes us as neighbors be not welcoming,” she said. “When really, college students are fun. I live with one.”
Students and Northwest Neighborhood residents alike have expressed a desire for an EvCC parking garage, but funding such a project has challenges. Washington colleges can’t use state educational funds to pay for parking structures.
“We think that would be a good thing for the college to do because then they are using less land to provide the capacity for parking demand,” Giffen said, “it’s just that it’s not economically feasible for them unless they can find another source of revenue to pay for that.”
Sisneros said that EvCC encourages students to take the bus by offering reduced fare passes and it’s also attempting to add more parking. EvCC is in “active negotiations to acquire more property that will likely be for parking,” Sisneros said, but while he couldn’t discuss specifics, he said the property would be in proximity to the planned new learning center across from the main campus.
Giffen said that because of the way funding has to be approved by the state Legislature biennially for the different stages involved in college construction projects that nothing happens quickly. “By the time they start planning and they get a building finished it takes them about 10 years,” he said. “And as part of that process, even before we have the college file an application with the city, we require them to do some outreach to the neighborhoods under our institutional overlay zoning.”
Culture
Many residents have expressed optimism for what the colleges’ developments might bring to the area. Holly James lives in the Northwest Neighborhood and said hopefully any planned growth would bring with it more student culture. James said she’s used to more humanities and arts colleges and that the local campus feels a little sterile to her.
More dining and shopping options would also be welcomed. Barbara Sweeney lives west of the EvCC campus and looks at the potential college expansions as a chance to attract more businesses as well. “Once you get all the students here there’s going to be little restaurants that are going to grow up,” she said. “There’s going to be all kinds of service things like pizza places.”
Sweeney’s friend Lois
Kimball lives in the same neighborhood and agreed with the sentiment. “All of that is good we need more of that in Everett, we need places of retail and the arts,” she said.
