We begin with euphoria and end in a depression.

by Charles Mudede

What a difference time makes. And yet, the story is always the same. We begin with euphoria and end in depression. In 1998, the Seattle Times celebrated (though with some reservations—it feared the 1997 Asian Financial crisis would spread to our region) the opening of Pacific Place. The mall was part of a $400 million revitalization project that included the relocation of Nordstrom, a sky bridge, and a new office building, all promising to transform the supposedly blighted urban core into a consumer magnet. “Pacific Place, [a] retail-cinema-restaurant complex,” wrote Seattle Times, “will add glitz and variety to downtown Seattle, [when it] opens Thursday at Sixth Avenue and Pine Street.”

A little more than 20 years after that blast of optimism, the same paper was unremittingly gloomy about the vertical mall’s future. It had just completed a long (two-and-a-half years) and disruptive renovation that left almost everyone cold. Though the mall’s new look seems “pristine,” wrote the Seattle Times in 2020, it’s “for the wrong reason: There are barely any stores.”

The owner of Pacific Place at the time was Madison Marquette. The Washington, D.C.-based real estate company purchased the property in 2014 for a whopping $271 million. A little later, it also bought the parking lot, which has more levels (six) than the building (five), for $87 million from the city. And so, more than $350 million was poured into Pacific Place. At the end of last week, on May 17, Puget Sound Business Journal reported the block-big and capital-losing mall (it only has about 15 tenants) had been sold to LA’s BH Properties. The price tag was, unlike the sale of 2014, kept under wraps. 

Pacific Place was doomed from the get-go, from the moment the idea of it was conceived by one of the founding members of Pine Street Development, Jeff Rhodes. The year was 1994. The plan was to think big. The belief was that the shock of a huge investment would restore the heart of downtown. The money for the plan came from many sources, including Kenny G, and the city provided the project with institutional support and a negative pick up on the massive parking lot. (Once the mall was fully operational, Mayor Norm Rice promised to buy and run the 1,200 subterranean parking units with the public’s purse.)

Ghost mall. CHARLES MUDEDE

But the developers, who claimed to have long experience in the business, made two huge miscalculations. Both were at a macro/social/historical level. One concerned the then-in-progress decline of the suburbs and the form of its culture (cars, malls, low density). The other concerned the rise of online retail, which, at the time, was still in its infancy. The former was a clear and present danger. The latter, admittedly, was still obscure, despite the dot-com bubble, which, after bursting in 2000, numbered Amazon as one of its survivors. But mall culture was already in trouble in the mid-1990s because a growing portion of the public saw its sea-sized parking lots, its simulation of community feeling, and its impersonal goods in a negative light. Even by the 1980s, suburban culture faced the rising and relentless criticism of new urbanism. By the 1990s, the anti-car and pro-density principles of this movement had reached the mainstream. And yet the developers decided to transpose the suburbs, whole hog, to exactly where many had moved to escape it. 

As if that wasn’t enough, the city devoted millions that could (should) have gone to affordable housing (increased density) to a parking lot that was so costly it became ammunition for the new urbanist cause. In the popular book Walkable City, Jeff Speck, using the research of parking professor Donald Shoup, pointed directly to the fact that Seattle had spent more than $60,000 for each stall below the mall. This was an extreme example of how the government subsidizes a large part of car culture. (Capitalism is never as cheap as it looks.) In fact, the city was ripped off when it purchased the parking garage. Seattle paid $73 million to own what cost $50 million to build, lost money maintaining the damn thing (“about $1.5 million a year“), and sold it for a song (only $87 million).

The parking lot is also said to have cost Mayor Norm Rice his chance at the big time, the Clinton Administration. He was the top runner for Secretary of Housing and Urban Development but was unceremoniously dropped when the vetting process likely revealed that he had directed HUD money to a project that was, in essence, for the rich and not the hard-working poor. Seattle Times of course called this interpretation of the fiasco a “cheap shot” in its 1996 article “Rice’s Loss Of Hud Job Is City Of Seattle’s Gain.” 

Even the architecture of the mall was out of time with the times. As the blogger for the Buildings of Seattle, Keith Cote, explained, its postmodern style was in the “death throes” by “the late 1990s.” Though Cote is “a huge fan” of this kind of architecture, its “later phase… especially when applied to shopping centers, often resembles a train wreck.” Cote is also amazed that “such a bloated design and creative bankruptcy came from such a prestigious firm as NBBJ.” (NBBJ is the Seattle-based firm that designed Amazon’s headquarters and the Spheres.)

Let’s now turn to Amazon and the decline of brick-and-mortar shopping. When Madison Marquette purchased Pacific Place for loads of money, Seattle was in the middle of an economic boom driven by the tech sector. Downtown’s property values were skyrocketing. The future looked ever so bright. The mall was “90 percent leased and anchored by Barnes & Noble and AMC Theatres.” But in 2017, Madison Marquette apparently got greedy. It wanted to attract the deep pockets of tech workers by renovating the mall’s interiors and cramming a brazenly bougie entrance into the southwest section of Pacific Place that directly faced the gateway to South Lake Union. When the disruptive project was finally completed in 2020 for lord knows how much, “two-thirds of the mall’s tenants” were history. And so, Madison Marquette saw the revenue stream of nearly full occupancy drop to a 21-tenant rivulet. “Barneys New York, Barnes and Noble, Victoria’s Secret, Brookstone, J. Crew” and more left during renovation. 

CHARLES MUDEDE

Then the pandemic hit, then the US economy lost a mind-boggling 22 million jobs, then the mall was directly hit by the Black Lives Matter revolt. Lululemon, the Canadian athletic apparel retailer offered a ray of hope. It moved into the mall in the winter of 2020. But a little more than two years later, it called it day. With this departure, KUOW wasted no time calling the Pacific Place a “Ghost Mall.” To make matters worse, one of its remaining tenants is called Ghost Gallery. Of the 10 or so times I visited the place in April and May, I never saw this gallery open once. The same goes for a number of other businesses on its second, third, and fourth floors, which at one point were to be converted into office spaces by a bold developer based in LA (the plan tanked in the fall of 2022). As for the celebrated European-style atrium, its inactivity and emptiness are only made more visible by the merciless light falling from the mall’s massive skylight.

Only the top floor has businesses (restaurants and a cinema) that attract customers. Indeed, the vertical mall has become something like a floating strip mall. When you look down from this busy level, you see lots of security guards, a few people heading up to where you are, bad art here and there, and a large amount of capital that’s “like a patient etherized upon the table.”

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The City of Lacey used federal housing dollars and local transportation dollars to build a massive police training facility. The place is much smaller than Atlanta’s cop city—more of a cop village, I guess—but protests broke out in February, and locals remain concerned about transparency and priorities.

by Kylin Brown

As cops crack down on protesters across the country, concerns about militarized policing strategies continue to mount. The “Stop Cop City” movement, which grew from a three-year blockade of a massive police training facility near Atlanta, has emerged nationwide as one response to the issue. Signs of this movement’s spread can be seen via stickers embellishing Seattle stop signs and, more unusually, at recent protests in the small city of Lacey, WA, where the town recently broke ground on a new police station and regional training facility. 

But is the facility in Lacey really a “cop city”? And for those opposed to expanding the police state, is it to stop it?

STOP COP CITY

On February 5, thirty protesters showed up at the groundbreaking ceremony for Lacey’s long-planned police station due to the casual addition of an entirely separate regional training facility building. 

As city council members and police donned symbolic hard hats and shovels for a photo op, demonstrators shattered the staged scene with chants of, “No cops; no prisons! Total abolition!” Some wielded signs that read, “STOP COP CITY,” while other signs read, “Fund housing, not police,” indicating dissonance between the City’s priorities and the public’s.

Thurston County Sheriff Derek Sanders said that the protests were too little, too late. “It’s a little late once we start putting shovels in the ground,” he told KING 5 News.

Lacey’s new police station has been publicly discussed in city council meetings and in other forums since 2019. Citing Lacey’s growing population and limitations to the current police station building, the City says that it lacks the space to accommodate its predicted needs.

But the opportunity for Lacey to host a regional police hub first arose at a Thurston County Regional Coalition work session, said Lacey Mayor Andy Ryder. “I remember having a conversation at one of our work sessions over this, and I remember the chief bringing up the idea of having this training facility [in Lacey] and immediately my ears perked up,” he said. 

In early 2022, the council approved a memorandum of understanding with St. Martin’s Abbey to allow the City to acquire 12 acres of forested property for the project. That agreement describes a police station, emergency management operations, and, finally, a police training center.

The spot. City of Lacey

Final project specs show the police station nestled in the hillside of the property, rising two stories and spanning 48,600 square feet. The 15,000-square-foot training center will be standalone so that the station can accommodate more space for things like evidence storage and confidential interviews, in addition to offering a “more welcoming” lobby. 

Inside, the training building will house an eight-lane firing range, an armory with gun-cleaning facilities, shell and site work training space, a digital training simulation room, defensive tactics training, and a large classroom for multipurpose use.

A look inside the proposed training facility. City of Lacey 

In recent meetings, local lawmakers say the training center would contribute to better training and collaboration between law enforcement in the region. They also think the development of both the new police station and the training facility will generate new jobs and help address western WA’s proported police shortage.

The “Cop City” Comparison 

Including the $4 million land purchase, design, construction, and other costs, the City pegs the price tag for both facilities at $61.5 million. By comparison, the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center is shaping up to be much larger, spanning 85 acres in the middle of the Weelaunee Forest—the largest green space in the Atlanta area—and costing a whopping $109.65 million. That facility also includes “an explosives testing area, over twelve firing ranges, a Black Hawk helicopter landing pad, a training center to practice crowd control, a driving course for police to practice chases, and a ‘mock village’ with a hotel/nightclub and convenience store,” according to the Boston Review. 

Lacey Council Member Lenny Greenstein said he hopes the City can offset some of the operations costs through partnerships with other agencies from across the region, including the Washington State Patrol, the Thurston County Sheriff’s Office, and neighboring cities “who are clearly going to want to use this facility because there is nothing like it in the area.”

Public Concerns about Transparency and Priorities

The City plans to use a mix of bonds and general fund reserves to pay for the project, a funding strategy that, incidentally, allowed them to move forward without needing a public vote. Beyond city council meetings, the use of that strategy meant the training center’s funding approval process did not need to be communicated to the public, a fact that became a large point of contention for the community members who oppose the facility today.

Local grassroots organizer Greg Urquhart said he is one of many locals who believes the City’s funding strategy intentionally excluded public involvement to avoid “any potential speed bumps” on the path to construction. 

“It looks like they passed this right before Christmas, when nobody was available to go to their city council meeting,” he said, referring to Lacey’s Dec 21, 2023 city council meeting. Only two city employees attended the meeting at the time of the approval.

Not exactly filled to capacity for the cop city funding vote. City of Lacey

As evidenced by recordings throughout the process, Lacey City Council meetings have seen a sharp decrease in public participation overall throughout the pandemic. Pre-pandemic, when the public opposed something, they sat in the front row with large signs and returned repeatedly to speak on the matter. Throughout 2023, dust gathered on the public’s seats as city officials indulged in their dreams of making Lacey a hub for law enforcement from across the region.

Bunchy Carter, minister of defense for the Washington chapter of the Black Panther Party, said a lack of transparency has fueled public distrust. 

“Being more transparent and forthcoming with information is a must, and they’ve done everything but that in this particular situation. I would hope that they understand that that’s part of the reason why people feel the way they feel,” he said.

The Black Panther Party of Washington is only “peripherally involved” with the issue at this time as they await the full details about the training facility’s features, which continue to be sparsely communicated to the public. 

“We already have a troubling trend of people who are having mental health crises, who are being killed by the police because the police aren’t trained to deal with that,” he said. “Now they will have this facility to increase the degree of training that is being given, and I don’t know that that’s going to be training in de-escalation. I don’t know if that’s going to be training for dealing with mental health crises.”

When The Stranger spoke to Carter, the Lacey website had yet to add that the facility will also provide “spaces for mental health and homeless outreach professionals” and “training areas for continuing to enhance de-escalation techniques,” which it lists today. 

Urquhart also brought into question the City’s use of $6.8 million in COVID relief funds that were previously set aside for permanent supportive housing. As an Indigenous activist and founder of two grassroots organizations, Red Road Rising and South Sound Street Medics, Urquhart has connections to Lacey’s most vulnerable populations, including unhoused people. 

Somewhat ironically, in using those federal housing dollars to help fund the training facility, they contributed to displacement, Urquhart said. Carter affirmed this comment, saying that about 20 people living in the construction area, which is just off of I-5, to whom the Party was providing mutual aid can no longer be found.

Another large chunk of funding for the project comes from the City’s general fund reserves, specifically its arterial street fund reserves. Sounds like investments in roads and permanent supportive housing will have to take a backseat for now. 

When asked for comment, the City of Lacey and the Lacey Police Department declined to speak about the training center at this time.

As for the claims that the facility is basically a “Cop City” for western WA, Urquhart and Carter see both similarities and differences when compared to the life-threatening situation in Atlanta. 

For Carter, a second-generation Panther, the greatest concern is that the Lacey facility will give police a place to centralize scores of heavily armed officers to deploy in times of civil unrest, an evermore frequent sight in this present moment in history. “This is absolutely an opportunity to further militarize the police,” he said. 

Urquhart, who is a military veteran, cautions that “a Cop City is not going to help us out in any way, shape or form. Increasing law enforcement just doesn’t work like that.”

The Stranger

Bumbershoot’s full music lineup is finally here!

by Megan Seling

It’s finally here. This morning Bumbershoot organizers announced this year’s long-awaited music lineup and headliners include beloved indie rockers Pavement, Beyoncé bestie James Blake, electronic music goofball Marc Rebillet, Australian rock and roller Courtney Barnett, and the best part of Sonic Youth aka Kim Gordon.

The Pacific Northwest is well represented, too, with Black Belt Eagle Scout, Tres Leches, Acid Tongue, the Divorce, Lemon Boy, Linda from Work, and Flesh Produce aka Fleshy P, a band I’ve wanted to see since Stranger contributor Kevin Diers described their 2023 Capitol Hill Block party set as a “furious thunderstorm of breakneck glitch pop gone hardcore with some nu-metal flavor.” Yes, please!

Here’s the full music lineup, in alphabetical order:

Acid Tongue, All Them Witches, Aly & AJ, Angélica Garcia, Automatic, BADBADNOTGOOD, Balthvs, Black Belt Eagle Scout, Carl Cox, Corridor, Courtney Barnett, Cunningham / Bird, Cypress Hill, Dean Johnson, Disq, Emi Pop, Flesh Produce, Freddie Gibbs, George Clanton, Gold Chisme, Grynch, Helado Negro, Hurray for the Riff Raff, I Dont Know How But They Found Me, James Blake, k.flay, Kassa Overall, Kim Gordon, King Buffalo, Kultur Shock, Kurt Vile & The Violators, Ladytron, Lauren Mayberry, Lee Fields, Lemon Boy, Linda from Work, Lol Tolhurst x Budgie, Marc Rebillet, Me First and the Gimme Gimmes, Mercury Rev, Moor Mother, NAVVI, Neal Francis, Oh, Rose, Parisalexa, Pavement, Pink Siifu, Pom Pom Squad, Psymon Spine, Pure Bathing Culture, R E P O S A D O, Rocket, Spoon Benders, Squirrel Flower, St Paul and the Broken Bones, Stephanie Anne Johnson, Sux, Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, TEKE::TEKE, The Divorce, The Groovy Nobody, The Polyphonic Spree, Thee Sacred Souls, TK & The Holy Know-Nothings, Tres Leches, Warren Dunes.

Not bad at all! 

The weekend will also feature immersive art exhibits and performances beyond music. The Recess District will host roller skating, breakdancing, cheerleading, a skateboard competition, and the Bumbermania! wrestling showcase (which was a surprising personal highlight last year), the Fashion District will showcase local designers with runway shows, hair and nail art, and vendors, and the Geodesic Domes will be back with the popular cat circus, pole dancing, and comedy curated by The Stranger’s Undisputable Genius of Comedy Dan Hurwitz.

Like last year, tickets are (relatively) cheap. Or cheaper, at least. Single-day tickets are $70 and weekend passes are $125 at bumbershoot.com. (Children 10 and under are free, but still require a ticket.) Not a bad deal considering a single day for Capitol Hill Block Party is currently going for $105 and Day In Day Out is $130, though Bumbershoot’s prices will increase June 21.

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