Little room for a growing county

By Warren Cornwall

Herald Writer

Imagine adding five cities the size of Everett to Snohomish County.

That’s what might happen by 2025, according to new state population forecasts.

The county is expected to grow from 606,000 in 2000 to between 800,000 and 1.1 million residents in the first quarter of the century, according to the state Office of Financial Management.

The prospect of adding 50 new people a day for 25 years evokes surprise and wonderment from some. It also poses challenges for policy makers and reveals what people see in the county’s future, or what they would like to see.

A chief point of discussion is how to house all the new residents: build out or up.

"It will be a compromise," said professor Richard Morrill, a University of Washington geographer who tracks population and housing shifts in Washington. "It would be impossible to handle simply through increased (housing) density — not going to happen because people won’t tolerate it."

Sue Adams leans toward building up. The director of Pilchuck Audubon’s SmartGrowth campaign said an important part of the solution should be multistory housing mixed with retail stores, built within the current urban areas. Some areas of single-family homes would give way to more apartment and condominium complexes.

That may defy the wish people have for single-family homes with lawns, Adams said. But there are pleasures in more compact living arrangement, said Adams, who likened it to housing in older European cities.

"What we need is to realize that land is also a limited resource, and we have tools that we can use so that we walk more lightly on the land," she said. "To make that come true we have to make it so that it’s more attractive to the American homeowner and their dream home can be on the fourth floor with a balcony."

That vision worries Mike Appleby, a sales manager for Chicago Title Insurance Co. who often works with land developers. Appleby warned that regulations are restricting the supply of land so much that new single-family homes will become more scarce and costly.

In the current situation, he agreed with Adams that "vertical development" could become a chief tool for finding more housing. But he feared that threatens the dream people have of owning their own home.

"Snohomish County has always prided itself on the pride of individual home ownership," he said. "I think if we lose that character it could affect us."

Those debates will take center stage in coming years, as officials try to figure out where to channel the added residents.

The state’s population forecasts are the cornerstone of discussions beginning this year about how much of the new growth different urban centers in the county should take, Snohomish County demographer Steve Toy said. Those negotiations have just begun through a coalition of local governments called Snohomish County Tomorrow.

When combined with land-use regulations, this could determine whether the growth boundaries surrounding cities are pushed out to make more land available for development.

That decision will lie mainly with the cities, said Snohomish County Councilman Gary Nelson, a member of the Snohomish County Tomorrow board.

The state forecasts suggest Snohomish County will grow faster than the other urban Puget Sound counties. By 2025 more than one in every nine Washington residents is expected to call Snohomish County home, compared with about one in 10 now. The state predictions are still in draft form, but few major changes are likely, state demographer Theresa Lowe said.

In addition to its impact on housing, County Executive Bob Drewel said the new forecast underscores the need to upgrade critical infrastructure, such as transportation.

Traffic problems have already taken on urgency in the Puget Sound, and state lawmakers are considering a multibillion dollar tax package for transportation. The Puget Sound Regional Council recently estimated it would cost $105 billion to cope with traffic by 2030.

Without changes, Drewel said the population forecasts evoked this picture: "It is essentially a Puget Sound region, with some emphasis on Snohomish County, being in perpetual gridlock."

You can call Herald Writer Warren Cornwall at 425-339-3463 or send e-mail to

cornwall@heraldnet.com.

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