Bargreen Coffee Co.’s roasting plant has presided over its block of downtown Everett’s Rucker Avenue for more than a century, changing little compared with the businesses around it.
Today’s head of the family business, Howie Bargreen, welcomes the big changes that he sees coming to downtown, even as they make his enterprise seem more out of place. Already, city zoning rules would never allow a coffee roasting operation if it weren’t grandfathered at the site.
But Bargreen is all for more condominiums and apartments, additional office space and revitalized shopping blocks, things all contemplated by the city’s downtown plan. If nothing else, more residents in the city’s core would be good for his coffee shop, Cafe Amore.
“I think it’s for the best,” Bargreen said of the plan, which he has followed at public meetings.
After years of seeing downtown Everett struggle to find an identity, many who own property and run businesses in the city’s central blocks are ready to welcome what’s next.
“It’s an exciting time to be here,” said bank president Mike Deller, watching the foot traffic along Colby Avenue outside his windows at the new Bank of Everett headquarters. “I’m not impatient, but I’d rather see it happen sooner than later.”
While city leaders consider the specifics of the downtown plan and get ready to vote on it, market forces already are whipping up property values, transactions and proposed developments. New and out-of-town investors are looking at acquiring properties on the Monopoly board of downtown properties, while longtime local owners watch their holdings gain value.
“I’m bullish on downtown Everett in ways I haven’t been in the 19 years we’ve been doing business here,” said Tom Hoban, chief executive officer of Coast Real Estate Services, based in the 113-year-old Marion Building at the corner of Hewitt and Rucker avenues. “This is the first time in years I’ve seen outside investors take a real good look at Everett.”
Big plans for city
If a downtown boom is hard to detect from walking the sidewalks, just wait.
Skotdal Real Estate, downtown’s largest single landlord, is planning at least two new large projects. Others are following.
“Our investment wing is actively acquiring properties in the downtown area,” said Hoban, who talks of a potential “Rucker Renaissance,” which would change the face of other buildings and even the streetscape along a few blocks of Rucker Avenue. He said his firm is looking at investing in or building projects with a combination of residential and commercial space.
Lobsang Dargey of Bellevue is one of the newest investors in downtown. Earlier this year, he bought the Everett Public Market building and adjoining properties on Grand Avenue for more than $2 million. He’s trying to attract new tenants for the building and starting to spruce up the exterior. He also plans to install a new elevator to make the upper floor attractive for more uses.
Additionally, though, he and various business partners are actively looking to buy more in the area, and he has future plans to construct new mixed-use buildings downtown.
The city plans to spearhead redevelopment along aging stretches of Hoyt Avenue by replacing a city-owned garage at 2929 Hoyt Ave. with 40 affordable apartments for artists and their families, as well as an arts education center
Those and other publicly funded investments have focused the attention of more private developers on the downtown area.
While empty storefronts still are easy to find along Hewitt Avenue, a surge of new restaurants and bars in the past few years have filled many others.
And there’s only a small supply available of premium “Class A” office space downtown. Less than 1 percent of those spaces were vacant as of this spring, according to occupancy rates from Colliers International.
“I think that little grid is an attractive area for investment opportunities because of what I think is going to happen,” said Pat Sievers, president of a fourth-generation family business that owns Everett Downtown Storage.
He added he also might put money where his mouth is. “Over the next number of years, I would look to acquire and/or develop property within those boundaries.”
The real estate game
For years, most of Everett’s downtown property has remained in the hands of local owners. Elsewhere, the area’s reputation as a sleepy and sometimes unsavory milltown helped keep others away.
The huge public investments made in downtown in recent years, along with growth trends that are more favorable to Everett, are changing that.
Dargey said some of his friends questioned his plans to invest here. After seeing Everett, however, and the projects that are under way, they were swayed.
“In the past five years, people have said to me, ‘Wow, Everett’s kind of turning around now.’ But it’s been turning around for a while now,” said Dennis Wagner, a local commercial real estate broker.
Wagner, known as “Downtown Dennis” ticked off a list of properties in or near the city’s core that he has sold or leased in recent years.
Hoban said his local brokers are busier than ever. The building Dargey bought six months ago is in an area that would allow taller buildings under the new downtown plan. Because of that, Dargey said, he’s already received a couple of calls from interested buyers.
Downtown property values already have risen in tandem with the rest of Snohomish County, which has seen double-digit increase the past several years. A new surge of buyers will only push them up more.
Sievers acknowledges that, knowing that he may be competing in the downtown real estate game with more out-of-town investors with bigger pockets. It’s a natural part of the market, he said.
“Maybe you could argue that it makes things more competitive and pushes higher prices and all that, but that’s a sign of a vibrant downtown,” Sievers said.
As long as out-of-town investors are interested in improving whatever properties they buy here, they shouldn’t be feared, Hoban added.
Downtown already has vivid examples of buildings that have languished. City discussions about the downtown plan have included some deliberation on what can be done to encourage owners to improve neglected buildings – the Mediterranean and Baltic avenues of the Everett Monopoly game.
“The challenge for both the private and public sector is how do you harness that and get these absentee landlords to either clean up or sell their buildings,” Deller said.
One of those out-of-town landlords who has attracted criticism is Pete Sikov, a Seattle-based investor. He owns about a dozen downtown buildings, mostly in a row on Hewitt Avenue.
Sikov said he first purchased in Everett six years ago because he believes the city values historic structures. “From what I can tell, there are things in the downtown plan that help try and preserve them,” he said.
He said he has struggled to keep tenants in his buildings because many of them aren’t up to city code. City officials offer inconsistent information when it comes to code requirements, he said, adding more confusion to the costly process of upgrading buildings.
For now, Sikov doesn’t have any immediate plans to renovate.
“If somebody were to come along and want to make a purchase, I would be open to listening, but on the other hand I’m not marketing my property,” he said. “I think Everett is still a good investment place.”
Dargey, who said he’s had positive experiences with the city and other property owners downtown, compares Everett’s phase of development to where Bellevue was a decade or two ago. The city’s location, size and other assets are becoming hard to ignore. He looked out his west-facing window at the Everett Public Market building and gestured toward the Port Gardner scene.
“Look at the view here,” he said. “You can’t just create that. There are limited places to get that.”
More people the key
Despite developers’ talk of money, buildings and property when discussing downtown, all agree the key to making downtown work is more people – more people working, living, shopping, dining and being entertained downtown.
That they are coming already is a certainty, thanks to hundreds of waterfront condos planned on the city’s waterfront, Hoban said. As the waterfront fills up, it should have a positive effect on the nearby downtown.
“What I like about the downtown plan is it will widen the area for high-density housing and apartments,” he said.
Sievers said the addition in the past five years of two major residential buildings has made a difference. Along with more restaurants and the draw of the Everett Events Center, downtown has the makings of a new after-hours scene, he said.
“You look out the window every day, and it’s no longer people getting off work and parking to go to the pub. It’s families parking and walking up to the (Imagine) Children’s Museum,” he said.
Craig Skotdal said the city center’s theaters, museums and other amenities make it attractive for families, couples and others looking for an attractive urban setting in which to live. There are also limited property tax exemptions that could encourage condo buyers to look downtown.
“The goal of creating market-rate housing in downtown is not about creating a safe haven for yuppies,” he said. “It’s about attracting and retaining talented people who will create opportunities for others – active urbanites who start businesses, energize service groups and generally make things better.”
Dargey said, in addition to allowing more housing downtown, the city needs to do what it can to recruit new businesses that will provide more jobs for those residents.
With more residents, more downtown shops will come. Those businesses and the people who shop at them are needed to make downtown thrive, said the Stanifords, who run the Vintage Cafe on Hewitt Avenue. Downtown’s main attraction, the Events Center, isn’t enough.
“The first year the Events Center was open, there was a huge influx of businesses and it was great,” said Karen Staniford, an Everett native who’s operated a business at her site for the past 30 years. The couple lives above the Vintage Cafe as well.
Since then, new restaurants have opened, and her traffic has flattened. There are too many eateries and too few retail shops right now, she said.
The downtown plan designates streets where the city wants retail stores to cluster. A good idea, the Standifords said. But they don’t see it happening until new residents settle downtown.
“They want people to invest in small businesses downtown, but there’s not enough new residents,” Karen Standiford said. “You have to work hard to do business downtown right now. … We need to get to the next stage.”
They would like to see new downtown buildings as fast as possible.
“We need to see those tower cranes in downtown putting up buildings,” Jim Standiford said.
That sentiment gets little argument from many of downtown’s investors and owners. But a few caution against losing some of downtown Everett’s friendliness and history.
“I don’t want to see all the old feeling gone,” Wagner said.
The North Everett Lions Club has embraced the change, shutting down its downtown bingo hall on Oakes Avenue last year after seeing a dwindling profit. Its sizable building, now nearly 30 years old, sits empty most days, though the club has turned its parking lot into a modest money- maker during concerts and games at the nearby Events Center.
Instead of fleeing downtown, though, the club is trying to secure its future by redeveloping its property. John Madden, president of the Lions Club, said its negotiating with businesses that would lease land at the site. The club also would like to build a state-of-the-art meeting space that could also be used by other groups.
Ted Wenta, executive director of the Everett Family YMCA, said that organization’s 107-year-old presence in downtown also will continue. Even if future facility needs force the organization to abandon its location along California Street and Rockefeller Avenue, the club would want to relocate within a six-block area of that, he said.
“I think a revitalized downtown would be really exciting,” Wenta said, adding that more people working and living in the city could benefit the YMCA’s membership numbers.
With a number of downtown blocks either showing their age or filled with vacant spaces, some say that the city’s plans to encourage some types of business and discourage others shouldn’t be blocked. Craig Skotdal, who mentions that Everett’s per-capita income ranks among the lowest in the county, said fears that downtown will be welcoming only to the wealthy shouldn’t be overblown.
“I think people need to avoid responding to reactionary paranoia about ‘gentrification’ and focus on the nuts and bolts of making downtown more livable,” he said.
Plan thinks big
Marilyn Rosenberg, who moved into a neighborhood just outside the downtown blocks four years ago, is ready for a new wave of residents and renewed activity.
Previously the owner of online businesses and an independent art seller, she liked Everett’s direction when she arrived.
“I could see it changing, she said of downtown. “But I couldn’t find a place where I could hang out. I thought if I can’t find it, I might as well create it.”
That creation is Zippy’s Java Lounge on Hewitt Avenue, a couple blocks west of the events center. Named after her Dalmation dog, Zippy’s is the kind of place where eclectic decor, cozy reading corners and frequent entertainment keep customers coming back.
The year-old business attracts the wide array of people who work and play in downtown Everett, she said. Prosecutors and lawyers hold meetings there; artists and young people hang out and talk.
Evening events, such as speed dating, poetry readings and nonprofit fundraisers, have brought in crowds.
“I have a lot of people come in here who are looking for a nondrinking environment,” Rosenberg said.
Musing on her love for downtown, Rosenberg said she likes the mix of new and old, history and progress.
“For me, it’s the place to be,” she said. “I like the overall feel of downtown Everett.”
As more people look at central Everett as a potential new home, the city’s expected passage of the downtown plan is coming at the right time, said Reid Shockey, the city’s planning director in the 1970s. Shockey, now a planning consultant, said the document will let developers know up front what they can and cannot do.
“If you have a plan, most of your good developers want to see it in place. Because if they’re going to invest millions of dollars, they want to know what’s going in next to them.”
The plan should also help those already living and working here to feel like there is some thought behind the city’s future, Skotdal said.
“The beauty of the downtown plan is that it creates a framework for action while establishing safeguards for development, so people can feel more comfortable about change and growth,” he said.
He added the city should make sure it takes steps to encourage private development and investment in downtown, instead of just passing the plan and waiting for developers to come. However, the market already is taking care of that to some extent, he said.
Deller said that 10 years ago, Everett residents may have hoped for a better downtown, but there was little realty to back that up. That’s changed, he said.
“Now there’s true, rational optimism,” he said.
Hoban said he’d like to see a new resolve among the city’s political and business leaders, property owners and residents. They need to believe in the value of a blossoming downtown for change to happen.
“We need to break away from the ‘it’s just good enough for Everett’s mentality,” Hoban said. “We need to embrace change and think big.”
Reporter Eric Fetters: 425-339-3453 or fetters@heraldnet.com; Krista Kapralos; 425-339-3422 or kkapralos@heraldnet.com.
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