Tacoma City Council has a long tradition of thinking big when it comes to sparking economic development but lately the council has been straying from that tradition in ways that could result in a big lost opportunity for the city and surrounding areas.
The council is primed to endorse the Link light rail expansion route that would run tracks from the Theater District station on Commerce up a looped hill around Stadium Way to Martin Luther King Jr. Way and 19th Street. The route would provide rail service from the Tacoma Dome to the “Medical Mile” anchored by MultiCare Health Systems and Franciscan Health System’s St. Joseph Hospital. Granted, this route has some merit since it would get rail service up the hillside, therefore providing a “backbone” for other expansions in the decades to come.
Yes, economic development along the route will come but the trouble with this route is that much, if not all, of that development will come anyway. The route runs through the Hilltop community, which has made large strides since the troubled 1980s and 1990s. Those days are gone and Hilltop is on the move to a bright future, so not running a rail link from downtown to the neighborhood won’t change that. In fact, residents of the area wanting better connection to downtown might actually suck neighbor retail dollars out of the community because the Link would broaden their shopping options.
At best, the MLK line would simply shuffle Hilltop spending to downtown and downtown dollars to the Hilltop. No new spending would be created. Tourists and their money won’t be drawn to the City of Destiny by faster access between Hilltop and downtown. The trouble with the MLK route is that a better option is out there, making the route not taken the MLK option’s biggest liability.
The proposed Portland Avenue route would link the Theater District and downtown to large patches of undeveloped, yet commercially zoned, land along Portland Avenue, which is another neighborhood that is prime for growth. Routing the Link expansion to Portland Avenue would tie in the city’s Salishan planned community and development hubs. It would also help solve several lingering parking issues downtown – running a light rail line to Portland Avenue would provide parking for Tacoma Dome concerts and events as well as conferences and presentations at the Greater Tacoma Convention and Trade Center, both “economic development” projects that have fallen on hard times because of their lack of access to parking and hotel spaces. The Portland Avenue route would feature abundant parking at the Emerald Queen Casino, which has already stated its willingness to allow for event parking. The recent news that the Puyallup Tribe is set to break ground on what will be a $200 million complex, which will be a regional draw that could feed into Tacoma’s downtown.
The Portland Avenue route connects low income and minority communities to downtown, it provides parking to Dome and convention activities. It is under the projected $150 million budget, and it opens up large swaths of land awaiting a spark for redevelopment. Acres of high density and commercially zoned land, with quick access to the Tideflats and I-5, are found in the city. They are along the Portland route. Running a line along this strip could transform the city. The Portland route would also provide a basis for future expansion to eventually connect Tacoma to SeaTac International Airport with a tie-in to the Federal Way to SeaTac Sounder line.
For a city that talks about “regionalism” and “connections,” it is odd that it would back a route that really does none of that at the cost of a route not taken that would.