An Urban Walgreen’s in Suburbia

Yes, Walgreen’s has built a decent new store in an up to the sidewalk urban fashion in an otherwise suburban area. But don’t look for this in the St. Louis region. I’m in Seattle on a combination business trip and brief vacation. Yesterday we spotted this new Walgreen’s in an area of NW Seattle (map)

The first thing you can see is the typical Walgreen’s window where a true second floor should exist. But under that is a sign & entrance for a place that does nails. What gives?

Walgreen’s is known for seeking high-profile corner locations but they don’t necessarily want a pedestrian corner entrance. Instead they want a parking lot and adjacent entrance. This is a good compromise design.

Seattle has requirements to build more urban even in areas that in the past had been allowed to have typical suburban development — far setbacks behind a sea of parking. Seattle has realized people will walk if you make the path interesting and convenient.

So the street corner, at far left in this picture, has a smaller business but gives Walgreen’s the visibility they desire. The other end of the building relates well to both the sidewalk and their small, but adjacent, parking lot.

Behind the Walgreen’s is local grocery store QFC with a large parking lot. This new Walgreen’s gives a more urban feel to the corner that it previously lacked. Between the Walgreen’s and QFC parking lot is a narrow drive-thru lane to serve the pharmacy.

Also of note is the red bike rack. The placement near the entrance is excellent. I would have preferred an “inverted-u” type rack that allows the bike to be supported in two places. This wave type rack is sexier which is why it gets selected. This rack is designed to hold three bikes — the middle bike entering from the opposite side. Whomever specified this rack failed to understand that point as the user would have to trek their bike through the planting area to do so. As a result, this is a essentially two-bike rack. An inverted-u rack would also hold two bikes and would have been cheaper. In the space they have they could have done two inverted-u racks for a total of four spaces — probably for the same cost as this single rack that really only hold two. I’m glad to see racks becoming more common but more thought needs to go into their selection and placement.

Back to the Walgreen’s…

Why don’t we have such urban thinking in the St. Louis region?

Basically it boils down to elected officials that are either ignorant of what it takes to make a more urban and walkable community or too lazy/spineless to require developers to do something different than their auto centric sprawl prototypes. At the same time these elected officials are trying to deal issue of meeting air quality compliance and population loss. Solutions are at hand but it requires doing business differently.

I recently had a St. Louis Alderman tell me, as we were discussing developments, “if you knew all the information” I’d have a different view. The additional information was tidbits like the store in question only has two standard models which the alderman accepted at face value. The “if you were in my shoes” answers just don’t cut it. It is an easy way out. Finally the real sentiment came out that in the past we haven’t had developers lined up to do projects in the city. So a developer expresses an interest in a project so we accept whatever it is they want to build because that is their standard model.

The building anything you want attitude is not limited to officials in the city. Municipalities in St. Louis County are tripping over each other to give developers incentives in a fight for sales tax dollars that are regionally flat. Brilliant.

The buildings we are constructing today will be with us for at least 20 years. That alone is a sad statement as we should be building for much longer life spans. But even a short 20 more years of parking dominated development is too long. Our region will fall behind other regions that are actively embracing pedestrian-friendly designs. Our region needs to attract more people, hedge our bets against rising fuel costs and make real efforts to reduce auto use that leads to lower air quality.

We cannot continue to have elected officials that simply accept the developers first sales pitch. We can demand better in our community.

– Steve