Tacoma's Transformation

By BRAD BROBERG
Special to the Journal

As deputy director at the Port of Tacoma, Don Meyer would try hard to persuade visiting trade delegations to stay downtown.

But downtown Tacoma made a lousy first impression.

Meyer would wince when he and his guests exited the freeway at Pacific Avenue and 15th Street - "a shady looking part of town with vacant land and weeds."

Visitors might stay once, but "they’d never come back," says Meyer. "There was nothing to do."

These days, Meyer has a new job, executive director of the Foss Waterway

Development Authority. And Tacoma has a bright new future.

After years of patiently laying the groundwork, Tacoma’s boosters are witnessing their vision for the city blossom. Last year was especially pivotal, setting the stage for several years of significant growth and development.

Some of the biggest improvements will take place at the intersection where Meyer once winced. On one corner of 15th and Pacific - downtown’s main gateway - the city plans to build a new convention center. On another corner, Pacific Steps, an upscale retail and office complex, will rise. Opus Northwest, a Bellevue company, is building Pacific Steps.

Opus plans to start construction of the Pacific Steps mixed-use project in the first half of 2001.

The selection of Opus to build the $60 million Pacific Steps complex was one of several development milestones to occur last year in downtown Tacoma.

There were many others, including:

• The Foss Waterway Development Authority picked Team Tacoma to construct an $88 million mixed-use development featuring shops, restaurants, condominiums, a hotel and pedestrian esplanade along the waterway’s shoreline.
• Site preparation began for the $74 million International Glass Museum and Chihuly Bridge of Glass at the south end of the Thea Foss Waterway.
• The Tacoma Art Museum announced it will construct a new $25 million home on Pacific Avenue.
• Sound Transit finalized the route for a light-rail spur along Pacific Avenue between the Tacoma Dome and downtown.
• Investor Erivan Haub began construction on a nine-story, $40 million class A office building at 13th and A streets (tenants will include Frank Russell Co. and the Columbia Bank headquarters) and submitted plans for another tower next door.
• The Tacoma Sheraton announced a 200-225-room expansion.
• Total Renal Care, a kidney dialysis provider, moved into the remodeled TRC Tower (formerly known as the Schoenfeld Building).
• Labor Ready announced it will move into the former Weyerhaeuser building after the timber company moves its Tacoma employees to its Federal Way corporate headquarters this spring.
• The city selected three finalists to bid on constructing the new $51 million convention center - Opus, Trammell Crow Co. and R.C. Hedreen.
• Supporters edged closer to making a final decision on whether to begin raising funds to build the Harold E. LeMay Museum near the Tacoma Dome. The $74 million museum would house much of LeMay’s collection of more than 2,300 historic automobiles.
• The Tacoma Technology Center, a co-location telecom facility in the former Lyon Building, approached completion.
• Horizon Partners purchased the former Hunt Mottet and Lile Moving & Storage buildings on Pacific Avenue and began converting the property to 150,000 square feet of "class A historic" office space, now renamed the Horizon Pacific Center.
• The old Broadway Terrace building underwent a renovation and reopened in December as the Ninth and Broadway Building.

And those are just the projects that already are underway or have been publicly announced. Additional proposals are taking shape behind the scenes.

"There’s a lot of stuff in the pipeline that you don’t see," says Juli Wilkerson, director of the Tacoma Economic Development Department.

The current boom has been a long time in the making.

Earling Mork, city manager from 1975 to 1990, says it all began two decades ago with a series of public investments fought for by local, state and federal officials as well as business leaders.

With the Tacoma Mall sucking the life out of downtown, "our intent was ... just to get things rolling."

Major projects included: building the I-705 spur linking I-5 to downtown Tacoma; restoring Union Station and converting it into a federal courthouse; and convincing the University of Washington to build a branch campus downtown.

"All of these things add up when it comes time for developers to move in," says Mork.

Apparently, that time is now.

"There’s a new Tacoma that’s just around the corner," says Cederstrand, noting that "$600 million [of development] is coming out of the ground in the next two years."

Cederstrand, who’s been called "the Donald Trump of Tacoma," is the broker for many of the commercial projects underway in Tacoma, including the Foss Waterway and Pacific Steps - both of which are being built on publicly owned land the city helped assemble and market.

Cederstrand is so bullish on Tacoma’s future that he and his family recently moved to the Stadium District just north of downtown.

"Everybody wants to live and work in Tacoma," says Cederstrand. "They just don’t know it yet."

Twice a week Cederstrand meets with King County businesses to extol his adopted hometown’s virtues.

"I call it my Tacoma road show," he says. By the time he’s through, "their eyes just open."

So what is it about Tacoma that has more people taking a second look?

The 500-foot Chihuly Bridge of Glass, which will contain $12 million worth of glass art, will connect the new International Glass Museum (at right) to downtown Tacoma. The museum and bridge are expected to bring new life to the inner-city Thea Foss Waterway, which stretches for 3 miles and is adjacent to downtown.

"It’s a very attractive feature for a company like ours," says Sterling Griffin, co-owner of LibertyBay.com, an Internet service provider that plugged into Tacoma last spring.

What do home prices have to do with downtown development? They make it easier for businesses to recruit employees.

For example, employees can afford to live closer to the office than they can if they work on King County’s Eastside or in Seattle, shortening their commute. And since employees don’t have to pay as much for housing, companies don’t have to pay as much in wages, says Griffin.

Griffin thinks more high-tech companies will find Tacoma appealing. For one thing, the city has protected many of its turn-of-the century buildings, spaces that techies adore. For another, the city recently installed a $100 million fiber-optic cable network dubbed Click! Plus it exempted Internet service providers from the business and occupation tax.

"We’re trying to find every way we can to make it easy to do business in downtown Tacoma," says Wilkerson.

That includes streamlining the downtown land-use code, fast-tracking permits and creating a Web site called Tacoma-Space.com. The Web site is the city’s "virtual broker" and brims with information about available properties, zoning and taxes.

"It’s an amazing city to do business in," says Cederstrand.

The city also maintains a conference room to meet with visiting developers.

Located on the ninth floor of City Hall, it’s called the Visibility Room.

From there, visitors can gaze out the window at city’s present and also glimpse the future via renderings of pending projects such as the Harold E. LeMay Museum, Pacific Steps and the Foss Waterway.

"Whenever I bring a company or a developer into the city, we start from there," says Cederstrand.