A broken landscape

(I wrote this a couple of weeks ago and was waiting to post some photos. It might take me a while to get the ones I want and post them, so I figured I might as well hit the Publish button.)

When I started my current job, there was a small forest a block away. Probably 2nd or third growth, but a forest all the same. There were paths, a drive that went nowhere, and a little bitty pond. I saw it freeze in the winter, that first winter. Unfortunately, I don’t have any good photos of that.

There were rumors at work, but basically: I walked to the bus stop, and across the street the forest had been cut down. The lowes went in first, followed by a handful of little strip mall buildings, and all around them, acres of parking.

The thing that infuriated me most, early on, was the removal of several big trees — sad that I can’t remember exactly what they were. Poplars maybe? And then…they planted different trees in the SAME DAMN SPOT. Much the same with the little pond; it’s still there, sorta, as a drainage pond, but stripped bare of all the surrounding vegetation, planted with something more “tame.”

Notable were — are — the empty spots; there obviously ought to be a building there; there’s even a handicapped ramp on the sidewalk in spots, not to mention a drive-through lane with nothing to drive through. But it’s still just weeds on bare dirt.

The curious part is that even the buildings that got built stood empty for a very long time. It’s gradually filled in: first a Christian gym, then the Starbucks. A sandwich shop, a teriyaki place, an insurance agent, a tanning salon, a sports-themed hair cut place, a Thai restaurant, most recently a “neighborhood” bar of a micro-chain out of Puyallup I think, and a nail salon. Oh, and an Edward Jones and a mail center. Plus, awkwardly in this context, a branch of my employer.

It’s all — or mostly — pretty convenient for me personally, because it puts all this stuff in walking distance from my office. Well, sort of. There’s that vast acreage of parking again: it’s a PITA to walk all. the. way. across from say, Lowes to Starbucks. The biking helps, but I still find it irksome.

There’s housing within a few blocks, and offices, and two big grocery stores — side note: the Starbucks here MOVED from a location in the strip mall on the other side of Yelm highway. Yeah, there are 3 strip malls on the 4 corners of Yelm & College – the fourth corner is a golf course.

I swear: it could be a comfortable urban village: there’s all this stuff relatively close together, including an elementary school up the hill, by the way…if only it weren’t for all the damn parking lots.

Well, that and the development mindset. There’s still big billboard-like signs over by the QFC on the other side of Yelm Highway, announcing that similar weed-filled lots can be built to suit. Have they been built? No, not so much as a spadeful of dirt.

After all that ranting, I can see an alternative in my mind’s eye, where the retail and offices are concentrated on the north side of Yelm Highway, grocery store as anchor on one side, Lowes on the other. Then move the housing down from the surrounding areas, the apartment buildings, the little neighborhood of houses that I ride through every morning. Move the pizza place, the liquor store that replaced the dead video store, all that stuff — including the McDonalds and the other burger place — and close (or move) the QFC. move our building — hell, rebuild the branch so that our building is just upstairs from it. Move the other big office building to be upstairs of one of the other buildings. and so on and so on, and suddenly you have a dense little neighborhood that ought to be alive all the time. It’s still suburbia, but without the feeling of desolation. I’ve spent quite a few bike commutes daydreaming about how it could work.

Postscript: I had mostly written a draft of this post when I came across this article: Getting off oil, we need active vibrant exciting cities. No kidding.