Developer buys Columbia City plaza

Those who have worked hard on Columbia City's redevelopment support a Seattle developer's plans to revitalize a crime-ridden shopping center in the South End neighborhood.

		Seattle P-I

HAL Real Estate Investments announced Monday that it paid Kin Properties of Florida slightly more than $6.6 million for the 74,500-square-foot Columbia Plaza property, which is bordered by Rainier Avenue South, South Edmunds Street and Columbia Park, down the street from the Columbia City library and a few blocks from Sound Transit's Columbia City Station.

HAL President Dana Behar said he has looked for a site in Columbia City since the beginning of the year, and plans to build apartments or condos above street-level retail space.

		Joshua Trujillo / P-I
	Neighbors hope their complaints about crime at the Columbia Plaza will soon end after HAL Real Estate Investments announced it purchased the building Monday.

Columbia Plaza includes a large parking lot and an 18,000-square-foot building that was erected in 1957 as a supermarket, but now accommodates crudely divided retail spaces selling clothes, electronics, jewelry and other merchandise. Neighbors have complained about drug dealing, gang activity and violence on the lot -- including a fatal shooting, reportedly over a dice game, in March.

On Monday afternoon, several young men hanging out in the lot blasted music from three sport-utility vehicles parked just outside the plaza building.

"It's just been a drag on the neighborhood for a long time," Pam Stokes said Monday in the neighboring dentistry office of her husband, Paul Hasegawa, and his father, Fred, who owns the small shopping center that includes the office.

"We call in drug deals (to police) all the time," said Stokes, who is the treasurer of the Columbia City Business Association.

Rob Mohn, a Columbia City property owner and association member, said the previous owners of the plaza, "have, over the years, shown very little interest in the property."

Current leases for the building run through February, but Behar said tenants might be able to stay longer because planning and permitting for his project could take two to three years.

Tenants said Monday that they had not been told about the sale but were looking for new spaces already because they knew the lease was expiring. Neighbors are more worried about the future of the Columbia City Farmers Market, which is in the plaza's parking lot on Wednesdays from May through October.

The market can stay rent-free for the next couple of years, Behar said, but it will have to move after that.

That was actually good news for officials at the Seattle Neighborhood Farmers Market Alliance, which operates it.

"There was a point this year when we thought we weren't going to have a market space for this year," office manager Janet Hurt said. "We were pretty freaked out."

Behar has pledged to help the market find a new home, he said.

Few details are available on what would be on the site, other than that it probably would include apartments or condominiums above ground-floor retail space and go up to the six stories the site's zoning allows.

The proposal will, among other things, go through the Seattle Landmarks Preservation Board because the site is in the Columbia City Historic District. Behar is a former member of that board and now serves on the Downtown/Belltown Design Review Board.

And he has a history in the area.

"I grew up near Columbia City and spent countless hours there as a kid -- shopping for school clothes, doing my homework in the library and going to see Bruce Lee movies with my brother," he said in the news release announcing the purchase. "I still come regularly with my family to go to restaurants and the Farmers' Market. I see this as the next Fremont."

Mohn said he was looking forward to seeing a proposal and hoped to have some input.

Stokes checked out HAL Real Estate's new Braeburn building, on Capitol Hill, and liked it, she said.

"We told them we want a grocery store down here," she said.

Behar's project is the latest of several recent mixed-use proposals in Columbia City, which has developed a thriving business district in recent years and an increasingly hot market for houses, but has until recently lagged in condo construction.

"You feel like a neighborhood just becomes better all of a sudden," Stokes said. "But it's a lot of behind-the-scenes work that made it happen."