Growing suburb fights apartment blight

By JACK HOPKINS
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

Virginia Levack remembers when her daughters would sit alongside the road in Covington and count the cars going by just to pass the time of day.

Sometimes there wasn't a heck of a lot of traffic on the two-lane street, and that got a bit boring for the youngsters.

Today there are almost too many cars on the five-lane highway for little girls to count.

"Now you have to wait for about 20 cars to pass just so you can get across the street," says Levack, who has lived in the once-rural community east of Kent for 35 years.

Johnny Sommers had just about the only store in town when Levack moved there in the 1960s. Residents who couldn't find what they needed at the combination grocery, garden and hardware store faced a long drive to some other city.

"They had to go to Auburn, Kent, Tacoma or Seattle because there was not anything here for them," said Levack.

It's different now. And anyone who has driven through town on Kent-Kangley Road is aware of that.

This village has seen tremendous residential and commercial growth the past couple of decades despite a four-year ban on new water hookups that ended only recently, when the overburdened local water district was able to make arrangements to expand its water supply.

Today there is little reason for people to leave the city limits -- unless they are looking for an apartment, that is.

Not one of Covington's 13,010 residents lives in an apartment. There aren't any to live in.

And if many of this 2-year-old city's residents had their way, there would never be any apartments in this heavily wooded community with its winding roads and beautiful views of Mount Rainier.

The desire to keep apartments out of town -- along with a demand for increased police services -- played a role in the community's decision to incorporate in 1997.

"There was a proposal to build a 200-unit apartment complex a couple of years ago, and people got up in arms over it," said Pat Nevins, Covington's city manager. "I think that was the straw that broke the camel's back."

All residents had to do was look at Kent, where a disproportionate share of the housing consists of apartments, to know what they didn't want.

"They didn't want Covington to be another extension of the apartment complex of Kent. They didn't want apartment after apartment. They wanted more single-family development," Nevins said.

Residents are a lot happier about new plans for the site of the dreaded apartment project. Scheduled for construction soon are a new post office and a 14-screen theater.

But only time will tell whether Covington will succeed at blocking apartments and urban sprawl.

The community's proximity to the intersection of heavily traveled state routes 18 and 516 and the state's Growth Management Act probably guarantee the city will see steady growth in the coming years.

King County growth planners, in fact, say the population in the Covington area is likely to reach 41,500 by 2010.

And Nevins says some of that growth will come in the form of apartments, although the city is working with residents to minimize their impact.

"The growth control act does require that we have a fair amount of low-cost, low-income type of residential development," Nevins said. "We'll probably have a lot more density in the community at some point in the future."

Mayor Pat Sullivan isn't convinced apartments necessarily qualify as the affordable housing required by state law. Apartments, he said, can be very expensive.

"But as long as the quality of apartments is of the highest standards and we can limit the number of units in any area, we can get by," Sullivan said. "We just have to get more ingenious in our ways of finding housing for all walks of life."

Dianne Heide, a 24-year resident of the community and co-chairman of the Covington Citizens Action Committee, doesn't fear apartments.

"You need different types of people to make a well-rounded community," said Heide, named the city's 1998 Citizen of the Year because of her civic activities.

But Heide and others say there needs to be a strong effort to make the community more pedestrian-friendly and not let growth get out of hand.

"I do think growth needs to be controlled," Heide said. "You need growth for tax income, but you don't want to end up with problems that make the town not as friendly as you would like it to be."

"Growth has to make sense and be well planned so we don't lose the qualities that we have in the community," adds Jean Bouffard, an attorney and first president of the Covington Chamber of Commerce.