Community's challenges include too little housing, too much traffic

By JACK HOPKINS
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

While Totem Lake boasts a thriving retail scene, it lacks housing with most located just outside the neighborhood. But there are a number of residents living close by the medical center and commercial area in a mix of single-family homes, apartments and condominiums.

Joe Martineau is one of them.

"I have lived here 18 years and watched it grow," he says. "And I am very happy with the medical community here and its growth. I'm not a kid any more, and I make use of it. It is one of the area's great strengths."

But Martineau, like many area residents, decries the traffic problems in the neighborhood.

Traffic has long been a problem in Totem Lake, which was sparsely populated until the opening of the mall.

"Totem Lake is a relatively new area," says Alan Stein of the Kirkland Heritage Society. "There were some early pioneers up there. But it was after the mall opened and the interchange was built that things really took off."

Martineau agrees: "The development really started out here in the late '60s. The biggest thing was the Totem Lake shopping center. When that and the hospital came in, it really started blossoming with all the small malls around here."

In the early days, the traffic problems revolved around getting on and off the freeway; there wasn't good access. Then an $8 million interchange was built, and the problem became too much easy access. Traffic clogged the neighborhood's streets.

Much of Totem Lake is not a good place to be on foot.

"We need to make an effort to make it more pedestrian-friendly here," Martineau said. "There are places it is hard to get to because there are no sidewalks, although slowly they have been going in. But traffic is a problem and will need some kind of resolution in the future," he said.

City Manager David Ramsey sees the easy access to the area as both "a blessing and a curse."

"There is tremendous access by cars. There are freeways and roads cutting every which way," he says. "Retailers like that. But I think in some ways there is too much access."