Seattle Neighborhood Analysis: Ballard and Capitol Hill
Created for ENV DES 100 - The City: Theories & Methods in Urban Studies, this report analyzes the urban form of the Ballard and Capitol Hill neighborhoods of Seattle, WA using GIS data and academic sources.
Seattle's Ballard and Capitol Hill neighborhoods. Andy Gagliardi, 2023.
Introduction
Seattle, Washington is a city of over 700,000 people with a high-density downtown core and lower-density residential areas north and south of downtown. Seattle is in a moment of massive change as a light rail transit line opened in 2009 and continues to expand. The Link Light Rail has transformed the neighborhoods it serves, especially the Capitol Hill neighborhood. An extension of the Link Light Rail to the Ballard neighborhood is currently being planned, and this paper will compare the impact of transportation access on the urban form between the Ballard and Capitol Hill neighborhoods in Seattle, WA.
General City Form Attributes
Seattle is located on the eastern coastline of the Puget Sound and on the Western coastline of Lake Washington. Seattle is also cut up by bodies of water, including the Duwamish Waterway that separates West Seattle from the rest of the city, and Lake Union and the associated shipping channel that connects the Puget Sound to Lake Washington. Seattle has an undulating and hilly topography, especially in the downtown core and the surrounding neighborhoods. The location of the modern-day Pioneer Square district was first settled thanks to the natural deep water port found on the coastline of the Puget Sound in that area, and the city of Seattle grew out from that initial development. The Northern Pacific Railway Company brought a rail connection to the Eastern United States in 1883, and Seattle’s population increased, the town flourished as a hub for the export of lumber, coal, and other extractive commodities. A gold rush in Alaska and Canada in 1897 also boosted Seattle’s economy. The city was built around the wharf area at first, and then spread out to other neighborhoods. In the early 1900s, only the areas surrounding Lake Union and Downtown had been built out, which includes Ballard and Capitol Hill, and the street grids north and south of these original areas were built out later, completed by the 1950s. Movement in Seattle has historically been along avenues and highways running north to south. Today, this is primarily along Interstate 5 and along the Link Light Rail Line 1. Seattle has many public parks—including the famed Gas Works Park—bringing Seattle’s tree canopy cover rate to 28%. Seattle follows a fairly standard land use pattern of a dense urban downtown central business district with lower density development in surrounding neighborhoods. 69% of land in Seattle is occupied by single-family homes, but more dense and mixed-use development has sprung up adjacent to areas served by the Link Light Rail. Suburban and sprawling edges of the city boundaries bleed into other neighboring municipalities to the north and south of Seattle. Westward, auto and passenger ferries connect Seattle to destinations across the Puget Sound, and eastward, two bridges connect Seattle to neighboring communities across Lake Washington. Seattle follows the Functional Urban Form Pattern with its largely gridded street pattern. The city expanded before auto-dependent planning was commonplace but has not had large-scale investments into viable transportation alternatives to automobiles until the 21st century.
Ballard Urban Form
Ballard is located on the western edge of Seattle along the coastline of the Puget Sound and north of Salmon Bay, a body of water connecting to Lake Union. Ballard’s northern border runs along Northwest 85th Street, and Ballard’s eastern border runs along 8th Avenue Northwest before jumping to 3rd Avenue Northwest after crossing Northwest 65th Street. In the southern parts of Ballard, larger-scale commercial areas with large surface parking lots exist along the coastline of the Salmon Bay Waterway. These parcels are large, but further north in Ballard, the lot sizes shrink and land uses shift first to a higher density mixed-use urban fabric, and then to lower density single-family detached homes for most of the neighborhood. Buildings are taller and larger along the north-south running arterial roads, and buildings are almost exclusively single family detached homes on the local roads in Ballard. The housing is more dense in the southern parts of Ballard, particularly along Northwest Market Street, and further north the housing becomes less dense. Detached single-family homes rest on small lot sizes, especially compared to other forms of suburban development that have developed outside of gridded street patterns. Ballard contains many green parks within the neighborhood’s urban fabric, including Ballard Commons Park, Gilman Playground, The Ballard Community Center and Playground, Carl S English Jr. Botanical Gardens, Salmon Bay Park, Loyola Heights Community Center and Playfield, Sunset Hill Park, Webster Park, and Golden Gardens Park. Ballard also hosts a weekly and year-around Farmer’s Market, located in the single area in the neighborhood where the street grid is disrupted. Located directly next to the Puget Sound, Ballard is more vulnerable to storm systems moving in from the Pacific Ocean. Street trees become more prevalent further into the residential areas, and the commercial areas are heavily paved and impermeable ground conditions. Ballard has a Walk Score of 90, and is the 13th most walkable neighborhood in Seattle. However, its transit score is just a 52, reflective of the neighborhood’s lack of rail-based rapid transit, but this will change in the future with the expansion of the Sound Transit Link Light Rail into Ballard with a station planned to be built along Northwest Market Street at either 15th Avenue Northwest or 14th Avenue Northwest. Ballard’s street layout mostly follows the cardinal directions, except for one area along Salmon Bay which runs parallel to the coastline for less than one mile. Ballard is mainly accessed by urban arterial roads, including the north-south running road 15th Avenue Northwest and the east-west running road Northwest Market Street. Shilshole Avenue Northwest runs along the southern edge of Ballard on Salmon Bay, and Seaview Avenue Northwest runs along Ballard’s Western edge until terminating at Golden Gardens Park. Ballard almost exclusively follows the Functional Urban Form Pattern, and the urban density of buildings decreases in a gradient with higher density with larger building size to the south and lower density with smaller building size to the north.
Capitol Hill Urban Form
Capitol Hill is located less than a mile northwest of Seattle’s downtown central business district. As defined by the Seattle City Clerk Office, Capitol Hill’s southern border is defined by East Madison Street, the eastern and northern borders run along the coastline of Lake Washington and Union Bay, and the western border runs with Interstate 5. The neighborhood is perched on a hillside that slopes upward to the north and east. Capitol Hill contains residential areas and a commercial and shopping district in the southern portion of the neighborhood. Land parcels are smaller further north in Capitol Hill and are larger further south. Further north, buildings shrink to smaller apartments and duplexes, and single-family detached homes occupy the top of Capitol Hill. The neighborhood also includes a high ratio of parkland and green space, such as Volunteer Park, Interlaken Park, Cal Anderson Park, and the Washington Park greenspace containing the Washington Park Playfield and the Washington Park Arboretum. The southern half of the neighborhood has primarily mixed-used buildings featuring retail and commercial spaces on the ground level and apartments and condominiums on the upper floors. These buildings range from 3 stories to 6 stories and create a dense urban fabric. Building spacing is almost never large in Capitol Hill; even for the areas with detached single-family homes, and the Floor Area Ratios on the lots are higher than most twentieth century era suburban tract developments. Perhaps Capitol Hill’s most defining urban element is its transportation access. With an underground Link Light Rail station in high-density mixed-use heart of the neighborhood, a streetcar connection on the surface level, and with ten bus lines crossing the neighborhood, Capitol Hill has strong transportation connections and offers residents the possibility of non-auto-dependent living. With the high share of urban parkland and with a street tree canopy, Capitol Hill has a strong balance of green space to urban and developed land. Capitol Hill has a walk score of 93 and is the 9th most walkable neighborhood in Seattle. Capitol Hill’s streets are mostly a grid, though several larger arterial roads cross Capitol Hill in diagonal manners that break from the rectilinear urban form that defines the collector and local roads. One portion of the neighborhood called Broadmoor is located on a particularly steep portion of the landscape, and the streets in this area break from the grid pattern and form a curvilinear street grid which compliments the contours of the hillside. Several other areas in Capitol Hill also have curvilinear street layouts that branch off of the grid pattern when the topography warrants curved roadways. The streets of Capitol Hill were mostly laid out at the end of the Nineteenth Century and laid out in a Functional Urban Form Pattern, with a small disruption of this urban form pattern to include the Picturesque Urban Form Pattern in the Broadmoor district.
Significance of Each Neighborhood
Capitol Hill and Ballard represent the conditions necessary for a neighborhood to effectively transition away from auto-dependency and toward human-oriented transportation solutions including walking, cycling, and public transportation. Capitol Hill has already undergone this transition with the opening of the Capitol Hill Link Light Rail station as part of the University Link project, and a Link Light Rail expansion to Ballard is slated to open by 2039.
Ballard, thus far, has more limited transportation options. Without any form of high-capacity rail-based mass transit, residents and visitors must depend on private automobiles or a network of buses, of which only the D Line provides rapid and high-frequency service. This automobile prioritization continues within Ballard, as the more urbanized and commercial core of the neighborhood contains many surface parking lots and building setbacks, which increase the scale of the urban grain to better suit automobile users rather than public transit and pedestrian users. Street widths, especially in the southern parts of Ballard, are wide and optimized for automobiles, containing more automobile travel lanes and lacking prioritization of other modes.
Capitol Hill has extensive connections to public transportation. Between the subway Link Light Rail station, a terminus for the First Hill line of the Seattle Streetcar, and a network of feeder bus routes which cross the neighborhood, Capitol Hill provides residents and visitors an urban environment in which automobile ownership is not a prerequisite for participation. Capitol Hill also has few surface parking lots and next to no building setbacks on land parcels, allowing pedestrians to access commercial areas without crossing parking lots. Streets rarely have more than one automobile travel lane in a given direction thanks to smaller street widths, which, combined with the higher density of buildings and the lack of surface parking lots and building setbacks created an appealing and pedestrian-friendly urban fabric.
Both neighborhoods strategically integrate green space into their urban fabric, with higher densities of street trees as building density decreases into more strictly residential areas operating in conjunction with larger urban parks featuring public gardens and community institutions to create a strong feeling of community and urban identity, a ‘Third Place’ outside of work and home. This concept, coined by sociologist Ray Oldenburg, is of a space in the public realm that works to help foster community, social cohesion, and economic and political stability. Third Places strengthen communities, and the presence of Third Places helps make both Ballard and Seattle vibrant, appealing, and resilient to uncertainties the future may hold. Today, Seattle is in the midst of a transition away from automobile dependency, and the progress made in Capitol Hill can be an example and a model for other neighborhoods in Seattle with similar conditions such as Ballard. Seattle also faces the ongoing challenges of climate disruption and the consequential potential for increased flooding risk and reducing the amount of impermeable pavement in an urban landscape (such as parking lot removal) will help Seattle’s neighborhoods be more prepared for extreme weather.
Conclusion
Ballard and Capitol Hill reveal that Seattle has the potential to reprioritize its neighborhoods to be more aptly used by pedestrians, cyclists, and various forms of public transportation. Capitol Hill offers a demonstration to Ballard of how to integrate a rail-based mass transit connection to a neighborhood which is primed to be converted into a neighborhood optimized for active and public transportation. Capitol Hill’s densification through mixed-use development surrounding the Capitol Hill Link Light Rail metro station and the neighborhood’s absence of surface parking lots are both models Ballard can follow for 2039 when Ballard’s Link Light Rail station opens.
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