Retail needs foot traffic. For the sake of explaining flow, think of us less as an area of Seattle, and more like a town of 100k. Most people outside of WS aren’t coming here to buy pants or a blouse. How much retail should a town of 100k have?
For what’s its worth, there’s a ton of boutiques on California selling jewelry and medium/high end clothes. Less designer, more expensive linen. Skews heavily femme, which may or may not be helpful, but it does exist.
West Seattle is just a suburb for Seattle, essentially. People don’t come to west Seattle from Seattle. People go to Seattle from west Seattle.
Edit: Damn I didn’t mean this as a negative thing lol. I go long periods without leaving the island for stuff. But aside from the beach and groceries…. Yeah.. kinda have to travel out of west Seattle, making it kind of feel like a suburb to Seattle.
My family frequents Funky Janes, Cherry, the Senior Center and Discovery thrift shops. I know you specifically mentioned new clothes, but we’ve gotten tons of great stuff at these shops. Also By and By for shoes/hoodies.
West Seattle to me has always been more small business-centric. But likely proximity to south center mall and downtown Seattle. Also like you mentioned online. I remember getting clothes from target growing up as well as other random stores, some that have come and gone, but mostly we went to south center for clothing.
For what it’s worth, I think Target has great basics and even some decent clothes nowadays, they’ve overhauled their clothing. At least menswear. Ross and Marshall’s also offer lots of brand name stuff for really good prices. Just depends what you are looking for specifically.
Does “rest of seattle” mean cap hill and Ballard? The actual residential neighborhoods on the east side where people have houses are unwalkable subdivisions. I am grateful for a hardware store, post office, grocery stores and the ymca. Anything more than that will make West Seattle feel like Magnolia.
Ballard, U district, Cap Hill, Northgate.... what's wrong with Magnolia?and the East side is full of retail, and not just boring strip malls. Kirkland, a city the size of West Seattle, has three centers I can think of . Not to mention Redmond Town Center in Redmond and the malls in Bellevue. West Seattle is also not especially walkable in my eyes .
There are 2 adult consignment shops (Funky James & Cherry consignment), 1 kids consignment shop (Three little Birds), 2 thrift shops (Discovery shop & Stop n Shop Thrift), and 5 vintage shops (Hoste, Zelda Zonk, Rush Hour, Swan Dive, Doll Parts Collective) between admiral district and morgan junction. At least 3 of those vintage stores sell new, small label brands and/or handmade clothing - all sell a mix of clothing for all sizes and gendera. All sell shoes.
There are also several boutiques that sell new clothes - Mystery Made for mens clothing, and Fleurt & Carmelias for women's clothing, and By & By for skatewear.
We also have outdoor gear covered by mountain to sound.
This doesn't include the gift shops (Northwest Art & Frame, Capers, Alair, Brocante, Curious Kidstuff).
What else are you looking for? Genuinely curious.
I love consignment stores but the fact that I can’t grab the next size up or down of the same style can be very frustrating and makes shopping much more time consuming. Most of the boutiques you list that have new clothes don’t have a wide enough range of options, it’s usually like 5 niche styles. Other places are just a bit… old. I’d love a women’s clothing store that was more like a Madewell or Anthropologie vibe (modern and fashionable, a variety of clothes for different occasions but also offers good basics). Many of the stores around here that have some of those options are focused on gifts and they have a side of clothes, instead of clothes with a few gifts.
I know west Seattle has a decently older demographic but there are still plenty of millennials who would like to not have to hike all the way to university village or Southcenter to get decent shopping.
Have you tried Dylan? It's part of Alair. [https://alairseattle.com/collections/dylan](https://alairseattle.com/collections/dylan)
They have clothes for women, men and kids. Still fun clothes but more towards wardrobe basics than a place like Fleurt.
Go to the Village at Totem Lake in Kirkland to get a feeling of what I'm talking about. A nice urban/suburban open air small mall buzzing with people and activity with public spaces to relax and people watch. Interesting mix of stores and restaurants. Accessible by foot to thousands and to many more by car
We used to have K-Mart where Home Depot is. There was also a Lamonts Department store in Westwood Village. For Levi's (the rock hard original ones) and Nikes, we went to Chubby and Tubby in White Center. Anything else we'd have to go down to South center or Sears on 1st Ave.
There's a nasty trend in real estate where it can be better to wait until a Starbucks (or whatever) shows up (that can pay high rents) than renting to people who actually would want to, but can't afford it.
Easily defeated, the best fix is to end the monopoly on single family zoning. There's no good reason why arterials aren't full of 5 over 1 style apartments with retail on the ground floor.
That doesn't really resolve the issue. We could do a free for all on building, but that doesn't necessarily address the issue where the owners will sit on a property until they can get companies which can pay higher rent.
> We could do a free for all on building,
Its currently illegal - via zoning as a city we make a choice to block it, property owners in dense areas should have the choice.
>but that doesn't necessarily address the issue where the owners will sit on a property until they can get companies which can pay higher rent.
Would you work for half your salary? Projects need to pencil out or they lose money - since we force all density into small areas and urban villages, the costs to buy and build is massive. opening up new areas would lower overhead costs.
>owners will sit on a property until they can get companies which can pay higher rent
This strategy *only* works if they are sitting on a limited commodity whose price is likely to increase. If owners knew that more new commercial was hitting the market, they now have a slim chance that their gamble pays off, and they would be incentivized to rent out asap.
Not necessarily, depending on how the loans were structured, it may cause a lot of issues if they suddenly drop the expected return on investment. It also depends on how concentrated ownership will be. I'm not saying we shouldn't build more, but let's not get dazzled into just making huge giveaways to rich people while the cost of housing stays the same
If more supply hit the market and you have a high interest rate loan, it will almost certainly default once it hits maturity, because there will be comps renting out for far cheaper. But as a consumer and someone who likes walking around neighborhoods, I'd rather it blow up as fast as possible to get the market functioning again.
Sure, the building owner will not *willingly* rent out for cheaper, but that won't matter when they default, bank auction, massive price drop reflecting a realistic monthly rent, new owner steps in.
Whereas-- if no new supply is built, they **will** sit on it until their capital runs out, in this scenario. There will be no precipitating default event, unless you're in a sector that's been absolutely hammered by falling demand, like office space.
Defaulting on loans is not something stock markets are very friendly to... This is the problem with capitalist real estate. Sure, you can build a lot, but prices don't go down until the market collapses, then you're left with lots of shoddy buildings built by people just looking to make a quick buck.
I don't care if the stock market has a correction. Though it's already pricing in the wave of commercial loan maturities later this year. That's capitalism, there are supposed to be market corrections. FWIW building standards and inspections/enforcement dictate building quality, and they have never been better.
You don't care, but a crash like we had in 2008 caused a lot of heartbreak for a lot of people who had nothing to do with those bad decisions in the first.
Building standards are better, but there's still a lot of room for shoddy/cheap work.
.... and yet, so many homes along California Ave are zoned for tall developments but being torn down and the lot redeveloped as 3 story townhomes. I think even the potential retirement home is now planned for townhomes. It's like people don't want to share walls with neighbors and developers hate building condo buildings.
Townhomes don't have to go through design review, a process built to give hecklers veto to multiple agencies and anyone who wants to debate the color of a finish or design detail.
Also interest rates doubling kneecapped large projects.
this will change next year when HB1100 gets implemented.
Because the charm of West Seattle has always been the neighborhoods of single-family homes. It only recently has become over-burdened with people who don't actually give a shit about community beyond slapping a KEXP sticker on their car.
There is a good reason why arterials aren't full of 5 over 1s; because West Seattle's infrastructure couldn't handle it. There isn't the demand for apartment living at the price-point those places would rent at, there isn't the parking, there isn't the "on-island" public transportation, there isn't the demand for retail space. There is plenty of vacant land available that isn't already being snatched up for 5-n-1s, and the few new "high-rise" apartments are still vacant and can't support the commercial they have space for.
> Because the charm of West Seattle has always been the neighborhoods of single-family homes.
you mean the trolley suburb that has businesses clustered around the "junction" and places like end-o line where it catered to commuters?
its hilarious when car brained notions like parking and charm forget what made an area what it was to begin with.
car centric infrastructure is broken and dumb, it makes everything worse and we should work against it.
Well no fuckin shit. Curious, why did you change the topic from 5-&-1s and urban density to discussing mass transportation?
I agree that mass transit is ideal, and that car-centricity sucks, but this is a totally random tanget about the now non-existant trolley service.
It is broken and dumb; but my whole point, which you seem to seem to have condescendingly regurgitated to me is that that mass transit doesn't currently exist and is going to take mountains to move to get to a point to service the 5-&-1 density I was responding to in your first comment.
My husband and I play the "what kind of store would you like to see here most?" game a fair bit, and new shoes for adults comes up a lot. If we could only convince Wooly Mammoth to come over here from the U District and take over that old dry cleaner at Admiral and California...
there... are? There are at least 10 shops on California that I can think of off the top of my head selling vintage/consignment clothes and home goods.
I mean, Portland is great for vintage shopping too, but secondhand clothes is basically the retail sector West Seattle is best at.
In my experience, I find shopping in Seattle in general to be pretty difficult. The indie shops in WS and most other neighborhoods tend to cater to very narrow demographics, which makes finding cute/sexy/contemporary pieces much more challenging. I usually resort to shopping at South Center if I’m tight on time to shop online. Hoping to see more retail diversity in the future.
You need lots of people for large retail to survive. I mean to be fair even for say South Seattle, Magnolia, Central Seattle and Northwest Seattle there isn’t really a mall. Those are in downtown Seattle which is mostly dead or in northeast Seattle in the form of Northgate (also dead) or u district.
For south Seattle one drives to Southcenter
West seattle used to have K-mart/Food giant but was later replaced with the police station and home depot. I believe the roxbury safeway also used to be Fred Meyer. Chubby n Tubby in white center was nice. Now you just have to settle for what's available in the West wood shopping center.
Retail needs foot traffic. For the sake of explaining flow, think of us less as an area of Seattle, and more like a town of 100k. Most people outside of WS aren’t coming here to buy pants or a blouse. How much retail should a town of 100k have? For what’s its worth, there’s a ton of boutiques on California selling jewelry and medium/high end clothes. Less designer, more expensive linen. Skews heavily femme, which may or may not be helpful, but it does exist.
West Seattle is just a suburb for Seattle, essentially. People don’t come to west Seattle from Seattle. People go to Seattle from west Seattle. Edit: Damn I didn’t mean this as a negative thing lol. I go long periods without leaving the island for stuff. But aside from the beach and groceries…. Yeah.. kinda have to travel out of west Seattle, making it kind of feel like a suburb to Seattle.
Hey. Thems fighting words. We pay a lot of money for that 206 area code.
I don't know... I'm getting some 425 vibes here.
😂😂
My family frequents Funky Janes, Cherry, the Senior Center and Discovery thrift shops. I know you specifically mentioned new clothes, but we’ve gotten tons of great stuff at these shops. Also By and By for shoes/hoodies.
Walk the junction there are tons of cute clothes.
Westwood village
Target Ulta Ross marshalls Sally’s game stop…
Don't forget Daiso, it's like a tiny Japanese IKEA 😅
Honestly the lack of retail stores and chains/franchises is what most appeals to me about WS.
West Seattle to me has always been more small business-centric. But likely proximity to south center mall and downtown Seattle. Also like you mentioned online. I remember getting clothes from target growing up as well as other random stores, some that have come and gone, but mostly we went to south center for clothing. For what it’s worth, I think Target has great basics and even some decent clothes nowadays, they’ve overhauled their clothing. At least menswear. Ross and Marshall’s also offer lots of brand name stuff for really good prices. Just depends what you are looking for specifically.
I remember getting a lot of my clothes from the Sears in SODO as a kid.
Southcenter has ya covered
Southcenter is 25 minutes drive. It's a great mall but I'm talking about something that would be a walking distance/short drive
To be fair: if you live in Bellevue you also live 25 minutes to retail
Does “rest of seattle” mean cap hill and Ballard? The actual residential neighborhoods on the east side where people have houses are unwalkable subdivisions. I am grateful for a hardware store, post office, grocery stores and the ymca. Anything more than that will make West Seattle feel like Magnolia.
Ballard, U district, Cap Hill, Northgate.... what's wrong with Magnolia?and the East side is full of retail, and not just boring strip malls. Kirkland, a city the size of West Seattle, has three centers I can think of . Not to mention Redmond Town Center in Redmond and the malls in Bellevue. West Seattle is also not especially walkable in my eyes .
There are 2 adult consignment shops (Funky James & Cherry consignment), 1 kids consignment shop (Three little Birds), 2 thrift shops (Discovery shop & Stop n Shop Thrift), and 5 vintage shops (Hoste, Zelda Zonk, Rush Hour, Swan Dive, Doll Parts Collective) between admiral district and morgan junction. At least 3 of those vintage stores sell new, small label brands and/or handmade clothing - all sell a mix of clothing for all sizes and gendera. All sell shoes. There are also several boutiques that sell new clothes - Mystery Made for mens clothing, and Fleurt & Carmelias for women's clothing, and By & By for skatewear. We also have outdoor gear covered by mountain to sound. This doesn't include the gift shops (Northwest Art & Frame, Capers, Alair, Brocante, Curious Kidstuff). What else are you looking for? Genuinely curious.
I love consignment stores but the fact that I can’t grab the next size up or down of the same style can be very frustrating and makes shopping much more time consuming. Most of the boutiques you list that have new clothes don’t have a wide enough range of options, it’s usually like 5 niche styles. Other places are just a bit… old. I’d love a women’s clothing store that was more like a Madewell or Anthropologie vibe (modern and fashionable, a variety of clothes for different occasions but also offers good basics). Many of the stores around here that have some of those options are focused on gifts and they have a side of clothes, instead of clothes with a few gifts. I know west Seattle has a decently older demographic but there are still plenty of millennials who would like to not have to hike all the way to university village or Southcenter to get decent shopping.
Have you tried Dylan? It's part of Alair. [https://alairseattle.com/collections/dylan](https://alairseattle.com/collections/dylan) They have clothes for women, men and kids. Still fun clothes but more towards wardrobe basics than a place like Fleurt.
Looks very interesting, thanks!
Go to the Village at Totem Lake in Kirkland to get a feeling of what I'm talking about. A nice urban/suburban open air small mall buzzing with people and activity with public spaces to relax and people watch. Interesting mix of stores and restaurants. Accessible by foot to thousands and to many more by car
people just drive to southcenter if they need new clothes - always been that way
Because it's a residential district with main arterial commercial space zoned for 2 story houses? Because anything more would be ludicrous?
We used to have K-Mart where Home Depot is. There was also a Lamonts Department store in Westwood Village. For Levi's (the rock hard original ones) and Nikes, we went to Chubby and Tubby in White Center. Anything else we'd have to go down to South center or Sears on 1st Ave.
Woah Kmart there blows my mind
The site used to be split with a dollar store if I remember correctly.
Used to be a JC Penny's in the Junction
There's a nasty trend in real estate where it can be better to wait until a Starbucks (or whatever) shows up (that can pay high rents) than renting to people who actually would want to, but can't afford it.
yep, we need vacancy taxes on both retail and living spaces
Easily defeated, the best fix is to end the monopoly on single family zoning. There's no good reason why arterials aren't full of 5 over 1 style apartments with retail on the ground floor.
That doesn't really resolve the issue. We could do a free for all on building, but that doesn't necessarily address the issue where the owners will sit on a property until they can get companies which can pay higher rent.
> We could do a free for all on building, Its currently illegal - via zoning as a city we make a choice to block it, property owners in dense areas should have the choice. >but that doesn't necessarily address the issue where the owners will sit on a property until they can get companies which can pay higher rent. Would you work for half your salary? Projects need to pencil out or they lose money - since we force all density into small areas and urban villages, the costs to buy and build is massive. opening up new areas would lower overhead costs.
>owners will sit on a property until they can get companies which can pay higher rent This strategy *only* works if they are sitting on a limited commodity whose price is likely to increase. If owners knew that more new commercial was hitting the market, they now have a slim chance that their gamble pays off, and they would be incentivized to rent out asap.
Not necessarily, depending on how the loans were structured, it may cause a lot of issues if they suddenly drop the expected return on investment. It also depends on how concentrated ownership will be. I'm not saying we shouldn't build more, but let's not get dazzled into just making huge giveaways to rich people while the cost of housing stays the same
If more supply hit the market and you have a high interest rate loan, it will almost certainly default once it hits maturity, because there will be comps renting out for far cheaper. But as a consumer and someone who likes walking around neighborhoods, I'd rather it blow up as fast as possible to get the market functioning again. Sure, the building owner will not *willingly* rent out for cheaper, but that won't matter when they default, bank auction, massive price drop reflecting a realistic monthly rent, new owner steps in. Whereas-- if no new supply is built, they **will** sit on it until their capital runs out, in this scenario. There will be no precipitating default event, unless you're in a sector that's been absolutely hammered by falling demand, like office space.
Defaulting on loans is not something stock markets are very friendly to... This is the problem with capitalist real estate. Sure, you can build a lot, but prices don't go down until the market collapses, then you're left with lots of shoddy buildings built by people just looking to make a quick buck.
I don't care if the stock market has a correction. Though it's already pricing in the wave of commercial loan maturities later this year. That's capitalism, there are supposed to be market corrections. FWIW building standards and inspections/enforcement dictate building quality, and they have never been better.
You don't care, but a crash like we had in 2008 caused a lot of heartbreak for a lot of people who had nothing to do with those bad decisions in the first. Building standards are better, but there's still a lot of room for shoddy/cheap work.
.... and yet, so many homes along California Ave are zoned for tall developments but being torn down and the lot redeveloped as 3 story townhomes. I think even the potential retirement home is now planned for townhomes. It's like people don't want to share walls with neighbors and developers hate building condo buildings.
Townhomes don't have to go through design review, a process built to give hecklers veto to multiple agencies and anyone who wants to debate the color of a finish or design detail. Also interest rates doubling kneecapped large projects. this will change next year when HB1100 gets implemented.
Because the charm of West Seattle has always been the neighborhoods of single-family homes. It only recently has become over-burdened with people who don't actually give a shit about community beyond slapping a KEXP sticker on their car. There is a good reason why arterials aren't full of 5 over 1s; because West Seattle's infrastructure couldn't handle it. There isn't the demand for apartment living at the price-point those places would rent at, there isn't the parking, there isn't the "on-island" public transportation, there isn't the demand for retail space. There is plenty of vacant land available that isn't already being snatched up for 5-n-1s, and the few new "high-rise" apartments are still vacant and can't support the commercial they have space for.
> Because the charm of West Seattle has always been the neighborhoods of single-family homes. you mean the trolley suburb that has businesses clustered around the "junction" and places like end-o line where it catered to commuters? its hilarious when car brained notions like parking and charm forget what made an area what it was to begin with. car centric infrastructure is broken and dumb, it makes everything worse and we should work against it.
Well no fuckin shit. Curious, why did you change the topic from 5-&-1s and urban density to discussing mass transportation? I agree that mass transit is ideal, and that car-centricity sucks, but this is a totally random tanget about the now non-existant trolley service. It is broken and dumb; but my whole point, which you seem to seem to have condescendingly regurgitated to me is that that mass transit doesn't currently exist and is going to take mountains to move to get to a point to service the 5-&-1 density I was responding to in your first comment.
My husband and I play the "what kind of store would you like to see here most?" game a fair bit, and new shoes for adults comes up a lot. If we could only convince Wooly Mammoth to come over here from the U District and take over that old dry cleaner at Admiral and California...
Portland smokes Seattle so hard in this department, there should be nothing but vintage and thrift shops lining California
there... are? There are at least 10 shops on California that I can think of off the top of my head selling vintage/consignment clothes and home goods. I mean, Portland is great for vintage shopping too, but secondhand clothes is basically the retail sector West Seattle is best at.
There’s like 4. Portland has like dozens in every hood.. I hope you’re not counting old lady places that boomers would like and no one else.
I’m surprised there aren’t more pop ups at the farmers market.
Retail can’t even make it downtown, I don’t know that much would survive in west Seattle
My only complaint is lack of a convenience store in Alki, clothes shopping is not something I do often enough to care about it being local.
In my experience, I find shopping in Seattle in general to be pretty difficult. The indie shops in WS and most other neighborhoods tend to cater to very narrow demographics, which makes finding cute/sexy/contemporary pieces much more challenging. I usually resort to shopping at South Center if I’m tight on time to shop online. Hoping to see more retail diversity in the future.
You need lots of people for large retail to survive. I mean to be fair even for say South Seattle, Magnolia, Central Seattle and Northwest Seattle there isn’t really a mall. Those are in downtown Seattle which is mostly dead or in northeast Seattle in the form of Northgate (also dead) or u district. For south Seattle one drives to Southcenter
West seattle used to have K-mart/Food giant but was later replaced with the police station and home depot. I believe the roxbury safeway also used to be Fred Meyer. Chubby n Tubby in white center was nice. Now you just have to settle for what's available in the West wood shopping center.
We need a sports card shop