[EDITOR’S NOTE: The following is a Letter to the Editor, written and submitted by a verified resident. It represents the opinion of the author, and does not necessarily reflect the views of South King Media or its staff.]
After two years of rainy Halloweens, it was such a nice change to have dry weather last Saturday and a fun night of trick-or-treating within our community.
Still, as I walked the neighborhood with my friends and our kids, I felt a little sad as well. You see, we live in the Cedarhurst neighborhood, and the city of Burien is proposing a very different vision for where we live, one that would change the make-up of this community permanently.
This neighborhood is a diverse residential community, with almost 250 homes within the North of NERA boundaries and hundreds more on neighboring streets. We are bordered on all four sides by busy roads with minimal crosswalks. Bounded by S. 128th Street, Des Moines Memorial Drive, S. 136th Street and 8th Ave S/SR 509, our neighborhood has not one single controlled crosswalk aside from at the intersections of these busy roads. So, like many other neighborhoods surrounded by highly trafficked streets, we stick to our quieter neighborhood streets for walks – and Halloween.
This year, we headed out into our neighborhood, my friend and I with 3 kids between us. By the time we visited one house, we ran into a classmate of my son and their sibling on the same street. Our 3 kids became 5 and we continued down the block. We passed groups of families with toddlers and babies. We saw older kids in their own small groups. On the next block, we ran into another friend. The kids were incandescent with the weight of their candy bags and the wonder of costumes and decorations.
As we continued through the neighborhood, our kids knocked on their neighbors’ doors, exclaimed over seeing someone they knew or a costume they recognized. We connected with more friends as we walked, our group growing. When we came to the house of our local elementary school lunch lady, I was delighted by the swarm of almost 20 current and former Cedarhurst students at her door, clamoring for the attention of a trusted adult in their neighborhood. Isn’t this how it should be? Isn’t this what we all want to have and protect in our communities?
How would you feel if the city designated your neighborhood and your property as Industrial Land Use only? How would you feel if that was slipped into the Comprehensive Plan and approved by the City Council without any discussion of what it would mean for you? City Planners and the Planning Commission have pushed a vision of our neighborhood that would replace houses with employers. Neighbors with jobs. Their vision was to see the houses gone in 20 years, replaced by light industrial development. Their only engagement with us was to ask what kind of businesses we would like to replace our homes.
We have months pushing back, and we have won some compromise. But it is not enough. We cannot accept land use designation and zoning changes that leave us out. The choice to replace our Residential Land Use with Industrial Land Use was made with no consideration to how this would affect us, our properties and our investment in Burien and our community.
I ask the City Council and Planning Commission to reconsider this vision for our neighborhood, and to amend the comprehensive plan to develop a different vision for our neighborhood that can preserve nights like this past Halloween, where we can enjoy the place we chose to call home. We are not afraid of change or growth. We just want to be included in it.
– Karin Sinkula
Burien Resident
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