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Photo courtesy of Gary Palmer
We first envisioned the Landing in 2000, in Jesse Tanner’s second mayoral term. I was council president that year, and had been working for years with Jesse, the Council, and our Economic Development Director Sue Carlson to increase Renton’s retail sector. Decades earlier Renton had lost major retail anchors to Tukwila’s new Southcenter Mall, including Penny’s and Sears. We knew that bolstering Renton’s retail offerings would increase city sales tax revenues and provide residents with additional fun and convenient places to shop and dine. Boeing had recently let us know they were to begin putting 3-5 acre tracts of surplussed industrial property up for sale as the company modernized its design and inventory management systems.
We saw an opportunity for a new shopping and entertainment center instead of warehouses and storage yards. We could foresee the possibility of a sixty acre mixed-use center, as long as the property was not sold in individual pieces. We developed the working title “Southport Landing,” adopting the Southport name from an adjacent development in its early planning stages on the waterfront at the site of the former Shuffleton power plant. Jesse, Sue and I (as council president) interviewed several potential project developers to establish viability of our vision and learn what they would need from us to be successful. In the next several years this project took shape in many ways, including hammering out a critical agreement with Boeing. If the aerospace company consolidated the land into one large parcel while they pulled back from it, instead of selling it off a few acres at a time, the city of Renton would contribute roads and public infrastructure to the final project. The City would use some of the tax revenues generated by the new project to pay for this infrastructure. Renton would get a say in the purchase and sale agreement, including approving the buyer and the proposed project.
We selected Harvest Partners, who employed renowned architects and brought us concepts we approved. The name got shortened simply to “The Landing”, since “Southport” was an independent (closely coordinated) project on the lake. Then we battled environmental lawsuits funded largely by Westfield, owner of Southcenter Mall as they seemed determined to prevent us from building the Landing. Making things more complicated, Westfield has significant leverage over many national retail chains since Westfield owns malls throughout the world, so we found we were generally going to need independent local companies and non-Westfield-dependant retailers to populate our new center. Construction finally commenced in 2007.
City officials and citizens standing near the center roundabout in the entertainment area of the Landing.
Then the great recession hit and we had some setbacks, like losing the Starbucks store. Harvest Partners had nearly completed construction, and they earnestly pushed forward with leasing, confident the economy would come back.
Within weeks of opening, it was clear we had hit a home run. Renton residents flocked to the new stores and entertainment, instantly filling local restaurants like the Rock and Papaya, and quickly making the Target and LA Fitness some of those chains most successful stores in the nation. The fact that we had to seek local chains and retailers ended up being one of our greatest strengths, as residents found the Landing to be a lovely and unique shopping environment, with wonderful new offerings, providing a fresh change from standard malls across the country.
Daily activities at the Landing can be found here.
To see pages of articles and photos from my blog during the creation and opening of the Landing, click here.
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