Northgate Mall may rip the roof off and build a city inside

Would you live at the mall, if you could?

Light rail is coming to Northgate in three years, and it'll result in a whole new mall experience there.

KUOW’s Joshua McNichols heard more about the future of the Northgate Mall at a public meeting Monday night. Angela King asked him about it.

What’s the new look for Northgate Mall?

It’s going to look more like a city street than a mall – that’s the idea anyway. They’re taking out half the retail space and putting in apartments and office buildings and even a central park.

They’re also going to open it up to the sky, tear off the roof – more like it was when Northgate was built in 1950. Right now it's kind of climate-controlled right now; a roof was slapped on in the 1970s.

But the new idea is that you'll be able to sort of meander through like you would meander through a neighborhood now.

People may be wondering why are we talking about living at the mall – the mall’s for shopping, right?

Well it's going to be about a lot more than that. It's going to be a place to live — 1,200 apartments.

But also there's these big forces shaping malls and kind of dragging them down. Retailers like J.C. Penney and Macy’s are struggling. These anchor stores are sort of like dead weights right now.

They're actually planning for this. In the meeting Monday night, they said, well maybe when Macy's goes we'll put in a street there, and that's where the apartments will go. When J.C. Penney's goes that we'll put a street there too.

So it was kind of like walking in the kitchen and hearing your family planning your funeral.

But the city is where the money is; that's where a lot of people want to live. So in a way they're looking at bringing the city to the mall. At the same time you've got suburban stores like Target trying to make their way to the city.

Some people are asking if this is really going to happen, and if so, when?

Well, first of all this is a long-term plan. It's going to take a long time to get approved. And then they’ll have 15 years to build it out, if they choose to.

And for another thing they're trying to attract tenants who may not necessarily buy into the whole vision of a pedestrian wonderland that they're trying to create next to the light rail station.

I mean, they're trying to attract this one tenant, a fitness company, and that company wants to come in and basically put in a big box kind of building like you'd see now at a mall. And the designers who are reviewing it are sort of saying, “Well that plan doesn't look like it does all the cool things you told us you want to do.”

And then there's these other retail tenants who have these long-term leases and they have a right to a certain amount of parking.

When you zoom in it looks a little bit more like University Village, where you've got cars and pedestrians kind of living together in tight proximity, with a lot of parking scattered around, but in smaller chunks. So it's not a complete transformation to a post-car world.

The design team and the developer pretend to be all on the same page. But behind the scenes, you can see a hint of a tug of war between idealism and reality.

The architects throw around big ideas that make it feel like this development is turning the very idea of a mall on its head. And the owner is the one who has to deal with the tenants who may not be ready to come along with all the changes.