UW Urban Design & Planning weighs in

A letter from Branden Born, Chair of University of Washington’s Urban Design & Planning Department to Councilmember Morales. Thanks, Brendan, for giving a clear voice to our struggles with rightfully returning the public land at Hidden Beach to public use.

Dear Councilmember Morales,

I'm writing to strongly object to the ongoing encroachment by adjacent landowners to the Harrison St. street end, also known as Hidden Beach. I do so as a citizen of the city and as a professor of urban planning, so I am familiar with this type of egregious behavior by landowners. This amounts to theft from the public by, frankly, the wealthiest among us. The driveways and plantings preventing public access should be either torn out or put into public use, with fencing on both sides to protect the public from the encroachment and what will likely be harassment from the neighbors.

Even better, there are excellent plans proposed by Friends of Hidden Beach, that are possibly moving forward with the support of SDOT, but one of the property owners is suggesting that city-provided surveys cannot be used as they are not in the public domain. Obviously, this is a trope to exhaust community resources and prevent public participation in the vein of a SLAPP suit. As is their FOIA to monitor emails mentioning Hidden Beach (to that end: hello north neighbor, I hope you get this and realize how gross your behavior is). The whole case is laughably obvious if you take a look at the video on the Friends of Hidden Beach website. Street ends are valuable neighborhood resources, especially when on the waterfront. They should not be stolen by adjacent landowners.

I hope you can take action and support the community against these selfish and illegal claims. An onsite press conference might be nice.

Best,
Branden Born
Seattle, WA